“Deek? How is it?” Pait asked nervously.

I shook my head as I stood up and patted myself off. “I’m not able to resurrect them. Their souls are already gone.”

“Based on the level of decomposition, this couldn’t have occurred much more than a month ago.” The dwarf stated.

“There are no physical signs.” One of the other adventurers spoke up uneasily. “No cuts, no bruises. It’s like they all just dropped dead.

“Oh, no…” Dav was holding onto Pait, her face shoved into his shoulder as she wept.

Pait held her comfortingly as she avoided looking at the grisly scene. Previously, the adventurers had just been looking outside, but after seeing the first sign of death, they started barging into homes. That’s where they began to run into the scenes of horror. There were dead people everywhere. Some died sitting at the dinner table with food left out to go bad. Whatever happened, it had happened suddenly without warning. It also hit everyone. Men, women, and children had all died where they stood.

“This had to be some kind of soul attack,” I concluded.

“Can such a thing be done without a soul reaving dagger?” the lead adventurer asked.

“There are many ways to destroy the soul. Entire jobs are dedicated to damaging souls, not the body.” I explained. “Soul reaving daggers are only a convenient method because it completely hides who did it. This method, on the other hand, could only be done by someone with a certain job.”

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I only gave a tidbit of information. The general public knew about soul reaving daggers, but there were dozens of ways to kill someone in a way that was permanent. You could trap their souls in their bodies like Miki had done to Lord Aberis. You could toss them into a dungeon as Lord Aberis had done to Xin. You could cut someone with a weapon that could suck in their soul like Alysia, which is different from a soul reaving dagger that only damaged their soul.

Physically damaging a soul would bring about a lot of pain. I knew this from personal experience. I cut my soul in half and had also refined my soul. Yet, these people’s expressions were mostly surprised, if even that. Had their souls been destroyed, then they would have expressions of pain and fear. This had happened so quickly and absolutely that they didn’t even have time to realize what was happening to them. That meant that the connection between their body and soul was severed, and their souls were taken. Why would someone take their souls?

“It’s more than that, though… they’ve lost more than their souls,” I muttered to myself.

“What is that?” Pait asked.

“So, you noticed.” The dwarf cleared out his teeth with his tongue.

“Notice what?” The lead adventurer asked.

“It’s like… their lifeforce was pulled out too. That’s why the smell isn’t worse. It was like all of their life was sucked out of them.”

“What kind of thing can do that?” Pait asked in disbelief.

“That is…” I began, but then my eyes jerked. “Someone’s coming.”

I still had the map open, and I had seen a sudden group much larger than ours enter the edge of my map. This was still about ten minutes away, so the others didn’t have a clue. That wasn’t completely true. The dwarf must have been a dungeon diver, as he looked in the direction the dots were coming from and nodded to himself.

“What do we do?” Dav asked. “Do we go back into the dungeon?”

Pait shook his head. “My mission is to find out what was happening in Dioshin. If I left now, there would have been no point in coming. I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

I had already decided I was going to stay. I couldn’t guess if this had anything to do with Miki. Maybe there was a soul problem that led them to needing to find her. Either way, I wasn’t leaving until I had an answer, so all we could do was wait.