“Beautiful fight, mate,” a man to Ryu’s left said. He’d pulled his gore-spattered helmet off, revealing light brown hair and eyes that seemed a tad bit too close to each other.

Ryu nodded. He hadn’t realized there was such a thing. All the fights he’d been in were ugly, brutal things, after all. It was actually sort of the appeal, if he was honest. And Ryu did try to be honest, at least to himself.

He climbed out of the stinking mud with a sigh. Blood, entrails, and what little of the swamp water left in the small area they’d drained had combined to form something even he found disgusting. It’d take hours to get the damn smell of it out of his armor, and if Bonny caught sight of it… he’d probably be sleeping outside. Strange how he considered that a problem, now. He was getting too complacent, and though he knew it could never last, he’d enjoy it while he could.

A fair few of the fighters around him spared him respectful nods, and he returned them. Nothing like a fight to pull comrades closer together, eh? The thought made him snort to himself. He walked towards Bonny’s tent on the other side of camp, turning a corner and barging into a… body? In the blink of an eye, his hatchets were out, but he realized his attacker wasn’t moving. By the looks of it, it probably hadn’t moved much of anything lately.

The glazed brown eyes almost made him sigh. It was always something, it seemed. In fact, he suspected it was one of life’s little games to see how many unfortunate events it could pile together at one time. A part of him urged to keep moving, to forget about it. Finding a dead body after a battle was no surprise, was it? He knew better, however. Monsters- for the most part- were efficient killers. This… This was the opposite of that. Ryu knew the signs of torture when he saw them, and as far as he knew, the only species in this area interested in such a thing was humans.

In a surge of mutiny, his feet carried him away from Bonny’s tent and toward the large canvas of the command tent. His mind had already given up on the dead man, but his body had not, it seemed. Trying to distract himself, he looked at the colored tents around him. If he tried, he could remember clutching Jinn’s hand as a boy in a war camp not too dissimilar to this one. The cacophony of all the sounds in the camp had always overwhelmed him. Jinn had been his only bastion in the chaos. The thought made him smile, the thought of the dead man suspended for a moment. Those had been simpler times. Better ones. It was those times he missed the most, the ones before Jinn’s lies. Before the Trial. His smile disappeared. It was always the self-inflicted wounds that hurt the worst.

He found himself staring at the dull gray command tent as his mind came back to the present. If it were a different time, he might have wondered how such a… flamboyant personality like Lucius could be contained in a tent of that sober of a color. The times suppressed his wonder, as they were wont to do, however, so he pushed through the tent flap and into the warmly lit confines of the command tent. Like any proper place of thinking, it smelled of the pages of old books.

“There’s been a murder,” Ryu said to the group sat around the round table in the center.

“Yeah, a few by the looks of it. Don’t worry though. You should see the other side,” Phil called, somehow already drunk. Ryu suspected he hadn’t even fought, by the looks of his too-clean armor. The bastard wasn’t even trying to hide it.

A few around the table tittered. “I don’t mean by the swarm. I mean a murder committed by one of the fucks you invited on this expedition. Take some responsibility,” Ryu growled. He started to turn and leave.

“No, Ryu. You’re right, forgive us. We should take responsibility,” Lucius said, eyes still crinkled with mirth. “So I’m putting you in charge of finding this murderer.”

“Very responsible, indeed,” one of the women at the table said. Ryu didn’t recognize her, but he felt the sudden urge to put an arrow between her eyes.

He left. They hadn’t won much of anything, yet he knew the command tent would not be the only celebration he’d see throughout the camp. Still, it didn’t worry him too much. For all the egos within the camp, the Climbers were elite. Nothing would get past them. No, what had Ryu worried was his position amongst the Climbers. He was to be the group’s moral compass? Him? He laughed, attracting a strange look from a man who was cleaning his gear nearby.

Ryu would find the murderer. He didn’t care to save innocent lives or protect the group. There wasn’t a pair of clean hands within twenty miles, much less in the camp. He’d find the murderer because the whole thing pissed him off. After a few moments, he found the body once more. It was strange, really. He knew a few people had to have passed the corpse, yet nobody had moved it. Or touched it, from the smell.

If he was honest, Ryu had only been on the other side of a situation like this. He had no idea how murders were investigated and knew little about the Skills employed to do so, save for the fact he did not have them. So he made a decision.

“Ryu, what is that?” Bonny asked, menace growing in her voice. She knew. It was obvious. How many other uses for a body-sized bag were there?

“This man,” Ryu said, opening the bag to reveal the murdered man, “was killed. And not by the swarm, as every wise ass has suggested to me. By someone within the camp, if I had to guess. Which I do since I’ve been put in charge of the investigation.” He looked between Bonny and her brother. They were in the middle of Bonny’s tent, and by the look on her face, she was none too happy to see the corpse around her furniture.

“All the more reason to not involve me, then,” she said.

Horace ran a hand over his face. He looked as tired as Ryu felt. “You have my help as always, friend. What do you need?”

Ryu grunted his thanks before pointing at the body’s wounds. “I’m looking for someone who wields a curved dagger. Possibly two someones. I think…” He trailed off, his memory sparking to life. “He was with those annoying assholes from the other night. Remember them, Bonny?”

“Yes, sadly.”

“I saw him right before the swarm hit. He was their leader, I think,” he said. Gods, but did he want to give up now. He was almost glad someone had killed the guy.

“So,” Horace said, thinking. “You’re saying there would have been plenty of people who would want him dead?”

“Probably. Him and his group were obnoxious, sparring with blunted blades in the middle of the night and being raucous. Hells, I might have even killed him if I had the chance.”

The siblings exchanged looks. “Why did they put you in charge of this?” Bonny asked.

“Bad luck, I guess,” Ryu said with a sigh. He encountered little else in life.

Horace tapped the arm of his chair. “I’ll contact some people with some expertise on this. Maybe try to get in contact with this group he was running around with if you can, Ryu.”

“Joy,” he grunted in response, sinking into one of Bonny’s plush chairs. She crinkled a nose. He hadn’t bathed since the fight.

“Go with him, Bonny?” Horace asked.

“Suppose so,” she said, standing up and pulling her hair back into a ponytail. “Come on then.”

“Can’t lose sleep over a good deed,” Ryu whispered under his breath. He shoved himself to his feet.

“What was that?” Bonny asked.

“Just something my… father told me once.”

---

Ryu navigated through the maze of tents for what had to be the umpteenth time in a grim mood. He’d be glad to see this damn camp marching once more and to make it to the dungeon. He wanted out of the Fifth Ring. Out of this damn swamp. He snorted. As if leaving would help. The sad truth was, Ryu struggled with things that couldn’t be run from.

“What are you thinking about?” Bonny asked from his side.

Oh, the annoyance of being asked about thoughts not worth sharing. “The man’s friends. Do you know where any of their tents actually are? Walking in the general area they came from seems to be… fruitless,” he lied.

“We could-”

“Found them,” Ryu sighed, waving at a group of men arguing around a fire. Tents- presumably the men’s- made a small ring around the campfire.

“Maybe one of them ate him,” one of the men said, his blue eyes vacant in the darkening afternoon light. Ryu’s nose told him a storm was brewing in the gray clouds above.

“Eat him? Rab, don’t you remember what he-”

“Who’s there?” the man with blue eyes called. Rab, if Ryu had to guess. His face was the honest type, one you might find on a trustworthy neighbor. The others looked… less wholesome. The man who had been interrupted in particular sported a nasty look, his face as sharp as the hatchets that adorned Ryu’s waist.

Ryu held his hands up. “My name is Ryu. I’m here about the murder of a man we believe to be one of your companion’s.”

“Myles?” Rab cried, standing to his feet. The hatchet-faced man held his shoulder with a restraining hand.

“Murder, you say?” the man said, spitting a wad of tobacco from his mouth. Ryu did not need to turn to know Bonny had her lip crinkled in disgust.

“Yeah, he was found after the Swarm.” Ryu’s tongue felt two sizes too large for his mouth, and he struggled to find the right words. If there were any. How did you tell a man his friend had been cut up like a piece of meat at the butcher’s?

“Killed by a monster then,” he said with a shake of his head. “Damn idiot.”

“Where’s his body?” the third man around the fire asked. He had a nasty burn mark along his neck, and his eyes looked like two jet slates.

“About that…,” Ryu trailed off, casting Bonny a look. She seemed to understand.

“First, may I ask your names?” the red-haired woman said, breaking the three men’s stares from Ryu.

“Name’s Orin. That there’s Rab, and the man behind me is Caine,” the hatchet-faced man said, gesturing with his head.

“Well, I guess there’s no easy way to tell you, but we don’t believe it was a monster that killed your friend,” Bonny said.

“Myles,” Rab interjected, staring at the fire once more. Ryu supposed the man hoped he would find answers there. Poor bastard.

“Yes, Myles,” Bonny said.

“Well, fuck.” Orin sat back down on the stump he was using as a chair. “Don’t suppose you know who it was?”

“That’s why we’re here, actually.”

“You know who it was,” Caine said, his dark eyes staring at Orin with malice. “You know exactly who it was.”

Orin worked his jaw for a moment. “I told you it was dark, Caine.”

“Mind telling us what you’re talking about,” Ryu said. He revised his opinion. They were all poor, miserable bastards, it seemed.

“Myles had gotten into a bit of a scuffle the other night,” Orin said. “Nothin’ serious, mind you. Didn’t find him until it was over and he was busted up on the ground.”

Ryu nodded. Lots of fights happened in the camp, he knew. They weren’t prohibited, either, as long as Skills and weapons stayed out of it. “So you don’t know who it was?’

“No, and I doubt it was them either. If they’d wanted him dead, I’d have found him that way.”

“Bullshit,” Caine snarled, standing to his feet. “Stop-”

“Didn’t have anything to do with you all sparring in the middle of the night, did it?” Ryu interrupted. Why was he out here? Was this really worth the trouble?

“That was you?” Rab asked, looking up from the fire. “Myles had… He had nightmares, you see. He’d just wake up restless in the middle of the night. Been that way as long as I’d known him, always figured he’d fought for one of the forces in the First. So we would spar and let him get tired again.”

“That wasn’t the problem that night, though,” Caine said, still glaring at his friend. “We’d been having a bit of a drink, just something to take the edge off after you lot had chased us off. Myles had a little too much, I’d say, and went to take a piss. He didn’t quite make it to the latrines.”

“And the fight?” Bonny asked.

Orin smirked a bit, though the expression looked bitter on his otherwise sad face. “He’d pissed on someone’s tent. Apparently they weren’t too happy.”

“It was more than that and you know it,” Caine barked. “I’d never seen Myles so shook up. He’d been a Climber for ten years and a fighter long before that. Hell, his level was higher than any of ours. Now you tell me, does that sound like the type of man to get shaken by a scuffle?”

Ryu shook his head. “You happen to know which tent he pissed on?”

They all shook their heads. Life had never run out of disappointments before. He was not sure why he’d thought it would change now.