System of the Beast Slayer [litrpg Adventure]
Copyright© 1999 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 119
A bright morgue, six corpses laid out in a straight line.
A faint rot and the sting of preservative clung to the bodies; four had soaked so long in the embalming fluid they’d turned a brownish shade, while two fresher corpses showed little change.
The bright light picked out every decaying detail of their skin. Without exception, from chest to belly they bore traces of dissection, long, gruesome seams like the legs of a centipede running down each torso.
Some bodies showed scattered sutures along the flanks, wounds likely fatal. The most horrifying was a man whose pale, swollen face had been partitioned like a ragged doll, seams climbing over it so the head was clearly divided into four quadrants.
The stitchwork was strikingly visible yet oddly neat, as tidy as a row of perfectly matched zippers on a coat; one could see the coroner’s skill in each precise seam.
Francis folded his hands over his chest and surveyed them with satisfaction.
“Mate, you should’ve seen how they were when I first found them ... I swear, in all of Ellander only Francis has hands sure enough to keep the dead looking almost like they did in life.”
“You’ve got nerve too; not as weak as I thought you might be...”
Roy said nothing. His gaze fixed on the freshest corpse; his pupils narrowed, surprise flickering across his face.
“You ... you know the deceased?” the curious coroner asked.
Roy nodded. Cranmer beside him sighed, “The Knight of Theros is usually full of himself, arrogant and irritating, but I didn’t expect him to end like this.”
The most recent victim was Arthur Tailles, the White Rose Knight who had once stopped Roy at the city gate and demanded a duel.
“This killer is taunting the Order of the White Rose,” Roy thought.
“Come to think of it...” Francis’s mouth bent in a mocking smile, “this Knight’s end is one of the more gentle and decent ones...”
“Allow me to explain.” He made a half-bowed gesture, then pointed with a knuckled finger at the chest; a thin suture marked the left thorax.
“Tailles was found in a little alley west of the princely palace, on his knees, humble and devout, holding up his heart toward the palace.”
“Ugh...” Roy pictured it and shook his head, “Cause of death?”
“He still had undigested celandine in his gut; he’d swallowed a crude, folk-made anaesthetic potion, then had his chest cut open and his heart taken out.” Francis sneered, “The killer’s method was crude, clearly no surgical training; the wound was mangled by a sharp instrument, no trace of aesthetic care.”
As he spoke a small scalpel flashed between his fingers like a silver fish, leaving a whorl of afterimages.
“Are you sure it was a blade and not a beast’s claws or teeth?”
“Questioning my authority? But you needn’t doubt your master’s judgement—this Letho fellow examined the wounds and reached the same conclusion as I did.”
Roy turned to Dennis Cranmer; the dwarf gave a curt nod.
Their attention moved to the next corpse, a bloated, ugly middle-aged man. His mouth hung oddly open, thighs swollen while calves below the knees were skin-and-bone; his soft body was a map of scars, it felt to Roy like a waterbag that had been crushed.
“This one’s far from a noble Knight ... one above, one below; he’s the ant beneath the stone, the beggar.”
“Beggar?”
“Surprised? Old Beggar Bar’s the sort with crippled legs who lies on the cold, filthy ground begging. Why would the killer brutally torture such a poor wretch?”
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