A Hand from Beyond the Sea (7)
With a single corpse laid out before him—brought along so he could explain the situation to the other sailors who still had no idea what was happening—Rotin let out a low whistle of admiration.
“Whether they’re real cannibals or not, this bastard’s gone completely murder-mad.”
After firing a shot into the air to signal the crew to fall back to the beach, Rotin was heading that way when he stumbled across it by pure chance.
It was a field of corpses—no other phrase fit. A truly appalling scene.
Some had been gutted so deeply their entrails spilled free. Others had been stabbed and twisted with a knife until a gaping hole opened in their throats. Still others had been struck so mercilessly with something heavy and bladed that their skulls weren’t merely split—they had caved in completely.
The sailors were certain it was the work of crazed cannibals. Rotin was not.
This isn’t how you treat prey.
Prey is killed cleanly. And that has nothing to do with respect for life.
The essence of killing game with care and precision is brutally simple: it keeps the meat and hide as intact as possible, leaving more usable parts and more edible flesh.
What began as ancestral wisdom for efficiency might, over time, have been dressed up as reverence for life or some solemn hunting rite—but at its root it is still efficiency.
A beast will go for the already-dead carcass before the living meat that costs stamina to bring down. A hunter kills cleanly because it pays better.
If they were cannibals, they’d treat humans as game.
In that case they would have killed as cleanly as possible to preserve edible parts, then carried the bodies home.
But this was different.
The corpses had been ruined far beyond what was needed simply to kill a man, and every last one had been left strewn about at random.
This is meant to inspire terror.
Attacking with excess force so the survivors freeze in horror. Butchering the dead so hideously that even a glance turns the stomach—so that everyone nearby shrinks back.
When the few face the many, the first thing you do is break the many’s morale—stop their feet and hands, fill their heads with fear until they go stupid.
Rotin might have run away young, but until then he had been a noble scion whose competence left everyone around him in awe.
And he was a man.
He had been thoroughly schooled not only in the etiquette and refinements of dueling and hunting, but in strategy and tactics as well.
That was why he could read the intent hidden beneath this brutality—something the other sailors could not.
They killed for the sake of killing. Why go that far? Are they simply madmen who love murder?
If not, the answer was simple.
We must have touched them first.
And if they had been touched—why?
The long voyage has made them rougher and more violent than usual, but these men aren’t fools. They’ve sailed the whole world; they’ve learned the knack of reading people and getting by even in foreign lands where no one speaks their tongue.
They would never have attacked some clueless stranger they met on this island first.
Which means they attacked someone they were allowed to attack.
Someone they were allowed to attack. There was only one. The man Rotin had ordered them to kill.
The butler. Whether these men or others, they found the butler. And they tried to kill him, just as I told them to.
How had they known it was the butler?
Something distinctive enough to give him away.
And the only distinctive thing on this island that they would have recognized was the single detail Rotin himself had given them.
“Hey, Chan.”
When Rotin called the name, the sailor who had fled from Chester and Monia stared blankly at him.
“Yes?”
“Among those ‘cannibals’ you mentioned—was there a woman with black hair and violet eyes?”
“Yes, there wa—”
Chan cut himself off mid-word, as if something had just clicked. He shut his mouth.
Black hair. Violet eyes. The moment those features were spoken, the sailors nearby caught on as well.
“Captain… you don’t mean—”
The one who had created that massacre—surely not?
“No, that’s impossible! A noble young lady and her butler? They’re both nobles, for heaven’s sake! How could they do that to people?”
“You never know. Living on an island might have driven them out of their minds.”
“How many did they get, anyway?”
“……”
They had thought only of cannibals.
Now an utterly unexpected truth had surfaced, and the sailors were thrown into confusion.
“It seems my fiancée has changed a great deal from the woman I knew. Still—knowing she’s alive is a relief.”
Rotin smiled.
The hope of meeting the living Monia rose in him, and he smiled with genuine pleasure.
“The plan doesn’t change. We take Monia. We kill the butler. This little display was almost certainly his doing. No matter how much Monia has changed, she isn’t the sort to be the first to suggest killing people.”
Of course, the truth was the opposite: Monia had been the more eager to kill. Chester had hesitated, afraid that if he took lives she would hate him for it.
“Fortunately, it seems we won’t need to climb all the way to the Summit of that high island.”
Nodding to himself at the good fortune, Rotin suddenly thought:
Then who the hell was that light? …Doesn’t matter. As long as Monia is here, that has nothing to do with me.
A short while later, every sailor who had received the signal had gathered.
“……Is this everyone?”
The total came to twenty-one: the team Rotin had led, another team that had arrived late, and Chan—the sole survivor of Chester and Monia’s hands.
Even the sailors who had relaxed a little upon learning the enemy were not cannibals now broke out in a different kind of sweat—cold and unpleasant, nothing like the sweat of tramping through the forest.
“This can’t be right.”
“They’ve lost their minds.”
Seventy men had gone onto the island.
And only twenty-one stood here now.
In the mere handful of hours they had been ashore, Chester and Monia had killed an absurd forty-nine people.
It was the result of Monia’s new ability to kill easily as well—crossbows and bows taken from the sailors, plus the properties of a newly discovered ore.
Naturally, even with Monia working hard, Chester had done most of the killing. The sailors gathered here, and those who arrived later and heard the story, could guess that much without difficulty.
“Damn it. What kind of monster does the captain’s country make into a butler?”
“Does that even make sense? Forget whether they can—how can anyone just slaughter people like this? Do they have no conscience at all?”
“Captain Rotin, is this normal for your butlers?”
“Of course it isn’t.”
Even Rotin was stunned.
Damn it. Is a duke’s eye for butlers really that different?
This was genuinely insane.
No—how did he even find us in this vast forest and kill us like that? Butlers are supposed to have good stamina, but does this one never tire?
The catastrophic losses suddenly inflated Chester’s presence to monstrous proportions.
Sailors live on an ever-changing sea; to protect even a scrap of their own safety they fall into superstition.
In the distant past there had been a superstition that women must never board a ship. Another held that giving a ship a woman’s name would make the sea guide it gently—so every vessel was named for a woman.
Some carried a living sacrifice ready for the legendary kraken. Others obsessively collected charms said to bring luck because of some old anecdote.
That faith in superstition—something close to a religion—had not changed even now, when women could travel by ship and vessels bore every kind of name.
He’s not human.
A demon! He’s got to be a demon! No person could do this!
Damn it! This is where my life ends!
Guns or no guns, you can’t beat a demon!
In their minds Chester had already transformed from an ordinary butler into a demon who lived by chewing men to death.
And naturally the thought arose that mutiny against Rotin might be safer than facing the demon…
No. That’s still out of the question!
There was Rotin—and there was also the “Big Brother” still waiting on the ship.
If they killed Rotin and mutinied, that man would sink the vessel on the spot without a second thought.
He was someone who had no purpose in life beyond serving the Rotin who had once pulled him out of endless despair.
Ask which was more terrifying—the demon or Big Brother—and there was no answer. Both were terrifying.
No—staying on this side is better!
They had Big Brother and Rotin.
Rotin was a noble scion trained specifically in the duel. His combat ability was on an entirely different plane from sailors who only knew brawls and street fights.
Even the cutlasses they carried mostly for show became keen masterpieces in Rotin’s hands.
“You—go fetch him.”
No one needed to ask whom.
One of the sailors sprinted for the ship to call Big Brother.