Emil eventually caught up to Ira who was waiting in front of the manor gates. It wasn’t too far—maybe a mile or two from where they had entered. But with everyone else’s slow pace, the two had a significant headstart.

Now that he thought about it, Ira was rather sly. She had immediately assumed that he would be able to keep up without being affected by the new laws—and he had unthinkingly proved her right. He could tell by the glimmering interest in her eyes that he had messed up a bit. It was too late to bother putting up an act now.

He sighed inwardly. It wasn’t too big of a deal and she didn’t say anything about it, either. It could be explained in multiple ways, so Emil brushed it to the side and focused on the issue at hand.

“This is it?” Emil questioned, turning to look at the dilapidated building. It was done in an old, outdated style. Without the owner keeping the world in tact, everything created inside of it was beginning to collapse.

“Looks like it.” Ira tapped on the wrought-iron gates and watched them fall over. “They’ve already cleared the entrance and bottom floor. It looks to be around three stories excluding the basement. The commissioners don’t know where the inheritance is…”

“How about you use that nose of yours?” Emil joked. She had seemed to be rather proud of it.

Ira laughed. “If only I could use it in that way. But we are going to have to find it on your own. Shouldn’t be too hard.” She licked her lips. “There should be some fun encounters along the way, I’m sure. I smell a bit of blood.”

She pushed open the front door and let out a disgusted sound. Emil had a second to wonder what had caused that reaction when the smell hit him: the heavy stench of blood and rot.

He covered his nose and mouth as he stepped into the foyer next to Ira. The sight in front of him made his stomach queasy.

A massacre had occurred here.

At first glance, forty or so corpses littered the ground. Their blood had formed a congealed pool that coated most of the tile, stopping only a few steps from where the two stood. The bodies were all torn up beyond recognition, as if they had been ripped apart by ravenous beast or put through a shredder. There were clumps of viscera splattered on the wall, large chunks of skin with hair sticking out of them along with bone shards. Some bodies were still more or less intact--only missing a limb or so--but their skulls had been cracked open and brain matter spilled out. The veins on almost all of the corpses were engorged and had turned a nasty shade of green.

For Emil, it wasn’t the first time he had seen gore, after all, he had killed before. But this was... It reminded him of the beasts that attacked his village even though he had not seen most of the carnage. He wasn’t very affected by it and remained weirdly calm, but the sight definitely wasn’t pleasant.

Most importantly was that the bodies were still pretty fresh. It had only been a day or two, so even though they smelled, the indoors allowed them to decompose slower. The nasty, rotting aroma came from something else. Mixed in was the slightest trace of sulphur.

“Ghouls,” Ira muttered, sniffing the air with a disdainful expression. They were pretty common beasts on the old battlefields her mother took her to when she was younger, so she recognized their scent. “How did they get in here?”

Emil wasn’t sure either. In demiplanes like these, anything that wasn’t invited couldn’t enter. Which meant there was no way for there to be ghouls unless they had been brought inside. It was possible for the corpses to have enough hateful intent to become the undead, but that would require longer than a day or two. Not to mention, these people were killed by something. Which meant...

He took a step into the blood pool and moved over to a dismembered arm, seeing evidence that it had been chewed on. Emil’s continued on, not caring about his boots growing dirty as he examined the bodies. Most of them, he couldn’t tell, but the less ravaged ones looked like they had been slashed by sharp objects or torn. He pressed on the swollen veins of a body and watched it burst, a smelly and green liquid seeping out. It was the curse from ghouls that affected those that they touched.

“It’s a feeding ground,” Emil stated slowly. Ghouls were messy and wasteful eaters. But they’d often come back to their previous meals and continued to feast. Whether or not the meat had rotted wasn’t really any concern of theirs. He was sure that, once they grew hungry again, the ghouls would finish off what remained in here.

Ira’s face turned ugly. “There was more lies to this mission than I thought.”

Emil nodded his head. He had also misjudged their intentions. “I was thinking that they were just robbers,” he said to Ira, checking to see if she had been on the same page.

“Yeah. They wouldn’t go searching for treasure themselves, but whoever tried to leave with any would be attacked by them.”

This wasn’t an uncommon method. But the thieves only attacked those who had grabbed items. Basically, they paid everyone then and later, they’d target the individuals who had gotten good rewards. Those ones would die and the thieves took back what they paid the mercenaries. This behavior was generally looked down upon, though and the practice had fallen off. The strange conditions of the mission had lead Emil to believe that was the case.

Emil and Ira, and possibly others, had figured this out, but weren’t bothered by it. If it didn’t involve them, why would they? Even Ira didn’t have the intention of purposefully luring in the robbers—she’d rather fight head-on.

“I thought they had misguaged how powerful the ruins were and the first batch died except for the survivor… they probably were the ones that did that to him in order to draw more attention.” Ira stated.

If everyone had been wiped out, perhaps, the C-rankers would have been hesitant. But the thought that a lowly, D-ranked mercenary could make out alive meant that could do even better than that and succeed. It challenged prideful people like Ira to come explore.

“But we were fooled in the end, so I guess none of that matters. We missed a very important fact: they’re not thieves, they’re necromancers.”

Everything had been a lie to lure in victims. There wasn’t an inheritance and there certainly weren’t treasures waiting to be grabbed.

Emil gripped his fist tightly. The mercenary’s guild didn’t start background checking jobs and approving them until they reached at least the A-rank. It was because C and D-ranked missions were far too abundant for them to bother. B-ranked was in the middle and depending on what was being requested of the mercenaries, it would undergo to the check.

The man that had been allowed to escape was probably so that they could draw the attention of stronger folk to feed their creatures. After all, from the beginning, they wouldn’t have been strong enough to handle C-ranked mercenaries. But with the blood and flesh of fifty D-ranked mercenaries, they must have grown stronger.

Necromancy was not a banned magic. Though, it was not very common. Its practitioners had a tendency towards evil, but this world was not one that cared about such things. Most people just didn’t have the stomach to endure it because becoming a good necromancer always required… experimentation.

There were multiple paths for necromancers to take, but the most simple and effective one was raising up undead creatures and feeding them meat. The higher the quality of food, the faster their undead army would grow. So, it wasn’t uncommon for necromancers to begin using humans as a food source. If exposed, they were normally executed or had bounties on their heads. Sorcerers who practiced necromancy tended to very tricky due to this. Usually, by the time one realized they had fallen into their trap, it would have been too late and death was nearly certain.

Ira laughed crazily as she reached her conclusion. “They want to use me as feed? Hah! Let’s see if they are worthy enough.”

Seeing the light in Ira’s eyes, Emil let out his own little chuckle. He had to agree with her words. Emil was naturally cautious, but he was still a teenager with hot blood. The tiredness that plagued him weighed down on his body, but his desire to beat down the necromancer was even stronger.