[WP] A monster hunter came to your village to deal with a threat nobody knew about until his arrival. Shortly afterward, people started disappearing. You suspect that the monster and the hunter are two sides of the same coin.
*****
Seven days.
One week.
That was the distance between Sakura's disappearance and Izumi's in a measure of time. It didn't take a lot of time, it wasn't forever. It wasn't a fortnight. It wasn't a month. In seven days, we'd dropped our guard and another young lady paid for it.
"Damn it!" I thought, looking at the lone slipper. Last night had been windy, and so the weather had erased any signs that someone, or some people had been there.
It was just the slipper.
"How could this have happened?" Sanji the hunter asked. "Were we so drunk, so deep in sleep that..."
"We let our damn guard down, that's what!" I screamed, turning towards Izumi's friends that hugged each other, crying deeply.
"This is...this is a slap on our faces. Right here, right in our midst, right while we were asleep. She was taken here. By someone or some people. This is a direct message to us..."
I nodded. "That we're helpless against them. That they can strike at any time, and we would be unable to stop them."
This meant war of course.
"So what now? We go on another search again? Try to find her?" someone asked..
"Like that yielded wonderful results last time," Sanji scoffed, and the others made sounds of affirmation.
Had they gone crazy? I seethed with rage, clenching and unclenching my fist. Was this how it was going to be? We would stay and do nothing until all the women in the village were gone?
I considered voicing my thoughts, but I decided against it. I needed to follow this path on my own. Just this once. If I found any proof to show that something had happened, maybe I could just get them to recommit to finding the girls.
Walking back to Akira's group, I asked her a simple question. "Did Izumi have any unusual nocturnal habits? Anything that would have made her leave her sleeping spot there?'
"Th-that's a strange question. No. No she didn't. She just slept and woke up like everyone else, maybe more late than often if you want to be very critical about her sleeping pattern. But that's all. Why do you ask?"
"Because Izumi didn't necessarily have as many drinks as us..."
"Actually, just a cup of sake. She doesn't like alcohol at all, and has a low tolerance for sake. We just gave her that one tiny cup to loosen up a bit, and make her dance without any reservations or shyness."
"Hmm. That's interesting then."
"What is?" Akira asked.
"I wonder who it was. The person that Izumi followed."
"A person she followed? What do you mean?"
"Whoever abducted her was someone she knew. Someone she was fairly familiar with, no, actually quite familiar with. At least that's what I think."
Akira and her friends looked at me skeptically. "Lee, that sounds a bit far-fetched, don't you think? I mean, how did you deduce that much?"
"The slipper. The way it rested in the sand. Look, right from the square where we all slept to the point where those slippers were seen, you can see tiny indentations of Izumi's slippers there. The heels don't leave marks, while the part of the sole where her toes lie are very visible, having been pressed into the sand. This means that she was prancing around on her tiptoe, trying to avoid the sleeping bodies."
They remained attentive, trying to grasp my line of thought.
"She'd only be doing that for fun, and there's hardly a chance someone wasn't there with her who enjoyed the scene with her, judging by howbthe footmarks were scattered sometimes to show how she turned, pivoted on that foot, to look back at someone that was there."
They nodded, but Akira pressed on. "There's no way you can tell for sure that there was someone there. Someone she was familiar with that followed her. You can't just..."
"Calm down. Let's go back to the slipper."
Luckily, it hadn't been moved, nor had anything around it changed.
"What do you notice about this footprint?"
They noticed it and commented. The sand behind it was disturbed, pushed back as though the feet inside where pulled back with a considerable amount of force.
"Exactly. The fact that no footsteps can be found after show that she was pulled backwards. I'd like to think that Izumi couldn't have made such a movement on purpose. Akira, how would you describe Izumi's perceptive ability?"
"Sh-she was like a cat. Graceful on her feet. Her ears were also sharp, and her eyesight was clear. She ate healthy though, so..."
"You see? First of all, she wasn't going to relieve herself. There are a lot of places around this square to do that as a lady, and none of those are in this direction. As you said, she was perceptive, so the wind would have carried the faint sound or smell of any one trying to creep on her. Buyer, the footsteps don't show us that she turned violently. She was pulled back, and into the arms of a strong person who wasn't wearing shoes, sandals or slippers, but wasn't going barefoot either. I know this because he or she didn't leave any tracks."
"So, in essence?"
"Walk with me first. I need to confirm something up ahead."
They followed me.
"In essence, this was someone she was interested in having sex with, and this was something they had planned on doing for a while now. That explains her prancing around and her complete trust in the person so that she could walk ahead. That meant she was leading the person to a spot where they would use, meaning that she had possibly never been with this person before."
"That...that actually sounds reasonable!"
"Thanks, because this proves my point!" I said, finding what I was looking for.
In the midst of the road was a muddy pit which had always been there, never drying during the rainy season as we were in. In the pit was Izumi's second slipper, and the sign of a huge skidding of a human foot. Then there was a bit of cloth that had obviously been wrapped around something cylindrical but had managed to come free. And finally, footprints. Or rather, the left footprint was just an indentation in the mud, while the other was a clear footprint, continuing after the mud pit for a few metres.
Akira caught on immediately. "The person isn't someone that's lived in this village for long. They'd have known that this pit was here. But no, they didn't, and so they slipped, and judging from the arrangement of these tracks, they ran off, clumsily too, though that's understandable since they were carrying someone."
I smiled. She had caught on perfectly.
*****
I forgot to add that this will be a short series. Very short. I've got no motivation to do something long for now, but I decided I could milk a nice little series from that prompt so I went for it.
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