Fresh Blood Challenge

They sent me a picture of a shoe, I thought. But there was more to it, there was always more than the obvious in these. I just had to look. There was bamboo, some of it fallen about, and a sort of green branch lying nearby. All of it looked to be freshly cut, cleanly snapped, no rough ends or long strips of fibre hanging off. I realized I was looking at the edge of an orchard, I could see the edge of a mud wall and the tree branch had some little fruits or something on it. The shoe was in the middle of the picture. It was black with black laces and reminded me of a those non-slip shoes you see on restaurant staff. You know, the black-soled shoes you can't wear on a gym floor because they leave streaks. I zoomed the picture a little. There was hard packed dark earth under the leaves and branches. I had first assumed it was just shade, but had been only partly right. The earth was wet around the shoe, a rough oval shape, maybe, probably not more than a foot at its widest. It looked like someone had spilled a cup of water. There were coordinates with the picture, so I ran them and pulled up a satellite map. There wasn't any water source within a hundred feet or so. I zoomed the picture again. There were little blood spatters on the ground. I saw it, then, I knew. I zoomed out and looked, and could all but see the impression of where he had fallen. I pulled a new satellite image, hours old, of the site. I mentally made note of the fact that it had become a site in my mind while I examined the new image. I could see the snipped branches over the site, bright almost-white scars over the shaded ground just inside the wall. A fresh divot on the top of the wall, and a few feet away a long black length of local cloth on the ground. A gate in the mud wall just past the scarf was open. A scuff in the earth halfway to the structure outside the gate, long and uneven, pointed to the structure. So. I tapped on my controller, entered my code and pulled up the live imagery. Nothing changed but the position of the sun. Wait. There was a change. In the courtyard of the structure there were some dark rags. No, not rags. A black shirt torn and blood on the ground under it. Fresh blood. I tapped again and a little over a minute later the structure erupted in an orange flash and disappeared under a pillar of dirt and smoke. I logged off and went for a coffee.