Pig Hunt (4)
Instinct spoke to Shahal.
Run.
"D-damn it!"
She had to vanish from sight before that mad dog got any closer.
But I spent over two hours circling around and covering my tracks!
It made no sense. She had deliberately wound in wide loops, sticking to well-traveled roads, so there shouldn't have been a single trail worth following. Even if there had been, her current form was the real one — entirely unconnected to that boy 'Sota'.
And yet the werewolf was barreling toward her in a dead-straight line, with perfect accuracy.
"BLOOD!!!!"
Roaring like a beast starved for days.
"Uuughhhhh!"
Shahal did exactly what primal terror and instinct demanded. She yanked the reins hard around and cracked the whip. The carriage lurched violently off the road.
-Jolt!
"Huh? Kyaaaaah!"
"Move, unless you want to be trampled to death!"
She swerved violently onto a busy thoroughfare and plunged straight through, tearing through the crowded foot traffic, fleeing the main road and diving into the narrow lanes. Even as the furious howling gradually faded into the distance, she didn't stop running.
Only after rounding corner after corner, twisting her trail into a hopelessly tangled mess, did she finally allow herself to breathe.
"Hah... hah..."
The horses panted roughly in time with her.
Where she stood now was a deserted street, utterly devoid of people — far removed from the main road, reachable only through a spiderweb of tiny alleys. It was, in every sense, the perfect improvised hiding spot.
"W-with any luck, they won't find me here."
She wiped the sweat from her face as she spoke. All around was silence. She couldn't even hear the clatter of hooves.
"Good. I think I've shaken them off for now..."
If she stalled just a little longer, the pursuit team would pass right by.
Then I just reverse course and slip away.
Shahal's mind was already racing, spinning up a fresh escape plan and route. She might have panicked for a moment, but she was still the vice-master of the Black Hand. She'd weathered countless incidents and accidents in the middle of missions; this mess was something she could manage too.
She steadied herself and started to think. If the roads are locked down, I could take a boat across the river... but they've got that under control already, judging from earlier, so—
And exactly three seconds later, a familiar sound rang out in the distance.
"BLOOD!!!"
That godawful werewolf's howl erupted from the corner right behind her.
Shahal's face crumpled like a child about to cry.
"Oh, for — I'm going out of my mind!"
Plans and schemes could go to hell. She whipped the reins in a frantic rush, and the chase was on again.
It was so unfair.
"How does he KEEP finding me!? What is wrong with him today!?!?"
Right up until yesterday, everything had gone smoothly. Everything had been proceeding perfectly — until she ran into that one immigration officer. Ever since, the whole operation had gone spectacularly sideways, all because of a man named Nathan Kell.
"I should have killed him right then and there! That cursed, spineless little excuse for an examiner!"
Venting her fury, she drove the carriage even harder, scrambling out of her hiding place in a desperate rush. And the moment she pulled the reins to the right, Shahal's eyes went wide.
"Hk! St-stop!"
-Screeeeech!!
She hauled back on the reins with every ounce of strength she had, and the carriage screeched to a halt, just barely.
A dead end.
Where the open road should have been, a tall wall now loomed across her path.
"Ha..."
She was beyond exasperated — she was dumbfounded. Had there ever been a day where nothing, absolutely nothing, went right?
With one split-second misjudgment, Shahal found herself staring up at the high wall in despair. It was too late to back out. Turning a carriage around in this narrow lane was impossible. But she couldn't go forward either.
Not unless she abandoned the carriage.
"How did he know?"
she murmured in a hollow voice. And then it dawned on her — that maddened werewolf's cry.
"...Blood?"
Come to think of it, werewolves were extraordinarily sensitive to scent. And the smell of blood was intensely strong and long-lasting.
"No way..."
Shahal whipped her head around toward the interior of the carriage.
-Oink...
And there it was: dark-red stains, dried and caked onto the bodies of the saint pigs. The blood that had spattered when she'd kicked that examiner earlier. And the blood that had flowed from the gash when the saint pig had cracked her head against the wall.
"Damn it!!"
She'd been in such a frantic hurry to flee that she'd forgotten the last trace. She'd failed to erase the single most important thing — so of course they'd followed the scent straight to her. The result was only natural.
"What an idiotic mistake!"
Self-loathing welled up inside her. She'd blundered into an amateur's error, the kind only a rank novice would make.
She was cursing under her breath and reaching to wipe the blood away when —
"Wait. No."
An idea flashed through her mind.
"...So you're tracking the smell of blood."
For an assassin, a crisis was never merely a crisis. Crisis was opportunity — and another way out. If they were relying on the werewolf to track her by blood, then she'd simply turn that against them.
Her gaze slid to the pigs crammed inside the carriage.
"Fine, then... let's give them enough blood to choke on."
-Shing.
Shahal drew a dagger from her coat. And slowly, she stepped inside the carriage.
The screams of the pigs echoed through the abandoned street.
"Grrrrrr!!!"
The Olfactory Officer was relentless in the pursuit. Not a single hesitation, not a moment of doubt — he simply tore forward, fiercely, eyes only ahead.
Watching his back as he ran, the Gustatory Officer held his reins and spoke with visible unease.
"The O-Olfactory Officer seems to have gone full beast. What if he loses his mind entirely like some wild animal?"
I answered with a laugh. "He's fine. For a werewolf, that's just Tuesday."
Werewolves carried a species-wide impulse known as the hunting instinct — the primal urge to catch a scent and chase it down. No matter how rational and level-headed an individual might be, that surge, rising without warning, was nearly impossible to suppress. That was why the werewolves had long ago established a tradition: regular howling sessions under the full moon, raw meat included, to vent the pressure.
The Olfactory Officer was now exploiting that very instinct to its fullest, hunting down the kidnapper.
"Grrrr, left!"
He didn't slow at a single fork in the road. Even in the tangle of intersecting lanes, a few sharp sniffs were all he needed to lock onto a direction and surge onward. Reliable piece of equipment, isn't he.
So we ran — past the main thoroughfare, plunging into and combing through the narrow back alleys — until the Olfactory Officer, who had been charging recklessly straight ahead, suddenly stopped dead.
"Everyone, halt! The werewolf's stopped!"
"Halt!"
The cavalry column behind him and I barely managed to rein in our speed.
"Grrrrr..."
"What is it, Olfactory Officer? Did you lose the scent?"
The expression that had been brimming with certainty had shifted — to bewilderment. Slowly, the Olfactory Officer raised a hand and pointed at the corner beside him.
Every gaze followed his finger to the right. And at the utterly unexpected sight, for a long moment, no one could find their voice.
The right passage was a dead end. A route no kidnapper would ever have chosen — and therefore, it should have been empty.
-Oink oink oink oink!
-Squeeeal! Squeeeal!
Instead, it was packed with seventeen pigs, terrified out of their minds, scattering in every direction in a frenzied stampede.
"What in the...?"
Too stunned for words, the Gustatory Officer and I both sat gaping.
"Pigs! It's pigs!"
"One of them might be what the Officer mentioned! Capture them all!"
The soldiers recovered first. Several dismounted, grabbing at the fleeing pigs as they shouted.
"Officer, is this the strategic creature you spoke of?"
One soldier's question snapped my mind back into focus. "No! That one's a male! Look underneath! It's hanging right there!"
"What about this one!?"
"That one IS a female, but it's far too big! The pig we're looking for is a sa— I mean, a piglet!"
The soldiers asked again and again, but the saint we were searching for was nowhere to be seen. These were, without a doubt, the same pigs I'd seen in the carriage earlier. I remembered — seventeen pigs had been in that carriage, not counting the saint.
But something was wrong.
"Why are they all wounded...?"
Every last one of the seventeen pigs before us bore knife cuts across their bodies — fresh, by the look of them, each squealing in pain and writhing in terror. And between the wounds, blood.
The moment I saw it, I understood exactly what the kidnapper had done.
"Damn it all — he's figured out how we're tracking him!"
Only then did I notice it: the thick, fishy reek of blood, so strong it stung my nostrils, pulsing through the entire street.
At the same moment, a soldier who had run to the very end of the dead end shouted back. "There's an abandoned carriage down here!"
"Check the interior, check it now! Is the piglet inside or not!?"
A terrible premonition crawled up my spine. Now that the kidnapper knew our method, abandoning the carriage could mean only one thing.
A moment later, what the soldier held up was nothing but a severed chain, cut clean through as if by a blade.
"This is all there is, sir."
"..."
The worst possible outcome. The bastard had shrugged off even the Olfactory Officer's pursuit and made the audacious call to ditch the carriage entirely.
He dumped everything and ran with nothing but the saint herself.
A move bordering on a gamble. And he'd pulled it off.
Clutching at the last straw, I turned to the Olfactory Officer. "Olfactory Officer — can you follow the scent any further? We cannot lose him now!"
He drew several deep, heavy breaths, then bared his teeth and shook his head. "...Other blood-scents have spread in every direction. I'm sorry."
Keen as his nose was, that cut both ways — drowned in too many scents at once, it went blind. And this street was drenched in pig's blood.
Seventeen pigs' worth of it.
"Damn it..."
I forced myself back into focus as fast as I could. This is no time to despair! There was still a way.
"From this moment, we split up and begin the search on foot! If he fled on foot, he can't have gone far!"
When a fleeing criminal shakes off the pursuit team, what does he do next? He heads straight for the encirclement — to break through it.
"Divide the troops in half! Half of you will cover the area around here! The other half searches elsewhere with me!"
What we had to do now was beat the kidnapper to the perimeter of the cordon and wait for him there — catch him the moment he ran into it. It was the only option left.
"Move out, Gustatory Officer! Olfactory Officer, you're with us too!"
"Wh-where are we going?"
"A shapeshifter won't be hiding in some secluded spot."
To hide a tree, you hide it in a forest. Where would a shapeshifter conceal herself? Among people, of course. From now on, she would avoid anywhere deserted — without the carriage to draw attention, she had no reason not to.
Which meant the place she'd hide would be wherever the crowd was thickest. And it would have to be somewhere she could leave the Count's domain immediately.
There was exactly one place nearby that satisfied every condition.
"To the Lacour Bridge!"
It was the only place.
-Dudududududu.
Twenty-five horses thundered after the Gustatory Officer at the head of the column.
"Faster! Just a little faster!"
At my urging, the Gustatory Officer whipped his reins again. "Hyah!"
Time was running out. The suspect was a shapeshifter. If we pushed into any district that hadn't yet been briefed on the disguise magic, breaking through the encirclement would only be a matter of time for her. And the Lacour Bridge was always jammed with crowds — the odds of her melting into that sea of people were extremely high.
"Faster!"
The scenery whipped past in a blur, and my eyes drifted briefly across to the road on the far side. That was when something familiar flashed by in the distance.
"Wait — Gustatory Officer! Halt!"
"H-halt!"
"Turn the horses around! Back, quickly!"
On the opposite road leading away from the Lacour Bridge, someone in strikingly familiar clothes was walking along. Clothing familiar enough to stand out even in a crowd. I narrowed my eyes and peered hard at the figure — then shouted in shock.
"That's... that's an Immigration Officer's uniform!"
The exact same uniform the Gustatory Officer and I were wearing right now. Whoever wore it was striding along at a brisk pace, a large bag in one hand.
The Gustatory Officer, seeing the same thing I did, muttered in disbelief. "B-but there can't be any other Officers in the Count's domain right now besides us Central Officers..."
It wasn't the tall Hearing Officer, nor the Touch Officer. Judging by the gait, it leaned more toward a man than a woman. It wasn't the Olfactory Officer either — he was covered head to toe in gray fur. And it wasn't the Gustatory Officer; the figure was taller than her.
Besides, the Gustatory Officer was right in front of me.
Something was wrong. No one I knew fit.
"Who on earth is it?"
Then, as if sensing my gaze, the unknown immigration officer turned his head toward us.
Our eyes met.
".....!!!"
Central Officer. Nathan Kell.
He stared at me from across the road. At me — with my violet eyes. Still clutching the bag full of pigs.
"...Found you."
"...Busted."
And the two of us — I and I — broke into a run at the same instant.