Re: Butterfly (Reincarnated as a Butterfly)

While half the knights, Rosslyn, and the young lords slept, Adon diligently searched his memory banks.

This time was not like other memory searches he had performed in the past. Then, he had been looking for specific details—a location, an event, a magical technique, a piece of evidence of some idea he wanted to demonstrate.

Now, he was looking for something more along the lines of an evidence-shaped absence. A hole in his recollections. A place where something was not, but should be.

It was a more profound challenge. He lacked easy search terms.

Instead of using his brain like a search engine, he wound up combing through it like a file clerk looking through old paper records for a document that may or may not exist.

The experience was the equivalent of looking through surveillance video to find the moment when someone had committed some minor crime, except that instead of just watching video, Adon had actually lived the experience. Now that he recreated it in his own mind, he had to do his best to ignore the things that he had been paying attention to at the time and simply focus on the telepathic feedback signals he had been receiving from the other minds present in the area while he was doing various things.

At least he could fast forward through parts of the previous day that were uneventful.

Adon quickly ruled out the period of time when he had left the rest of the group besides Goldie in the tunnel between levels. Then he moved on to the initial invasion of the ants' level. There was no break in contact between the butterfly and the humans, no moment of radio silence, in the period from entry until first contact with the ants.

In the ensuing period of struggle, two humans indeed died, and their psychic presences correspondingly disappeared from Adon's telepathic radar. That was it. Before he knew it, he was re-experiencing their successful flight from the army of ants and the decision to hole up in the cave.

Adon paused it when he realized that the memories had gotten to the point where he, William, Samson, and Goldie were all about to head off into the deeper recesses of the tunnel.

No, that doesn't make sense, he thought. There are still twenty-six. But I know that now, in the present, there are only twenty-four… How?

What he was observing did not seem reasonable.

Certainly, Rosslyn, the young lords, Adon, or anyone else might be forgiven for not noticing if someone in their group had tripped and fallen down a hole during the escape outside. There were pits all over the place, because of the nature of the environment, and the getaway had been chaotic and unplanned.

But inside the cave? With limited points of access?

How was it even possible to sneak something past Rosslyn's senses in here, let alone making it past not just her but also Frederick and all of the trained knights all around them? These were the elites of two countries' warrior castes. Getting around them should logically be an extremely difficult task.

The butterfly found himself grasping at straws looking for an explanation—Maybe the Quugaarpaks did it, I know they can move through the walls! Or maybe they wandered off on their own?—when he logically knew that these 'explanations' only gave rise to further questions.

How could the Quugaarpaks possibly be responsible, when they were far too large and clumsy to sneak around the group? Why would the knights have gone off on their own, when they knew they would both be in more danger and in derogation of their duty to protect their lieges?

Adon resumed reviewing his memories and found that the group had shrunk to twenty-four people during his, William's, and the spider's absence.

Damn. It literally happened in my only blind spot…

That seemed like an insane coincidence, which left only the direst of possible explanations.

First and simplest possibility: someone within the group, or some ones, had somehow and for some reason murdered two of their fellow knights. Adon knew the idea wasn't as impossible as he—and especially the Princess—might like to imagine. There were often secret alliances, cliques and outcasts, old grudges, and so on in a group of this size journeying together. Adon had enough knowledge of social dynamics from his collective experiences to grasp that.

And a dungeon is exactly the kind of place I would imagine you could get away with murder if you were of the mind to do that. No law enforcement will ever get down here. The crime scene is supposed to be destroyed at the end of this expedition, after all. It's sort of a perfect crime.

There were holes in the theory. Adon had observed the demeanor of the group as a whole when the matter of the missing people was being discussed. Everyone, so far as he could tell, had been rattled and disturbed by the questions that Rosslyn and the young lords had asked, as the gears turned in their heads about what might have happened to their fellow knights.

But it was possible that Adon's Telepathy had been fooled. He had not been looking deeply into people's thoughts. The culprit could have been just as rattled as everyone else, but for the alternative reason that he or she was worried about being caught.

The second possibility made the first somehow more palatable. There might be a monster that could mimic a human being on this level of the dungeon, and perhaps it had taken an opportunity earlier, when everyone was distracted, to take the place of…

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No, that doesn't work! Adon thought, feeling the beginnings of frustration take hold. That would mean that at some point there were actually twenty-seven consciousnesses instead of twenty-six in our group. At whatever point this mimic slipped in and joined us, its consciousness ought to stick out like a sore thumb in my memory banks. But I lived through all the important parts of this level again. Just about all the parts, period. I would have noticed something like that. And if this thing had not only suddenly appeared but also replaced one of us, it would have to have been impossibly quick to escape my retroactive detection. It would have to have killed the original person so quickly that my senses couldn't pick up that one consciousness died and another replaced it. One of Rosslyn or William's magical knights. No. No way that happened.

Unfortunately, the only explanation that really made sense was the third one that Adon had thought of.

There was something else like him out there.

Adon had the ability to become almost completely undetectable at times. He was not undetectable to someone with Telepathy, but he could be functionally invisible, could make himself small, could fit into the most improbable of places.

That was the only way this unknown entity's exploits seemed possible at all.

But if that was the case, it was far from a reassuring answer to the question.

It can kill any of us, at any time, anywhere, Adon thought glumly. I'll have to tell the others, but what do you even do about something like that?

He tried to imagine what he would be like as an assassin—essentially a perfect killer, if his targets were not aware he was hunting them. Constant vigilance could make him pretty harmless to most people with mana, he guessed. So, they could stay on guard all the time, and that might make this killer less dangerous.

No, wait, whatever it was snuck into the cave while I was with William, Goldie, and Samson. That means they're a way better assassin than hypothetical me. I don't know how I could go about killing two knights in the middle of a fight—when everyone is at their most on guard!—and completely removing or destroying their bodies so that no one knew they were missing until we took a Goddess damned head count!

In fact, considering that the entire squad of soldiers had been watching the entrance periodically as they kicked or tossed dead ants into the area to form their makeshift barrier, it ought to have been impossible for the bodies to be snuck out through that space. Unless the killer could make the cadavers invisible, too, which was far beyond Adon's power.

As he grew more concerned about the enemy, Adon realized that there was at least one limitation on the hypothetical creature's powers that was implied by its behavior thus far.

It did not want to kill anyone when Adon himself was present.

Theoretically, it was possible that the creature was avoiding committing its assassinations when any of the arthropods were around—or even avoiding doing so when William was present. They only had the one case to work from, after all.

But in practice, the only reason Adon could think of for the creature to have struck when it did was that it would otherwise be detectable with Telepathy, the same as any other sapient life form—and many non-sapients. If that was its concern, it needed to avoid all three arthropods, but especially Adon, whose Telepathy was the most powerful and developed of them all.

The dungeon would have known that, if Samson was right about it adapting, and it had not only shielded the ants from telepathic attacks, but it seemed to have informed its assassin creature that Adon's powers were something to avoid.

Well, at least it isn't completely undetectable, Adon thought slowly, relieved. If the monster could walk around invisible and undetectable by Telepathy, it might as well be able to pop in and out of existence freely.

Now the questions were: where was it now, and what had it done with the corpses of the knights who had disappeared?

Did it somehow pass me in the tunnel? Adon questioned.

He quickly reviewed that segment of memories between him departing and him leaving, but there were no random, unexpected psychic presences at any point in his journey through the cave, besides the Quugaarpaks that had arrived to aid and avenge their fallen brethren.

No, no, impossible. Where, then?

Adon began to have the feeling that once he knew where the monster was or where the corpses were, everything else about this mystery would fall into place.

Did it slip out through the front of the cave? The entrance was being watched a lot because of the ants periodically coming through, but maybe not at all times. If the monster managed to make it look like two knights were walking under their own power, the others wouldn't have given them walking toward the entryway a second look. Then they could have slipped out—or been slipped out—of the cave pretty easily. And it only had to do this twice, while a hectic skirmish was going on. It's probably not as hard to sneak someone out of a place as it is to kill them in full view of lots of other people, so if the monster could do the second one, it could probably do the first. All right then.

Of course, there was also the other possibility: that this monster could functionally swim through earth and stone, like the Quugaarpaks, but there was no point in even considering that. It would simply mean that no one would ever be safe or able to hunt the creature effectively unless it chose to make itself visible and available for that.

It was an unanswered question. Adon's lack of detailed intelligence was a recurring theme here.

He would have to table the twin questions of where the creature was and what it had done with the bodies for now.

What do we actually need to do to be safe from this thing? That's the only question that matters.

He thought for a moment.

It's simple. I just can't leave the group unattended right now. I, Goldie, and Samson are the only ones who have the ability that would probably have detected this thing. And I'm the only one who definitely has strong enough Telepathy for that. For all I know, the monster is actually good at hiding its psychic signature, too. So I just stay close to the others…

As for finding the creature and dealing with it, Adon had less of a clue.

The best I've got is that we need to talk to everyone who fought earlier and see if they noticed any suspicious action. Furtive movements toward the entrance. Knights getting closer than they needed to to the outside without having a good reason for it.

If he was correct that the monster had left through the front opening, the fact that it had managed to arrive in time to take advantage of the skirmish might mean that its nest was nearby somewhere outside the cave. The evidence there was thin, and if the monster had done something else, then the group could do nothing about it. But this would be a good starting point at least.

Detective Adon is on the case, the butterfly thought.