Chương 200: Reborn as the Dragon — Chapter 200 - The Terrifying Maze (2)

Outside the maze, the air was still dry. The moment they crossed the threshold, that changed. Cold dampness hit them like a wall, seeping through cloth and skin alike. A faint smell of rot hung in the air, the kind that only built up over years, maybe decades. It made Freya even more certain: this maze had been here a long, long time. Torchlight caught the obsidian walls on either side, flames dancing in the polished black stone. Otherwise, everything was silent.

Only the shuffle of footsteps, echoing down the corridor. They turned a corner. A gnoll statue loomed directly in their path, fanged maw frozen mid-snarl, red crystals glittering in its empty eye sockets. Freya didn't see it until she was nearly on top of it. She shrieked and almost hurled her staff across the room. The torchlight shifted, light and shadow playing across the statue's face. That gaping maw looked half like a scream, half like a grin. Spine-chilling.

"What is wrong with people! Who puts a statue in the middle of the corridor? Damn them!" Freya steadied herself, raised her hand, and fired a Wind Blade at the statue's neck. The spell swept clean through it, and left nothing but a pale scratch across the stone. The statue didn't move. Didn't crack. It just stood there, as if mocking her.

"Damn it!" She kicked it anyway. One hard kick. Then she stopped, because if she kept throwing a tantrum at a chunk of rock, she'd never hear the end of it.

"Keep moving." She snorted, stepped around the statue, and grabbed Kayal's chain on the way past, hauling him off the ground.

"Stupid dog. Scout ahead. No sense whatsoever — useless!" Kayal gritted his teeth. He kept his expression carefully submissive, brushed the dirt from his hands, and moved to the front without a word. They passed more gnoll statues after that. Several of them. Gradually, the group settled, terrifying or not, once you'd seen enough of the things, the horror wore off.

"Why does it feel like we're being watched?" Kayal frowned, slowing his pace. The feeling had been there since they entered, low and formless, but it had grown sharper with every turn. And whatever it was, it felt close. He stopped. Looked around. His gaze landed on a platform tucked against one wall. Square, maybe two square meters, roughly half a man's height. Nothing on it. No markings that stood out. Strange. It was a wrong feeling he couldn't name.

The walls nearby were carved with murals, monsters tearing apart humans, hunting villages, feasting. Brutal images. But the wrongness wasn't coming from those. It was coming from something else. Pain flared through his backside. Freya's voice cracked against his ears.

"Hey! What are you stopping for? Keep scouting!" He didn't need to look. He lowered his head and kept walking. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. Nothing could be worse than right now. What he needed was an opportunity, a moment alone with Freya. He just had to wait for it. The group pressed deeper into the maze. At the very back, a player passed the platform. A pair of eyes blazing with red light snapped open.

The gnoll had been standing there the entire time, locked in a state of perfect concealment. Now it stepped out of nothing. Silent as smoke, it drifted up behind the last player in line, and one enormous black-furred claw came down lightly on the man's shoulder.

"Huh?" The player turned on instinct. He saw a gaping maw. Crunch,...

"Light, I'm starving. Didn't you have half a turkey left from this morning? Come on, help a brother out."

"Light?" He called a few more times. No answer. The player turned around, and found that his buddy Light had simply ceased to exist. Gone. No sound, no warning, no trace. His chest clenched. He pulled up the team interface. Light's portrait was already drained to black and white, the color bleeding out fast. In a few more seconds, the system would kick him automatically. Standard mechanic: when a teammate died too far from the group, they got booted from the party and lost private chat privileges. Light was dead.

He died without making a single sound. The player swept his gaze around. The rest of the group was already moving away, growing smaller down the corridor. On either side: cold stone walls and a darkness that felt like it was waiting for something. A cold draft moved through the air. Something warm dripped onto the back of his neck. He stood very still. What was that? Trembling, he turned around. A gnoll face stared back at him from inches away.

The creature was slightly hunched, its gray-maned head nearly pressed against his, scarlet eyes watching him without expression. Its maw hung open just enough, wide enough to swallow a basketball whole, blood still wet on its fangs. The stench hit him all at once, hot and rotten. That warmth on his neck had been its saliva. Cold shot up his spine and straight into his skull. His legs buckled. The gnoll caught him before he hit the ground. One massive furry hand clamped over his mouth.

The darkness swallowed them both. Crunch,......

"Does it seem like there are fewer people than before?" Freya frowned. She'd been following behind Kayal without paying much attention to the others. But the background chatter around her had thinned considerably, and the players nearby had gone tense, eyes cutting to every shadow, hands close to their weapons.

"What's wrong with all of you?" She yanked the chain. Up ahead, Kayal choked mid-step and stopped, hand going to his throat.

"People are dying," said a player near her. His face didn't look good.

"We started with over five hundred. Somewhere along the way, we lost seventy-eight. The problem is, we didn't see anything. No fighting, no screaming. They just... disappeared." Freya sneered. Her contempt for these people had long since bottomed out. Lowborn are lowborn. They were walking through a dungeon packed with threats and couldn't manage a shred of vigilance. One-fifth of their number was gone, and not a single one of them had noticed.

"Look! Over here — it's Paris!" A shout from somewhere ahead. The group converged on the source and found a headless corpse lying alone on the ground. In the cold air of the maze, the blood still steamed where it had sprayed from the neck. Paris had been killed recently. Very recently.

"The break in the neck is ragged. That's not a blade — it's a bite." The player who spoke was calm, his voice measured. Before the game, he'd worked in forensics. He crouched over the body and didn't look away.

"Whatever bit him took the entire head off in one strike. Based on the wound, the creature is at least two meters tall. Probably more."

"Hm... There's gray fur on his shoulder." He looked up.

"Miss Freya, can you identify it?" Freya pressed her lips together and took the strand of fur carefully from the player's hand. She turned it between her fingers. Dry, stiff, almost like steel wire. The tip was fine and pale. The root end was thick, darkening to near-black. She ran it against her knowledge systematically, comparing texture and coloration to the bestiary she kept in memory.

"This looks like gnoll fur. But gnolls can't kill silently, that's not what they do. The fact that these creatures haven't attacked directly means our numbers concern them." She paused, thinking it through.

"Which suggests they aren't especially powerful in a straight fight. They're ambush hunters. Patient ones." She turned the fur over one more time.

"If I had to guess... I'd say Ghost Wolves. Some variant." She wasn't entirely sure. Ghost Wolves ran small. Biting a man's head off in a single strike was difficult for their size, she knew that. But she couldn't think of any other wolf-form creature capable of hunting in total silence, and that narrowed the list considerably. ➤ Next: Terrifying Maze (3)