“Being meticulous so as not to miss out on any clues is one way to work towards solving a crime. Getting lucky is another, and at times, more reliable.” - Haerkul of Clan Poisonrot, investigator constable from Elmaiya.

“Well, well, what do we have here?” said Aideen as her shovel hit something that was neither dirt nor rock.

Aideen and Celia had taken out shovels and dug the area they found suspicious. It was fruitless labor at first, as whoever had done the digging had dug quite deep. They had dug a meter deep and had yet to find a thing even as the sun began to set on them. Even so, Aideen was undeterred and simply brought out some enchanted portable lights to illuminate things as they continued working in the dark.

The two of them dug over two meters deep before they finally found something. Both Aideen and Celia carefully dug the soil around the item and discovered a cloth sack that would have been large enough to stuff a child into. They lifted the sack out and tossed it out of the hole they dug first, before they helped each other get out from the hole.

“What do you think it is?” asked Celia with some curiosity. The shape that the cloth sack took showed that it had several long items inside it, and the proportions seemed wrong for it to have been a body.

“No idea, but whatever it is, it’s got to be something important,” replied Aideen as she brushed off some of the dirt from her clothes and started to untie the sack’s opening, which was tied up quite tightly with a dead knot. “Whoever hid this wouldn’t have made so much effort, going so deep in the jungle where not even the local hunters tread, nor bury it that deep otherwise.”

“Fair point,” replied Celia as she nodded. If the people who hid and buried that sack were indeed the Baron’s guards as their source said, then if there was any incriminating evidence in the sack, it would be all but certain that the noble was involved in whatever took place. Celia still almost cried out in surprise when Aideen finally opened the sack and upended its contents, though.

For what spilled out from inside the sack were three severed limbs.

“Someone of distant therian descent, looks like,” noted Aideen as she inspected the limbs. There were a pair of legs and a right arm, all of which had dainty claws at the tips of the fingers and toes instead of nails. They all looked like they had been removed from the body by something that was extremely sharp, and as Celia looked closer, curved as well.

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“What sort of blade would make this sort of clean cut?” she asked with some wonderment while observing the stump of one limb. “Even the bone had the same sort of cleanness to the cut… how?”

“You’ve seen it before, just on a much larger scale,” noted Aideen with a shake of her head. She then pointed towards the cut area with one finger. “Notice how it curved from the outside to the inside, almost as if the remaining parts beyond had just been scooped out of existence and left this part behind. That jogged your memory yet?”

“Wait… Do you mean… Void magic?” asked Celia with some incredulity in her voice. Void magic was rare as it was, given how few of the people born with that affinity made it alive past their awakening, and even then the vast majority of those tend to be ones whose ability to use the affinity was negligible at best. To be able to carve pieces off a person like that… would require a good bit more ability with the affinity.

“The cut’s way too clean for it to be anything else,” replied Aideen with a shake of her head. “From what I could tell off the limbs, it's likely from a young woman, late teens to early twenties or so, at most. Given the distant therian heritage, seems to be well within the strike zone of that elusive Tailhunter we heard a lot about in town.”

“Do you think she might be one of his victims, then?”

“All the evidence we have so far are circumstantial at best, but if that was actually the case, then this brings several unpleasant implications into the matter,” said Aideen in turn. “For one, it would mean that the Baron is definitely involved in the matter, either covering up or protecting the culprit, if not the culprit himself, for whatever reason.”

“For another, it might mean that there might be a skilled void mage who might be the culprit or working for them. Those are always a pain to deal with, so we always got to keep an eye out for them,” she added with an exasperated sigh. “Not forgetting the complications of the local authorities being useless if the Baron turned out to be involved. Nine of ten times they’d be by his side.”

“That’s all always so troublesome,” noted Celia with a similarly suffering sigh. “Sometimes I wish things could just be easier. You know, when I first heard of necromancers the stories I heard made me think that they could speak to the dead and all that. Makes me wish we could get someone who could do just that with us now, heh.”

“Huh. Your wish might be granted, actually.”

“What do you mean?”

“The feeling I’m getting from these remains are closer to us than a dead body. Whoever this is, it looks like that she might be close to rising as an unliving. She might have fully regenerated after another week or so, even,” noted Aideen after a careful inspection. “That would have ended up horribly had we not dug her out already.”

“How so?”

“Imagine coming back to life, only to find yourself contorted and twisted in a very tight space where you cannot move, cannot breathe, cannot do anything. Even if you scream nobody would hear you. Even if you struggle you wouldn’t be able to move the soil above you,” said Aideen with a grim face. “How long would you have persisted under that situation before you gave up hope entirely?”

Celia’s face turned equally grim as she understood what Aideen implied with her words.