The Divine Hunter

Chapter 324: Matteo's Ritual

"Did you hear that?" Roy looked around the bodies in the chamber. Aside from the sound of Todd cutting open Elsa's skin, the air had been eerily quiet. When the young witcher tried to listen again, the sobs disappeared.

Todd said nothing and went back to cutting Elsa open.

Was I hearing things? Roy shook his head, but he kept an ear out for that voice. "I'll help you." He went over to Elsa's side and pulled her eyelids open. Her pupils were grey, and that was something exhibited only by people who had been dead for days. The young witcher then moved her joints around, but they didn't feel stiff at all. They were supple, in fact, but her temperature was a lot lower than the environment’s.

He couldn't ascertain her time of death. He found some ash lodged in the body's nose, mouth, and ears. It felt like she had been buried in peat before, though he wouldn't suspect it just by seeing how clean she looked.

Roy thought, Peat. Where can I find peat for warmth and heating in Novigrad? That's a key location.

***

After cutting the wrist open, Todd drew the scalpel up Elsa's forearm, elbow, and shoulder. The skin parted away, revealing the crimson muscle tissues underneath. Unlike most corpses, there was no blood or fluids oozing out of the incision.

Roy was a little surprised. All her blood was congealed like jelly and stuck to her skin.

"Have you seen something like this before?" Todd stopped for a moment.

"Basilisk venom does that." Roy put the other arm down. "But that's not the smell of poisoned blood. The blood of any basilisk venom victim would smell like livestock shite."

Roy huddled closer to the blood and smelled it, but all he gleaned was a faint aroma. It felt like her blood was infused with luscious honey. There wasn't any stench of livestock excrement at all. If everyone's blood smelled like this, the vampires would go crazy for us. "Either Elsa has taken some sort of potion, or a sorcerer has modified her blood."

Todd almost exploded with anger. He could imagine how much agony Elsa must have been in.

A moment of silence later, he cut the other arm and her legs open, but they all showed the same result. Aside from the jelly-like blood, her muscles, tendons, arteries, and blood vessels were kept intact. There were no wounds or marks of torture.

Todd took a deep breath. Time for the organs next. But when the scalpel touched Elsa's organ, it started trembling.

Roy blurted, "It's getting colder." He rubbed his hands. Feels like the temperature just dropped like a rock. It was about sixteen degrees a few moments ago, but now it's like one or two degrees. Maybe zero. Brr. Freezing.

Even an enhanced human like Roy found this hard to bear. Without the whispers of the wind, even the air itself seemed to have frozen up.

"Can you stay quiet, witcher?"

Roy shrugged his shoulders and stopped shivering. "Of course. I won't disturb you again."

But he started looking around cautiously. I miss Gryphon. In her crow form, she can be the perfect scout. Wonder if I should summon her.

Todd made a diagonal cut on both sides of Elsa's chest that met in the center, and then he kept cutting downward until the scalpel touched her belly button, forming a thin, deep Y-shaped gash. "Give me the rib spreader."

Roy picked up the supersized mole grips from the tray and handed them to Todd. The mercenary pointed them at Elsa's ribs and tried to spread them, but then the fire of the sconces on the walls and pillars suddenly went out.

The duo was shocked, and Roy quickly tensed up like a cat. He curled up a little and took a defensive stance, but just a moment later, the flames lit up again, shining on every corner of the room. Everything was still the same as they were. The body was still lying on the bed, and Todd was still holding the rib spreader.

"I think something's really off. Why don't I call Letho and Auckes? Or we can continue tomorrow morning?" Roy vehemently suggested.

"It's alright. Let's go on," Todd insisted. He placed the part of the rib he cut out on the tray and aimed at the other side.

Elsa was modified, so she probably has some chaos energy left over in her body. That was probably just the energy releasing itself, Roy told himself, but then someone suddenly knocked on the door.

"Casimodo? But I thought he'd gone home."

There were a few doors leading to this place. The morgue was separated into a few rooms, and they were in the deepest one. Only the steel door was closed, while the others were left open.

Roy went and opened the door, but nobody was outside. Only the dim light of the flames hung in the air, and silence was its companion. The guards were still nowhere to be seen.

"This is peculiar." Roy locked onto the weapons in his inventory space and came back to Todd, pretending nothing had happened. This time, he left the door open.

Todd was holding a blackish-brown organ in his hand. It was Elsa's lungs. They were supposed to be smooth, but instead they had blackened and were covered in fluids and neoplasm.

The observation was surprising to Todd. Only nicotine addicts of many years would develop these kinds of lungs, but Elsa was not even twenty years old when she died. No way this is possible. "Is this consumption?"

Roy touched the blackened part and smelled his finger. "No. More like burn marks. Smells like something is overcooked, but I'd say this is medium."

My daughter is not a steak.

"Alright, fine. No joking anymore. But with her lungs burnt to this degree, her whole body should have been charred, and yet she looks perfectly fine."

The duo was thrown into another web of questions, and Todd decided to cut off all the organs, including the heart, liver, and pancreas. As expected, all of them were as burnt as the lungs.

"Guess we found the cause of death." This begs the question. How did Elsa's skin manage to stay intact while her organs are burnt? Or is the skin really intact? "I need to have a closer look."

Roy took the scalpel and checked the skin again, but this time, he cut open the fat and muscles to separate the whole skin.

What he found surprised him. Ink marks? On the skin?

Todd and Roy pushed the skin back, and they unraveled something horrifying. A huge pattern was carved into Elsa's skin from her chest to the back. It looked like a circular disk surrounded by conical protrusions. Like the sun projecting black light.

There were a lot of indecipherable runes carved in the center of that disc, and Roy noticed that line of ancient numbers. His proficiency in Elder Speech allowed him to read that line, and subconsciously, he said, "Year 1271, fortieth day of Lammas…"

"What do the numbers mean, Roy?"

"That was the day Elsa went missing." Roy tried his best to make sense of the remaining runes on the skin.

"Dammit! What did the bastard do to her?" Veins popped on Todd's face, and he went very nearly berserk. He could recognize some of the runes thanks to his extensive experience on this continent, but everything else was unknown to him. All he could do was worry.

"Calm down, Todd." Roy massaged his temples. He recognized a part of the runes. They overlapped with Elder Speech, Common Speech, and Nilfgaardian tongue, which he read into a little before. However, they were also different.

He read about this writing before in the temple of Melitele's library. It belonged to the Wozgors and Dauks, two already extinct races. The young witcher didn't manage to have a good grasp on Wozgorian, as his stay in the temple was a short one. He only recognized less than a fraction of the runes on the pattern.

All he had to go on was limited knowledge and conjectures. "Oh, I get it now! These runes record a ritual!" A hint of horror flashed in Roy's eyes.

"A ritual?"

"Pardon me, Elsa," Roy muttered and quickly cut the body's hands, feet, scalp, and belly open. Six parts of the body, and all six parts had runes engraved on them. From what Roy knew of the occult, hexagrams mean a lot of things. They could be summoning circles, a symbol of evil worshipping, and of course circles for a lot of other rituals.

"What do these runes mean?"

"Curse… born on the day of light's absence…" Roy tried to decipher the runes, and what he gleaned was chilling. "Day of the light's absence… That's the eclipse. Born on the day when light was nowhere to be found…" Todd was looking grim. "That means girls of the prophecy like Elsa."

Roy looked at the runes on the left hand. "Torture… despair is the mother of destruction." Her insides were burnt. That's one form of torture.

"I wonder if this autopsy counts as torture," Todd muttered. He regretted this a little, but their work must go on. I must find the answers.

Roy advanced to the next line of runes. Right hand. "Blasphemy… corrupted purity… So the murderer set his sights on her because she was pure. Taking that purity away is part of the ritual."

Todd remained silent, but his eyes were red with fury, and yet he held it down.

Now for the left leg. "Sacrifice… the living must die…"

Roy couldn't decipher the runes on the right leg, so he moved on to the belly. "Hunt… the dead shall become claws…"

"What's the holdup, witcher? What did the last line say?"

"Revive… the dead shall return to life… I see!" Realization struck Roy. "I think I know who killed the coroner." The coroner's missing scalp and some black hair he found in the half-elf's mouth gave him the answer. The killer used every part of their body to murder the coroner. That was one mad killer, and nothing's madder than a dead body that came back to life.

"Hold on. There's one last line, Roy."

"Absorb… ripe… Sorry, I can't understand this."

Hmm, there's an Elder Speech phrase here. When Roy realized what the word meant, his expression froze, and then his face fell. "Matteo… Matteo Sigula… Collection item?" Roy's eyes narrowed, and for a moment, his breathing stopped.

Realization dawned on him. So even after he's escaped that lab, he's still… "Hiding in Novigrad? That godforsaken bastard!"

As if responding to the witcher, someone slammed the steel door shut, and the impact made the morgue shudder.

Then the bells started to ring. Roy and Todd froze up as the bodies on the beds suddenly sat up.

***

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