Hunter

"Captain Huang... should we retreat?" a Peacekeeper asked cautiously, his voice kept extremely low, as if afraid of alerting the "Bloody Mary" in the distance. "The target has been confirmed as an Anomaly, and all the missing people are dead... there's no point in us staying here..."

"Give me the chainsaw," Captain Huang said, reaching out to the Peacekeeper holding it.

"Captain, what are you doing?" the Peacekeeper who had just spoken asked urgently. "That's an Anomaly!"

"So what if it's an Anomaly? It was burned to ashes nineteen years ago... we can burn it again now!" Captain Huang said fiercely. He removed the gasoline tank from the chainsaw, unscrewed the cap, and poured all the gasoline into his own canteen.

"Does Bloody Mary really fear fire?" Sun Hang took two steps back, standing next to 0401, and asked in a low voice.

"How... how would I know?" 0401 panted. "I wasn't even born nineteen years ago..."

"The 'Bloody Mary' from nineteen years ago feared fire, but this one now... it's hard to say," 0398 shook her head. "Do you remember what that guy in the white coat said during the onboarding training?"

For Anomalies, past experiences may not be useful... not only that, but sometimes, experience can backfire and kill you.

But Captain Huang clearly hadn't received Investigator onboarding training... even if he had, in his current state, he had long forgotten that advice.

When a person's consciousness is completely dominated by anger and fear, their ability to think is essentially gone.

The brain subconsciously delegates judgment to instinct and experience, while simultaneously releasing a large amount of adrenaline, squeezing out the body's hidden energy.

Captain Huang began to accelerate, and in just two seconds, he rushed from the bottom of the stairs to the edge of the blood pool.

He kicked out sideways, twisting his body, and while canceling out his forward momentum, he transferred the remaining kinetic energy through the muscles of his abdomen and back to his right arm—

The canteen filled with gasoline was thrown with great force, tracing a nearly straight trajectory through the air before hitting the suspended intern Peacekeeper heavily.

The moment he threw the canteen, Captain Huang grabbed the assault rifle slung on his back, released the safety, and raised the muzzle—instantly, the continuous sound of gunfire in automatic mode echoed throughout the hall.

The gasoline-filled canteen exploded, and the blast of fire immediately engulfed the bodies of "Bloody Mary" and the intern Peacekeeper. The raging flames wrapped around the bloated corpse and the thorns entwined around it.

The pale body crackled under the scorching flames, but the vibrant demonic flower was not destroyed. Instead, it unfurled its petals completely.

"Die, monster!" Captain Huang roared, having lost all reason. Even though the magazine was empty, he kept his finger on the trigger, his eyes fixed on the unharmed Bloody Mary in the flames.

The next second, dozens of thorns emerged from the blood pool, instantly wrapping around Captain Huang and dragging him into the pool.

Immediately after, a new bud emerged from the intern Peacekeeper's eye socket, and the dislodged eyeball fell into the blood pool with a "plop."

The bud trembled a few times, and its tightly closed petals slowly opened, immediately intensifying the bloody smell in the hall.

The carbonized skin began to crack and peel, and countless buds sprouted from the flesh, then bloomed wildly.

For the first time, Sun Hang felt that the phrase "a riot of flowers" could be used to describe a corpse charred to a crisp.

The bloody smell in the hall had become overwhelmingly strong. For others, it felt like they were inhaling thick blood plasma instead of air... but for Sun Hang, that intensely sweet fragrance had completely overwhelmed the bloody smell. An indescribable hunger gnawed at him, making him want to devour the newly formed flower buds immediately.

Sun Hang's remaining sanity told him this was abnormal, but that sliver of reason was quickly drowned out by the overwhelming appetite.

The Peacekeepers turned and fled, discarding their heavy equipment as they desperately ran towards the passage. As for 0401 and 0398, they had already retreated into the passage after noticing the flames were ineffective against Bloody Mary, and were now running into the basement room with the Countess's portrait.

More thorns crawled out of the blood pool, covering a distance of more than twenty meters in mere moments. They wrapped around the ankle of the slowest-running Peacekeeper and dragged him into the blood pool amidst his screams.

The Peacekeeper's screams vanished the moment the blood submerged his head. A few seconds later, a mangled skeleton slowly floated to the surface from where he had sunk.

From an outsider's perspective, it looked as if the blood pool was filled with aqua regia, not blood plasma, instantly dissolving the Peacekeeper's flesh and blood. But in reality, after being dragged into the blood pool, the Peacekeeper's flesh and blood had already been devoured by the Bloody Mary's roots lurking at the bottom of the pool.

Bloody Mary's thorns had spread throughout the entire hall, except for the area around Sun Hang, which remained a clear space about three meters in radius—just like the Blood Mist earlier, these thorns deliberately avoided him, as if afraid of contact.

With every step Sun Hang took forward, the thorns in front of him retreated the same distance, which annoyed him.

The intense hunger drove him step by step towards the blood pool. Just as he was about to reach the edge, a loud noise came from above. A graceful figure broke through the ceiling of the basement and landed heavily beside the stairs.

Sun Hang looked back. It was a tall woman, over 1.8 meters tall. Her clothes were tattered from breaking through the basement, with only a few scraps of fabric clinging to her.

In stark contrast to the rags was the woman's fair, smooth, and undamaged skin.

"Target confirmed, Serial Number D37, 'Bloody Mary'," the woman muttered to herself. "Initiating extermination mission."

As soon as she spoke, countless black scales emerged from beneath her skin, instantly enveloping her perfect body.

Sharp black bone spurs protruded from her knees and elbows. At the position of her shoulder blades, a pair of folded, slender limbs broke through the surface of her skin and unfolded.

Between the two limbs was a flexible wing membrane, covered on its surface with fine scales that had a metallic sheen. These scales rubbed against each other, producing a grating metallic sound that made one's teeth ache.

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