Chương 42: Chapter Forty: The Trouble With Being Thorough

The Marsh Boggart broke from the reeds, all four limbs at once, mouth open wide. Alice didn't bother stepping back as she once would have. It closed the distance in two lunging strides, claws first, and she let her weight shift onto her back foot a half-beat before it would have made contact, [Dodge] moving her clear of the strike almost without thought. The Boggart's claws swiped empty air where her collarbone had been. It stumbled ungainly past her on its own momentum.

Alice was already turning as it moved to land, knife coming up at the same time. [Dodge] – Passive.

[Knife Work] – Passive. It only took one strike; under the jaw, up through the soft tissues where the skull met the neck, and the whole thing was over before the creature even realized it. It fell motionless, and Alice stood over it for a moment simply breathing, watching to see whether it would twitch again. It didn't. [Marsh Boggart] killed. Combat event logged.

Skill [Knife Work] has leveled up. She wiped the knife clean on the grass and looked down at the body with distaste. This is the part that games never bother with, she thought, not for the first time, or at least the ones I played. In every game she'd half-remembered from her old life, the corpse generally dissolved into a tidy list of loot, or could be easily looted into game items without the macabre task of mucking through the blood and sinew. But real life wasn't that simple.

Before her lay a body, and gaining anything from it meant hard work. Hard, skilled, and somewhat disgusting work. She'd thought about this before, quite a bit, but it had never become more than thoughts until this last week. Until then, she had always found some reason to walk away from it instead. She was aware that it was merely squeamishness dressed up as practicality, though she'd never quite admitted that to herself before in those words. But it wasn't only the squeamishness, either.

Alice genuinely didn't know what she was doing, not really. Watching the butchers in the market work from some distance away was not the same thing as slicing a knife yourself through a creature that used to be living. She'd tried a few times over the past several days out here, and each time she'd made a mess of it and gotten nothing for her trouble; no skill, no notification, just wasted meat and a sick feeling and enormous guilt.

She was going to give it only a few more honest tries, perhaps until the end of the week, before she let herself give it up entirely. Kneeling on the grass, she turned the body over. It had claws worth quite a bit to the guilds if she took them clean, and a hide that wasn't worthless either, and she'd watched enough at the skinning yard to know in theory what she should do. In practice, her hand did not want to move. She always hesitated before the first cut.

Cutting something's still-warm body apart wasn't the same as killing it. Killing happened in the heat of a moment, in mere seconds that didn't leave room for many thoughts. This was different. It took time, a lot of it, and every extra second was another chance to ask herself whether she should be doing it at all. Alice didn't need the meat. She wasn't starving, or even had the desire to taste it.

And there was something that felt genuinely wrong about opening a creature up purely because she wanted to see a shiny notification window, as though its body existed to teach her a skill rather than a real once-living being. She could sell the parts, of course, but that was money she could easily earn in other ways, ways that didn't depend on cutting up the corpses of beasts. Perhaps, it would do more good left where it lay, fed on by whatever else lived in the marsh.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. I don't think I have the stomach for this, she thought, and very nearly believed it enough to wipe the knife clean a second time and walk away. She made herself do it anyway. Mostly because she'd already lost several hours in the past week and a fair amount of dignity attempting this exact thing, and turning back now felt like throwing all of that away for nothing.

Sunk cost fallacy had its claws deep in her mind, but she promised herself that she was not going to do this for more than a week. If she didn't get the skill after this weekend was over, she would stop trying. She started at the wrist, off the joint, the way she had seen butchers in the market do it, and forced herself to keep the same slow, deliberate pace through every cut that followed. It was worse than she'd expected every time, but not for the reasons she'd braced herself initially.

It was gruesome, yes, but not to the point of vomiting or even stopping. No, the real issue was that this was intimate in ways that killing it had never been. By the time she reached the claws her hands had found something almost like a rhythm, and she hated slightly how quickly that had happened. Skill created: [Butcher] Oh, thank god. She sat back on her heels, hide in one hand, the feeling of mild nausea somewhere under her ribs.

She made herself finish the claws too, because leaving the job half done seemed worse, somehow. Perhaps a strange kind of respect to be paying a creature that had tried to open her throat, but there it was. Deep down, she knew she would not practice this skill often, if ever. It had taken five days of taking apart the bodies of her kills to even create it; she was simply not talented in this sort of thing.

Even worse, she couldn't help but ruin her practice time with thoughts of dubious ethics and moral excuses and she did not enjoy facing herself with this level of pretentiousness. Looking at her bloodied hands, she took out some rags to clean herself and thought, at least not like this.

After she'd finished cleaning up, Alice allowed herself to simply rest for a moment. Her immediate tasks, for now, were done; the hide was rolled and strapped down, the claws were washed and wrapped separately and she herself had rinsed as much as was possible in the middle of a marsh. She found a dry patch of ground, sat, drew her knees up, and looked out through the reeds toward the direction where she knew, even with no direct sight, that the city of Londinium lay. Soon it would be evening.

She sighed, long and slow. I am alive, she thought, but that didn't sound as comforting as it should have been. No one has come for me, the next thought followed and her eyes narrowed in frustration. It was strange. Much too strange that no one had looked for her. She had left herself wide open in the past few weeks ever since her panic attack and yet, nothing had happened.

Either she had misjudged the killer and he was instead the type of man who enjoyed prolonged psychological torture instead of the short-term physical ones, or… Or she had this completely wrong. It had been three weeks of Alice making herself, by any account, extraordinarily easy to find. She wasn't stealthily sneaking out of the city or hiding in the crowd. Instead, she had a predictable routine, treading the same marsh paths at the same hours every day and with few to no eyes on her at any time. And yet nothing.

Not a peep. There was no sound in the reeds that didn't belong to some kind of Boggart or Gallows-Crow. No footsteps that weren't her own. No one watching from the tree line with anything comparable to malice or rage. She turned the water skin over in her hands, considering that line of thought properly now.

If she'd genuinely been a target, the way the list with the names of the victims and the strange behaviour of the previous Alice before her death had led her to believe, this whole new routine was exactly the sort of opportunity a clever killer would want. Alone, in the middle of nowhere. Far from the constable stations and where anyone, friend or stranger, might notice her missing before nightfall.

After she had straightened out her thoughts three weeks ago, she had decided that she was going through with her plans, and if the killer did show up? Well, she had a knife and she was no longer afraid to use it. Only one of them would walk out of the marsh, and even if it ended up being him, at least this whole anxious feeling of prey-like fear would be over. But that didn't happen. Which means one of two things. Either the killer is more patient and sadistic than I thought or…

I was never as much of a target as I assumed I was. There was a third option, of course. But Alice didn't think it a serious one. The killer could simply be an arrogant imbecile who couldn't even bother to read the papers.