When the dogs began barking energetically, Walley jumped in fright.
Inside the house, the half-wolf was able to hear a man and a woman talking.
"Honey, the dogs started barking. Is it because of some thief?" the woman asked. Her voice was weak, which made Luke conclude that she was an old woman.
"No, it can't be, I put guards around the plantations all night, it must be them and the dogs found it strange." The old woman's husband replied with a certain tone of irritation. "Oh, oh! It's okay, Honey. If it makes you feel safer, I'll go downstairs and check it out, okay?"
As the vineyard owner descended the stairs from the second floor to the first, he heard someone knock on his door three times.
*Knock, knock, knock*
knock The old man immediately stopped halfway up the stairs, because the guards he's hired are normally not supposed to knock on the door unless something has happened, and if that was the case, the guards wouldn't knock so calmly.
Immediately, the old man's heart began to beat fast and he forced himself to ask aloud, "Who is it?!"
Outside, Walley regained his composure after being startled by the dogs and answered the old man. "My partner and I are adventurers, we came to talk about the furious deer contract that is on the loose in the region. You were the one who issued this contract in the guild? The reward says here that it is 30 gold coins." Walley's voice gradually lowered at the end, as the owner opened the door to the house.
Looking sullen at having been disturbed just as he was about to go to sleep, the old man looked at Walley from head to toe, then at the hooded man behind Walley.
"Is this your partner?" the old man asked, pointing his chin at Luke.
"Yes, he's a little dark, but don't worry about it, we'll be able to kill the monster. Can we talk about the monster?"
Still frowning, the old man asked: "What do you want to know? Yes, the reward is 30 gold coins, that's not a lie."
"Why, sir, I don't doubt that one bit." Walley said as he looked at that newly built house in the core of the vineyard. "What we want to know is about the monster, what it looked like, where people first saw it, stuff like that."
The owner of the vineyard raised his neck, looked around the area his eyes could reach, looking for the three men he had hired to protect the property, but he didn't find even a faint glow of a torch in that dark environment other than the lamp on the door of the house. .
"Oh, whatever! Come on, you two come in, I'll tell you everything I remember about the monster." The old man said and walked out of the way for the two men to enter the house.
At the old man's request, Luke and Walley followed him inside.
Inside the house, the old man lit all the candles he passed to the way to the living room, where there was a large sofa and an armchair. The owner sat down in the armchair, then opened a wooden box on a small table beside it, took one of the cigars from the box, cut off the end, finally lighting the cigar with a match.
Walley and Luke patiently waited for the old man to start talking.
The old man took a swig and looked at the men. "You can sit down." He pointed to the couch.
As requested by the owner, the two false adventurers sat down.
"Okay, where do I start? Ah, yes... The monster's first appearance was two weeks ago. During the day, many townspeople come to our vineyard to work and leave at dusk after receiving their pay for the day. Normally, my wife counts in the morning how many people came and sets aside the money to deliver in the afternoon, but during one day the numbers of workers did not match, there was one less woman." explained the old man.
"Did this woman come to work for you often?" Walley asked.
"Yes every day. Therefore, the first thing we thought was that she had been lost in the plantations, or lost track of time, but after intense searches we did not find her. We concluded that she had come home early and we paid everyone as usual. However, the next morning one of the dogs had a human leg in its mouth."
"Let me guess, did you think it was the dog that killed the woman?" Luke asked, watching the smoke from the old man's cigar rise to the ceiling.
"Of course we thought so, but the dog himself led us to the woman's remains, and we found a corpse so disfigured that there was no way the dogs could have done that..." The look of annoyance on the old man's face was clear as he said this.
"Care to say what the figures on the corpse looked like?" Luke soon asked.
Raising his eyebrows, the owner asked, "W-why?"
"It's easier for us to identify the type of monster that killed the woman. Different types of monsters have different ways of killing their prey."
The half-wolf was being inquisitive, but he was asking questions that a true adventurer would ask before setting off in search of a monster, which shouldn't be as alarming to the old man as it seemed. The owner began to sweat when faced with a question that had not been asked by any adventurer until that moment.
"H-huh? What are you talking about? I said it was a mad deer, I put that in the contract." said the old man.
Paying attention to the old man's heartbeat, Luke noticed that the pulses were irregular, indicating that he was lying, or that Luke was close to discovering something. At that moment, Luke huffed and placed both feet on the coffee table in the living room, later crossing his legs.
"We are here to do the work and we want to finish it. Therefore, I will propose something to you, sir." Luke said, his face practically expressionless.
"A proposal?" The owner and Walley asked at the same time.
"No need to be scared, it's just business we're doing. My proposal is as follows: if the monster in the region is really a raging deer, I will kill it and will not demand payment of the 30 gold coins, however, if the monster is not a raging deer, this entire vineyard will be mine." Looking into the old man's frightened eyes, Luke proposed.
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