"Mr. Huang... should we retreat?" A sheriff asked cautiously, his voice so low it seemed he feared alarming the distant "Bloody Mary," "The target has been confirmed anomalous, all the missing people are already dead... there's no point in us staying here..."
"Give me the chainsaw." Mr. Huang reached out to the sheriff holding the chainsaw.
"Mr. Huang, what are you planning to do?" The sheriff who had just spoken exclaimed, "That's a monster!"
"So what if it's a monster? If we could reduce it to ashes nineteen years ago, we can burn it again today!" Mr. Huang said fiercely, tearing off the gasoline canister from the chainsaw and unscrewing the lid to pour all the gasoline into a canteen he carried with him.
"Is Bloody Mary really afraid of fire?" Sun Hang stepped back two steps, standing next to 0401, and asked quietly.
"How... how would I know?" 0401 panted, "Nineteen years ago I wasn't even born yet..."
"Nineteen years ago, the 'Bloody Mary' was afraid of fire, but this one, it's hard to say now," 0398 shook his head, "Do you remember what the guy in the white coat said during our orientation?"
For anomalous entities, past experiences may not necessarily be useful... In fact, sometimes, relying on experience might even backfire and get you killed.
But obviously, Mr. Huang hadn't undergone the training that investigators did... Even if he had, in his current state, he would have forgotten it completely by now.
When a person's consciousness is completely dominated by anger and fear, there's hardly any capacity left for rational thinking.
The brain subconsciously hands judgment over to instinct and experience, while triggering a massive release of adrenaline, extracting the hidden energy from the body.
Mr. Huang started to accelerate, taking only two seconds to rush from the foot of the stairs to the side of the blood pool.
He turned his body mid-stride, nullifying his forward momentum, transmitting the remaining kinetic energy through his waist and back muscles to his right arm—
The gasoline-filled canteen was hurled with force, cutting a near-straight trajectory through the air, hitting the suspended intern sheriff heavily.
At the moment he threw the canteen, Mr. Huang had already swung up the assault rifle slung over his back, flipped off the safety, and lifted the muzzle—in an instant, the continuous gunshots in full-auto mode echoed throughout the hall.
The canteen filled with gasoline was shot, exploding in flames that engulfed "Bloody Mary" and the intern sheriff's body, enveloping that bloated mass along with the thorns entwined upon it in fiercely burning fire.
The pale body crackled under the fiery tongues, but the vivid demonic flower not only remained unburnt but fully unfurled its petals.
"Die, monster!" Mr. Huang shouted hoarsely, having already lost his reason—even though the bullets in the magazine were spent, he kept clutching the trigger, glaring furiously at the unscathed Bloody Mary amidst the flames.
The next second, dozens of thorns shot out from the blood pool, instantly ensnaring Mr. Huang and dragging him into the pool.
Subsequently, a new flower bud burst forth from the intern sheriff's eye socket, dislodging the eyeball which dropped into the blood pool with a "splash."
The bud quivered a few times, its tightly closed petals slowly opening, immediately intensifying the bloody scent in the hall.
The carbonized skin began to crack and peel off, countless flower buds budding from the flesh, and then blooming madly.
For the first time, Sun Hang felt that the phrase "a riot of flowers" could describe a corpse charred to cinders.
The bloody scent in the hall had thickened to an intolerable degree, and to others, the air seemed less breathable than syrupy blood plasma... But to Sun Hang, the intense sweet fragrance had completely overwhelmed the bloody smell, and an indescribable hunger clawed at him like a torment, making him yearn to instantly devour those nascent flower buds.
The sliver of sanity left in Sun Hang told him this was very unusual, but this morsel of reason was quickly submerged under the avalanche of hunger.
The sheriffs turned and began to flee, discarding their heavy gear and running desperately for the passageway. As for 0401 and 0398, they had retreated into the passage upon realizing the fire's ineffectiveness against Bloody Mary and had already dashed into the basement adorned with the Countess's portrait.
More thorns crawled out from the blood pool, spanning over twenty meters in mere breaths to ensnare the slowest sheriff's ankle, pulling him screaming into the pool.
The sheriff's screams were cut off the moment the blood plasma swallowed his head, and within seconds, a fragmented skeleton slowly floated up from where he sank.
From the onlookers' perspective, the blood pool seemed filled with aqua regia instead of blood plasma, dissolving the sheriff's flesh in an instant. In reality, his flesh was devoured by the Bloody Mary's roots entrenched at the pool's bottom after he was dragged in.
Bloody Mary's thorns now spread throughout the entire hall, with the sole exception of a three-meter radius around where Sun Hang stood—a clearing that, like the previous blood mist, consciously avoided him, seemingly afraid to make contact.
With each step Sun Hang took, the thorns ahead would retreat accordingly, which irked him slightly.
The overwhelming hunger spurred him step by step toward the blood pool, and just as he was about to reach its edge, a loud crash sounded from above. A graceful figure burst through the basement vault, crashing heavily beside the steps.
Sun Hang turned back to see a tall woman over 1.8 meters in height, her clothes tattered almost beyond recognition from bursting through the basement ceiling, leaving only a few strips of fabric hanging onto her.
In stark contrast to the tattered rags was her unblemished, smooth, and flawless skin.
"Target confirmed, sequence number D37, 'Bloody Mary.'" The woman muttered to herself, "Commencing elimination mission."
As soon as the words fell, numerous black scales erupted from beneath her skin, enveloping that perfect figure in an instant.
Sleek black spikes protruded from her knees and elbows, and from where her shoulder blades were, a pair of folded, elongated appendages broke through the surface, stretching outward.
Elastic wing membranes connected the segments, with a layer of metallic sheen tiny scales covering the membranes' surface, which scraped against each other, producing a string of teeth-gritting metallic screeches.
In just a few seconds, the woman who descended from the sky had transformed into a winged humanoid monster.