Hunter

"Captain Huang... shouldn't we retreat?" a Peacekeeper asked cautiously, keeping his voice extremely low, as if afraid of alarming Bloody Mary in the distance. "We've confirmed that the target is an anomalous entity, and all the missing people are already dead... There's no point in staying here any longer..."

"Give me the chainsaw." Captain Huang held out a hand to the Peacekeeper carrying it.

"Captain Huang, what are you planning to do?" the Peacekeeper who had just spoken asked urgently. "That thing is an anomalous entity!"

"So what if it's an anomalous entity? We burned this thing to ashes nineteen years ago... we can burn it again now!" Captain Huang snarled. He yanked off the gasoline canister attached to the chainsaw, unscrewed the cap, and poured all the fuel into the water bottle he carried with him.

"Is Bloody Mary really afraid of fire?" Sun Hang took two steps back, moving beside 0401 as he asked quietly.

"How the hell would I know?" 0401 said between ragged breaths. "I wasn't even born nineteen years ago..."

"Bloody Mary back then was afraid of fire, but this one... hard to say." 0398 shook her head. "Do you remember what that guy in the white coat said during orientation?"

When dealing with anomalous entities, past experience was not always useful... Worse still, sometimes experience could get you killed.

But Captain Huang clearly had never attended investigator orientation... Even if he had, in his current state, he had long since forgotten those words completely.

When a person's consciousness was utterly dominated by rage and fear, there was barely any capacity for thought left.

The brain instinctively handed judgment over to instinct and experience, while flooding the body with adrenaline and squeezing out its hidden reserves of energy.

Captain Huang began to accelerate. In just two seconds, he charged from the bottom of the stairs to the edge of the blood pool.

He planted one foot sideways and twisted his body. As he canceled out the momentum of his charge, he transferred the remaining kinetic energy through the muscles of his waist, abdomen, and back, all the way into his right arm—

The gasoline-filled water bottle flew from his hand, tracing an almost perfectly straight line through the air before smashing heavily into the suspended trainee Peacekeeper.

The instant he threw the bottle, Captain Huang had already grabbed the assault rifle slung across his back, released the safety, and raised the muzzle—then, in an instant, the nonstop roar of fully automatic gunfire filled the entire hall.

The gasoline-filled bottle exploded at once. The blast and flames swallowed both Bloody Mary and the trainee Peacekeeper, and the raging fire enveloped the bloated body and the thorns wrapped around it.

The pale body crackled under the licking flames, but the vivid demonic flower was not burned away. Instead, it spread its petals wide.

"Die, monster!" Captain Huang roared. He had completely lost his mind—even after the magazine had run dry, he kept his finger clamped on the trigger, glaring furiously at Bloody Mary, which remained unscathed amid the flames.

The next second, dozens of thorns shot out from the blood pool, instantly coiled around Captain Huang, and dragged him into the pool.

Then, a new flower bud emerged from the trainee Peacekeeper's eye socket. The dislodged eyeball fell into the blood pool with a plop.

The bud trembled a few times, and its tightly closed petals slowly opened. At once, the stench of blood in the hall grew even stronger.

The charred skin began to crack and peel away. Countless flower buds sprouted from the flesh and blood, then bloomed wildly.

For the first time, Sun Hang felt that the phrase "a riot of blossoms" could actually be used to describe a corpse burned into charcoal.

The stench of blood in the hall had become overwhelming. To everyone else, what entered their nostrils no longer seemed like air, but thick blood plasma... Yet for Sun Hang, that intense sweet fragrance had completely drowned out the smell of blood. An indescribable hunger clawed at his heart, making him desperately want to swallow those newly sprouted buds whole.

The remnants of Sun Hang's reason told him that something was terribly wrong, but that sliver of sanity was quickly drowned beneath the overwhelming tide of appetite.

The Peacekeepers turned and began to flee. They threw away their heavy equipment and sprinted desperately toward the passage. As for 0401 and 0398, the two of them had already retreated into the passage as soon as they realized that fire was useless against Bloody Mary. By now, they had run into the basement with the Countess's portrait.

More thorns crawled out of the blood pool. In only a few breaths, they crossed more than twenty meters, wrapped around the ankle of the slowest Peacekeeper, and dragged him into the blood pool amid his screams.

The Peacekeeper's scream vanished the moment the blood plasma covered his head. A few seconds later, a mangled skeleton slowly floated up from where he had sunk.

From an outsider's perspective, the blood pool seemed to contain not blood plasma, but aqua regia, dissolving the Peacekeeper's flesh in the blink of an eye. In reality, after he was dragged into the pool, Bloody Mary's roots lurking at the bottom had already devoured all the flesh from his body.

Bloody Mary's thorns had spread throughout the entire hall, except for a blank area roughly three meters in radius around where Sun Hang stood—just like the Blood Mist before, these thorns were deliberately avoiding him, as though afraid of touching him.

Every time Sun Hang took a step forward, the thorns directly ahead retreated by the same distance. It irritated him.

Driven by the intense hunger, he walked step by step toward the blood pool. Just as he was about to reach its edge, a tremendous crash came from overhead. A graceful figure punched through the basement ceiling and slammed down beside the stairs.

Sun Hang turned to look. She was a tall woman over six feet in height. Her clothes had been shredded beyond recognition as she smashed through the basement, leaving only a few strips of cloth barely hanging from her body.

In stark contrast to those rags was the woman's pale, smooth, completely uninjured skin.

"Target confirmed. Serial Number D37, Bloody Mary," the woman muttered to herself. "Commencing elimination operation."

As soon as she finished speaking, countless pitch-black scales burst out from beneath her skin. In the blink of an eye, they encased that perfect body.

Sharp black bone spikes emerged from her knees and elbows. From where her shoulder blades had been, a pair of long folded limbs broke through the surface of her body and unfurled.

Elastic wing membranes connected the two limbs. Their surfaces were covered in a layer of fine scales with a metallic sheen, and as the scales rubbed against one another, they produced a series of teeth-grating metallic scrapes.

In just a few seconds, the woman who had fallen from the sky had transformed into a winged humanoid monster.