Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 46
Cannibal cult.
Child trafficking.
Mistress Donna. White...
For one fleeting instant, Lannor could not tell whether the cold inside him came from rage or guilt.
He only felt an endless chill sweeping through the Witcher’s body.
What should have been an ordinary hunt, routine and orderly, carried out with a friend, had turned in an instant. Some nameless enemy had come at them smiling, bent on murder from the start.
The enemy had been man-eaters. Bernie had taken an arrow. Lannor’s brain had endured the shock of a full seventy percent proficiency infusion. He had gotten the man back to the village, then forced himself through the splitting pain in his skull and performed the surgery.
The young man had thought he had saved his friend’s life.
One thought had been pounding through his head the whole time: today was a damned nightmare, it nearly worked me to death, tomorrow I’m tracking down that bow-shooting bastard by scent alone and putting him in the ground, but today I do not even want to climb out of bed, and no one is stopping me.
But the moment Bernie’s belly was stitched closed, Old Aaron brought him this news.
Like a thunderclap from a clear sky, like fire surging straight into the blood.
Like a basin of cold water dumped over his head, so cold he could not even sort out what he was feeling anymore.
Guilt?
Yes. Deeply.
He had come to Auridon for one reason above all, to see that the widow of a man who had once spoken up for him could live well.
And now their only remaining child had been taken.
Gone.
Why?
Because the girl was out gathering those damned alchemical ingredients for me.
What other reason could there be? Lannor could not imagine a child made prematurely sober by family tragedy wandering beyond the village for no reason at all.
White knew far too well how dangerous the world outside the village was.
And even now, from the small cloth bundle in Mistress Donna’s lap, there still rose the fresh, unmistakable scent of white crape myrtle.
Anger?
Of course he was angry. In Lannor’s eyes, stealing children belonged to the same tier of evil as eating human flesh.
But above all else, what stood out most right now was urgency.
Damn it. Damn it! Damn it!
Why did every foul thing have to come crashing down at once?
Lannor remembered criminal investigators in his homeland had once concluded that within the first forty-eight hours after a disappearance, both the recovery rate and the victim’s survival rate stood far, far higher than after that window closed.
And that had been in a world with advanced technology.
There, traffickers letting their merchandise die in large numbers was something left centuries behind.
But in Velen ... in Velen, where every day people died in batches like insects.
In Velen, the moment a person left home, they were already gambling with sudden death on the road, let alone being abducted.
Every second mattered now.
Lannor surged up from the dock planks so violently that the boards beneath his near two-hundred-kilogram weight let out a groan.
“Why didn’t you say so sooner?”
The Witcher’s face twitched with anger. As he spoke, he pulled his steel bracers and studded leather gloves back on, glaring at Old Aaron.
The old man’s face crumpled tighter.
“You were saving a life.” He pointed at Mistress Donna. “Donna wouldn’t throw herself at you like a madwoman and interrupt, even if she’s worried enough now to go mad.”
Mistress Donna.
At that name, Lannor forced his misdirected fury back down his throat.
In his own mind, if there was one person in this world he had no right to lose his temper with, it was Donna.
The middle-aged woman slumped on the ground no longer looked anything like the cheerful, hard-living soul he had first met.
Even after losing the pillar of her household, losing its main source of labor, she had still been broad-minded, optimistic, fearless.
She had mocked her dead husband without restraint, then turned around and taken up work no woman’s body ought to bear, holding their home together by herself.
As if life itself simply could not beat her down.
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