Chapter 259: Wooden Cabin (10)

No—no, she couldn’t!

Just as she was about to blurt out the evil god’s name, years of mental training finally paid off at a crucial moment. Everly pulled back from the brink and stopped her dangerous imitation in time.

She clenched her teeth and bit down hard on the tip of her tongue. A sharp pain surged through her, and the thick taste of blood filled her mouth, instantly clearing her foggy mind.

“Teacher! Misha! Wake up!”

Everly rushed forward, grabbing both Harriet and Misha by the shoulders and shaking them hard.

Neither of them reacted.

In the dim beam of the flashlight, Everly saw faint black threads appear in Harriet’s gray eyes. Those strands wriggled like living worms, twisting constantly within her pupils. The more they moved, the thicker the darkness in Harriet’s eyes became. Before long, even the muscles in her cheeks began to twitch uncontrollably.

“…The Black Goat that nurtures ten thousand offspring… Mother of all things…”

Misha was drenched in cold sweat, her body shaking like a sieve. Her lips moved as she muttered under her breath—she had clearly already been bewitched by the monster’s roar.

If it had been anyone else who was being affected, Everly might have gritted her teeth and run away on her own. But she couldn’t. The ones whose minds had been ensnared weren’t just her teacher and classmates—Misha was there too.

How could she possibly abandon Misha and run?

Everly glanced back at the monster behind them.

While it was roaring, it seemed unable to move—like certain spellcasters in games who have to stand still to deal damage. It was currently standing in place with its mouth wide open, showing no sign of taking action for the moment.

After a brief moment of thought, Everly reached into her backpack, took out a flashbang grenade, pulled the safety ring, and threw it straight into the gaping maw of the goat-hoofed monster.

In the chain letter incident, in order to deal with the undead killer Gary, Everly had once used a flashbang grenade. The explosive had limited damage to the body, but the instantaneous burst of intense light and deafening sound could briefly blind people and cause them to temporarily lose their hearing and balance.

What Everly needed was exactly that kind of sensory disruption. She wanted to try whether she could “use magic to defeat magic”—using the noise from the flashbang to help everyone break free from the goat-hoofed monster’s auditory hypnosis.

If it worked, that would naturally be the best outcome, and it would buy everyone a chance to survive. If it didn’t, she would immediately summon the true form of the Sacred Tree and have it take her and Misha away.

Fortunately, she had made the right gamble.

The moment the grenade left her hand, Everly curled up with Misha, closed her eyes, and did her best to cover both of their ears with her hands.

“Boom!”

A blinding white light erupted instantly, followed by a thunderous explosion that echoed through the air. The distance was too close—despite covering her ears, Everly still felt a brief wave of dizziness, and a buzzing tinnitus filled her mind, cutting off her perception of external sound for a moment.

When the intense light faded, Everly opened her eyes and immediately looked at Misha. She saw that she had already broken free from that blank, unfocused, mentally scattered state and was now painfully holding her ears, her face scrunched up, her mouth opening and closing as she muttered something unintelligible.

She couldn’t hear anything, but that didn’t stop Everly from knowing that Misha had regained consciousness.

After all, the deafness would only last a short while—it wasn’t a problem.

After checking on Misha, Everly quickly glanced back at the others.

When the monster had roared, everyone had been running, all with their backs turned to it. Because of that, Everly’s flashbang had only caused them auditory shock, with limited impact on their vision.

At present, everyone had already regained consciousness. They were all holding their heads and ears with pained expressions, swaying unsteadily as they struggled against the dizziness caused by their disrupted vestibular systems.

What made Everly feel pleasantly surprised was that the goat-hoofed monster actually reacted to the flashbang.

She had carefully observed it before. The creature’s upper body only consisted of tentacles and a mouth, without organs like eyes, nose, or ears. By all logic, neither flash nor sound should have been able to harm it.

But in reality, after the explosion, the monster’s roar stopped.

It stood frozen in place like a poorly functioning old machine, completely motionless.

Even the tentacles on its body—those constantly writhing, snake-like appendages that had been twisting and entangling without pause—went limp as if they had lost all vitality. They drooped over its body, making the massive goat-hoofed monster look, at first glance, like some kind of giant mop that had wandered out of nowhere.

If it had been an ordinary human killer, Everly would have taken the opportunity to finish it off immediately. But the goat-hoofed monster was a product of ritualistic cult sacrifice. She had no certainty that she could kill it in a single strike. If she acted rashly and failed, she might not only miss her chance to destroy it, but also wake it from its stunned state—and that would be far worse.

Using the Sacred Tree bracelet was certainly an option, but unless absolutely necessary, Everly still wanted to see if she could escape using her own strength. Perhaps she could save a life-saving trump card this way.

Seizing this rare window of escape, Everly jumped high into the air and frantically gestured for everyone to run toward her.

After signaling, she didn’t bother checking whether the others understood. She grabbed Misha and immediately started running ahead with her.

Fortunately, her classmates weren’t foolish.

Seeing Everly and Misha running toward the forest, their stunned minds quickly realized that this was not the time to stand around in a daze.

So what if they were dizzy? So what if they couldn’t run fast? Even if their bodies were still swaying unsteadily, as long as they could move, they had to run now.

In the face of death, all pain could be endured.

So they forced themselves into motion and ran.

So on the clearing, as if receiving some kind of signal, everyone except the monster still frozen in place suddenly broke into a full sprint toward the forest, driven purely by survival instinct.

One step, two steps, three steps…

Out of the thirteen people, Everly and Misha were already at the very front of the group. And because both of them were fast runners, they quickly pulled ahead. While the others were still stumbling through the withered black vines covering the forest clearing, the two of them had already taken the lead, rushing out of the clearing and into the forest beyond.

Unlike the clearing, which was covered in black vines, the forest floor was extremely slippery. In some places, thick layers of moss blanketed the ground. With every step, their bodies inevitably sank downward. And with every lift of a foot, the mud created a suction-like grip that clung tightly to their boots until, at last, it released with a wet “pop.”

Their pace inevitably became heavier, and their speed unknowingly slowed.

As she ran, Everly suddenly thought of the nightmare from the first night in the wooden cabin.

In that dream, she had also been running through a similar pale-gray forest. The ground beneath her feet had been soft like rotting flesh, and with every step, foul-smelling blood had seeped up from below.

That association made a sudden, inexplicable fear rise in her heart.

For some reason, she had a bad feeling…

The gloomy thought had only just begun to surface when her hearing—gradually returning—caught a faint rustling sound.

It came from all directions. Sometimes loud, sometimes faint. At times it sounded like branches scraping against each other; at others, like fingernails scratching. Everly raised her flashlight and swept it wildly around, quickly locating the source of the noise—

The trees.

At some unknown point, the trees around them had “come alive.”

Even though there was no wind, the forest suddenly began to sway violently. On the pale-gray trunks, countless round swellings began to bulge outward one after another.

It was a horrifying scene dense enough to trigger trypophobia. The swellings on the tree trunks looked like greasy acne on a slovenly teenage boy’s face—clumped together, tightly packed, and multiplying in a way that made the skin crawl. In the blink of an eye, they had already swollen to the size of basketballs.

At first, these growths were still wrapped in gray-white bark. At least initially, they were just that—tree bark. But at some point during their expansion, something changed. The outer layer of skin suddenly gained an unnatural elasticity, almost like human skin.

So the swellings kept expanding. The pale outer membrane grew thinner and thinner, shifting from gray-white to a faint white, and finally becoming semi-transparent.

Beneath the bark was something that looked like a mix between tadpoles and maggots. They writhed wildly inside the bulging sacs, stretching the skin from within. Their movements grew more and more violent, until finally—

With a series of sharp “pop!” sounds, the membranes burst open. Thick, foul-smelling yellowish-white mucus spilled out, and from within the fluid, their true form was finally revealed:

Black tentacles.

A massive number of tentacles erupted from the tree trunks, flailing wildly in the air. The smaller ones were as thin as fingers, while the larger ones were as thick as an adult’s thigh.

The tips of the tentacles, much like those black vines before, were fitted with circular mouths and sharp suction-like barbs. Whenever someone passed by, they struck out from the darkness as if they had eyes.

If a person was unprepared, even the slightest brush against them would strip away a layer of skin.

At that moment, a boy made a fatal mistake in his panic. Losing his sense of direction in the chaos, he crashed headfirst into the trunk of one of the tentacle trees.

“Swish! Swish! Swish swish swish!”

Sensing prey had thrown itself into their grasp, the tentacles on the trunk immediately curled inward in excitement, forming an “embracing” gesture. Layer upon layer, they wrapped around the boy’s upper body completely, engulfing him whole.

“Ahhhhhhh!”

As the barbed tips of the tentacles pierced into his body, the boy let out screams that rose higher and higher in pitch.

Teacher Ted was running at the very back. Seeing a student trapped, he didn’t hesitate for a second. He immediately grabbed his mountaineering axe and bravely charged forward, swinging it down at the tentacles.

“Clang… clang, clang!”

Even though the tentacles were extremely flexible, the sound and sensation when they were struck were surprisingly similar to chopping wood.

Ted was physically strong and had great power. Each swing of his axe carved deep gouges into the surface of the tentacles. Red fluid seeped out from the wounds—its smell and viscosity were indistinguishable from blood, making one inevitably wonder what exactly they were cutting into.

Were these things really trees?

“Teacher, we’ll help you!”

The young university students might have been naïve, but that was precisely why their hearts were pure. Hearing their companion’s cries of pain and their teacher’s heavy chopping sounds, two of them stopped running and turned back with weapons in hand. Together with Ted, they hacked furiously at the bulging mass of tentacles.

Although there were many tentacles, they couldn’t hold out for long against their combined assault. Once the two thickest tentacles were cut off, the smaller ones didn’t even require much effort—so long as they avoided the barbed mouths at the tips, they could simply be snapped off by hand.

Soon, the trapped boy was successfully rescued. Though his clothes were tattered and his body was a mess of torn flesh and blood, making him look miserable and pitiful, he was, at the very least, still alive.

“ROAR—!”

Before anyone could celebrate the boy’s survival, a deafening roar erupted from the clearing behind them.

Everly spared a moment to glance back. In their hasty escape, several flashlights had been dropped in the forest clearing. Thanks to the beams of light still shining, she could see that the goat-hoofed monster had already recovered from the stunned state caused by the flashbang.

Fortunately, the kind of whistling sound that could induce hallucinations earlier seemed to have a cooldown period. The monster did not repeat that trick to delay them with illusions. Otherwise, Everly would not have had a second flashbang to interrupt its “casting.”

After regaining mobility, the goat-hoofed monster opened its mouth wide and roared in fury. Its tentacles whipped wildly through the air like snakes. Its bulky body leaned forward, one hoof stepping ahead while the other braced diagonally behind it, taking on a posture of brute force as it dragged at the massive vines connected to its rear with all its weight.

“Creak… creak creak…”

As it pulled, the giant vines emitted strained groans of protest. Cracks spread across their surface, and the points of connection to the monster were rapidly thinning. At this rate, it looked like the creature could break free at any moment and give chase.

Everly’s pupils contracted sharply. She was just about to warn everyone to run when a series of screams erupted behind her.

“There’s a face on the tree!”

“F**K! What the hell is that thing?!”

She didn’t even need her classmates to explain what was happening. Turning her gaze toward the nearby tentacle tree, Everly instantly understood.

Beneath the bulging clusters of tentacles, a grotesque human face had somehow emerged on the once-bare trunk.

It was a scene that pushed the limits of human imagination.

It was impossible to tell whether a human had fused with the tree, or whether a human had become a tree. Either way, that face was now perfectly embedded into the trunk, completely integrated with it. The boundary where the two met was hard and rough, marked with strange textures—entirely resembling bark—while the center of the face still retained unmistakably human features.

At that moment, the face lifted its wrinkled eyelids. Its pitch-black eyes, lacking any visible whites, stared venomously at Everly and Misha. Saliva dripped from its mouth as it smiled in madness, repeatedly muttering phrases like “Mother of All Things… Black Goat…”

Everly noticed a tattoo on the forehead of the face.

It was a very familiar symbol: a large circle filled with chaotic lines inside, with two smaller circles connected at the edges—identical to the strange sigil they had seen in the White Mist Forest.

From this, she concluded that the face embedded in the tree belonged to a Black Goat cultist.

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