Chapter 198

Merlin walked to the end of the corridor they were all standing in, towards the window overlooking the street they entered the building from. Peering into the street he saw a few undead wandering around, but nothing too worrisome.

"We may be in the clear, there isn't many down there," Merlin said, "Let's block off the front door with something sturdier than that chair, just in case."

"I'm on it!" Both Typhoeus and Alvira responded, quickly dashing down the stairs.

The rest of the party began gathering around the door at that point and they could all hear the faint scraping sound of furniture being slid across a wooden floor.

Merlin continued to peer into the street, and once he saw the zombies wander further away from the house, he gave Tiny a thumbs up, indicating that it was safe for him to start.

Tiny pulled his hammer back as everyone made space in the hallway, and with a heavy swing, accompanied by a deep grunt, Tiny's war hammer struck the doorknob, letting out a loud bang.

The area around the doorknob was reduced to splinters and the doorknob itself, alongside the locking mechanism that was attached to it, had been sent flying into the next room.

Everyone within the building went silent the moment the sound rang out, all of them hoping that nothing had been alerted by the noise. Nobody else even dared to move, although Merlin decided to peek at the city street once more.

On the street, he noticed a group of three zombies wandering toward the house, but it seemed as though after only a few moments they gave up and began wandering past it.

"I think we're safe for now," Merlin whispered to the group as he walked slowly over to them. "Let's see what we've found."

Tiny pushed what remained of the door, only to find that it was still being blocked. After pushing the door with some more force, he heard the familiar sound of furniture scraping across the floor. But not long after, the door was open and the group could now make their way into the last room.

The first thing Merlin noticed as he entered the room was the strong scent of herbs, the room had an overwhelming medicinal smell.

"It smells like a hospital in here," Snowbunny commented. She took a few more steps into the room and then suddenly froze.

In front of Snowbunny were two individuals, one laying in a large bed, and the other sitting on a rocking chair beside them. What had caused Snowbunny to freeze, however, was the state that their bodies were in.

It was clear to see that the two individuals were corpses. Fortunately, they didn't show any signs of becoming undead. They had both somehow retained their mortality in the middle of the Necropolis.

Merlin slowly approached the corpses and began inspecting the one on the bed first, as it was the more gruesome sight.

The one laying in the bed was a middle-aged woman with a soft, pain-free expression on her face. Most of her body was covered by what were originally white bedsheets, now stained with a large dark reddish-brown patch of blood where the woman's stomach would be.

Within the centre of this blood stain, thrust into the sheets and by extension, the woman's abdomen, was an ornate dagger. The dagger stood vertically as if it were Excalibur lodged into a stone, practically inviting someone to pull it out, and yet Merlin didn't have any intention of reaching for it.

Merlin heard a crunch under his foot when he stepped closer to inspect the woman's face, and as he looked down at the ground he noticed the shattered remains of a teacup. Bending down, he picked up the largest piece of the teacup, and as the sunlight from the nearby window shined upon the ceramic, Merlin noticed a somewhat sparkly residue coating the inside of the teacup.

This particular sheen was somewhat familiar to him, as he had seen it several times already, even in this lifetime.

'Holy water?' Merlin thought to himself, 'So they consumed holy water to protect their bodies from the necrotic energy?'

He looked towards the bedside table, which had a teapot resting on a tray, alongside a spare teacup. Peering into the teapot, he saw several wilted herbs, from those he could identify he quickly deduced what sort of concoction they had made.

'Mostly pain relief and sleep inducement.' Merlin thought, 'No wonder the woman looks like she died so peacefully.'

Merlin turned to the middle-aged man sitting on the rocking chair. The man's cause of death was also rather apparent, his throat was slit open, meaning he likely either choked on his own blood or died of blood loss.

The man's expression was vastly different to the peaceful expression of the woman. Even after death, Merlin could still detect the suffering the man must have felt, but the strongest emotion he could feel was regret.

The murder weapon was also easy to find, as the blood-coated blade was still being held in the man's hand. Merlin glanced at the man's other hand and quickly noticed a blood-stained book that was leaning against the chair's armrest.

"What's the story here?" Typhoeus asked as he walked further into the room with the rest of the group.

Merlin turned to look at his friends, he could tell that a couple of the members were rather uncomfortable with this scene, especially Nora.

"I don't know for sure, but I could make an educated guess..." Merlin said before reaching for the blood-stained book, he quickly flipped it open to a random page and quickly noticed that it was a personal diary. "But I'd imagine this diary would give us better answers."

Alvira walked toward the woman laying on the bed, it was very obvious that her eyes were locked on the ornate dagger sticking out of the woman's stomach.

"Don't touch it," Merlin warned her.

"Why not?" Alvira asked, likely thinking that he wanted to take it for himself.

"See the religious symbolism on the blade's design?" Merlin said, pointing towards the dagger. "That's a very strange thing to use as a murder weapon, especially when he had a perfectly viable knife to use already."

"There might also be a reason as to why he left this blade stuck in the woman, let's read the diary to figure out if there was before we start messing with anything," Merlin said while waving the diary around.