Garyung’s estate was unlike anything Kaldalis had ever seen in an MMO that wasn’t explicitly a base builder. It was a stone mansion built like a castle, that looked like it had been expanded several times, with three squat, dome-roofed towers, a large stables, and what looked like a small vineyard stretching out along the side of the property. The mansion was nearly four stories tall, with stairs up into the front door indicating that there was a larger basement as well.

“What the fuck, dude,” Kaldalis said with a low whistle. “How did you get this sick of a setup?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Garyung said. While he gave a dismissive gesture, there was a shadow of a smirk, clearly proud that his work here was impressive. “For the most part, this was the quest reward with the dukedom. All I really did was show up.”

“Bullshit,” Kaldalis said. He pointed up at the stone wall. “I can see where the stone changes colors. Those parts were built afterwards. You got this place and then spammed upgrades into it.”

“Alright, alright,” Garyung said, clapping a hand on Kaldalis’s shoulder and steering him towards the stables. “Let’s get this investigator brain to the job at hand instead of making me explain things that I shouldn’t be allowed to.”

“It cost me a mint to upgrade my tent to have just a table and a real bed,” Kaldalis said. Despite continuing to protest, he allowed himself to be steered towards their objective. He pointed out the places where the color of the stone indicated slight differences in the age of the parts of the building. “How did you put in a bunch of towers, two extra floors, the attached stables, and all this decorative shit. And I’m guessing the vineyard, too.”

Garyung refused to answer, but he was muttering something under his breath. Kaldalis thought he picked out the words “loot cave” but he couldn’t be sure. All he could guess was that the alpha players had some closely-guarded exploit to farm money. Regardless, it must have been patched out now, or else Garyung would be there now farming to support Cotanaku’s finances.

Regardless, the stables were where his attention was most needed. Garyung’s life was more important than his money.

The stables were large, but not comically so. There were two rows of three stalls, but each stall was relatively spacious, compared to what popular media had led him to expect from a stable. Only a couple of them were occupied. One near the entrance held a relatively normal-looking horse, which surprised Kaldalis. Almost every creature he’d seen here had been a weird mashup monster rather than just something that could have just been generic mount assets up-resed from another game. However, the other occupied stall held something that looked a lot more like it belonged in the world of this game.

It looked like a cross between an alligator and a pangolin, but shaped like a horse. It was a scaled beast, with each scale standing out to give it a vaguely spiny appearance. Kaldalis couldn’t see its feet, but from its rough build, he wasn’t sure if it would have clawed feet or horrifyingly incongruous hooves. Its shape seemed well-suited to be a mount, though, with strong muscles, and some of the scales looked like they had been trimmed down to accommodate a saddle. Its long snout was a mess of triangular teeth. The strange mount’s slit-pupiled eyes followed the pair of them as they entered, though the horse in the other stall seemed utterly disinterested.

“Is this the horse?” Kaldalis asked. “Or was it the other thing?”

“The horse,” Garyung said. “The Pholidota Croquine was a quest thingy, and I raised it from an egg. It wouldn’t hurt me even if I punched it in the nose. If it got loose, the worst I could get would be a playful headbutt or a friendly nibble.”

“And is this the stall?” he asked, pointing at the stall holding the horse.

“We moved her there after they caught her,” Garyung said. He pointed to the other side, where an empty stall stood open. “This is where she was, and broke out of.”

“Okay, give me a minute, then,” Kaldalis said. “I’m going to walk around and scratch my chin and imagine a bunch of CGI words floating around my head explaining what happened.”

In the real world, Kaldalis was just an accountant named Dylan. He wasn’t really an investigator, but accountant work could be very detail-oriented. If Dylan could spot the exact spot in a ten thousand cell spreadsheet where the formula was wrong, Kaldalis might be able to notice an unexpected discrepancy in a stable.

The first thing to check was the horse. He approached slowly, but the animal seemed either oblivious or uninterested in him. Even when he was standing literally at the door of the stall, the horse just stared placidly ahead. Kaldalis wasn’t that familiar with horses, so he wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for. But as he reached up and touched the horse’s neck, it was pretty obvious what was wrong here.

“So this horse got spooked enough to trample you?” Kaldalis asked. “This horse? She’s practically asleep standing up here.”

“I know,” Garyung said with a grimace. “I wouldn’t believe it myself if it hadn’t happened to me.”

Without knowing how to follow up on that piece of information, he moved to the broken stall. Obviously, the door was broken, but it had not yet been repaired. There was a splintered section around the latch, so it looked like it had been broken suddenly, as if by a sudden kick from the horse. However, the wood around the splintered bit didn’t look right. He ran his finger along the broken edge. The middle of it wasn’t splintered, but was instead a slightly rough edge, with a strange row of symmetrical markings.

“This was cut,” Kaldalis said. “Partially. Someone drove a tool into this. A saw or chisel or something.”

“So what does that tell us?” Garyung asked. “Anything?”

“Real talk? Nothing.” Kaldalis shrugged. “This is just definitive proof that someone did something. This wasn’t an accident, even though they wanted it to look like one.”

“But we already knew that,” Garyung grumbled. “We saw someone fleeing the scene.”

“Yeah, but if you hadn’t survived?” Kaldalis asked. He stepped into the broken stall and knelt down, trying to ignore the smell. “Imagine if you die in this freak accident. Who shows up to investigate?” He noticed a lump of easily-identifiable brown substance that had a very clear boot print in it. “The Zaran guard. And they do a half-assed job of it and say it was an accident when it clearly wasn’t.”

“So does that mean the Zarans are behind it?” Garyung asked. The Bhogad cast a sudden look around, flinching as if he’d heard someone approach.

“Not necessarily,” Kaldalis said. Right before he stood up he saw something out of the corner of his eye. A little glimmer of light. He kept speaking as he brushed aside a bit of straw to investigate. “They might have been half-assed on the job because they just hate PCs, and not on explicit orders. That might have been the intent of the assassin, though. To make you think that. They leave obvious clues that point to foul play, knowing that the Zarans don’t give a shit.”

In the straw at the back corner of the stall, there was a little metal tube. At one end it tapered down, but it was broken before reaching the end. Kaldalis wasn’t sure what he was looking at for a moment.

“So who else could it have been, though?” Garyung asked.

“I mean, I kinda wanna do the cliche,” Kaldalis said, holding the tube up to the light, trying to figure out what it might have been. “But I figure asking if you have any enemies isn’t going to lead to the most useful discussion we could have.”

Garyung grimaced. They both knew that it was a stupid question. By declaring Cotanaku an independent nation, Garyung had made a lot of enemies. Besides that, there was no telling what Demriv was up to while she was here, either on her own vengeful initiative, or as an agent of the Panbu council. Not to mention that Kaldalis couldn’t even begin to imagine what enemies Garyung may have made on the international stage in his brief time as the leader of a nation.

“What is that?” Garyung asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence at last, pointing to the bit of metal in Kaldalis’s hand.

“I’m not sure yet,” Kaldalis said, holding it out.

“A broken pipe?” Garyung guessed. He was visibly reluctant to touch it, but knelt down to peer closely at it. “Maybe a piece of a weapon that broke when the horse went crazy?”

“Piece of a weapon…” Kaldalis muttered. He pushed past Garyung and out of the stall, going back to the stall that held the horse.

The animal was just as placid as before, making it easy for him to slip into the stall alongside her. He took a careful moment to gently feel his way along the horse’s flank until he found what he was after.

It was nearly imperceptible. He had been looking for signs of proper wounds to see if he could determine what kind of weapon had riled the horse up, but there was nothing. What there was, though, was a tiny little knob of a scab. If the horse had even been slightly neglected, it could have passed for a knot in the animal's hair, or even a large tick. But whoever Garyung had looking after his stables cared about their job.

“This was a syringe,” Kaldalis said at last, squeezing past the horse again to get back to Garyung. “That’s why the horse freaked out. She was drugged. Someone snuck in here, damaged the stall door, drugged the horse, and probably got kicked to have dropped this.”

“Okay, great,” Garyung said with a nod. “So what does that tell us? Anything?”

“Nothing concrete,” Kaldalis said, putting the broken syringe into his inventory and starting for the exit, “but it might be a useful starting point. I know where our next stop is.”

“What is it?” Garyung asked, moving quickly to stay close to Kaldalis.

“Not what,” Kaldalis said, the side of his mouth curling up into a smirk. “Who.”