Dissecting Monsters

After hearing Vera's account, Charlotte wilted completely. Never mind solving the problem tonight-she could barely swallow her dinner.

Gordon was about to offer a few words of comfort when he felt his chair tremble ever so slightly. He glanced around. No one else had noticed.

Thud.

A muffled impact came from beneath the floor, and the candle flames flickered.

Thud.

Now everyone could hear it clearly. Something enormous, heavy, and furious was deep underground, madly hurling its body against the old mansion's foundations.

A monster. Gordon realized he had sensed it before the others. The vibrations from the floor lingered deep inside his body, as though the power of Unbroken Strings had permanently altered his five senses.

Charlotte went deathly pale, her shoulders tensing. The servants standing nearby exchanged glances, trembling all over. Several maids covered their frightened tears with handkerchiefs.

Vera quickly stuffed the last piece of blood-tinged beef into her mouth, swallowed hard, and stood to grab the black longsword beside her. Her chair legs dragged across the floor with a prolonged screech.

"Wait," Gordon said.

"What?" Vera looked at him like a blade already drawn, only to have someone press two fingers against its spine.

"I don't think we can keep handling this by killing them one at a time as they come. You just said you've already killed five. Can you keep it up?"

"Yes," she said flatly.

Five Deepclaw Demons. An ordinary person would struggle to handle even one. Yet Vera sounded as though he had asked whether she could eat another half a roast chicken.

"Can you keep killing them until dawn?"

"As long as there's food," Vera said.

"...Your appetite isn't the issue," Gordon said. "Deepclaw Demons don't enjoy touring ancestral mansions. They usually stay at the bottom of Blackwater River, in sewers, waste pipes, places like that. The Montfort mansion isn't the only old house by the river in Lundenim. Why this one?"

"The ancestral mansion has simply fallen into disrepair. The plumbing-" Evans said.

"If we're still blaming the plumbing, that can only mean the pipes matter more than all our lives," Gordon interrupted.

Evans fell silent.

"You want to find out why?" Vera asked.

"Yes," Gordon said. "First, we find out why they're coming. Otherwise, you'll spend all night killing them in the basement and end up with just three things."

"One: a floor covered in stinking monster corpses." Gordon raised one finger. Vera frowned.

"Two: a stomach left utterly empty by intense combat." Gordon raised a second finger. Vera's eyes widened.

"Three: a bill the Montfort family won't pay in full because the crisis hasn't been resolved." Gordon raised a third finger. Vera had already started wiping away sweat.

"I'm listening." Vera promptly sheathed her sword.

Gordon put down his knife and fork and wiped his hands dry with a paper napkin.

"I want to dissect them," Gordon said. "Mr. Evans, is there a room in this mansion willing to sacrifice itself for the family?"

Under Gordon's direction, the small drawing room was converted into a dissection room. It was where they received guests who were "not important enough, but couldn't be turned away."

The chairs were moved into a corner, the patterned rug rolled into a fat python, and waterproof cloth spread over the table. Silver candlesticks were temporarily requisitioned and placed on either side for light.

Five Deepclaw Demon corpses were piled against the wall, their skin blue-gray and their claws curved. The room soon smelled of wet mud, fish, and rotting flesh.

Gordon picked up the carving knife. Its handle nestled against his palm, as natural to wield as his own fingers.

The first cut fell.

The Deepclaw Demon's skin was even tougher than he had imagined, coated in a slick membrane. The knife tip slipped slightly as it pierced the surface, like stabbing old leather smeared with fish oil.

Gordon changed the angle, inserting the blade beneath the gill slit on the side of its neck and cutting along the grain of the muscle. As the edge met cartilage and fascia, those subtle layers of resistance traveled back up his arm.

Watching beside him, Vera felt that Gordon worked with remarkable confidence.

His movements weren't as ferocious as Vera's when she killed, nor could they even be called fast. Yet they carried an utterly calm certainty, like opening a letter whose contents he already knew.

The third, the fourth, the fifth...

Gordon surveyed the tableful of fish ingredients. There was enough to open a sushi restaurant.

The text before his eyes kept flickering and shifting.

[Deepclaw Demon's hand. Correct number of fingers, incorrect aesthetics.]

[Wound on the side of the neck. Strong evidence for prosecuting Vera before a Demon Judge.]

[Willy. Smaller than yours.]

Gordon raised an eyebrow.

[Deepclaw Demon's stomach. No fingers, bones, or rats. Very bad at its job.]

[Deepclaw Demon's intestines. Empty. Even monsters can get so caught up in something that they forget to eat.]

After examining all five Aberrants' stomachs and intestines, Gordon put down the knife.

Empty stomachs. Empty bowels. No bits of citizens, no clumps of animal fur. Now that was interesting.

A pack of carnivorous monsters living in sewage had broken into an ancestral mansion, killed a person and a dog, and rammed their heads against the foundations-yet hadn't eaten a single bite.

"These dead water monkeys look pretty ordinary to me." Vera stared expressionlessly at the tableful of bloody innards. She had finally lost patience with this slow academic work.

"Miss Hunter, that's already strange enough." Gordon shook his head. "They killed at least one person and one dog. Why didn't they eat a single bite?"

"?"

"Look closely." Gordon turned all five monsters' stomachs and intestines completely inside out, displaying them before her. "Clean as a whistle. They haven't eaten anything tonight."

"So?" Vera took some bread from her pocket and bit into it hard.

"That's not normal."

"Aberrants aren't normal to begin with." Vera was unconcerned.

"But Aberrants follow biological patterns. Deepclaw Demons prefer damp, dark environments and hunt by ambush. They crawl out of sewers, grab something, drag it back into the water, then bite it to pieces and swallow. That's natural behavior. You haven't seen them eat anything tonight, have you?"

"..." Vera stopped eating and retraced the night's battles in her mind.

As a hunter who had spent years taking jobs on the black market, she had seen Deepclaw Demons countless times.

She had seen them drag away drunkards and clamp down on hunting dogs' hind legs before sinking into the water, leaving behind gradually fading whimpers.

Those things weren't picky eaters. Rats, dogs, people, rotten flesh, even severed limbs from their own kind-as long as something fit in their mouths, they would swallow it whole.

But tonight... these monsters really had been different.

They had desperately squeezed through the sewers and drainage gates, charging into the house one after another and tearing apart the cook who stood in their way.

Thinking back on it now, the way they had torn at the cook hadn't looked like preparation for a feast at all. It had looked more like...

Venting their rage!

Releasing some kind of... anxiety and unease.

They hadn't eaten or fought over the corpse. Their goal had been strikingly consistent: to scramble madly deeper into the house!

A chill slowly crept up Vera's back.

It was incredible that Gordon had deduced so many clues from just five stomachs.

She silently swallowed the bread in her mouth. As a hound who constantly prowled the edge between life and death, she looked down on others of her kind whose muscles were lacking, but she paid attention to those with brains.

Evans, the butler standing in the doorway, had listened to the entire exchange. His already grim expression grew worse.

Until now, Evans had thought of Aberrants as beasts. Deepclaw Demons invading the ancestral mansion was like a pack of wolves attacking a country farm: unfortunate, but nothing unusual.

Yet according to Gordon's analysis, these Aberrants actually had some other "purpose."

Beasts had hunger, fear, and instinct.

But creatures with a purpose would stop at nothing to achieve it, as long as the cost was lower than the price of failure.

Put simply...

Wolves wouldn't pass the sheep pen, ignore the mutton, and head straight for the study unless they wanted an education.

Evans had to admit that, judging by Miss Charlotte's performance, he had never thought much of the teaching quality at the Royal Academy of Natural Sciences University.

Now, it seemed the school might not be the problem after all.