“Heave, ho!” the workers grunted as they plopped a chunk of one of the leviathan’s organs—maybe its heart, or its liver, or something?—into a massive pot. The guild folks were hard at work chopping up and pulling out the beast’s insides, and oh god, was it ever gross.
No, seriously, can I please just go home now?
It had been a long and eventful process, with a fair few of those “events” involving Elrand clinging to the leviathan again, but the monster’s blood had finally been drained. The butchering process had now moved on to its next stage: harvesting the leviathan’s innards. Elrand was ecstatically chopping away at its stomach with my magic sword, though he didn’t let his ebullience get the better of him and was taking a lot more care than you’d think at a glance.
The biggest obstacle that stood in our way was, unsurprisingly, the creature’s incredibly tough hide. That was a trait that wasn’t exclusive to leviathans, it seemed—all dragons had it, to a greater or lesser extent. However, once you managed to cut through their skin, (or rather, if you managed to cut through it—the fact that we had to bring out magic swords to do the job said it all) the creature’s flesh and innards were soft enough to slice with perfectly ordinary knives. Not even the strongest monsters, it seemed, were borderline invulnerable both outside and in.
Of course, just because it could be butchered with an ordinary knife didn’t mean that was what we’d actually settled on. In Elrand’s words, “This is a leviathan we’re working on! My cuts have to be as clean and precise as possible if I want to avoid waste, and that means I have to use a mithril knife!”—a declaration that he proceeded to follow through on.
As you might expect, considering the creature’s sheer size, the leviathan’s organs were ginormous as well. Not even the biggest containers that the guild could provide were big enough to fit even its smallest organs, so instead, each of them was cut apart on a wooden butchering table and then stored in pieces. It was a really gruesome process to watch, but Elrand seemed over the moon to be right down in the thick of it. I even caught him muttering little comments to himself from time to time along the lines of “Oh, I see! So that’s where their hearts are located” or “I’ve never seen a liver this glossy and firm before... Beautiful!”
I’ve gotta admit, watching a guy talk to himself while he disembowels a monster might very well be the creepiest thing I’ve seen in ages.
In short, the whole process was mentally exhausting to watch. It kept wearing on until eventually, Bram let out a shout. “All right! Let’s wrap it up for today,” he said.
“What?!” Elrand exclaimed. “But I still have so much work left to do!”
“I’m aware, and you’ll just have to do it tomorrow.”
“Why, though?! I can work straight through the night! That wouldn’t bother me at all!”
“Even if you wouldn’t mind, I can’t afford to take responsibility for that decision.”
According to Bram, our current security setup wouldn’t be sufficient to make working through the night a feasible plan. The fall of darkness would almost definitely mean more would-be thieves deciding to try to grab a quick windfall. Not only would the guards have more trouble to deal with, they’d also be working in worse visibility and dealing with the exhaustion of staying up and alert long into the night. Putting a pause on the process was the much more practical option, and so I stowed the remainder of the leviathan’s corpse in my Item Box once more. We could pick it up again the next day, when we’d be working under much safer circumstances.
“I’d like to begin at the same time tomorrow as we did today. Will that work for you, Mukohda?” Bram asked.
“That should be fine, yes,” I replied. “No objections, right, Fel?”
“Hmph. I wish to partake of the leviathan’s meat as soon as possible, but the reason behind your words does not escape me. An overnight vigil is far from a desirable task. All the more so seeing as I have grown quite hungry,” he added as he shot me a rather sharp glance.
Oh, crap. Now that he mentions it, we totally skipped lunch today, didn’t we? I’d been so preoccupied watching everyone go about their business that it’d completely slipped my mind.
《Sui didn’t eat anything for lunch, so Sui’s really, really hungry too!》 the slime chimed in from its perch atop Fel’s head.
《Yeah, my bad! I’ll make something really filling as soon as we get home,》 I telepathically assured my familiars.