"What is...?"
As Roland gazed at the scene before him, even his normally unruffled face froze in a rare moment of surprise.
The cloyingly thick reek of blood spread relentlessly, surging into his nostrils like a frenzied mist or miasma, lingering and battering his sense of smell.
Blood so red it was almost black trickled down the sloping sides of the suitcase, staining the carpet covering the entire room a more vivid, richer, searing red.
And at the center of this wicked, filthy tableau lay a girl's pale body.
From her head and the back of her skull, from her eyes to her lips, from her upper arms to her wrists, from her chest to her lower abdomen, from her buttocks to her thighs, from her calves to her toes.
Not a bit missing, not a piece absent, seventeen neatly arranged parts in all.
Of course, what stunned Roland was not this gruesome sight, but the abnormality behind it.
Someone who was not a normal human being, but a scumbag with a twisted worldview like Ryunosuke Uryu, would be able to appreciate its ethereal unreality once the initial impression gradually faded.
Although Shiki Ryougi had no perverse inclination to regard murder as art, her view of life and death had always been rather detached. That was why she had keenly sensed this abnormality and taken the initiative to clean up afterward, picking the girl up and bringing her back.
Once one absorbed the immense visual shock, the impression this scene left was less that of a murder scene and more that of an abstract artwork, possessing a beauty that did not belong to this world.
Even though her clothes were little different from rags, even though she lay in a pool of blood, she still possessed a presence so powerful