An abandoned shack theatre, music playing outside and in.

-alfiedavis: Afterwards…wait…

-Oliver Spears: Shh, lad. It’s only an NPC.

Oliver, after the splash of the paralysed NPC being dumped into the cauldron of embalming fluids, caught the hum of an Arcane formation being activated. The ritual granting permanence to the girl's body was starting.

The air in the theatre and around it became heavy as if the local gravity had increased. A strange voice, one belonging to neither Ramiro nor his victim, suddenly entered the space; the speaker, talking with their mouth full, had a tone that was deep, distorted, and moist.

“The soul is sweet.”

-alfiedavis: That's a demon.

-Oliver Spears: Lord Xun.

-alfiedavis: Who—

-Oliver Spears: Shut up.

“But the body is sweeter,” Ramiro replied formulaically.

“Why do we weep for the poor?”

“Because they are too thin.”

“And why do we weep for the stars?”

“Because they scorched our tongue.”

“Take it, brother. This seat at the banquet is yours.”

The gravitational pressure lifted at the withdrawal of the entity's presence.

“We volunteer to clean this carrion, and to accept in your place the scavenger’s thankless task.” Ramiro continued to chant. “Rest now, coyote of the sun. That we may save this rejected body from the lonely chill, lend us your stomach that fears not the decay, and lend us your teeth that crush the skull and femur.”

He paused.

Splashing. Gurgling.

Oliver recognised the splashing for Ramiro delivering abdominal thrusts, the gurgling for the embalming fluids infiltrating the girl’s lungs.

After Oliver'd pieced together Ramiro’s cannibal habits, he'd carried out extensive research into the corpse preservation methods of Xun, into the precise steps of the ritual, the Alchemical ingredients, the lore. As a journalist, he'd done everything short of performing the ritual himself, the time being unavailable due to the race against The Company's takeover of The Empire.

During his research, he'd learned that The Saviour and his serial killer roleplayer brethren were actually not the lone practitioners in Suchi of this preservation technique, which was employed by a cult of Slumdweller cannibals, The Primordial Path of Nerin. In a hard to ignore coincidence, this cult had been amongst Ramiro’s hit-list of enemies during the purges several days ago in response to The Church and The Company’s pressure. The Saviour had perhaps been attempting to erase the traces he’d left while studying with these cannibals. Mysteriously, however, before the Villagers could apprehend the cult, someone got to them first. Oliver, searching the tunnels in which the cult had been eradicated, believed the assassins to have been a small squad of higher-level players.

Could that have been a hit-squad from The Company? Maybe. The Tyrant, who could very well also be a cannibal, might've been driven by the same motivation as his amigo Ramiro to destroy the evidence of their shameful pastime. Anything was possible. Oliver would let the public decide the truth for themselves in one of his follow-up articles.

“Rest now, vultures of the moons. That we may warm this rejected body with the summer of our soul, lend us your unfeathered crown that explores the abdomen unsullied, and lend us your patient beak that strips the bone to white.”

The splashing and gurgling returned, Ramiro dunking his victim back into her marinade. The action was vigorous and rhythmic, like a lifeguard giving chest compressions to a drowned swimmer.

Oliver supposed a lifeguard was a fitting metaphor. In a paradoxical sense, Ramiro would, through his above-and-beyond method of killing the NPC girl, be granting her a kind of life. Through his depravity, through the perverted leap of faith that dared to consider her a person and to kill her as a person, The Saviour would, with Oliver’s assistance, bring her existence into the conscious of the real-world and impart upon her defiled body the sentiment in the excess of his actions. She would thereby be transformed from a vague, meatless idea into an object imbued with human feeling. By dying, she would live.

“Thankless, thankless, thankless are we, the scavengers. The heavens would soon reek if we relaxed our vigil. Abhor us but endure us. Necessary are we who adopt the soulless dead. Abhor us but endure us.”

At the utterance of the last word, the arcane humming stopped, the ritual of bodily conversion finished.

-alfiedavis: What did that—

Oliver Spears: Shh. Louder.

His subordinate amplifying the noise inside the shack again, Oliver paid careful attention to the hush after the ritual, trying to perceive within Ramiro’s inhalations and exhalations a signal of the next move.

The typical cultist of Xun, their core motivation being utility, would have swiftly dispatched of the victim before storing their corpse in a container. In a pickling-like process lasting weeks to months, by being continuously fed Alchemical ingredients, the body would be steadily suffused with magical energy, which the disciple would, after steeling the nerves of their stomach, transfer to themselves.

However, this specific cultist happened to also be a king with a wealth of resources to access much more savoury methods of empowerment, if that were his goal. As it would turn out, the ends were not what this sicko desired but the perverted means.

It all came down to the nature of the killing. Therein lay the heart of the story, the music.

The Saviour, a veteran in sadism who knew well the holy dictum that small sacrifices were necessary to attain the greatest pleasures, waited with his paralysed victim, enduring the torturous delay of gratification.

His patience was soon rewarded by a symphony of coughing and sputtering, the girl’s diaphragm convulsing to expectorate the embalming fluids. With a splashing that grew increasingly fierce, her limbs, the paralysis potion no longer deadening the nerves controlling them, began to stir as into them flowed the animacy of the person that’d been screaming in her eyes throughout the demonic ritual. At last, gasping, the breath of the soul returned to her body, from which it could now be reaped.

A sheathing noise sounded, as faint as a pair of scissor blades cutting the air. This was followed by a stretched-out whine like a boiling kettle but deeper in pitch.

-alfiedavis: What’s that sound?

-Oliver Spears: The music of transubstantiation.

-alfiedavis: Oh. From one of the bands?

Oliver smiled sorrowfully back in his booth.

Although both heard the identical notes inside, his confused subordinate was deaf to the melody connecting them. Without having taken the leap of faith, even if his colleague perceived the ongoings in the theatre, the man wouldn’t appreciate the breadth and depth of meaning behind them. The music did not dance in his ear. The noises on their passage through the shack’s dilapidated walls lost the strength to reverberate in his own guts and skeleton.

He could not, as Oliver had, allow himself to be moved and dragged by this song back across the wall between them. He could not ride along the succession of sheathing noises—of which there were many now following each other in a rhythm—to join The Saviour in plunging the dagger not into the intangible chest of an NPC but into the flesh-and-blood chest of her, a little girl. He could not savour, in the sustained kettle-whine, the girl’s startlement and anguish pouring from her burning wounds. He could not admire within the cauldron’s sloshing about from her futile resistance another more minute sloshing synchronised with the dagger-strokes that proved Ramiro’s vigour and power as the force of each attack was transmitted through the child’s body and into the waters of her baptism. He could not inhale through Ramiro’s panting those greedy helpings of oxygen invigorating the lungs of them, the living.

How tragic, thought Oliver. While the rational boundaries that deafened mankind were intact, his poor subordinate would never vault his soul into here with them—Oliver included—and delight in the sublime melody of this girl’s beautiful life and this girl’s even more beautiful death.

Ramiro and Oliver’s weapon clattered off the dusty ground.

The unhearing might perceive in that abrupt cessation the end of a life, but it wasn’t - listening closer, one would hear the continuance of the girl's transubstantiation, of the girl's pained breathing. The pair had discarded their dagger simply due to it surpassing its utility in this quest. What value it may have had in accelerating their progression, it was nevertheless an instrument, its inches of impersonal metal unable to transmit the flow of sensation between human skin.

With a sloshing, they raised the child from the cauldron’s waters, heaving her out like a specimen of a new species of man from the primordial ocean, and they, her creator, positioned her to be marvelled. With a squelching, they held and felt her throat made slimy by the embalming fluids of her genesis. They had been kneeling. Now, they rose to their feet, lifting up the child by her neck, which was stretched within their fingers by the weight of her body rising into the air, droplets raining and dripping from her soaked clothing down into the cauldron.

The girl herself made no noise, no further physical resistance existing within her. Despite the paralysis wearing off and the wounds having healed, the mortal lashings of the dagger through her chest had killed the illusion that her small body contained anything special that might reverse her tragedy by struggling. The totality of power had been stabbed into her. She had surrendered to the fact that her fate was ultimately determined by another’s will, and that her salvation lay entirely in pleading the case for her continued existence to her creator.

“Please, your grace,” she whimpered through the tightness of their fingers, her gaze offering an even stronger request for mercy.

An error.

The girl was mistaken to have wasted her last breath on these last words, for no offence ignited the fury of the strong more than the confession of weakness.

“Fight,” Ramiro and Oliver pleaded back at her. “Why can’t you fight?”

Scorn seizing them as they'd seized her throat, they denied the pathetic entreaty and squeezed down harder on the weakness bulging in her neck and the reddening veins of her eyes.

The sensation of her fragile throat-meat and cartilage collapsing in their grip began to change them all. Like the demonic magic used to propel the embalming fluids across the walls of her cells and to transform her corporeal nature, the textural feedback of her choking throat was propelling their spirits to cross the walls separating their selves and transform into one. Through a paroxysm of shared pain, they were merging. Oliver, Ramiro, and the child were uniting into one entity suffocating and being suffocated.

And as the three of them clasped their fingers tighter around their neck, as the song inside of them climbed to the crescendo through the mounting pressure, an unexpected fourth figure suddenly intruded. Oliver had never detected this other in his studies of Ramiro's prior killings, but now, in the extra immersion of the real moment, the epiphany gripped him of their fingerprints, their hands, upon everything. From out of the tense muscles of their forearms emerged this fourth's paternalistic shadow, from out of their large and brutal hands seizing their neck fragile as a rabbit’s, from the unfair difference in strength granted by nothing except the advantage of time and age. Time itself, its concreteness dependent on the oxygen obstructed from reaching their brain, had dissolved. They were cast back into the childhood past, they were the pathetic child being choked by the shadow in its rage, and they were the raging shadow choking the pathetic child.

“Why couldn't you fight back?” the child choking themselves begged of themselves.

Crick.

To this soft and pitiable note, the hands that’d created them became the hands that’d destroyed them, the melody of their life ceasing with the snap of their neck vertebrae.

-Oliver Spears: Turn the amplification back on.

-alfiedavis: Mate, I heard that. It’s—

-Oliver Spears: ON!

But the music inside the shack lingered.

With the sole sounds of their solitary breath and the water dripping from the dead girl’s clothes, Oliver and Ramiro lingered with her corpse through the onset of desolation. Emptiness in every form descended upon them. There was the emptiness of departure as the soul-lights rose from her soaked hair like steam after a hot shower and passed mournfully through the ceiling, the emptiness of her dead eyeballs staring back into theirs, the emptiness of her dead body dangling limp between their guilty fingers, the emptiness of themselves as their dark temper dissipated and left them hollow, the emptiness of the world that in its utter vacuity of purpose or plan had failed to stop them yet again. Emptiness – it was this emptiness that always gripped them after killing someone.

Most of humankind, without having committed murder, would be quite familiar with this emptiness. This same hollow, drained feeling was also present at the end of making love, the metaphorical vacating of the spirit that, by discarding some of itself, opened up the space inside for the newborn generated by love to enter. In the duality of man, this serene emptiness signalled both the conception of life and its termination.

The civilised individual might baulk at the sadist for this equation of lovemaking and murder, dismissing his opinion as a symptom of a degenerate, diseased mind. But this was, genuinely, the truth. Civilised man resided, unbeknownst to himself, in a state of pacified ignorance due to the artificial limiting of his access to the most enlightening sources of carnal knowledge. To kill a person, to taste the forbidden fruit of ending their life, this was to glimpse the obvious and inextricable connection. In fact, those who stayed in the garden long enough to sample from many trees would learn, eventually, that lovemaking was the lesser of the pair, lovemaking itself containing less intimacy and feeling than murder. To make love to someone was, properly measured, a paltry, unsatisfying copy of the greater act that could have been done to their body; love was a gaunt younger sister dressed up in the hand-me-down clothing that murder had worn much more voluptuously.

The roots of this inadequacy were ancient, much older than man. If one delved far back into our primordial pre-history, when we were not yet even animals but microbes, it was murder who manifested long before love - although at this ancestral point the two concepts were almost unrecognisable in their basal forms. Love, before its evolution and abstraction, had been the procreation instinct, the motivation to pair temporarily with another, swap genetic material, and produce a half-clone. As for murder, its unabstracted form was none other than the hunger drive, the impulse to pilfer another’s corporeal material and integrate it into oneself. At the beginning of this celullar past, murder existed quite happily in the total absence of love, the first microbes being self-replicators. Over a billion years transpired before the birth of love, a billion years during which murder had sufficed alone for survival, defining alone what it meant to be a living organism. Now, as even an amateur biologist would know, a quirk of evolution was that ‘new’ functions were rarely new, mother nature with her lack of forethought being too lazy to create from scratch and improvising upon whatever pre-existing machinery was available - a bird’s wings were stolen from the theropod's forelimbs, and man’s cognitive flexibility retained into adulthood was stolen from the neural plasticity of childhood apes. Similarly, when love was born after its billion-year delay, it, too, was built upon what was already at hand, borrowing and refashioning each of murder's constituent elements while disguising their shameful origin. If one didn't believe this, all one needed to do was look at the vestiges of this original theft that were still clearly visible today in the uncanny overlap between lovemaking and killing. The prolonged, predatorial stares...the racing heart pumping blood into the limbs to fight...the entwinement of the salivating mouth in a defanged simulacrum of biting and ingesting...the carnivorism of sensuous language that expressed a heightened intensity by reversing ‘skin’ back into ‘flesh’, ‘desire’ back into ‘hunger’ and ‘craving’…in every element of love, a wish to murder and eat the other person was supremely evident, barely hidden, unable to be suppressed from exuding out of the self-replicating, murderous cells that still composed the majority of the human body. Moreover, every human was themselves a re-enactment of love’s dark genetic history. Murder was present at birth in the newborn, whose very first instinct was to devour whatever it touched; if babies weren't so weak and their stomachs so small, they would eat their own mothers, as they attempted to daily yet failed. The inclination to love another only gradually manifested through the process of maturation as the child was pacified by those stronger than themselves and forced into suppressing and perverting the earlier, purer desire to kill and eat everything.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

And the perplexing emptiness in the wake of making love also carried that dark trace. At its foundation, this empty, drained sensation—so calming and welcoming of meandering thoughts—was none other than the self-tranquillisation of the predator’s nervous system as it redirected the bloodflow from its violent, killing claws to its peaceful, ruminating gut.

The emptiness after love was, originally, the emptiness of the stomach.

With a gentle thud, their murderous deed done, Ramiro and Oliver laid the NPC girl's corpse out on the floor, next to the dead donkey to whom the girl had been reunited by the enlightenment of death reducing both to their identical forms as empty meat. For a final proof of the emptying-out of the significance in her, they would now dismember and ea—

No. Oliver was mistaken.

That unexpected fourth figure who'd joined them while strangling the girl, the paternalistic shadow...the past suffocater of The Saviour of The Slums...the orphan hands...

The melody between these notes was much more personal. Ramiro was also going to eat this NPC as a person.

With a gentle thud, they'd laid the girl down with the cauldron intervening between her and the donkey, maintaining through the visual barrier of this physical object the critical metaphysical separation between man and beast. While the soul may have flown out of the girl already, its residue still clung to her corpse like the perfume of a pretty woman after exiting a room. It was this vital, human essence, even more so than her meat, that would satiate their emptiness.

Now, for a perverted cannibal, many questions arose regarding the procedure of the ritual: what pieces, what pieces first, in what quantities, cooked or raw? As with any other sublime art, there were no objectively correct choices but only those derived by the individual cannibal after wrestling out the subjective argument between the factors of speed, convenience, practicality, and taste. Manifold were the paths available. Nevertheless, all acts of eating the dead started from the exact same conundrum: head on or head off.

That the removal of the head should be the cannibal’s first question might not be obvious to most. Modern man was after all, even if he consumed ‘meat’, a quasi-herbivore, grazing thoughtlessly away on the produce of clean, bloodless slabs shipped to him far away from the kill-site, pre-processed and wrapped in plastic. But those who'd conducted the entire procedure of hunting, butchering, and devouring their prey, human or otherwise, would know the head's significance. At some primitive, instinctual level, the head was the seat of the soul; so long as this seat remained in connection with the body, the soul was able to transmit from the brain along the nerves spreading down through the muscles the uncomfortable impression of wholeness and being. Removing the head severed this link, a second death after death that reduced the body from the burdensome category of ‘corpse’ into the lighter category of ‘carcass’. Head off or head on, this was the subtle but crucial difference between eating the meat of a person and eating the person themself. Eating the person themself was obviously much more spiritually nourishing, but it was also more painful, more nauseating.

Ramiro and Oliver, after a heavy course of experimentation with previous victims, had found a compromise in the middle that suited their palate. They, who retained a morsel of guilt, didn’t have the strength of stomach acid to break down and dissolve the entirety of a person, but they could stomach and savour a couple bites.

With an almost imperceptible slap of flesh upon flesh, they cupped the girl’s hands together. They held her palms down, and as their own palm touched hers, they could feel the warmth yet to fade in her skin, the voice of the soul trapped within her inanimate veins continuing to pulse and beg.

Again, however, they refused, this time much quicker due to the diminishing of her capacity to fight back. Since their hands were much larger and mightier, it took only their one to smother her two. With the hand left freed by the unrighteous surplus of their power, they guided the teeth of a hacksaw to the tender flesh of her wrist.

-alfiedavis: Oliver…Oliver, what is he sawing?

-Oliver Spears: Take the leap of faith. Listen and hear our music.

And how strange the resistant cry of the instrument searching for what precisely had constituted the girl in her layers, as it palpated for the vestiges of her Being in the thinner-than-silk sleeve of her epithelium, in the meagre coating of fat, in the bundles of nerves and tendons and muscle, in the stubborn bone. Yet everywhere the saw explored, no trace of the person remained except her fleeing footsteps echoing in the meat.

The child’s young age and her malnourishment from poverty had left her wrists thin. Her hands were separated in seconds.

They lay down the bloody instrument and, in the silent music that followed, raised one of the severed hands for an admirative inspection. To their eye made keener by experience, the unique features that’d defined her stood out, the dark splotches of skin around the knuckle creases, the gracile taper of the digits useful for her sewing work, the fingernails kept short and pristinely clean by the habits of this occupation. Most of the orphans’ nails had been much dirtier. The grandfather who’d taught this girl sewing had shielded her from some of life’s grime. Beautiful.

While making their assessment, they noticed the girl’s head behind them lying on the floor, her dead gaze piercing them with a cold judgement.

Her fear flashed into hatred.

At once, guided by the girl’s soul and the paternalistic shadow haunting all of them, the hand began to fly towards their face. Alarmed by this phantom movement, they choked on their breath and tried to push the ghastly thing away, but its approach continued indifferently, unable to be halted by their petty cries of resistance. The shadow, as it’d commandeered their hand to close upon her mouth, used her hand in vengeance to close upon theirs, her palm and fingers smothering their lips and assaulting their nostrils with the repulsive salt-scent of human skin beneath the embalming chemicals and blood.

But they were not a child anymore; they had accepted the perversion of growing up.

Scowling back at the dead girl, refusing to perish so weakly as she had, they revealed the canines elongated and sharped by survival.

-alfiedavis: Crunching?

-Oliver Spears: And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, this is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.

-alfiedavis: The ritual…my god...

Their lips uttered the foulest of prayers, and all sins were forgiven, the empty abstractions of love and murder healed by the appeasement of the stomach yearning at the heart of both. Hosanna to this alone, the highest and holiest of delights. The NPC had been transubstantiated into the flesh of a little girl, and from the little girl into the sacrificial lamb who offered herself to their stomach so that they might be redeemed for their iniquities. How pathetic and small she’d been in life; in the death, she would join with the strong and noble, uniting with them as her proteins and fat were incorporated into the muscles that still dared to strike back against the shadows. In acknowledgement of her sacrifice, they would abide by her commandment and use their tastebuds to memorise her skin, her meat, her bone, her blood, and most importantly her soul that’d once articulated itself through the delicate movement of the fingers they were eating. No longer would the girl’s sweet tongue give voice to sing; but, heark, by her immortalisation upon their own tongue, her melody plays on forevermore inside of them.

Oliver, warning his subordinate against disrupting their peace with any groans of disgust, sat crouched in the masticating quiet of the shack theatre beside The Saviour, the two of them hunched over the girl's corpse, devouring her hand from her clean fingernails to the severed wrist joint.

Once they were finished, he stayed an extra half a minute with his brother in communion, the two of them digesting the girl, digesting their guilt. Storing her second hand for a memento, they picked back up the hacksaw and, bringing her song to its public end, hid their sin, returning her back to an idea by severing the NPC head from the NPC torso.

-Oliver Spears: Splendid work, lad. Now, we do our job of broadcasting this abominable truth.

Sending out a couple orders, he broke the sensory connection with his subordinate.

Oliver’s eyes opened upon the restaurant stall his body had been located in. Chatter from the other diners was filtering through the stall’s cheap curtain, and the table before him was spread with untouched dishes too bland to satisfy his palate anymore.

His clothes and mask disintegrated, being exchanged for a professional suit and tie. Producing a pocket mirror, he checked his face. The features were his own, his ginger beard, his pale, English complexion, and his bulbous nose, but the shape they had contorted into was that of a pervert, flushed and sweaty as he caved into his debased urges yet again and was flooded with insane rationalisations.

However, this man in the mirror was not Ramiro. He had neither the hubris of a saviour nor a cannibal. He did not wave the holy or unholy hand while daring to compose the song of humanity.

Wiping away the vile expression, he, who’d infiltrated the minds of countless creeps before their apprehension, gave his reflection an inquisitive yet egotistical grin, one befitting of himself: Oliver Spears, Gaming Journalist of The Year 2049, a reporter, an amplifier that ensured that the truth of these dastardly melodies did not fade unheard behind the thin and rotting walls separating us from the perverts stalking everywhere in the wretched slum of life.

Leaping to his feet, Oliver threw back the curtain and marched outside into the atmosphere of the festival, into the crowd and the music. One of the drunks lying across the street flicked him a nod; rising to their feet, they followed as his cameraman. Together, they snuck up to the door of the abandoned theatre.

Boost-augmenting his hearing, Oliver reached towards the door-handle, listened to the lamentations of the saw inside, and waited until that divine moment when The Saviour paused to lay down his instrument for another snack break.

THUMP!

A deep thud sounded above them, an Accompanist’s drum hovering over the theatre’s roof inflicting any occupants inside with a combat debuff to prevent escaping by logging off.

Simultaneously, Oliver shoved the door open and barged in. “Greetings, your grace! Oliver Spears with Channel 5 News here. Sorry to interrupt your dinner, but–“

He stopped, the cameraman bumping into him from behind.

Inside, instead of Ramiro with a mouthful of the child’s butchered meat, Oliver had walked in on an idyllic scene.

At a portable kitchen unit, a giant of a man in a chef outfit was slouched under the theatre's ceiling and over steaming pots and sizzling pans, using a saw to remove a prime chunk of leg from a warthog. The girl the team had been tracking was relaxing safely in a bubble bath. While the strange chef with his superb impersonation abilities had been preparing the meal, the girl had dozed off watching him, her arms draped on the rim of the tub and her head slumbering on top of them.

The chef, glancing with surprise at the intruders, spat out a crisp apple he’d been chewing, then furrowed his azure eyebrows in mischievous irritation.

“You should have RSVPed,” Karnon growled. “I haven’t prepared enough food for this many guests.”

A joke. The warthog was huge, large enough to feed dozens.

Oliver glared at the trickster NPC in dismay and horror and confusion. “You bastard…”

The journalist’s mind began to stir, wondering what parts of the investigation had been a fucking prank by this fucking game character.

Was it merely this evening, the team fooled into chasing down and trapping an imposter? Or was this whole week-long investigation one wild, pointless goose chase designed by this cunt of a character?

That’s right, Oliver recalled. The leads that’d sparked his investigation had been most peculiar, the synchronised delivery of the boxes of Memory Spheres from both an anonymous sender and the instructor NPC, the cryptic short story about Don Quixote feeding blood soup to a sleeping priest and ruining their vow of vegetarianism. This whole debacle could have been a prank from the beginning.

But why? For what possible reason would this comedic-relief character mess with him?

Oliver mulled the mystery for barely a second before the answer manifested, the answer that was behind all of his misery: Him…The Tyrant.

Although the journalist had no proof, he was certain. The Tyrant, after banishing him to this backwater slum, had performed one last cruel twist of the knife, exploiting his limitless power to sick Karnon on him and fooling him into believing that an interesting story might be found here. The cruel wielder of the ultimate sword of truth had resuscitated Oliver with hope simply to bisect him yet again.

Wait!

For that Don Quixote letter to have referenced an out-of-world character, it had to have been composed by a player. What if...what if The Tyrant himself had penned it while cackling over his writing-table?

But that didn’t make much sense…Alex Wong had no literary inclinations…

Oliver, dismissing that last thought, shook his head in disgust. “You absolute bastards…”

His cameraman had a worse reaction at this abominable charade, curling over and dry-retching.

Oliver did a double-take, not understanding why the fellow should be so repulsed, the guy clueless to his tragic backstory.

The cameraman seemed to have turned himself away from the bathtub in which the NPC girl had been sleeping. Oliver retraced to the source of the man’s disgust.

The dismay and horror and disgust dropped from the journalist's face, leaving only confusion.

Oh, he’d been mistaken. It was not sleep weighing down the child’s eyelids. She was dead. The God had reassembled her mutilated corpse and posed it.

Oliver turned to Karnon in his chef outfit, and an illusion faded from the oversized warthog as it reverted back into a donkey with its skull caved in, bits of bloody brain oozing out of the wound.

“Hehehehehe!” The God, giggling maniacally, used a leg he’d hacked from the donkey like a handkerchief to wipe a soul-expanding tear of joy from his cheek. “The Mock Mock Cannibalism Prank…classic.”

“You dare shield the people from the swine who lord over them?!” Oliver raged. “Bring him out, you blue cunt! Bring him out from wherever you’ve hidden him!”

“Hidden? No, he’s right over there.” Karnon pointed across the theatre to a drawn stage curtain, a pair of shoes visible beneath.

A gust of wind fluttered through the curtains, ripping them aside and revealing a red-drenched figure in an ogre mask.

The exposed Ramiro broke into a sprint for the theatre's back entrance. Shoulder-charging the door, he smashed it open and bowled over the Cutthroat team member who’d been listening on the other side.

Oliver, readorning an inquisitive expression, righting the hunched-over cameraman and slapping him sensible, chased in pursuit. “King Ramiro, please, not so fast! You’ll give yourself a tummy ache!”

The fleeing Saviour had nowhere to escape, the alleyway behind the venue blocked off by a Channel 5 squad decked out in equipment, a wall of shields, spears, and arrows waiting for him.

Oliver popped out behind the pervert, a housecat dropping from the roof of an adjacent building and transforming into a bear to protect him. The masked figure, his head twisting in search for an escape, crossed gazes with the journalist, The Saviour's eyes through the disguise lit with the panic of a hog encircled by a barking pack of hounds.

“King Ramiro,” Oliver barked, “Oliver Spears, Channels 5 News. Spare a minute to answer a few questions for the audience, would you? Please. Firstly, could you describe the texture and taste of raw human flesh? Secondly, why do you prefer preteens? Is it because their meat is more tender at that age or is the cannibalism a kinky substitution for Saana’s prohibitions on paedophilia? How long, exactly, have you been a paedophile-cannibal? Was it..."

“Shit,” The masked figure swore in defeat. “You caught me.” Sighing, he ripped off his disguise, unveiling the face familiar to everyone as that of The Slum’s beloved Saviour and a headful of shiny azure hair. “Me: Karnon, Lord of Mischief.”

Oliver, stopping his litany, scowled at the imposter, his mood ruined and constipated by this Scooby-Doo-esque reveal. Glancing back inside the theatre, he saw that, although the kitchen had been abandoned, the corpses were still there, dead as ever.

He threw the God a frustrated, questioning look.

Karnon returned a gesture of permission. “You can have them. My wife’s forbidden red meat until I get back into fighting shape.”

“Where’s Ramiro?”

“Beats me, Ollie. The Slum’s a big place; he could be anywhere.” The God checked the time on a sundial despite it being night-time and pretended to remember an urgent appointment. “BEATS me! Alright, team, I’m late for a date. It’s been a hoot pranking everybody, everybody. Hilarious job. Keep up the laughs. Karnon’s Blessing and all that. Give yourselves a raucous round of hohohoho—”

From the trickster deity’s thrusting crotch, a golden light was about to shoot out, only to be misdirected into the soil as a cluster of vines ruptured from his feet and dragged the laughing giant into the earth.

Thus Karnon vanished, leaving Oliver behind with his crew, the lot of them sharing looks of stupefaction like a class of children at lunch who’d had a clown march through their rank and smack the ham sandwiches from their grip.

Oliver checked the theatre yet again, where the bodies of the donkey and the girl remained. Behind the stage curtain that ‘Ramiro’ had fled from was the cauldron with the embalming chemicals, along with a pile of limbs and torsos built from four or five other children.

Tremors from the laughter of the God underground caused the tailor girl’s head to fall off from her neck and hit the floor with a clunk.

By Oliver's judgement, the weight in the landing was befitting of an actual decapitated head, as was the oxidised hue of the blood dribbling down her neck-stump and the exterior of the bathtub. The corpses appeared to be authentic.

The murder-cannibalism part seemed to be real. He had indeed listened to the girl get strangled, butchered, and eaten.

Then what joke was Karnon pulling?

Whether this sting had worked or failed, Oliver's current evidence was more than sufficient to ruin Ramiro. To be completely honest, letting this NPC die had been optional. He'd just wanted the money shot of The Saviour eating a kid.

At a shattering of porcelain behind Oliver in the theatre, the murdered girl's corpse was dragged into a hole punched through the bottom of the bathtub. Karnon’s arm emerging from the ground collected her fallen head.

Oliver’s disoriented gaze, fixing on the sight for a while and finding, still, no sensible explanations, wandered his surroundings, his journalists wondering why their pig had transformed into Ramiro into Karnon, the masked passers-by trying to snoop.

Eventually, he noticed one of his team in the bathhouse across the street, their neck held in pause by a masseuse frowning at the commotion in the street. Clever Trevor was wearing an expression as perplexed as Oliver’s. However, the intern’s bewilderment seemed to be different, stemming not from the incidents around them but from whatever footage he’d naughtily started watching again.