then hardened into a wall, cracked, and collapsed. The red-and-white mass toppled onto the ground in square chunks, then vanished. When his vision returned, Kaito found himself standing in the land of the beastfolk. So this is what it's like, huh? Kaito recalled the information he'd heard from Hina back when Lute's subordinates had been setting up the teleportation circle. The pureblood borough was where the beastfolk nobles lived. That was common knowledge, even among humans. But it was impossible to have a society with only an upper class. Soldiers were needed to protect the borders, farmers to till the land and tend to the livestock, merchants to manage the flow of goods, and all sorts of other people. Beastman society had advanced far past the days of subsistence hunting. But as far as humans were concerned, they generally assumed everyone but the ruling class was treated as nothing more than possessions. As a result, the perception of the pureblood borough as a "land of aristocrats" had persisted even to the present day. The logic was that limiting the number of owners made for more convenient negotiations. But the simple village sitting before them proved that vague yet extravagant impression of outsiders was flawed. The village was surrounded by a wooden fence with toxic vines wound around it, likely as a basic defensive measure. All over the village, Kaito could make out animal-shaped weather vanes and cloth charms hanging low to the ground that made it clear how much the inhabitants revered the wind and the earth. The buildings' foundations were stone, but pretty much everything else was made of wood, with scales and leather plastered onto the roofs and doors. The beastfolk lands were farther north than where most humans lived, but it was unclear at a glance how much protection from the elements the buildings actually offered. Finally, the last noteworthy feature of the hamlet was the boorish chains strung up between a dozen or so of the houses. Assailed by unease, Kaito strained his eyes. The chains were wound together like a spiderweb, and there were a number of pieces of game hanging from them. There were large figures, medium-sized figures, and figures so small that you could hold them in your arms. And all of them were swarming with flies. The hanging figures' silhouettes shifted slightly each time the insects squirmed. It was at that moment that Kaito noticed the thick, familiar scent of blood and rotting flesh. Before he confirmed the nature of the figures, he closed his eyes once. The Kaiser's eerily human laughter resounded in his eardrums. Hina made to step in front of him, but Kaito stopped her with one arm as he prepared himself for the worst. Then he opened his eyes again and looked straight ahead at the tragedy. As he'd suspected, the ones strung up were the village's inhabitants. The fox-headed beastfolk were decorating the village like spoils from a hunt. A carnival. The aftermath of a fox hunt. Imprudent similes flashed through Kaito's mind. But eventually, he arrived at the most appropriate descriptor of all. A massacre. There was no other word that could describe the horrible scene before him. Blood and bile ran along the length of the chains and dripped slowly to the ground. All the victims had their stomachs carved out, their empty abdominal cavities visible from the outside. White maggots were wriggling around in their flesh. Clenching his fists, Kaito drew closer to the corpses. He looked up at their expressions. Their faces were all stiff and filled with a terrible sense of anguish. The intensity of that emotion was no different between humans and beastfolk. "Yeah...I'm sure it must have been painful." Kaito spoke quietly. Rage and hatred toward the unknown perpetrator flared up inside him. But his experiences in life had left him well accustomed to those negative emotions, and he quickly regained his composure. Looking back between the buildings, he posed a question to Lute. "...What about the insides?" "The insides?" "What happened to their innards?" Kaito gave his inquiry in a dispassionate tone. After being taken aback for a moment, Lute hesitated to answer. Kaito waited for a response. There should have been a fairly substantial amount of other viscera. However, those organs were nowhere to be seen. He could make out little bits spilled here and there, but most of it was clearly missing. A few seconds later, Lute gave his pained reply. "It repulses me just to say it, but they were all shoved into a barn. There is no shortage of people who ridicule beastfolk for engaging in animal husbandry. We came to the conclusion that the way the killer dealt with the organs, too, was intended to provoke us." "Have they also been left the way you found them?" "Given the state they're in, we deemed it difficult to handle them individually. We plan to burn the entire barn to the ground later." "Let me have a look." Kaito made his request directly. Stooping over, Lute gave him a worried warning. "...It's really quite a dreadful sight, you know." "That's fine. I've seen people who had their guts and brains fused together while they were still alive." With a sympathetic nod, Lute took the lead and began walking off. However, his underlings stood frozen in place. It looked as though they didn't want to have to see the grisly scene in the barn a second time. Kaito and Hina left the subordinates behind and followed after Lute. He stopped in front of a shed adjoining a small farm. After hesitating for a moment, he pulled off the bar sealing its door shut. He doesn't want to have to open the door himself. Once he realized that, Kaito spontaneously took the initiative. Trading places with Lute, he placed his hand on the door. Then he slowly pushed it open. Flies buzzed around noisily. The stench of blood and rotting flesh ran thick. Kaito nodded as he strained his eyes against the oddly subdued, dim red light. Yeah, seeing this would definitely be traumatic if you weren't used to this kinda stuff. With Hina beside him, his stare was fixed on the grisly spectacle. A mountain of beastman innards sat amid the muck, blood, and tallow clinging to the floor. Ravaged intestines and pulverized stomachs blended together, their contents spilling out. The stench they gave off was even worse than that of the corpses. The various lumps of flesh were so repulsive that it was almost unimaginable to think they'd once been inside people. Upon closer inspection, though, there were things other than innards mixed into the pile. Kaito spotted pig heads and cow heads, garnishing the pile like comical decorations atop a macabre cake. Kaito grabbed one of the pig heads by the ear and pulled. It made a grotesque sound as it came out. Mucus leaked from an orifice. After carefully examining the opening at the base of the severed head, Kaito looked back toward the mountain of innards. A few seconds later, a quiet mumble escaped his lips. "...There's no meaning to this." Suddenly, Kaito released his grip. The pig head fell. After bouncing once off the floor, it sank back into the sea of guts like a deflated rubber ball. Behind him, Lute spoke up dubiously. "What do you mean by that?" "What I mean is that this isn't any kind of provocation, message, or sacrilege." Kaito's declaration was firm. He pointed at the animal heads artlessly mixed in with the innards. "If they wanted to give it some kind of meaning, there had to have been a better way they could have used the animal corpses. It's too random, too crude to have been by choice. It relies too heavily on the viewer's imagination." "But then...why use the barn?" "Oh, that part is real simple." Kaito's voice was lilting as he gave his answer. A spectacle on the scale of the one before him didn't even faze him anymore. Because of that, he simply described the situation as he saw it. "There were stains on the ground from the extracted innards. In other words, the perpetrator started out simply leaving the guts on the ground after they yanked them out. But over time, they started to build up and get in the way. That's the reason why the killer gathered them all up and shoved them in one place. Then the animals were noisy, so they shut them up. I know it's a messed-up way to put it, but it was probably all just part of their assembly line." As he listened to Kaito talk, Lute's fur stood on end. Kaito wondered a little if that was a normal reaction, or if Lute's rage was simply that tempestuous. Lute's golden eyes were filled with loathing as he glared alternately between Kaito and the grim scene. "You...you mean to tell me that that's the reason they created this monstrosity?" "Yeah, probably. And you don't have to glare at me like that, you know. It's not like I'm the one who did it." "...Ah, forgive me. How rude of me." Lute hurriedly looked away from Kaito. But the repulsion and disgust he'd directed toward Kaito for coming up with such a fiendish conjecture still remained in his eyes. Kaito, not pointing that out, just nodded and closed the barn door. He then made his way back to the chains between the buildings. When he did, he resumed his examination of the strung-up corpses. The victims' shoulders had stiffened in an odd way. That was due to the fact that the chains had been run into their left shoulders, then behind their necks, and finally back out through their right shoulders. They'd each lost huge amounts of blood. And all that had probably happened while they were still alive. "So whoever it was, they hung the victims up while they were still alive, then tore open their chests and ripped out their insides, huh?" "And there isn't any major damage to the chains, is there? They must have run it through with a single blow each time without any need to try again." "There's no way a regular human could use a chain that way... This must have been done by someone else." Kaito and Hina were whispering to each other. Behind them, Lute straightened out his posture. At some point, his subordinates had assembled as well. The beastfolk were silent, their expressions tense as they awaited Kaito's conclusion. I know how they feel. As he felt their intense gazes wash over him, he realized why they'd thought this atrocity had been committed by human hands. They didn't want to believe that one of their own could perform an act of such heinous violence, even if it meant ignoring reality. And it was only natural to want to know the purpose behind such an incomprehensibly brutal act. The witnesses needed there to be some kind of motive in order to come to terms with this tragedy. That was precisely the reason why the beastfolk had decided their enemy must be mankind. And there are even parts to that logic that are sound. Humans wasn't to blame for this. But it also wasn't the work of a beastman. The crime couldn't have been committed by just anyone. And there hadn't been any objective beyond causing pain. It had been perverse. It was just an insane, evil crime. "I know who did this." Then Kaito made his assertion. Hina quietly nodded. The beastfolk were struck speechless. "...Who in the world was it, then?" The chains rattled in the wind. The bodies swung back and forth. The flies took off, and the thick, rotting fragrance wafted by. Assailed by every unpleasant sensation imaginable, Kaito spoke. "It was a demon. I'm sure of it." But there was a fierce contradiction between that answer and reality. All fourteen of the demons' contractors were supposed to be dead. After all, it had