Welp, that's embarrassing.
Apparently a couple of kids decided to play in the woods and one of them got missing.
We were given a brief description of what she looked like and we went to search for her.
And that kid also happens to be the one who keeps taking on odd jobs as well. In spite of not having any powers to speak of, she was useful to some extent as the cleaner-up. That kid was ready to do almost anything for money.
Is her family poor?... Welp, it's not our business to mess with others' affairs. We're merely an association, not an authority. We settled here merely because it's one of the few places that would accept us. We just settled in as its guild. Just a band of lowly wandering vagabonds...
Perhaps it's due to that vague familiarity with her that we decided to put in more effort. And it was a slow day anyway, so we had nothing better to do.
The forest is truly enormous. Many paths that seem to loop into themselves, makes you wonder why those kids even frequented the forest as they did before one of them disappeared. Perhaps it's due to being locals they could navigate their way easily...
But kids are kids, they're bound to make mistakes.
The search party lasted for 2 days before we stumbled across a curious corpse.
It was her.
But it was horrendous.
Her stomach was ripped open. The clothes were torn apart. The face is mangled. The organs were missing. And the blood spread everywhere.
"O-Oh god..."
It seems like the work of a syndicate of sorts. It's usually to them - that the organs matter most, and it's not just the heart or especially the brain - organs that daemons feast upon and desire so much.
But that strange way of how it all set up... Maybe we're dealing with something far sinister.
Well... We gotta deliver the news.
"W-What?!... N-No way..."
"..."
The mother was crying and the son was in silent stupor. Yet despite his silence, we knew for a fact he's taking worse than his mom. The implications of his sister's disappearance weren't pretty. They left the establishment in silence and it was up to us to give this child a proper burial. We gave the body to the local nurse to wrap the body for funeral and contacted the cemetery to dig another grave.
When she was finally put to rest, we couldn't help but feel conflicted.
On one hand, maybe we should've reached out to her. Maybe we shouldn't have ignored all those signs that something was seriously wrong. She was utterly nihilistic for a child and it was a shame that she died before even seeing a glimpse of hope. It's a sad tragedy all around.
On the other hand... It felt like an inevitability. Despite her minor combat skills that allowed her to work alongside us, she had no powers. If she wandered far into the woods, she wouldn't have survived either way - she would be either trafficked, killed or spirited away by a daemon. There's so much a child like her can do. For her to live amongst us would be a miracle... But unfortunately miracles are miracles, they can never happen. It was just a child's play after all, just a whim. And due to that whim, the child died.
Unfortunately, we failed - but it was an inevitability.