Chapter Thirty-Five
REGAINING CONSCIOUSNESS
' . . . He's dead?'
Veritas was left in shock at the words that Incidamus spat out. Not that long ago, he had an interaction with Dionysus, who was still clearly alive.
'Wait, no. Even then, there was something going on.'
Veritas nearly overlooked this point, but then he remembered that the whole time he was around Dionysus, he seemed to be having a headache of sorts. At first, he played it off as just a bad day, or maybe too many drinks, but now that he was dead, Veritas was beginning to doubt his previous thoughts.
"Something going on? Well, my job's done, so I'mma head out."
KSHH
Incidamus threw Dionysus' corpse behind the counter and right into the shelves full of bottles, resulting in an immediate clash, and then, plenty of bottles falling. Along with the bottles, Dionysus' corpse also dropped onto the ground with a loud thud.
' . . . No, this can't be the end of it. Take his body and throw it into the sewers.'
Veritas stopped Incidamus just as he was about to walk out through the front door.
"Haah . . ."
Incidamus let out a slight sigh before hopping over the counter and throwing Dionysus' body over his shoulder. This time, he was able to walk out the front door without Veritas stopping him.
'Wait, Veritas. Aren't I gonna get some attention if I carry a body like this?'
'Just do what you always do, don't worry about it.'
Incidamus was known by his friends and Veritas as the type of person who didn't care about anyone or anything. If you put a commoner next to a king, he'd easily identify the differences, but the treatment of either would be the same.
Put simply, he lived how he desired.
'Eh, you're right.'
Out of Dionysus' mouth, blood was beginning to drip out. This was something that Incidamus had realized, and since he realized it, Veritas also undoubtedly noticed it.
'You know, how do you think he died? He has no injuries on the outside, and I'm finding it hard to believe that he got an injury on the inside, considerin' he doesn't look like the type of person to eat glass.'
Veritas was still wondering why Dionysus died, and he was asking the same questions as Incidamus. He had little to go off of, besides the fact that he seemed to be having a headache previously.
"Isn't that guy bleeding . . .?"
"Stay away from him."
"Watch out honey, don't go close."
As expected, Incidamus was garnering attention at a very rapid pace. Since he was carrying a body, he expected to get a lot of looks, so he was able to deal with it, just like always.
'Sewer grate right in front of you, on the ground.'
Just like Veritas said, there was a grate right there. Incidamus quickly moved the lid and dumped the body into the sewer with no worries as to how he treated it. After that, he got off the main road and slipped into one of the alleyways.
'Alright, now it's my turn.'
Veritas stood up from his chair and walked up to the wooden double doors that led into the humongous chamber that he was in and opened one of them. In front of him, a long, long marble hallway with many paintings hanging on the side poured into his view.
These weren't what he was here for, so he walked down the hallway until he reached the end of it, which was just a spiral staircase that you could either go up or down with. He decided to head up them, all the way to the top. He passed around four floors before making it to the final one, and once he did, a singular wooden door was there.
EUUU
The door was old, creaky, and somewhat broken, but Veritas couldn't bother himself to fix it. Once he stepped onto, or into, what was on the other side of the door, it became really dark. Before, torches lighted up the place he was in, but there were absolutely none here, and he was underground.
The place reeked of feces and urination, but Veritas was used to it. Along with that, there were concrete paths along the walls, so it wasn't as if he had to step into the water running in between the paths.
Veritas was in the sewers, the same ones that Dionysus' corpse was in.
'It always stinks up here, but I had to put it down there so that nobody would find me.'
He made his way through the horrendous underground that he was in using a lantern that he had brought along, all the way to where the corpse had been dropped. Once he arrived there, he saw Incidamus' results.
A corpse lied at the bottom of a ladder that would lead to the world above, and a pile of blood had formed below the corpse. The corpse itself was drenched in the blood, especially the torso of it.
'Wait.'
Veritas' ability allowed him to connect with any people that he would choose, allowing him to see and hear through them, along with gaining access to their thoughts. However, the other senses besides sight and hearing were inaccessible, meaning that he couldn't sense any of them.
Now that he was actually here, right in front of the corpse, he smelled something from it that he couldn't before.
'Is this really blood?'
He dipped his finger into the blood, although there wasn't enough blood to actually dip it into. Once it was covered in it, he brought it up to his nose and sniffed it.
'Well, Incidamus did throw his body up against all those bottles, so they might have just dropped some liquor onto him.'
Veritas identified that it wasn't blood that Dionysus' corpse was drenched in, but instead a lot, and a lot, of liquor. He found it slightly suspicious that the liquid was exactly the same tinge of red as blood and seemed to be just as thick as the stuff, but there definitely were some normal explanations for all of this.
'Well, surely there's an explanation.'
Just like Incidamus, he put the body on one of his shoulders. Veritas, in his current state, was a thin man who seemed to be lacking in the physical department, but thanks to abilities granting their users more physical strength, he was easily able to carry the corpse.
Nobody would be able to truly make out Veritas' features in the darkness of the sewer that was only slightly removed by the lantern that he held, but he had a black trench coat that reached all the way to his knees, green eyes that complimented his brown, shaggy hair, and thick black boots that could easily manage to hike a mountain. To finish it all off, he had a grey shirt beneath the trench coat, and some brown pants on.
'No, there's something wrong here.'
Veritas wanted to conclude his deductions already, but he couldn't bring himself to believe that the liquor got into his mouth, and with an amount so large that it was still pouring out of him.
'It's definitely wine, but why is he bleeding wine?'
Upon closer inspection, it was coming out of his eye sockets and ears as well. Veritas was dumbfounded as to just how this was possible, and could only come to one possible conclusion.
'I don't know how, but in the small margin of time between me leaving the bar and Incidamus arriving, someone managed to kill him using a drink related ability.'
Veritas, while not interacting much with the world himself, knew a lot about it thanks to his five information gatherers. For that reason, he knew of many different abilities, some very broad and general, and others extremely specific.
While it was dubious to believe that someone with such a specific ability, such as controlling wine, existed, and happened to kill Dionysus, a bartender, in a bar, Veritas was struggling to find any other explanations.
'It's so unlikely that I'd rather believe a whole lot of other things over it, but it's also the only reasonable choice.'
Spending the time wrestling with his thoughts, Veritas finally arrived at the singular wooden door that he had exited from to find the corpse in the first place. He pulled it open and walked through it, Dionysus still thrown over his shoulder, still bleeding wine.
He made his way through his dungeon and dumped Dionysus' body into one of the rooms that are connected to the hallway that led to his main chamber, and after he did so, locked the door behind him and walked back to his main chamber.
"Alright, what next?"