As Claude slowly pushed open the door leading to the dining room, he peeked inside to see if the coast was clear first. Those vile beasts had desecrated and defiled the precious dining room, where he and his mother ate breakfast together, just like they had the rest of the house.
Pieces of the broken wooden furniture, such as the chairs and the table, were left littered all over the tiled floor, alongside the broken pieces of the previous vase that once stood so proudly on the tabletop. The only thing left nearly intact was the white tablecloth.
There were also a few strange bags chilling near the far end of the dining room wall. He suspected the bags were his mother's, assuming that she tried to pack some valuables in the kitchen before they left. Other than that, there appeared to be nothing else out of the ordinary. There were no demons inside; the coast is clear.
Claude swiftly bolts into the room and the door behind him. As the locks click into place, he breathes a huge sigh of relief as an enormous gush of comfort and security washes over him. Now, nobody should be able to enter the room while he searches the place, at least without breaking the door down and alerting him of their presence.
After locking the door, Claude heads over to the kitchen to begin his search there. He was on the lookout for a very specific Damascus knife, a Japanese blade known for its sharpness and durability. Because if he were to risk his own life to save his mother, who may or may not even be alive, from demons strong enough to harden like toothpicks, he might as well get the best there is.
As he steps into the kitchen, he immediately notices the smooth granite countertops, now bare and empty, cleared of the utensils and appliances that once occupied them. His inner skeptic swept in and questioned the scene. Why would his mother put away the kitchen appliances at a time like this? However, Claude had little time to delve into the subject. He had other matters in mind.
Upon pulling the cabinet where Bella stored all her knives, he was shocked to find nothing at all. He immediately checks another drawer, only to be met with the same discovery. What once contained a compartment filled with knives was now replaced with the same acrid air around him.
Unable to accept this strange reality so easily, Claude continues to check more drawers in an attempt to find something. However, as he searched every nook and cranny of the kitchen, he began to suspect that the appearance of the demons and the disappearance of the kitchen items were somehow connected to each other.
Their prior presence in the room was obvious, as the large claw marks and the broken furniture can attest to that. But what would the demons want with kitchenware? Why would they bother stealing such trivial items?
He was sure it wasn't his mother's doing. There was no reason for her to pack things she could buy from the store. Nearly everything in her kitchen was brand new, as she often replaced the old items as soon as they turned a year old.
Though his mind tried to come up with an explanation, panic and fear crept up from behind him once more, derailing his train of thought for the second time. As Claude failed to find a single item to arm himself with, it increasingly seemed as if he was trapped inside the kitchen, with the only thing protecting him being the flimsy locks of the wooden door.
His emotions only grew stronger as the seconds passed. With so little time on his hands, Claude wondered whether he should stop searching the kitchen and move onto the garage already. It appeared as if the kitchen had nothing to offer him, and it won't be long till those demons start roaming around the house again.
"But... what if the garage doesn't have anything? If they looted the kitchen, maybe they looted the garage too."
As the thought passes in his head, it triggers a whirlwind of emotions to start ravaging everything inside his head. His movement slowed down, while his hands began to tremble. He could feel the weight of the situation on him, pulling him down.
But just as he was on the cusp of breaking, his nose picked up a familiar scent that immediately snatched his attention. Unlike the horrid tobacco and urine mixture he picked up when he entered the house, this one had a damper, more pungent odor.
It had a sharp and salty tang that lightly clung to the air, with a strange hint of decay added on top. Memories flooded back of him in his youth, when he was a little child, just 3 feet tall. Every time he opened that top door of the fridge to grab some ice cream, the pungent odor would strike his nose, ingraining itself in his memory to live on forever. It was a scent Claude was all too familiar with.
"Is that…" he sniffs a little more. "Is that fish?" he asked himself. As he continues to sniff, his doubts about the identity of the aroma dissipate as his memory aligns it with the stench of fish his mother typically purchases from the store.
"That's fish, alright. But where's it coming from?" he asks himself.
Using his nose as a radar, Claude started searching the room, trying to locate the origin of the aroma. As he got closer, the scent grew stronger and more potent. He eventually walks up to one of the hemp bags lying on the floor, dripping a bit of liquid down its damp surface to the smooth tiled floor.
Sensing that the fishy odor came from within the bag, he kneels down and unties the knot holding the mouth of the bag shut. When he pulls back the mouth open, his nose is bombarded with the suffocating odor of rotting fish, while his eyes feast on the contents.
Fish, some cut, others not, were cramped inside the hemp bag. On the surface, he could see a few ants roaming around, collecting bits to bring back to their colony. Mixed in with the fish were little bits of beef and chicken his mother kept around, probably to serve him when he got back home.
Claude closes the mouth of the bag and stands back up. He walks towards another bag and unties its knot. Inside that bag were the ceramic plates that had gone missing from the cupboards and drawers, all neatly stacked up together.
With this grand discovery came a grand revelation, as Claude was finally able to put two and two together. When the demons came inside, they saw and took all the valuables in the kitchen and the dining room, stuffing them inside the hemp bags they brought along with them. Although Claude was unaware of the underlying motives, he now knew where to search for the Damascus knife.
For a second, Claude felt a bit like a fool for not piecing it together sooner. His mother didn't own any hemp bags, nor would she even bother to pack up kitchen items she could buy from a store. It should have been obvious from the beginning!
"Hey, at least I figured it out eventually, I guess." He told himself.
Claude got up and started searching through every hemp bag on the ground, trying to find the one containing all the knives. To save himself some time, he touched and examined the surface of the bag before trying to untie the knot.
His assumption was simple: each bag contained a stack of one type of item. One of the bags contained fish, while the other had ceramic plates. By checking the surface of the bag, he can guess what contents are inside it and save himself some time. With this method, Claude was able to find the bag with the knives pretty quickly.
Using his immaculate strength, Claude lifts the heavy bag up before turning it upside down. Then, as he held on to the brown sack with his right hand, he untied the knot holding the mouth together. Once the knot loosened, gravity did the rest. The metallic blades started falling down, exiting the bag before hitting the hard tile floor with a clatter.
Claude knew that diving his hand into a bag entirely composed of sharp objects was not a bright idea. It might result in a few minor cuts at best and a serious injury at worst. Since he didn't have much time to spare, going through each knife one by one would be time-consuming. Plus, given that a Damascus knife has a distinctive pattern on its blade, it should be easy to spot in a pile.
His keen eyes were able to quickly detect that the knife wasn't on the surface of the pile. So, he starts carefully moving the knives on the top of the pile away to gain better visuals on the blades hiding just below.
Eventually, he unearths the Damascus knife from the pile, its wavy, patterned blade finally exposed to the musty air of the room. Near the base of the blade, the word "ベラ" was delicately engraved into the metal, a word that referred to his mother's name, Bella. Claude kneels down and picks the blade out of the pile.
Realizing that the search was over, Claude smiled as he tightened his grip on its smooth wooden handle. Now that he was armed with a weapon, he felt a surge of confidence injected into his body. Now ready to take on the demons, Claude stands back up with a smile on his face and starts walking towards the door.
But before Claude could make it back to the door, he heard the sound of the knob twisting and turning violently. Claude freezes in place before moving back a bit. It appears someone was on the other side of the door, trying to get in.