Again, once sleeping, the same dream awaited her.

“It’s not like I could see if something changed. It is too dark.” She looked towards the chained man, the only thing barely visible “And you look as miserable as always.”

“You should try some Corissian breakfast, it’s glorious. Roasted goat cheese, honey…”

The dream went like always, with her talking to the void.

…

Soft crunching sounds woke her up. Without moving or making a noise, she opened her eyes a bit, waiting for them to adapt to the little light that entered from the window.

Blinking slowly, the first thing she saw was thin golden threads around the room hanging from the ceiling to the walls, the window, and the bedhead.

Something dangled from them. After focusing a bit, she realized they were small cocoons. Dozens of them, hanging over her head.

The thing in the room kept on munching, so Velvet, sneakily, as if being sleeping, turned her body slightly.

It stopped eating for a second, before continuing.

Do I really move that much while sleeping? He barely reacted…

Opening her eyes a bit again, Velvet focused on the corner of the room, where the golden threads converged.

There, the gluttonous thing was munching on one of the cocoons with a voracious attitude.

Usually, when spiders ate, they regurgitated stomach fluids over and into its prey, combining that with masticating with their fangs and teeth, reducing the prey's body and tissues to a soup.

Of course, that varied by the species, but something she was sure of is that spiders didn’t eat like humans.

Demonic spiders, on the other hand…

It was still very dark, so she wasn’t exactly sure, but it seemed that Hyde was eating the bugs just by munching on them. And he ate quite fast.

Once he finished one cocoon, he put it aside on an increasing mountain of empty cocoons, then, he dragged one thread towards him and grabbed another, doing the same.

Now Velvet realized why taking a demon to the real world was so limitating on size. Hyde alone probably ate all the train bugs. And he was palm sized.

Having five of them in a place could probably ruin an ecosystem in days.

Still, that depended on how much he stayed without eating.

But he is a bit bigger than when I summoned him… Not twice as big, just a little bit more, and maybe it was a trick of the shadows, but Velvet had a perfect memory, so she was sure Hyde had grown.

Well, it is good for me if he’s stronger. With that, she went back to sleep.

…

This time, when she woke up, it was finally morning, and Hyde had cleaned every single trace of his midnight snack, going back to hiding in her hat.

If she could dream of something else than that void, she may have thought it was just a dream. But since she couldn’t, obviously it was reality.

Still, she hoped he had saved something for later, and not just eaten every single cocoon she saw.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Because there were a lot of cocoons.

Velvet stretched, before sitting up and going to the bathroom.

Face cleaned and other things done, she went back to sitting on the bed and called the paper figurines back.

One by one, they walked over, materializing slowly from the air and forming a semicircle around Velvet.

She counted nine, and waited, but the tenth never showed up.

Velvet sended a signal to it again, but got no response.

“It’s not broken, but it won’t respond.”

“Cut off the link with it, now.” Hyde ordered her, coming out a bit from the hat.

“Eh?” She was going to do so, but then realized her hand was starting to sprout some rashes, starting from the tip of her finger and climbing.

Containing her desires to scream, she cut the link as fast as possible with the paper figurine, stopping the propagation of the painful rash.

“Shit!” Not touching or scratching it, she opened her suitcase with her free hand, pulled the shirt she wore yesterday and went to the bathroom.

There, she opened the sink’s faucet, put her hand under it and started scrubbing it with the shirt.

Soon, blood, pus and pieces of skin dripped with the water down the faucet. Velvet gritted her teeth, cursing in silence though the skin tearing pain.

“Shit… There’s another magician here! And a really fucked up one! They really waited until I called the figurines back! Ahh…!” Making sure she took off every single piece of skin the other magician had infected, she left her hand in raw flesh.

She cut the connection before the rash completely covered her Esca, which obviously was the magician’s idea.

Damaging the Esca didn’t affect the ability to do magic, it affected the purification of miasma instead. It was just a way to mess with someone in the most annoying way.

Luckily for Velvet, she had more than three weeks to heal, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

She left her hand under the running water for a while to dull the pain, complaining all the time.

“I think this is enough…” sighing, she left the bathroom “I don't have any charm to heal this, so I’ll go and ask the service for medicine.”

Magic that could heal physical wounds was scarce. No, the correct term was flesh magic, and finding a magician specialized on it was very difficult. After all, it was one of the most corrupting paradigms.

Yes, she did sew some healing sigils to the kid’s clothes back at home. But in reality? Those were glorified painkillers. If they were to get really hurt, a trip to the doctor was in order.

“You shouldn’t. Not before looking at what they have written.”

Referring to the paper figurines, Velvet hadn’t checked them, so, curious as to what Hyde meant, and sitting on her bed again, careful to not touch anything with the damaged hand, she stared at the figurines.

Since they couldn’t speak, they shared what they had seen by writing on their bodies.

The text was in first person, but it was obvious they didn’t do those things, just saw them.

Velvet stopped reading, staring at the paper figurine in silence.

She knew which figurine went into each room. The other magician was five rooms to her left, and the murder occurred two rooms to her right.

Now, she didn’t know who occupied the magician’s room, since the person went in before her, but that couldn’t be said about the ones to her right.

A scream came from that direction. Velvet took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

“There's been a murder! So-someone is dead!”

The sound of people leaving their beds in a rush and asking questions came next. Some people didn’t bother to dress themselves, just wrapping their bodies on the covers. Some just opened their door a bit, to pay attention to whatever was happening.

Velvet had no need to do either. She knew who was dead.

Still, she left her bed and carefully wrapped herself on the blanket to also peek through the door. After all, she didn’t want to seem suspicious.

“T-there’s been a murder!” The voice, probably a member of the cleaning service, shouted again.

A man that didn’t bother to finish dressing himself, of rough appearance, went there and looked inside the room.

“Fuck! It’s that detective! The one searching for the girl!”

Gasps of surprise sounded, the people that were peeking went to finish dressing, just before the supervisor appeared.