"Yuki, I shot it through the head. It's dead." Natsuki rounded the ruins and walked over to the fallen wolf. "Once you immobilized it, I just fired the same spell again."

"Oh, I see." I should have expected that, shouldn't I? I'm not fighting alone, after all. "Let me clean the blood off my sword, then I'll carve out its eyes."

"Okay. I'm going to go explore!" Grinning widely, Natsuki walked off to a corner of the ruins, touching and feeling the stone walls.

With a snap of the wrist, I cleared the blood off my blade, and pushed it back into the scabbard.

—That was a joke. You can't clear blood from a blade that easily. I pulled some wiping paper out of the bag I had left on the ground nearby, and wiped the blood off the blade.

Walking over to the wolf's head, I pulled out a rusty old hunting knife and carved out its eyes, in which I could still see something like a flame smoldering weakly. I'd really like to replace this knife, but you don't need a particularly good knife to deal with most dead animals, so it hasn't been a high priority.

Since the wolf also had some strange fangs, I decided to pull those out as well. Normally, the extended tusks of feral hogs and the like are too deeply set into the jaw to pull out, but with a bit of magic, it might be possible...

I wrapped one hand around one of the wolf's fangs, and let my mana run down from my hand around its shaft, deep into the jaw. If applying mana to a sword's edge could make it cut more efficiently, then applying mana to a cylindrical shaft should make it easier to rotate, right...? I twisted the fang sharply, and I could hear the gums and muscles ripping away. With a gentle pull, the fang came out easily. I did the same to the other fang.

"Natsuki," I called out. "I think we should take the hide too. It's probably valuable." After all, it's a brilliant vermilion that one would never see on a normal wolf.

I heard a rock tumble for several seconds before coming to a stop, and then Natsuki popped her head out from behind a wall. "Sounds good. It's a bit too big to flip over, so let's ignore the underside." Walking over to the other side of the wolf, she lifted up its front leg and, with a slightly rustier hunting knife, cut shallowly along the underside of the leg. I, on my side, did the same. Skinning is a fairly delicate task, so we skinned it silently.

Once we had pulled the pelt off— only about two-thirds of the total, as we couldn't reach the belly— we turned the pelt fur side down on the ground and set to cleaning the inside. Only then did I finally speak.

"Do you think the meat is safe to eat?"

—Not that anyone would ever eat wolf meat willingly. Wolf meat is absolutely terrible. But I'm curious.

Natsuki knitted her eyebrows. "Probably not, given how suspicious its blood looks. Though I suppose we could take the backstraps and ask the Guild to take a look."

The blood that had leaked from its leg was, after all, steaming. That's not normal. So I climbed onto the wolf's back and cut out its backstraps, which I shoved into two layers of game bags to be safe.

I returned to the pelt, and this time Natsuki was the one to speak. "Yuki, I found something like a stairwell in a corner of the ruins. There seems to be some kind of underground passageway down there. Let's stretch and peg this, and then let's go explore."

An underground passageway? I've heard that there are underground ruins that contain remnants of the world from the time before the Legorian Empire was established. Of course, those remnants include—

"We might even find some powerful magical artifacts, don't you think?!" Natsuki's hand quivered in anticipation. Luckily, cleaning a hide does not require a steady hand.

"Yeah. Let's explore."

I was excited too, though not as much as her.

Some time later, with the vermilion hide drying outside, we descended down a half-collapsed staircase to an underground passageway. Natsuki, walking in front of me, lit a brightly burning flame on her fingertip, like Agnia had shown us the other day. It lit the walls of the passageway, which were made of remarkably normal rock.

I ran my fingers against the walls, and felt nothing more than the normal bumpiness of a rock wall carved out of nature. "Natsuki... this passageway is too normal... so normal, it's kind of creepy..."

"Don't say that, Yuki," she injected sharply. "If you say that, something dangerous will show up."

"Really?" I tilted my head. "Is that how it works?"

"Yes. It's a law called Chekov's gun. I read about it in a book."

"What's Chekov? And what's gun?"

"Chekov is a person, and I don't know about gun."

I tilted my head further.

A silent minute or so later, while I was still trying to figure out the logic of Chekov's gun, Natsuki stopped.

"Yuki, look over there. See that green glowy thing over there? Can you tell what it is? Moss, maybe?"

Farther down the corridor, beyond the reach of Natsuki's magic light, a glowing green cat stood upon a pedestal, raising its front paw as if inviting us in. It did not move, but only stared directly at us, as if daring us to move forwards.