Chương 55: True Blood

The heavy, rhythmic silence of the Whispering Weald was suddenly shattered by a sound that made my skin crawl. It was a raw, jagged scream that tore through the purple haze, dripping with the kind of genuine agony and sheer, unadulterated terror that suggested someone was currently having a very bad day. It echoed off the rotting trunks, sounding like it had been squeezed out of a person who had just realized that being a hero involves a lot more sharp edges than the brochure mentioned.

I didn't even have to think about it. With a practiced flick of my wrists, I summoned my Training Prototype revolver into one hand and my Practice Piece flintlock into the other. The weight of the iron felt grounding, even if I was currently pointing them at a wall of toxic fog. Beside me, the rest of our traveling circus was already shifting into battle mode. June flourished her Scuffed Juniper scepter with a sharp, regal snap of her wrist, looking like she was about to conduct a symphony of destruction.

Her Polished Pebble began to hover lazily around her head, wobbling through the thick air with the grace of a drunken bumblebee, though she wore an expression that suggested she was about to personally evict the forest from its own soil. Fiona gripped her Gnarled Birch Branch, her eyes widening with a fierce, Highland spark of protective energy. Almost instantly, the Sproutling's Grip root wrapped around her hand began to pulse with a soft, golden luminescence, casting a warm glow against the sickly violet shadows.

Then there was Aiko. With a low, haunting whistle that sent a shiver down my spine, she manifested that massive black-iron greatsword. The Spine-Breaker's Reaver looked like it was hungry for a fight, but its wielder looked like she was preparing for her own funeral. She had her bladed gauntlets strapped on tight, her knuckles white as she gripped the wolf-hide hilt, but her entire body was vibrating with a level of frantic energy that made me worried she might just vibrate into another dimension.

She started muttering to herself, her words coming out in a fast, breathless stream of panicked Japanese honorifics and existential dread. Her voice was so low and shaky I had to strain just to catch the terrifying highlights of her internal monologue.

"This is really it... the end has finally arrived for Aiko-san," she whimpered, her eyes darting toward the source of the scream as if she expected a giant mouth to swallow her whole.

"Aiko-san is finally going to engage in real, terrifying combat. I... I can only hope that when the monster devours me, it is at least efficient about it. Please, let my passing be quick and entirely painless." I furrowed my eyebrows, glancing from the massive, soul-crushing sword in her hands to the girl who was currently negotiating the terms of her own demise. Dimitri's head snapped toward the sound with the intensity of a bloodhound that had just caught the scent of a very righteous cause.

He didn't hesitate for a single second, his face hardening into a mask of pure, unshakeable heroism that made me feel like I was standing next to a living propaganda poster. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"A fellow soul is weeping in the darkness, crying out for the strength we carry in our hearts!" he rumbled, his thick Russian accent booming through the trees like a church bell.

"We cannot allow this melody of despair to continue! My friends, let us sprint toward the light of duty!" Without waiting for a consensus or even checking if we had our shoelaces tied, he took off. He charged into the thicket with his dented iron pot rattling on his head, and since he was the guy with the only shield in the group, we had no choice but to scramble after him like a frantic tail on a very muscular kite.

We burst through a final wall of strangling vines and found ourselves on the outskirts of what used to be a village. I say used to be, because the place currently looked like it had been swallowed and partially digested by a giant, sickly grape. Everything was coated in that pulsating purple goo, the slime dripping off the thatched roofs and melting the wooden fences into piles of violet sludge. It was a literal ghost town, only the ghosts were replaced by a thick, suffocating stench of rot.

"Help... please... someone..." A raspy, wet voice crawled through the air. I looked down and saw an old man, his clothes tattered and soaked in the corruption, desperately dragging his body across the stained soil toward us. His fingers were digging into the mud, leaving shallow trenches as he reached out a trembling, dirt-stained hand, his eyes wide with a flicker of hope that we were actually his salvation.

I started to move forward, my hand reaching out to grab him, but the universe decided that a happy ending was definitely not on the menu today. Before any of us could even blink jagged root burst out of the earth like a spear launched from the depths of hell. It moved with a sickening, liquid speed, punching a clean, wet hole right through the center of the old man's skull. There was no struggle, no dramatic final words, just the wet thud of wood meeting bone.

His hand went limp in the dirt, but his glazed eyes remained locked on us, frozen in a final, horrifying stare as the life drained out of him in a heartbeat. Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the root retreated. It slithered back into the shadows of the towering trees with a raspy, sliding sound, vanishing into the purple haze as if it were never there at all, leaving us standing in the silence of a fresh grave.

I stood there, completely paralyzed, feeling like my soul had just tripped over its own feet and fallen out of my body. Seeing a human being get turned into a kebab with that much anatomical precision was not exactly on the list of things I'd prepared for when I woke up this morning.

My heart was thumping against my ribs with the frantic rhythm of a trapped bird, screaming at me to turn around and sprint back to the first floor until my lungs exploded, but my legs had apparently decided to resign from their duties and were currently acting like two very heavy, very useless pillars of salt. I forced my gaze to drift past the poor guy who'd just been ventilated, and the view didn't get any better. The village square was a literal graveyard of gruesome endings.

I could see more shapes sprawled out in the purple sludge, some twisted into angles that were physically impossible for a living person, and others so far gone they looked more like piles of laundry than former villagers. It was a brutal, high-definition reminder that this wasn't some cozy theme park with safety railings. This was the dungeon finally taking off the kid gloves and showing us exactly what it does to people who don't pay attention.

The sheer, staggering danger of the place was starting to sink in, cold and heavy like a lead weight in my gut.

"Brace your hearts and steady your blades, my wonderful companions! The enemy reveals its cruelty so that we may reveal our courage!" Dimitri's voice boomed out like a thunderclap, his thick Russian accent cutting through the fog of my terror and dragging me back to reality. It was like a bucket of ice water to the face. I blinked, my fingers twitching against the grips of my guns as I desperately tried to reboot my brain and recover from the soul-crushing shock of the last ten seconds.

I risked a glance over at June, expecting her to be delivering some biting remark about the poor aesthetic of the massacre, but what I saw was a complete system failure. Her regal, high-society mask had shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. She was standing there with her mouth hanging open in a silent, horrified gasp, her face a ghostly shade of white that made her look like she was about to join the villagers on the ground.

Her entire frame was shivering with a violence that suggested her royal nerves were currently being electrocuted.