< < Optional Stage Objective > >
< Solve the Murder Mystery >
< < Quest Unlocked > >
< Murder and Mystery >
< Solve the murder of Cassius Bello >
After taking out six third-generation bloodfiends, ten lesser fiends, and nine ghouls, Adam and Kat stumbled upon a cri scene in the Pleasure district near the bridge to the Wine district while following the direction of his compass. It was a nice-looking two-storey house that had belonged to soone who’d been wealthy, but not wealthy enough to live amongst the rich people on the other side of the bridge.
Adam hadn’t heard of the quest before, but it seed to be sothing akin to the Wine District Ball which only happened on a specific day in the stage.
I’ve gotta keep that in mind for future stages, especially if I end up getting stuck on missing quests for the achievent. It’s possible that there are certain secrets tied to limited ti events too, such as whatever we’re bound to get out of giving the wooden mask to Lady Cassandra during the ball.
Three Moonport guards were blocking off the house, but after talking to a very distraught woman outside, Adam and Kat were allowed to enter. The woman had been the victim’s lover, but it was quite clear, the mont they saw the corpse inside the study on the second floor, that Cassius Bello had been a bloodfiend.
“Is this truly worth solving?” Kat wondered.
“For the points, it is,” Adam replied as he leaned down to inspect the dead man slumped over a letter he’d been in the middle of writing.
The killing wound was a single round hole directly through his nape, slipping into the disc that was sandwiched between the C3 and C4 vertebrae, and severing the spinal cord. The weapon had gone all the way through and made a small hole in his throat, allowing Adam to look all the way through after pulling the dead blood out.
Adam unequipped the Shapeshifter’s Claw and touched the index of his crimson glass hand to the wound. A sharp tug on his mind pulled him through the fragnted last monts of Cassius Bello’s life. He’d been in a hurry to write sothing down before he was suddenly killed.
“Takes a lot of force and precision to kill soone like this,” Adam muttered.
“Does the blood show you anything?”
“Not much,” he replied.
He tried to delve into the final monts of the victim once more, focusing on even older mories. If they had co here later, when the body would’ve been more than a day old, it likely wouldn’t have worked, but Adam was able to capture a few fleeting monts of Cassius Bello witnessing sothing before coming to his house where he was murdered.
What exactly it was he’d seen was impossible for Adam to tell, but it was the face that he saw in the vision which mattered.
A tall spindly man with caral-brown skin, shock-white hair, white scars extending from the corners of his mouth to below his ears, and large eyes that shone with an unnatural golden light and had tiny pupils.
Adam gasped as he returned to his senses.
It feels dangerous to dip too deep into mories like this.
It was clearly so leftover of the Mandate’s original power, before the Flayed Lady had warped it to her magic, and he was quite aware of how much damage he might do to his own mind if he wasn’t careful.
“He was killed by the Golden Nail,” Adam said. “It’s strange though. the Golden Nail doesn’t usually kill people like this.”
“The guards said he prefers to kill won, right? That he likes to degrade them.”
Adam nodded. “He’s an ‘artist’. This murder falls outside his pattern.”
“So how can you tell it’s him?” Kat asked.
“I saw him when I gazed into Cassius’ blood. He has a very distinct appearance.”
Adam suddenly recalled sothing that Elia had told him way back when they’d been stuck in Alepheria’s hidden lab, before they’d both died. It wasn’t sothing she’d experienced herself, but yet another ‘lesson’ from Arturo. According to him, the Golden Nail was doing sothing in Moonport, and his murders, although randomly targeted, served so greater purpose. If his pattern appeared in the stage, it was important he was stopped before the dawn of the fifth day.
Elia seed to interpret it as if the serial killer was summoning sothing, but apparently Arturo hadn’t said what exactly would happen, which made Adam think he’d heard it from soone else and been too scared to try it himself, only passing on the warning so that his chosen successor didn’t suffer an avoidable death.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t curious, but that sort of experintation is for such a ti as when I’ve got nothing to lose.
After all, Adam predicted he would have to loop a lot before he found his destined universe with all of his friends. This loop, although a total shitshow, was far from dood. And he owed it to Beck to give it his best and not throw his own life away, not to ntion, the experience he gained here would help him in the future. It was one thing to have Elia’s descriptions and explanations to go by, and another to actually put them into practice.
“Is it not strange that a bloodfiend would be caught unawares by an attack like this?” Kat wondered. “They have a strong sense of sll, do they not?”
“They don’t seem to rely on it that much, considering how easily I’ve been able to sneak up on them,” Adam said. “But yes, it is quite odd. I don’t fully understand why he ca here to write sothing down, when he might have had the power to take on the Golden Nail himself. He’s not supposed to be particularly strong, and this guy was a second-generation. Although I suppose the Golden Nail may have so kind of holy magic to make him a dangerous matchup for the fiends.”
Kat looked down at the desk and whatever Cassius had been trying to write.
“It looks like a drawing,” she remarked, pulling the bloodfiend’s head back to be able to see it clearly.
Adam looked at the paper. The ink on it was red and it ford a strange symbol, a four-pointed star with the bottom two points fused together and a ring centred on the symbol, its line piercing each of the star’s legs through the middle.
He couldn’t tell why, but the symbol elicited so strange sense of dread in him.
Although he was hesitant to use the power much, Adam touched Cassius’ blood one last ti, trying to ho in on how he’d felt in his final monts.
What he’d originally mistaken for fear was in fact exhilaration. Cassius hadn’t been in a hurry to write sothing down because he was scared for his life, but rather because he’d been worried about forgetting what he’d seen.
Stolen story; please report.
He had observed the Golden Nail as he killed a victim, likely attracted by the sll of spilled blood or sothing, and he’d observed the symbol during the process, perhaps because the murderer was performing a ritual. Cassius had instinctively known it held power within it and he’d wanted to collect it for study or maybe to show to the Patriarch or soone else.
Adam took the paper and lifted it up in the air to study it closer.
“It’s unfinished,” he said.
“How can you tell?” Kat asked.
“I don’t know,” Adam replied. “It just feels that way.”
He showed it to her again.
“What do you feel when you see this?”
“Are you doing a Rorschach test on ?” she replied with a small smile. “I feel nothing, but it reminds
of a mountain with a sun rising behind it.”
Maybe I’ve seen the symbol before, and that’s why I have such a strange reaction to it?
It could have been inside Alepheria’s laboratory.
But, I think the way it was supposed to look was like…
Adam scratched a line from the top left corner to the bottom right, removing so of the blood, then from the top right and down to where it touched the first line. The last line was the most difficult to get right, as it went up from the bottom left corner to so invisible point.
The mont he finished the last line, the piece of paper started to crumble itself, folding in Adam’s hand until he was forced to drop it to the floor.
It kept folding and folding, becoming increasingly smaller with every repetition.
Even though paper could only be folded so many tis before it was physically impossible to fold it anymore, the paper did not seem to care, and it just continued until it vanished, its matter folded onto itself to the point that it was smaller than what the human eye could see.
“What was that?” Kat asked. “Did you do that on purpose?”
Adam look down at where the paper had been.
“Paper is not strong enough for a sigil,” he muttered.
“What do you an?”
“You need a specific material to scribe such symbols of power onto,” he said, not quite sure how he really knew, but it sounded right. “Tungsten would work. And so might human flesh.”
“I am not following,” Kat admitted.
“It’s okay,” Adam said. “I think I know what the Golden Nail is doing though.”
“And what’s that?”
“He’s recreating the symbol on his victims, using his weapon as his pen and their flesh as his paper. Given that it doesn’t seem like he’s only striking in one area, based on how the guards spread their bounty posters everywhere, I think he may be making the sa pattern on top of the city.”
“The pattern on the paper?” Kat asked.
“Yeah. I don’t know what it does, but if he can finish his work, then the city of Moonport will likely suffer so terrible fate.”
“If you know the pattern and where he has already struck, it would be possible to predict where he would show up next,” Kat said. “But I am not sure I understand your logic.”
Adam thought about it for a while, but it was hard for him to ntally visualise, so he called upon his blood magic to draw out his thoughts. First he made a rough outline of Moonport and its district, and then he made a simple reconstruction of the sigil out of bone, so that it was possible to move it around. He made it just big enough that it would be possible to fit within his drawing of Moonport.
“This is just guesswork and speculation,” Adam started, “and I may be completely off base, but if he is doing a city-wide sigil, it could look like this.”
He arranged the symbol so that the flat part where the two bottom legs of the four-pointed star ca together were perpendicular to the gate out of Moonport. The arrangent ant that there would be at least one point, either from the internal lines or the corners of the star, which fell within one of the districts, with the one important exception of Garrison, which was totally avoided.
“We are close to where the two inner lines intersect,” Kat remarked, since that point fell within the north-western corner of the Pleasure district.
Adam nodded. “Let’s check it out. I’m guessing it can’t have been too far since Cassius ran here rather than the Blue Pavilion or so other area that would’ve had a lot of fellow bloodfiends.”
Before they left the cri scene, they looked around so more. Unsurprisingly, they found a few bottles of ‘wine’ hidden inside Cassius Bello’s study, but other than that, it was a completely normal house.
“He might not have been one of the dangerous bloodfiends,” Kat said, contradicting her initial statent about the guy. “He may have been similar to Cienna.”
“His girlfriend is human, so he was probably using the wine to avoid feasting on her,” Adam considered. “Though that wouldn’t make him any less dangerous. Not to ntion, this blood wine isn’t exactly ethically sourced.”
When they left the house, the guards waiting outside seed a bit annoyed, but then Adam shared their findings.
“The Golden Nail?” asked one of the n, while the woman was clearly in shock at the revelation.
“It is consistent with the wounds the lieutenant told us about,” said one of the others.
< < Quest Updated > >
< Murder and Mystery >
< Track down Cassius Bello’s murderer >
“I wonder how we are ant to prove he was the killer,” Kat remarked as they headed towards the corner of the Pleasure district.
“That’s a good question,” Adam replied. “I doubt he’ll be up for coming with us to confess to the guards.”
“Perhaps retrieving his weapon would be sufficient proof?”
Adam nodded. “That might work. It’s supposed to drop when we kill him.”
“Would one of us have to switch to using it for the sake of the quest?” Kat asked.
“That I don’t know,” Adam admitted. “It would seem a bit odd if that were the case.”
It took them a bit longer than expected to reach the area that Adam had guessed might hold so significance to the Golden Nail, and when they arrived, it was just a collection of rundown brothels with too much foot traffic to allow for any ritualistic sacrifice to take place.
“I think my initial assumption must be flawed. Perhaps he is not trying to make a sigil that spans the city, or maybe my idea of how it would look is wrong,” Adam said. “But it was the only thing I could think of.”
“It was quite a logical leap to make,” Kat replied. “Sothing I have been wondering though, is whether the symbol that Cassius wrote down is exactly as he saw it. How did you know that you had to scratch those lines into it?”
“It’s hard to explain,” Adam started to say, before stopping himself. “Wait, maybe you’re right. Maybe the Golden Nail doesn’t know how to finish the sigil, so he is using won as his test paper to try and find the way to make it.”
“If it cannot be written down on paper, it would be difficult to copy,” Kat agreed. “But it makes our search significantly harder.”
“Not necessarily,” Adam said. “I still think there would be a benefit to searching within the area of Cassius Bello’s house, since we might find a trail.”
He looked to the sky where the sun was close to setting.
“I say we give it until nightfall before we head for the Wine District Ball,” Adam said. “We should talk to the girlfriend again to try and figure out what areas Cassius frequented, so that we can make so educated guesses about where he might have seen the Golden Nail at work.”
They returned to the cri scene and talked to the woman for a little bit, learning that the dead bloodfiend had preferred to stay at ho during the day, though he would occasionally go to the bridge leading to the Wine district to look at the boats in the water.
Since Adam doubted that the bloodfiend’s sense of sll would have been strong enough to detect traces of blood from inside his house, they went to the bridge to look around. Like the bridge from Artisan to Wine, shops and boutiques were nestled along the rising curve of the structure.
There weren’t any lodies that stood out to Adam, but after looking out over the water of the canal in the direction of the Market district, he noticed very faint tones of agony and despair. And then he saw it, nestled in the back behind a massage parlour and brothel was a secluded courtyard. It was shaded from above by balconies, but when seen from the bridge, it wasn’t really that hidden. Any curious eye would have noticed it.
Adam and Kat left the bridge and ran atop the roofs until they reached the courtyard, which they accessed by going down the back of one of the buildings. There was a small dock that they landed on before entering, and what they found within was like a garden, though the area wouldn’t get a lot of sun during the day due to the balconies above.
Inside, where a short tree grew from a patch of soil and grass, sat a woman in a yellow sumr dress stained by her blood. Her head was bent back, with a golden nail ramd through her throat and neck, securing her to the trunk of the tree. Her hands were placed between her spread legs, one over the other in an almost dainty pose of pushing down her skirt, with a nail holding the hands together. Two more nails through her thighs pinned her to the ground.
Kat frowned at the sight of the woman. The front of her body had been revealed and an ugly symbol was carved above her exposed breasts.
Adam knelt by her side, hearing a small rasp and gurgle coming from her.
She was beyond saving, but it would still take a while for her to die from her wounds, since the skin had sealed around the nails, as though her body had healed the gaps they’d made in an effort to keep her blood from spilling out.
It was a vile fate to condemn anyone to.
Adam placed his hand on the side of her head gently and started slowly pouring his mana into her blood.
Then he crystallised it and killed her in an instant, putting her out of her misery.
“Look at her fingernails,” Kat said. “She must have scratched him.”
Adam looked down at the woman’s nailed-together hands. Her fingers were bruised and dotted with blood, with a fair bit stuck under her fingernails.
It’s not her blood.
He carefully extracted the material, creating a small glob of crimson from it.
It had a very unique feeling to it when he touched it with his Mandate of Blood, and the emotions that passed through the fragnted mories he saw were frustration, impatience, and an all-consuming desire.
“I know what his lody sounds like,” Adam told Kat. “We’ll be able to find and kill him tonight.”
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