Noon found their camp digging by the damp roadside a resting place for two corpses. The sun was a scalding disc high in the sky, raining golden rays that filtered through the canopy of leaves protecting their backs as they turned up the soil with makeshift tools. Hugo and Ardey dug with the end of their scabbards, while Dolor and Horan raked the ground with sturdy fallen branches they found nearby. Frey, they didn't make him dig, as he was an outsider and this was company's business. He watched on them full of guilt--that these men were the ones cleaning after his mess, not because he killed two of their comrades last night, and they didn't deserve a grave. No, he reiterated in his mind, they didn't deserve a grave.

Krul, when the camp found him by the brushes near roadside, was a grisly, gory mess; skin was ripped off his whole face, leaving only forehead skin and scalp and skin on the jawline. All four of his limbs were torn--not cut--seemingly by brute force, and were thrown randomly about the nearby trees, and blood seeped through the stumps like rivers of flesh and blood. A mangled hole was ripped out of his chest, about the dimensions of a fist, and what was left of his body was wrinkled and withered and stunk as though he'd been weeks dead, and he wasn't. Krul was too horrid of a cadaver, that even the forest maggots didn't touch him, even though he smelled plenty dead.

Frey didn't remember how that happened--how he killed Krul; hell, he could barely remember his bout with Dotan, the fat man's partner in crime, just bits and pieces of the fight, and only the exact moment he drove his blade into Dotan's chest remained in his head, and after that was just blabber with Gren, and the bandits, and the rest was just black. Needless to say he was horrified out of his wits, if he was the one who had reduced Krul to the sloppy mess he was, which, he thought it, very unlikely. He had the guts to kill, but torture? And in the scale of tearing the victim limb by limb... He just couldn't see himself being able to do something like that.

Unless, he wasn't the one who did it.

He gulped, and felt with his left hand the cold silver arm-guard clinging onto his right, under the black sleeve of his coat, and he shook his head in denial. 'No, it couldn't be. Maybe it was an animal, like a wolf, or a vulture, or maybe a monster like a goblin hound or something I hadn't seen yet.' but he knew he was fooling no one.

He did it. Or at least, his body did. He felt sick at the thought then, and for a bit he saw himself becoming a monster, in his mind, a bloodthirsty fiend who lusts on death and decay, but he shook the image away. He then saw his hands were shaking, in intermittent spasms, and his fingers wriggling, looking for something, anything, to touch. He balled his fists and the spasms faded, slowly. The devil--as he called the mad voice whispering in his head--hadn't surfaced since he woke up. Maybe that was a good thing, maybe it went away, though he felt it wasn't the case. Far from it. Something told him the devil was just starting with him, still growing, inside his little head.

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And when his head becomes too small for it...

"Boss was a nasty man," Dolor, one of the only two soldiers left of Krul's convoy, smirked with snark as he impaled the ground with his branched oak twig. "Hell, he probably was the most sadistic boss I've ever had. Whips slaves with a shout and a smile, works us to the bone, but sometimes too generous with booze that it made us feel kinda glad to be stuck in this shit hole of a job with him. Figured one day he'll meet an ugly end for all his evil, but not this ugly." he shook his head and kept digging. Dolor was a thin, soft-bellied man in his forties, wearing a leather hauberk and shoes and steel shoulder plates, along with a perpetually worn-out expression on his face. His head sported graying spots of hair, as gray as the silver wisps climbing their way into his beard.

Ardey and Horan exchanged troubled gazes. Hugo shared a look of dismay with Dolor, but not as much. Frey had the impression that Hugo hated Krul's way of spurring the slaves into action, with kicks and with scorns, and the sadness on his old face was not without an undertone of guilty relief.

"Those South Thieves are just pure monsters," started Ardey. "I don't know how they did what they did with the Lieutenant, but by the sorry state we found the bastard in, I can say truly I wish we had lynched those bandits on the spot. Right, Frey?"

Frey looked up, away from his trembling fists, and caught Ardey waiting for his nod. He didn't. "I don't know, sir. The bandits might've been the ones to knock Lieutenant into the coffin, but I doubt they mutilated the Lieutenant. I mean, would they really waste time flaying him, when their goal was to escape, and knowing that the camp might awaken anytime? I think it unlikely."

"So someone--or something else did that to him, is what you're saying?" Horan asked, thoughtful. "But what?"

"Maybe it was a lich, or something." Hugo chimed in. "You saw how the body was shriveled and withered. That only happens when life was sucked out forcefully from the body, and I don't think those two scoundrels had access to lost magic."

"Whatever. The fact still stands that they took the whole slave band with them. That's felony in its own right." Ardey scoffed.

"That might be true, but coming from you, who was supposed to be the watch last night, they mean nothing at all." the one who said this was Gren, who overheard the conversation as he finished a round of scouting the periphery, along with a soldier named Bautu, who was, along with Dolor, the two soldiers that are left of Krul's company. Bautu was young and silent, and he had bluish-white skin contrasting Dolor's sun-tanned complexion. Bautu reminded Frey of Dotan--young and innocuous and head-lowered, but Dotan turned out to be a sadistic bastard and Frey hoped this one wasn't like him.

"Hey, you picking a squabble with me, Gren-boy? I can show a rookie one or two tricks." the hot-tempered Ardey bore holes in Gren with his feisty gaze. Gren was unfazed, and little was stopping Horan from face-palming.

"Stop it, Ardey." said Horan calmly. "It's true anyway: you slacked off and snoozed even though you were given duty." Ardey's copper face flushed red, and he became tame.

Gren turned to Hugo. "No more sign of the bandits around, sir. They made better use of their morning, from how it looked. We saw tracks leading east, fresh ones--a pack of them, probably the slaves, and I say we can't hope to give chase." he snuck a glance at Frey, and it was rife of loathing and repulsion, of fear and disgust, all mixing in a spiral in Gren's muddled brown eyes.

He would have to talk to Gren soon, before he became liability.