Chapter 257: Wooden Cabin (8)

Even the SAI had been alerted. It seemed that the enemy they were facing this time was extremely formidable…

At the thought, Everly felt her heart sink.

Based on their previous encounters, SAI agents were generally psychics with special supernatural abilities. The fact that these cultists had managed to overpower a SAI agent and place them on an altar to torture and kill them made their strength almost impossible to fathom.

Everyone in Everly’s group was an ordinary person. Against opponents like that, they would have virtually no means of resistance. All they could do was hope that the agent’s belongings might contain some useful clues or defensive tools to make them a little less helpless.

Everly called her two companions over. While silently apologizing to the deceased agent, she carefully searched through the agent’s clothes and backpack.

Apart from identification documents, the only thing she found among the clothes was an old brass pocket watch. Inside the watch’s cover was a faded photograph yellowed with age. In it, a much younger version of the agent stood beside a woman holding a baby, both smiling brightly at the camera.

It was clearly a personal possession. Everly did not dare look at it for long. She carefully put the brass pocket watch into her own backpack, intending to find an opportunity to return it to the SAI after they got out.

Misha and Harriet worked together to inspect the agent’s backpack.

The bag had obviously been searched through already. None of the weapons or useful tools Everly had hoped to find for self-defense were there. What remained were only basic wilderness-survival supplies. Their packaging had all been opened, and they had been stuffed back into the bag in a disorderly mess, as though whoever had searched it had done so with exceptional roughness.

Fortunately, after a thorough search, the two of them still managed to find something that had been hidden away—a pair of metal spheres of unknown purpose and a notebook stained with blood.

The spheres had been concealed inside the lid of a thermos bottle stored in the backpack’s side pocket. If Harriet had not been so meticulous—noticing that the bottle’s weight felt off, unscrewing the lid, and taking a look inside—they would never have found the two spheres wedged within the lid’s hidden compartment.

Judging by the care with which they had been hidden, it was obvious that these two metal spheres were anything but ordinary.

The silvery metal spheres were about the size of cherries. Each sphere had a seam running around its center, with a tiny button located along the edge of the split. Setting aside their size and color, their overall design looked remarkably similar to the Poké Balls from the Pokémon anime.

Everly, Misha, and Harriet passed the spheres around and examined them, but none of them could figure out their purpose. For safety reasons, they decided not to tamper with them.

As for the notebook, Misha had discovered it hidden between two rigid layers at the bottom of the backpack. Its pages were densely packed with writing, making it look very much like the classic “diary” prop from a horror movie.

Everly suspected that the diary likely contained information about the cult operating in the forest.

Given the urgency of the situation, she couldn’t afford to read it carefully. Every additional minute the students spent inside the suspicious cabin meant more of their strength being drained away. No one knew whether death awaited them once the cabin had absorbed the last of their vitality.

As a result, Everly only skimmed through the notebook. Flipping through it at a glance, she focused on the last few entries. After quickly grasping the enemy’s situation and the purpose of the metal spheres, she immediately closed it again.

From her brief reading—and a fair amount of inference—she pieced together a rough understanding of what was going on.

In simple terms, the group had encountered a cult devoted to worshipping “That One.” The diary never clearly explained who “That One” actually was—or perhaps it had been explained earlier in the journal and Everly had simply missed it. In any case, the diary’s owner usually referred to the cultists as “Black Goat Believers.”

The Black Goat Believers had originally been active mainly in the western region of the Abanaqi Mountains. About a year ago, for reasons unspecified (the diary merely referred to it as “that incident,” and Everly had no idea whether earlier entries contained more details), the SAI launched a large-scale purge against the Black Goat Believers in that area.

Most of the cultists were either captured or killed during the operation. However, a number of extraordinarily lucky survivors managed to escape the crackdown and fled deep into the mountains, where they went into hiding.

The Abanaqi Mountains were the oldest mountain range in North America and served as the natural boundary between the eastern and western regions of the United States. Stretching nearly 3,200 kilometers in length, the range provided countless places to hide. The cultists were experts at concealment and possessed a number of mysterious, seemingly supernatural methods. As long as they chose not to reveal themselves, even the SAI was unable to track them down.

The situation changed not long ago.

About a month earlier, the SAI received intelligence suggesting that the surviving remnants of the Black Goat Believers who had escaped the purge a year ago had likely fled into the Black Mountains. Because the source of the information was unknown and its reliability uncertain, the SAI did not act rashly. Instead, they dispatched the diary’s owner, Dees, to enter the Black Mountains alone and search for the fugitives.

Originally, it was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance mission. Dees only needed to locate the cultists and report their position back to headquarters; there was no need to infiltrate their ranks or take unnecessary risks. For a veteran agent with nearly twenty years of service in the SAI, the task should not have been particularly difficult.

However, during his investigation, he accidentally uncovered something unexpected—the reason the Black Goat survivors had escaped the purge was not because of luck. They had struck a deal with a certain underground research organization.

[…So it turns out that the failed summoning wasn’t a complete loss after all. The being that arrived by accident generously left behind an egg. The Black Goat Believers tried every method they could think of, but were unable to hatch it. In the end, they handed the egg over to that organization in exchange for assistance.

During the year they spent in hiding, the Black Goat remnants maintained frequent contact with the research organization. Not long ago, the organization delivered an extremely valuable “sacrifice” to the Black Goat Believers.]

The following day, Dees wrote another entry:

[…Today I obtained new intelligence. The Black Goat remnants have decided to hold a sacrificial ritual of the highest order during the next full moon. They intend to offer the sacrifice to the “Great Mother of All Things” in order to win the favor of their deity!…

[…I cannot determine whether the research organization they mentioned is connected to the Megan Biological Laboratory that we have been closely monitoring. The only thing I can say for certain is that if the ritual succeeds, given the quality of the “sacrifice,” the Black Goat Believers may actually achieve their long-cherished goal and successfully summon ██ into the physical world!

I cannot stand by and ignore this. ██ is an existence that should never descend upon this world. Its arrival would bring endlessly multiplying death, fear, and madness, reducing the world to a lifeless wasteland…]

The ████ portions appeared to have been deliberately blacked out in the diary. Everly had no idea what they originally referred to, so for the time being she mentally labeled it simply as an evil god.

Dees had arrived too late. By the time he discovered that the Black Goat Believers intended to summon the evil god, only half a day remained before the full-moon night on which the ritual would be held.

Even if he sent the intelligence back to the SAI, there was a good chance the Bureau would not reach the site in time. After a difficult internal struggle, Dees decided to take a desperate gamble and infiltrate the cultists’ headquarters himself in an attempt to sabotage the ritual.

[…I deeply regret not requesting more equipment from the Technical Division before accepting this mission… God, I should never have been so lazy just to avoid writing extra reports! With only the tools I currently possess, I have a feeling that a brutal battle awaits me.

If necessary, I will use my final trump card and unleash the Catatumbo Lightning, allowing the eternal storm to cleanse everything. But I sincerely hope it does not come to that. The moment the weather sphere is activated, the thunderstorm it generates will engulf every living thing nearby. I have no desire to be struck by lightning and reduced to charcoal.

Whatever happens, wish me luck…]

The diary ended abruptly there.

Clearly, luck had not been on Dees’s side.

Judging from the bloodstains covering his clothes, backpack, and notebook, he had been captured by the Black Goat Believers during the operation that night.

He suffered extensive torture at the cultists’ hands, and even after death his body was denied peace, left to slowly decay within the ritual circle in a grotesquely twisted posture.

But Dees’s efforts had not been entirely in vain. More than half a month had passed, and the world had neither ended nor been overrun by some terrifying evil god. That meant he had successfully disrupted the sacrificial ritual and prevented the mysterious ██ mentioned in the diary from descending into the world.

In addition, near the end of the diary, Dees mentioned a trump-card item called a “Weather Sphere.” Everly suspected that it was the same object as the two metal spheres they had found inside the thermos lid.

If the metal spheres really were Weather Spheres, then they definitely could not be opened casually. According to the diary, the Weather Sphere was an indiscriminate weapon. Once activated, it would summon a thunderstorm that struck everyone nearby with lightning.

The discovery left Everly somewhat disappointed.

Another frustrating realization was that Dees’s diary contained no mention of the cabin. Most likely, the strange phenomenon here had only appeared after his death. Otherwise, his corpse would never have ended up positioned as a sacrifice within the ritual circle.

Since that was the case, Everly would have to find her own way to destroy the ritual array.

Doing so might alert the cultists hiding somewhere in the forest, but the students truly could not afford to wait any longer. Even Misha and Teacher Harriet on the upper floor were showing obvious signs of severe exhaustion. The students below were undoubtedly in even worse condition.

After a moment’s thought, Everly packed away the diary and the Weather Spheres, then led her two companions in clearing out the attic compartment.

The most bizarre and suspicious thing in the entire cabin was the magic circle before them. She had a strong feeling that if they destroyed it, they would be able to overcome the cognitive distortion and escape the cabin.

As for how to destroy an unknown magical array—

Fortunately, Everly happened to know a few methods.

If it belonged to the category of dark magic, such arrays generally had to be disrupted using objects imbued with holy power. Examples included holy water blessed by one or more bishop-level clergy members; sap from an olive tree more than a hundred years old; powdered white crystal that had absorbed moonlight during seven consecutive full moons; the menstrual blood of a pure virgin; the tears of a unicorn…

Unfortunately, Everly had none of those items available at the moment.

Compared to those, there was another purification method that was far easier to achieve and no less effective: fire.

Everly was going to burn this filthy, corrupt, and evil-infested ritual array to ashes.

Although the rain-soaked wooden cabin might be difficult to set ablaze, igniting just the ritual circle itself would not be a problem.

Under Everly’s direction, the three of them fought against the overwhelming tide of exhaustion while gathering all the ritual items scattered across the array—along with an iron bucket placed outside the circle—and piled them up beneath the corpse at the center of the formation.

Worried that those objects might be attached to some kind of curse, none of them dared to touch anything directly. They used sticks, trekking poles, and other tools to push and maneuver the items instead.

After clearing the floor, Everly took a metal tray from a candle holder on the edge of the attic space and poured all the remaining kerosene inside it over the center of the ritual circle, soaking the corpse and everything beneath it.

Harriet even took a moment to go downstairs, instructing everyone below to contribute any fuel they had—oil blocks and solid alcohol.

Each person added a little, and when combined, the total amount of accelerant turned out to be surprisingly substantial.

After piling all the fuel together at the center of the array, Everly took out a windproof lighter, lit a piece of tissue paper in her hand, and tossed the burning paper onto the flammable pile at the corpse’s feet.

“Boom!”

A violent burst erupted. Crimson flames surged instantly, engulfing the entire attic space before them.

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