“Phew! And with that, we’ve finished harvesting the last of its organs!” Elrand said, dabbing at the sweat on his brow with a rag he kept hung on his belt and dyeing the cloth blue with the leviathan blood his hands were still covered in.
Elrand had a perfectly satisfied smile on his face. He might have been a sorry excuse of an elf, but he was still an elf all the same, and between those classically handsome elven features and the smile on his face, he was practically aglow. I had to admit that it was sort of incredible—in every sense of the word—that someone could be that happy about having had to do such a gory, brutal job.
The man’s unbelievably consistent when it comes to his interests, that’s for sure. In a certain sense, I had to respect that. It was a job that I never would have been able to handle. In fact, one glance at the Leviathan’s intestines getting yanked out of its body had made me nearly lose my lunch—or, well, my breakfast, really. I felt a lot more tired than Elrand looked as he moved along to the next stage of the butchering process.
“I’ll be removing the head next! Ordinarily, I would proceed to butcher the head itself afterward, but in this instance...” Elrand lowered his voice to explain the situation to me. “A leviathan’s skull is full of tremendously valuable components—its eyes, fangs, brain, and the like—which means that it’s the most likely part of the monster to be targeted by thieves. Bram has requested that I instead butcher the head indoors at the guild.”
Oh, that makes sense. We know the guild’s storehouse is big enough for the head to fit, so there’s no reason not to do it there.
“Now then, I will begin the removal forthwith!” Elrand said before raising the sword he’d borrowed from me aloft, then slicing the Leviathan’s head clean off. “Oh, I wish I could process it right now! What a terrible shame!” he muttered as he stroked the monster’s severed head.
Mental note: Make a point of not listening to Elrand when he talks to himself from now on. It basically always ends up being something super freaky.
“I’ll go ahead and put this away for now,” I said. I stepped up to the leviathan’s head and stowed it in my Item Box for safekeeping.
“Ahh...” Elrand quietly moaned, reaching a longing hand out toward the head as it vanished away.
It was decided that I’d keep hold of both the monster’s head as well as the portion of its neck that Gon had bitten into in my Item Box for the time being, then drop them off at the Adventurer’s guild on my way home.
“Just don’t go thinking you can take it easy for the rest of the day,” I said. “I know Moira isn’t around right now, but if you slack off and don’t get any work done, she’ll chew you out again the next time you see her.”
“I-I’m well aware! I’ll do my part, I promise!” Elrand replied.
Will he, really? I’m not so sure. The local Adventurer’s guild had been absolutely swamped with inquiries, and was more or less in a state of barely controlled chaos. Bram and the other bigwigs didn’t have even a second to spare, and Moira had been forced to temporarily step away from her role as Elrand’s babysitter to back them up. And, wait—backing the conversation up a few steps...
“Hey, remember what you said about thieves targeting the leviathan’s head? Is that really something we have to worry about? Like, would anyone dare to even try with this many high-ranking adventurers standing guard?” I asked.
And that’s not even starting on Fel’s and Gon’s barriers! Plus, I didn’t hear about any would-be thieves turning up yesterday. I’d been pretty worried about the possibility at first, but since nobody had made an attempt, I’d sort of figured that the incredibly heavy security had scared them all off.
“I’m afraid to say it is. Regrettably, more than a few people have tried already,” Elrand replied.
As it turned out, I simply hadn’t been paying close enough attention. There had been thieves—a frankly astonishing number of them, in fact—which the adventurers had been apprehending. Gon and Dora-chan had captured a decent number as well, supposedly.
Come to think of it, those two took off pretty much the second we arrived at the work site today. They said they were keeping watch again, but I sort of figured they were just running away from you-know-who. Neither of them had said a word to me about having caught so many prospective criminals.
Apparently, the potential to score a massive windfall by selling a single piece of a monster was simply too good for a lot of people to pass up, no matter how many guards there were around said monster. I just didn’t get it. Who could look at a group of adventurers like that and not give up on the spot?
“Fortunately, we do have the adventurers to stand guard. We’ll trust them to handle security while we move on to skinning the creature, at long last! Thankfully, expert butchers from all across the guild’s network have traveled here to help with that stage!” Elrand explained. And indeed, I saw that a whole host of butchers were starting to gather around him as we were speaking. He must have already put out the word that it was time for them to get to work.
Oh, hey, there’s Johan! He seemed to notice me and gave me a wave, which I returned. A moment later, however, he dropped right back into serious mode and moved along. The man was a true professional.