Mark kept staring at the troll’s corpse for a few more seconds.

’This whole thing gives me a very bad feeling,’ he thought, getting to his feet.

"Yuki," Mark said through the mental link. "Go ahead and investigate where this troll came from, I want to know what’s up ahead before we keep moving."

"Understood, Master."

Then Mark turned toward Ely and Aria.

"What do you two think?" Mark asked, nodding toward the corpse. "What do you think happened to it?"

"Honestly, Master, I have no idea," Ely said, looking at the troll lying on the ground. "I’ve never seen a wound like that before."

Aria for her part simply shrugged.

"Does it even matter?" she said in a carefree tone. "After all it’s just a troll, war trolls are nothing but stupid creatures that spend all their time fighting each other for fun. One of their own probably ripped its arm off and it just couldn’t regenerate it."

Mark looked at her for a second and then looked at the corpse again.

’...Maybe Aria is right,’ he thought, running a hand over the back of his neck. ’Maybe I’m overthinking this.’

A wounded troll fleeing its settlement wasn’t exactly an unprecedented event.

’It was probably just an internal fight that got out of hand.’

Mark was about to give the order to keep walking when Yuki’s voice sounded inside his head.

"Master, I’ve found the troll camp, but..."

"But?"

She paused for a couple of seconds, which coming from Yuki was an eternity.

"It would be better if you came to see it yourself."

"Is it that bad?" Mark asked, frowning.

"...Yes."

"Understood, we’re on our way."

When he finished speaking with Yuki, he turned to look at the others.

"Yuki found the camp," Mark said out loud. "Let’s go."

Everyone nodded quickly and the group set off.

They moved along the main road at a brisk pace, passing between the giant roots and enormous trunks rising on both sides.

Zilu stayed close to Mark, with her ears completely upright and her eyes moving nervously from side to side, clearly uncomfortable with the situation.

They didn’t have to walk far, barely twenty minutes later the road opened into a small clearing between the trees.

And what they saw made everyone stop dead.

"What the hell happened here..." Mark said quietly.

The war troll camp was completely destroyed to the point that absolutely nothing remained standing.

The wooden and bone structures the trolls used as dwellings had been reduced to charred rubble.

The logs that had been used as fences and walls were split in half or simply torn from the ground.

And the terrain itself was covered in burn marks, deep cracks, and craters of various sizes.

But the destruction wasn’t what surprised them.

It was the corpses.

Some were lying face-down on the burned earth, others were propped against the remains of structures, and every single one of them, without exception, was horribly mutilated.

Arms cut into pieces, legs severed, torsos split open down the middle, bodies tied with their own intestines, and some completely skinned.

That was without mentioning the enormous amount of blood everywhere.

On the ground, on the rubble, on the trunks of the nearby trees, on the rocks.

Everything was covered in dark blood that had dried into thick crusts over every surface.

And in the center of the camp, arranged in a perfectly straight row on the ground, were the heads.

Twelve troll heads lined up side by side.

"Okay..." Aria said in a voice that had completely lost its earlier carefree tone. "This definitely doesn’t look like a simple troll fight."

"...Even I find this excessive," Rose said from behind with a serious expression that was unusual for her. "And in very poor taste."

Mark looked at Zilu.

She had stayed a few steps back, her face noticeably pale and her eyes fixed on the scene in front of her. Her ears were completely flat against her head and her hands trembled slightly at her sides.

And she looked like she was about to throw up at any moment.

Ely, who was at Mark’s side, stared fixedly at Yuki who was standing at the edge of the camp.

"Yuki," Ely said, looking at her. "Did you do all of this?"

Yuki quickly shook her head.

"It was already like this when I arrived."

Mark looked at the camp again and then began walking into it.

"Master, where are you going?" Ely asked, stepping to follow him.

"To get a closer look," Mark replied without stopping.

Mark walked among the rubble and the bodies, stepping around the dried blood puddles and the remains of structures blocking the way.

And as he moved through, he confirmed what he had already suspected.

The wounds on the corpses were identical to those on the troll they had encountered earlier.

’Just as I feared,’ Mark thought, looking at a body that had been opened from the back. ’Whatever did this was the same thing that cut off the arm of the one that escaped.’

Mark kept walking until he reached the center of the camp, where the twelve heads were lined up in a row.

Looking at them closely he realized that each one was worse than the last.

The first still had a relatively intact face, with an expression of terror frozen on its features. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

The second had no eyes.

The third had no jaw, it had been cleanly torn away, leaving only the upper portion of the skull with the tongue hanging out.

The fourth had no tongue.

The fifth had the skin of its face completely stripped off, leaving the muscles and bones beneath exposed.

And so on.

’Someone or something massacred all the trolls in the camp, and then entertained themselves mutilating them one by one,’ Mark thought as he looked for the least damaged head.

When he finally found it at the end of the row, he crouched in front of it while extending his hand and concentrating his energy.

"Wake Up."

The energy flowed from his hand toward the troll’s head, wrapping it in a faint purple glow that pulsed once before being absorbed into the grey flesh.

For a few seconds nothing happened, but then the troll’s eyes flew wide open, blood began pouring from them, and an instant later it let out a bloodcurdling scream.

"AAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!"