“Go now! Run!”
If that was a preacher, then it would be back in moments; that blow wouldn’t be fatal. I’d have to grab it and wrench its head off. Donald was completely terrified, however, and wasn’t getting up.
“What’s wrong with you? This is pathetic! And you were trying to take down that old man? He’s ten times worse than that monster,” I said, hoping some provocation would snap him out of it.
“Sounds rather frightful,” said another voice. A white figure was standing behind Donald—a completely different monster. “Should he have gotten onto his knees and begged for mercy instead?”
It was about my height and wore nothing that resembled clothing. Its slender body was covered in black-and-white mottled tattoo-like patterns. Small golden eyes flashed on its narrow face. I couldn’t see any nose or mouth. Arms extended from its sides with massive pincer claws. If anything, it looked like a black-and-white spotted crayfish-man. Another preacher.
This wasn’t like Levi, who had multiple copies of himself. There were two different preachers here at once.
“You need not fear. We are merely purifying your tainted soul,” it said in a muffled voice, lowering the pincers toward Donald.
“Run!” I shouted, right as the massive claws crushed Donald’s skull. His body fell over without so much as a scream. I didn’t need to check his vital signs. He was a corpse.
The crayfish-man tossed Donald’s body aside unceremoniously and rounded on me.
“You wanna go, then? Sure thing. I’ll take you on,” I said. Then I felt another presence behind me and looked over my shoulder.
It was the monster named Sam from earlier. As I thought, it was back already—and completely unharmed.
Now it was two on one. And I had a time limit. It was an ugly situation.
But the crayfish-man just looked at Sam, then passed by me. He didn’t seem to care about me at all. Instead, he left through the hole in the wall, leaving behind tendrils of something like smoke. Sam briefly turned back to look at me, then went back out through the hole, too.
Silence filled the room.
They weren’t coming back. I exhaled with relief.
Who were they? Was Donald actually a true believer of that cat-puke sun god? Did they come to silence him before he spilled their secrets? A crowd was starting to gather as I contemplated what had occurred. I couldn’t blame them after the noise we’d made. There was no time to waste.
I tore through the closet. Donald had been trying to get some reports, he said. That was where he’d hidden them. Reading the reports might tell me something. I tore off the closet partition and found a brown leather satchel behind it—bingo. The hole was to be Donald’s escape route, I gathered. Well, it would become my escape route.
I took the contents out of the satchel and jumped through the hole. There was a rope ladder below that went down to a pitch-black room on the first floor. I pushed the wall, and it opened to the outside; it was a back alley. I stuffed the paper into my pocket and snuck back home without drawing further attention. No one followed me.
Back in my room, I spread out the sheets.
Most of them described an investigation into the old man’s malfeasance. Overstated expenses and exaggerated monster kills were only the start of it. He continually understated his profits and paid off various legal enforcers. The old man was doing whatever he felt like. It would be easy for him to manage protection for a young lady like his granddaughter, of course. But while this was all very fascinating, the more pressing matter was the syphilitic sun god and his preachers.
I read through the reports. Thankfully, Donald had summed them up in a convenient way. I was also grateful he wasn’t a poet. If he were, I’d have gone back to his room to wrench his head off myself.
…Interesting. According to the documents, there was an adventurer engaged in funny business down in the dungeon, and the most likely suspect was Sam.
It was well known around this town that the scum sun god’s followers transformed into monsters called preachers. Arwin had reported as much to the guild after the stampede. Donald must have seen the monster and thought he was Sam.
But there was one contradictory detail in this report.
The Adventurers Guild had no record of a person named Sam.
I made sure to check all the names and faces because it was vitally important to Arwin’s safety. So I could guarantee there was no such person. What does this mean?
Mysteries abounded, but one thing was certain: I had trouble on my hands again.
Preachers and sufferers. Just when we’d just gotten over the stampede.
I would be telling Arwin about this, of course, but the real problem was the old man. He had tried to screw me over on this one. I wanted to kill him, but he was well known around town, and that would cause too many problems. April would mourn him, too. But I could expose his misdoings to headquarters. The only problem with that was no one could fill his shoes. If he didn’t have an heir, chaos would plague the guild. And if the guild was in shambles, their support for Arwin would wane.
In the end, I decided to head for the old man.
I had no intention of getting involved in the guild’s sins or influencing its moral compass, but this matter affected Arwin’s safety. The best way to lure out any sufferers was to get the old man involved. He’d lost plenty from the stampede, too; he wouldn’t be against the idea. If needed, I could use Donald’s report as a bargaining chip.
The next day, I went to the guild around noon. Mornings were always hectic around there, so I waited until a later hour. He would have heard about Donald’s death by then. If he tried to blame me for it, then Donald’s report would reach headquarters. I wasn’t in any rush.
But when I got there, the guild was in absolute tatters. All the staffers seemed unnerved, their eyes unfocused and their minds distracted. I didn’t smell blood, so it probably wasn’t anything related to monsters.
The old man didn’t get attacked again, did he?
I tried to flag down a staffer, but they just looked at me and said, “Not now.” Others were shouting about the adventurers and getting them back out of the dungeon, and so on.
At last, I found someone who might be able to answer my questions.
“What’s going on, squirt?”
April’s face was pale. She looked like she was on the verge of tears.
“Matthew!” she cried, hugging me.
“What is it? What happened?”
I bent down to her eye level and patted her on the head. April rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Her voice trembled.
“The guards took Grampa away…”