Werner moved through the corpses slowly, studying them, his expression cycling through shock to confusion to calculation. He stopped beside the matriarch, examining the damage pattern on her armor.
"These holes," he said, almost to himself. "They're tiny. Precise. Like someone drilled through with something small and sharp, not a sword or spear."
Other recruits were spreading out, examining the hatchling corpses, finding similar patterns. Cracked armor, concentrated impact points, damage that looked almost surgical in its precision despite the obvious violence required to create it.
"Maybe the instructors?" someone suggested nervously. "Testing us? Seeing if we'd actually investigate?"
"Why would instructors kill beasts and not harvest cores?" another recruit countered.
"Bounty hunters?" someone else offered. "Passed through here, cleared the area, left the cores because they were in a hurry?"
