Chapter 56: Camping
Coming out from between the trees and returning to the road, Aziz slightly widened his eyes in surprise at what he was seeing.
The rest of the group of bandits lay dead on the ground, without exception.
But what truly surprised him wasn’t the fact that they were dead — that was already expected, considering the chaos they had initiated. What left him momentarily speechless was the grotesque state the bodies were in. It went beyond the limits of a simple death in combat. It was as if each man there had been deconstructed from the inside out, dismantled by invisible and merciless hands.
Arms and legs were completely twisted, at such absurd angles that they seemed to belong to discarded rag dolls or sculptures made by a disturbed artist whose vision of art was based on pain and mutilation. The joints were dislocated in anatomically impossible ways, and the bones — some snapped in half, others pierced through — tore through the skin with white, jagged tips, resembling thorns of a wild creature.
Abdomens, torn open like ripped sacks, exposed a moist, pulsating tangle of partially crushed viscera, some still twitching from involuntary spasms. Stomachs, intestines, and livers were spread like grotesque crimson ornaments across the filthy, blood-soaked earth. In many, the chest had been crushed as if something enormous had collapsed onto them. Skulls, brutally shattered, exposed brain matter now reduced to a whitish paste mixed with blood, dust, and dry leaves.
The smell was a story in itself — a nauseating cocktail of metallic blood, decomposing flesh, fresh feces, and warm urine. An acidic, penetrating odor that seemed to seep through the nostrils and cling to the throat. Flies were already turning the scene into a feast: they buzzed in slow circles, landing on the half-open eyes of the dead, crawling into gaping mouths, feasting on exposed wounds as if that place were a banquet reserved for worms.
Aziz stared at the scene in silence, his body steady, but his gaze carried something bordering on fascination. He felt, strangely, a bit relieved. Relieved and... satisfied. He wasn’t alone in his brutality. There were other hands here — hands perhaps as raw and ruthless as his. That validated something within him. Something he didn’t want to name, but that pulsed strongly in his chest.
Maybe all of them had crossed some kind of line that day. A line that, once crossed, offered no return. And that was fine.
"Craa! Craa!"
The ominous sound cut through the silence like a thin blade. The trio looked up at the cloudy sky, where a dozen dark birds circled, tracing slow, rhythmic orbits, descending like a hungry whirlwind over the scattered bodies.
Crows.
Hungry, sharp-eyed, and noisy crows, hovering above the massacre. Their black feathers absorbed the pale light of the cloudy sky as if they were moving fragments of the night itself. Small, gleaming eyes observed the ground with surgical precision, choosing where to land first. This would be a bountiful meal — and they knew it. Nothing here required haste.