Chapter 203: Gluttons

Lucius and Kiana could see that in one hand of Doyle there was a Long Fang Wolf, but in his other hand was actually a human. Kiana's eyes went wide, and she became uneasy upon seeing this.

"Who is this?" Kiana couldn't help but question.

"Indeed… who is this Doyle and why did you kill him? I thought I told you to hunt beasts?" Lucius asked as well.

"HNG!!" In response, Doyle grunted and dropped the wolf's corpse down before pointing to his chest.

Lucius looked closer and saw an arrow tip embedded in there.

"Ah! So he attacked you and you killed him?" Lucius asked.

"Eng!" Doyle grunted in agreement.

"Well, that makes sense." Lucius nodded his head before checking the arrowhead.

He pulled it out and saw that it was of a rather high quality.

"huh... interesting." Lucius muttered.

Kiana on the other hand, was not fully assured of it.

"Is this fine? Won't it become problematic?" Kiana questioned.

"Well, I can't fully control them to not attack and letting them be attacked while not doing anything seems foolish. Self-defense is fine if they do it. As for the man… the problem will depend on his identity." Lucius answered.

He then turned to Doyle and spoke, "put that man down and let me see who it actually is… hopefully, his face is fine enough to be identified." 

~thud~

Doyle placed the man's corpse down and Lucius saw his face. But even after a minute, he could not recognize him.

"I don't think I've ever seen this person in my life before." Lucius spoke.

"Neither have I, but…" Kiana said as she bent to check the man's clothes. "I think this might just be a hunter." She added.

"A hunter? Hunting out at night? And one that is able to pierce Doyle's defenses? I doubt that." Lucius spoke.

Upon hearing this, Kiana realized that this didn't fully add up either. It had taken her epic ranked gift, one that had high power from the very start to be able to injure Doyle before.

It was very doubtful that just any arrow might be able to pierce his defenses.

"Your right… this should not have been possible." Kiana admitted.

"No hunter would come out to hunt here at night, no matter how much strange he thought he was. Which means…" Lucius said, but was interrupted by Kiana.

"He was here for something else!" Kiana spoke.

"Indeed. Plus, I doubt most people would attack someone out of nowhere. Even if Doyle did look, it doesn't seem normal to attack another human out of nowhere. Even if they were guarding something, giving out a warning is the normal procedure." Lucius explained.

The more Kiana heard his words, the more she realized that they made sense.

"What could have he been doing here?" Kiana said.

"Well… we can only tell that if we know where he was." Lucius replied.

"Hmm… it'll take us some time to get there though," Kiana spoke.

"Not necessarily… after all, we have Doyle here," Lucius said with a smile.

"You mean to say, he will carry us?" Kiana asked.

"Yes. It will be the fastest way to confirm it. Even if we come in the morning, there are chances some of the clues might be erased. Plus, there might be more than just this one man if they are doing something, say… nefarious." Lucius replied.

Kiana felt a bit unnerved at the idea of Doyle carrying them but accepted it nevertheless. The current times were sensitive for the Land of Etara and she knew this very well. It wouldn't be unusual for there to be spies managing to infiltrate somehow and gathering all of their information.

Besides, it would make sense to her that whoever this man was tried to kill Doyle directly upon seeing him. This meant that whatever this man was hiding or guiding, could not be seen by anyone else.

"It is settled then, we shall go take a look," Lucius spoke.

"Do we need to do anything about these corpses?" Kiana asked.

"Hmm… Doyle eat the wolves. As for the man, we'll keep the corpse just in case we need to confirm his identity later or investigate more." Lucius stated.

"HNGGG!!" That was all that was needed to get Doyle excited as he jumped at the wolf corpses and started devouring them. To a Lost, there was little difference between what was edible in a living creature. Hair, nails, and even clothes were often consumed by them in their hunger. 

At least in Doyle's case, he had the hunger under control due to the Hell energy that Lucius gave him. But more food was always welcome to a Lost as their hunger was endless. 

The Hunger of a Lost was actually a topic of great interest in Lucius's past life and the Great Barrom clan's scholars had done a lot of research on it. The general consensus was that Lost would eat a lot and could stay without hell energy as long as they got nutrients in the form of blood and flesh of living creatures.

But the scholars wanted to know just how much could a Lost eat, given that it had an endless supply of food but no Hell energy?

The answer was… there was no limit. Or rather, the tests that the scholars did reached the limit of what they could practically maintain. The Lost's that they had done these experiments kept on eating and eating until they no longer looked like what they normally did.

They would become morbidly obese and yet were able to maintain their mobility. This continued on till they changed their form entirely and became a completely new category of Lost. These lost were called as 'Gluttons'. They had massive bellies that hung at their back like a rucksack.

They carried these bellies on their backs and crawled around using their legs. While they did become slower, they didn't really lose full mobility. Plus, the continued nutrition made them gain a lot of fat that increased their defenses to the maximum and even increased their strength.

One could imagine why the experiments needed to be stopped. Maintaining a controlled environment simply became impossible.