Chương 59: Loot the Bodies

The Beasts' bodies looked like they were crumbling into dark gray powder, as though they'd been burned and drenched in acid at the same time, but Evan had no time to admire the effect of his Celestial magic. He rushed over to Oliver, cut him out of the spiderwebs with the tip of his still glowing sword, then sprinted to Luca. Oliver struggled back to his feet and hobbled over to Catriona, while Evan crouched next to Luca.

He was still breathing, but his skin color had a sickly yellowish tone, and when Evan gently lifted his eyelids, he saw that the whites of his eyes were bloodshot.

"That can't be good," he mumbled while he checked his party display. Luca's health bar was down to 13%, and while Evan checked his status conditions, it dropped another percent, down to 12%. From Oliver's run-in with the Earthwyrm, Evan knew a health bar dropping that rapidly was an absolute emergency. Unfortunately, the experienced Forest Folk healer who'd helped Olly was a day's journey away, and the only healer on their team was the patient.

"How is Catriona doing?" Evan yelled over his shoulder while he gently shook Luca. If only he could wake him up so he could cast a few cleansing spells on himself.

"Uh, I think she's come back to herself," Oliver yelled back. He wrapped his arm around the archer's shoulder to prop her up into a sitting position. She weakly opened her eyes, but still looked dazed. Evan had less success. Luca showed no sign of regaining consciousness, and his health bar had dropped to 11%. Another round of desperate shaking made the potion bottles attached to Luca's belt clink. The sound gave Evan an idea.

He ripped both bottles, health potion and mana potion, out of their pouch and forced Luca's jaw open with his fingers. With shaking hands, he poured the health potion into Luca's mouth, silently praying he would be able to swallow it, despite his unconscious state, and not choke on the blue liquid. To his relief, he saw the health bar slowly ticking upwards. Some of the potion dripped down his chin, but whatever got in was enough to make Luca rouse. When his health reached 20%, he opened his eyes.

"W... what?" he asked, voice raspy, eyes swimming around aimlessly.

"Don't talk, just drink," Evan said, pressing the glass bottle back to his lips. Luca readily swallowed the rest of the bottle's contents. He managed to sit up. He still looked like death, but he could talk more smoothly.

"What happened? I don't... feel so good." He lifted his arm to inspect the dozens of spider bites on his hand and forearm. Evan dropped the empty health potion bottle to the ground and pushed the mana potion into Luca's hand.

"Here, quickly, drink this and then cast as many cleansing spells on yourself as you can." Thankfully, Luca grasped the situation he was in quickly. He drank the potion in one go and started using his cleansing skill on himself. Hovering his hand over his bite marks, water started flowing down his arm. Everywhere it touched, the tiny puncture wounds lost their red rim, and soon after they healed over without leaving a mark.

Evan sat by and monitored his friend's health bar, watching it climb up while the status warnings faded one by one. Catriona and Oliver came over and sat down on the ground next to them. Olly had a bleeding thigh wound, and Catriona was still a bit wobbly on her feet, but they were all alive, and that was all that counted. Oliver was pale. He kept glancing at the pile of bodies next to the hole, but always looked away quickly, as if he was afraid of what he would see if he looked for too long.

Evan had an inkling of what was going through his mind.

"We're going to rest for a bit and then Luca, Cat, and I are going to bury the bodies."

"I'll help," Oliver announced quickly.

"I should help."

"No, you shouldn't," Evan said gently.

"You don't need the added trauma, Olly. We will tell you if we recognize someone from Silvercreek, but you don't need to see the bodies. You really don't."

"He's right," Catriona said.

"The hardest part is yet to come, and you need a clear head for that." Oliver nodded weakly.

"Okay."

"You shouldn't overexert yourself anyway. That's a pretty deep cut," Luca said, pointing at Oliver's wound.

"I can throw a bit of healing your way, but my skill isn't strong enough to fix this. You need to rest so your body can heal it itself." Despite his protests, Oliver seemed relieved his friends were taking on the gruesome task of burying the bodies without him. After a few minutes of rest and chatter, where they discussed how incredibly cool Evan's final [Super Nova] had been and praised him for figuring out how to channel mana into his sword to activate its enchantments, they got to work.

Evan picked up one of the shovels Bear and Spider had used, while Luca and Catriona worked together to gently lower the bodies into the hole. Evan forced himself to look at each one while he dug out dirt to expand the grave large enough to fit all the victims inside. Neither Catriona nor Luca really knew the villagers of Silvercreek. Evan hadn't spent much time there either, but Oliver's hometown was such a small community Evan was certain he would recognize them, even in their disfigured state.

Looking at them demanded a lot of willpower from Evan. Some of them looked barely human anymore. Extra limbs, misplaced facial features, too many teeth, too many eyes, even tentacles, and almost all of them showed strange tumor-like growths on both their faces and bodies, where the skin was cracked and discolored. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Oliver sat several feet away, head hung low, eyes fixed on the ground.

Evan could almost feel the tension and fear radiating off his friend. It was one of the last bodies they buried when Evan paused for the first time to take a closer look. A woman, in her forties. She was missing her eyes. Skin had grown over them, perforated with dozens of holes where the eye sockets used to be, giving the corpse an insect-like look, but the rest of the face was intact enough that Evan recognized her. She'd been the tailor in Silvercreek.

The friendly woman had sold him his first set of clothing, after he'd been forced to toss his torn-up T-shirt and jeans. Even from afar, Oliver must've noticed the change in Evan's body language.

"You found someone?" he asked, jaw muscles twitching.

"Who?" Evan climbed out of the grave and walked over to Oliver.

"The lady who owned the tailor shop. I didn't know her very well, but she was very polite to me. I'm sorry." Oliver took a deep breath and nodded.

"She was very kind. She didn't deserve this."

"No, she didn't." A long, tense silence stretched between them. Oliver rubbed a shaky hand over his face.

"But you didn't find Felix."

"No, we didn't find Felix." Oliver jumped to his feet.

"Then we need to make haste. He could still be alive. He could still be somewhere inside this building. We need to find him." With renewed vigor, he grabbed the spare shovel and started shoveling dirt into the open grave. Evan joined his side, and together they made quick work of the unpleasant task. Within an hour, the victims of the Professor's experiments were buried, protecting what little dignity they still had left in death. Catriona looked at the bodies of the three Beasts.

"What about them?"

"I'm not going to bury them," Evan said quickly.

"They can rot for all I care." The sharpness of his tone surprised even himself. As a nurse, he'd always strived to show every patient the same level of care and respect, no matter who they were or what they'd done, but this was different. The Beasts had participated in an absolutely gruesome crime and had shown no signs of remorse or even just doubt. On top of that, they'd also tried to kill him. Evan just didn't have it in him to show them compassion. Not this time. Catriona furrowed her brows.

"I wasn't suggesting we bury them. I meant looting them." Evan scratched the back of his head.

"Oh, right… that." He'd completely forgotten about the possibility of looting a corpse. He remembered Oliver had told him about it and that it was smarter not to tell anyone about his extremely rare affinity crystals so as not to tempt them into killing him just to loot his body, but until now Evan had only ever looted monsters. He realized this was the first time he'd killed another human being. To his surprise, he felt pretty indifferent about it.

These criminals truly had been more Beasts than human, and no one could argue he hadn't acted in self-defense.

"Yes, let's loot their bodies," he said sternly.

"Why hasn't it happened automatically?" Oliver shrugged.

"No one really knows, but that's how it works. You should get a prompt from your ledger once you get close to the body."

"Then let's share. Oliver, you can have Bear, and Catriona can loot Spider."

"No, it has to be you," Catriona explained.

"Only the person who dealt the killing blow can do it."

"Experience isn't shared with the party either, by the way," Luca chimed in.

"I bet you got a ton of experience points for killing those guys."

"Oh, I haven't even checked yet. I got so many notifications during that fight I lost track." He opened his menu to sift through the list of notifications. [You have killed Francis Erlo] [You have earned 102 experience points.] [You have killed Hugo Semetris] [You have earned 134 experience points] [You have killed Eric Tameryo] [You have earned 191 experience points]"Wow," Evan said.

"I hate to say it, but killing other mana users really pays off." After quickly checking his progress bar, he got even more excited.

"I'm 82% toward rank 5!" Catriona raised an eyebrow.

"Don't get any funny ideas. You only get experience points from killing another mana user when you have a quest for it." Evan looked at her, confused.

"But I don't have a quest for that."

"We do, actually. It's an optional goal for our save-the-abducted-villagers quest. It popped up just after we entered the estate."

"Really? Why didn't you say so?"

"Oh, I was a bit busy not getting torn apart by Nightterror Hounds," Luca snarked. Evan checked his quest log and found a new addition to the quest. [Optional Goal: Kill the criminals known as Beasts (3/3) Reward: +3 Strength, +3 Spirit, +1 Perception, +1 Endurance, 800 mana stones]"What did you get?" Oliver asked.

"A juicy attribute boost and a whopping 800 mana stones," Evan reported.

"Peanuts compared to what looting them will bring in," Luca said.

"Go check the bodies." Evan approached Spider first. He'd been the farthest away from the [Super Nova] attack, so his corpse was the most recognizable of the three. [Would you like to loot the body of Francis Erlo (rank 4)? Y/N] Evan mentally selected yes. [You looted 1239 mana stones] [You looted 1 Spider Affinity Crystal (common)] Evan thought he should probably feel some kind of guilt over looting a dead body, but that thought couldn't prevent the grin from appearing on his face.

He moved on to Bear's corpse and repeated the process. [Would you like to loot the body of Hugo Semetris (rank 4)? Y/N] [You looted 183 mana stones] [You looted 1 Bear Affinity Crystal (uncommon)]"Man, that guy wasn't good with money, huh?" Evan mumbled before looting Bears's body and moving on to Rat. [Would you like to loot the body of Eric Tameryo (rank 5)? Y/N] [You looted 8272 mana stones] [You looted 1 Rat Affinity Crystal (common)] Evan reported the haul to the rest of the group.

"We're going to share it, of course."

"We can discuss dividing the loot later," Oliver said.

"Let's go back into the building now. We need to find the entrance to the dungeon." He had already made three large steps toward the back door they'd come through when Catriona's familiar sprinted toward Oliver and yipped at him anxiously.

"Not now, little lady. No time for play, we're in a hurry."

"She doesn't want to play," Catriona said, brows knitted together.

"She wants to tell us something. Go ahead, girl, what do you want to show us?" Lys ran a circle around Olly before taking off in the other direction, dashing across the backyard. Catriona jogged after her, past the dead Beasts and past the fresh grave until the fox stopped at a seemingly random spot in the yard, just a few feet away from the back wall. She nervously danced around, waiting for the rest of the team. Catriona got there first. She crouched down and inspected the ground before waving the group over.

"What is it?" Oliver asked. Catriona brushed some of the sandy away.

"A trapdoor, I think." At first, it looked completely ordinary to Evan until he spotted something shiny where Catriona had moved the sand and earth aside. A metal ring. Without much ado, he bent down and pulled on it. The ring was indeed attached to a wooden trapdoor. He pulled it open all the way, revealing a narrow shaft with a wrought-iron ladder leading down. Oliver looked down the hole and frowned.

"We don't know where this leads. Might just be the entry to the sewage tank." Catriona shook her head, patting the fox's fur.

"No, I don't think so. Lys followed the scent of the dead bodies. Wherever this shaft leads, the Beasts brought the dead bodies through it." Evan withstood the temptation to stroke the fox's soft fur, but he gave her a smile.

"Well done, girl. We would've searched the estate for days without finding the entrance." He swung his leg over the edge and grabbed the railing.