Chapter 303: An Unlucky Vacation (2)
Gary and the chainsaw man hacked away at each other for what seemed like an eternity in the video.
The chainsaw man was incredibly powerful. Both his physical strength and his weapon gave him a clear advantage over Gary, so during the first part of the fight, he was overwhelmingly beating Gary down.
And he was obviously no ordinary human, either.
During Gary’s counterattacks, his machete struck the chainsaw man several times. On one occasion, he even slashed open the man’s abdomen, spilling his intestines and internal organs all over the ground.
Yet despite such horrific injuries, the chainsaw man didn’t so much as grunt.
He simply kicked Gary flying with one powerful blow, bent down, casually scooped up his blood-soaked organs, stuffed them back into his stomach, and resumed fighting as though nothing had happened, chainsaw still roaring in his hands.
At that point, the person recording the video couldn’t help blurting out, “Jesus Christ!” before zooming in even closer to get a better look at the battle below.
After seven or eight minutes of brutal fighting, however, the chainsaw man gradually began to lose the upper hand.
He was certainly formidable, and his regenerative abilities were impressive—but Gary healed even faster.
Whether his arms or legs were severed, or even his skull was split open by the chainsaw, the instant a wound appeared, countless fine, thread-like strands of new flesh would sprout from its edges. They writhed toward one another, knitting the injury back together, and in the blink of an eye, what had been a massive wound would shrink to nothing more than a thin scar.
The chainsaw man, on the other hand, had spent several minutes healing the gash in his abdomen alone. Clearly, he couldn’t match Gary’s legendary ability to survive almost anything.
And so the tide gradually turned.
By the ninth minute of the video, the chainsaw man was visibly faltering.
By the eleventh minute, Gary was laughing heartily as he brought his machete down in a devastating slash, cutting the chainsaw man cleanly in half at the waist.
Blackish-red blood splashed over half of Gary’s body.
Still laughing, he sliced open the chainsaw man’s chest, reached inside, and tore out his still-beating heart. Then he lifted the edge of his white mask just enough to expose his mouth and took a loud, crunching bite out of it as though he were eating an apple.
“Th-This… this isn’t staged, is it?”
Apparently shaken by what they’d accidentally captured, the person filming let the phone tremble in their hands. Then they zoomed in again, focusing tightly on Gary’s head, seemingly trying to determine whether the heart was real.
At that very moment, Gary—still chewing on the heart—suddenly looked up.
His brown eyes shot upward like arrows, locking unerringly onto the person filming from above.
“F**K! %@*%…”
Startled by the sudden eye contact, the cameraperson’s hand jerked violently.
The image spun in a dizzying blur. The video now showed the rooftop of the building rapidly receding into the distance, along with the ominous crimson moon hanging in the night sky.
Smack!
The fall lasted only a few brief seconds.
Just before the phone was about to hit the ground, the image jolted violently—and then came to an abrupt stop in midair.
A moment later, the camera shifted sideways.
The rooftops and the moon disappeared from view, replaced by an enormous close-up of a face.
After all these years, Gary looked exactly as he had when they first met at the campsite: an innocent, youthful baby face, long eyelashes, and a pure, carefree smile. If not for the blood smeared across the corners of his mouth and chin, no one would ever associate such an angelic face with the masked man who had just been gleefully hacking someone apart with a machete.
“Oh… so phones have evolved into something like this now~”
Gary blinked curiously as he turned the phone over in his hands, poking and prodding it from every angle.
When one of his fingers brushed across the camera lens, it left behind a streak of blood that permanently smeared over it, making the already blurry image even dirtier.
After fiddling with it for a while, Gary managed to switch the camera around so that it faced him again. Waving cheerfully at the viewers on the other side of the screen, he flashed a bright, utterly carefree smile.
“Hi~ This should be recording me now, right? I heard there’s something called the Internet these days that’s really amazing. I wonder if this will actually reach you…”
He grinned even wider.
“Anyway, Everly… I’m back.”
“I’ll be coming to find you now~”
After saying that, he gave the camera a playful wink.
The next second, the video ended abruptly, and the screen went black.
“…”
Everly sat in silence for a moment before exiting full-screen mode and opening the video’s information page.
The clip had been uploaded to YouTube the day before. It included a location tag identifying it as the Linhe District of Yonah City. As for the uploader, he was an obscure street-racing teenager with barely any online following.
Everly tapped on his profile.
His previous uploads were almost all videos of modified motorcycles, street racing, and flashy riding stunts. Since his skills were fairly average, he had accumulated very few subscribers.
The video he had posted the previous night, however, had become by far the most popular upload on his channel.
Perhaps worried that the graphic violence would get the video taken down, the uploader had tagged it as things like special effects makeup and performance footage. But in the description, he had written:
“Late at night I heard something strange. I looked out the window and accidentally captured something absolutely terrifying… Warning: This isn’t staged. Everything in this video really happened!”
Of course, people on the internet weren’t about to take his word for it.
Not long after the video was posted, viewers began debating whether it was real.
One group insisted the video was obviously fake. After all, how could someone keep fighting after having their stomach sliced open?
Another group went through the footage frame by frame with a figurative magnifying glass. When they finished their analysis, they practically screamed that the footage had to be genuine—that all the flying blood, intestines, and gore were real.
The two camps argued back and forth without convincing each other.
So they started calling in more people.
As more and more viewers joined the effort to analyze the video, its popularity steadily snowballed. After fermenting across the internet for a full day and night, it had gone modestly viral, even spawning several trending hashtags, including #RealFootageOrSpecialEffects? and #EverlyImBack.
It was that suspicious hashtag that had caught the attention of Misha, an avid internet surfer, prompting her to click on the video out of curiosity.
Back in the summer after graduating from high school, Misha had suffered more than enough at Gary’s hands during the Red Oak Camp incident. She would recognize him even if he were reduced to ashes.
And so, seventeen hours and thirty-eight minutes after it was uploaded, the message Gary had intended to deliver through the video finally reached Everly—after taking a rather roundabout route through Misha.
“There’s not much information in the video. I’ve already asked Orff to look into it.”
Seeing Everly tense up as though facing a formidable enemy, Misha reached over and gently patted her on the shoulder.
Standing beside her, Orff adjusted his glasses.
“I’ll head back and start investigating right away.”
“Thanks.”
Everly smiled at the two of them before rubbing her aching temples.
Misha and Orff didn’t know this, but Everly herself had seen the chainsaw man before—in her previous life.
People nowadays loved making rankings and “Top Ten” lists, and the horror genre was no exception.
Gary, for example, had been included in a famous online list titled “The Four Greatest Slasher Killers in American Horror Film History.”
Coincidentally, the chainsaw man was another member of that same quartet.
He was known as Claytor, the Heart-Stealer.
If Everly remembered the movie recap videos she’d watched correctly, Claytor had an equally extraordinary background. He was supposedly the product of generations of inbreeding within a deeply disturbed family.
The family had originated from a cult that fanatically worshipped a certain demon. According to legend, their ancestor had been a half-human child born from the union of that demon and a human.
To preserve the purity of their bloodline, the family almost never married outsiders.
Generation after generation of inbreeding did indeed make their so-called demonic bloodline “purer”—but it also left family members increasingly deformed and grotesque in appearance.
Because of his looks, Claytor had been relentlessly b*llied by children from nearby villages.
The horrific burns covering his face were the result of one particularly brutal act of b*llying.
After being disfigured, Claytor never left the secluded mountain home where his family lived.
His past experiences filled him with an intense hatred for humanity. As he grew older, his demonic blood caused his body to swell into the hulking mass of muscle seen in the video. Cruel, bloodthirsty, and violently aggressive, he viewed anyone who entered his territory as prey.
Before long, people began disappearing with alarming frequency in the forests surrounding the Claytor family’s home…
As one of the Four Great Slasher Killers, Claytor naturally had his own film franchise.
The plots of the first two movies were fairly formulaic. A group of unsuspecting people would wander into the forest where Claytor lived, only to be hunted down one by one until everyone was dead. The appeal of the films lay almost entirely in their graphic gore and gratuitous fan service, with little substance beyond that.
One interesting detail was that, when production first began, the studio had simply wanted to cash in on the booming trend of B-grade slasher films. They only intended to make a quick profit with a couple of movies.
So at the end of the second film, the director made a decisive choice and had “justice” arrive in the form of a massive mudslide that came crashing down and killed the irredeemably evil Claytor once and for all.
No one expected the first two movies to become such huge box-office successes.
Fans flooded the studio with letters demanding a third installment.
The producers weren’t about to turn down easy money, so they ordered the director to keep the series going.
But there was one problem.
Claytor had already died at the end of the previous movie.
How were they supposed to continue the franchise?
The director and screenwriters racked their brains for a solution. After endless brainstorming and hair-pulling, inspiration finally struck.
They would simply add new lore.
The “demonic bloodline” mentioned earlier had originally been nothing more than a trendy bit of background flavor thrown into the script.
By the third film, however, the director and writers finally found a use for it.
According to the new lore devised by the director and screenwriters, Claytor hadn’t truly died.
A fragment of his consciousness had fused with a mass of mud carried away by the landslide. Later, someone dug up part of that mud and crafted it into a ceramic flute. From then on, whenever anyone played the flute, Claytor would descend upon the world. He would not disappear until every person who had heard its haunting melody was dead.
That was the premise of the third film.
The franchise went on to produce several more sequels, thanks to overwhelming fan enthusiasm. As the number of films increased, audiences gradually became harder to impress. To keep each installment feeling fresh, the director and writers kept piling more and more abilities and backstory onto Claytor.
By the seventh movie, he had evolved into an overwhelmingly powerful monster burdened with an absurd amount of lore.
Among all his abilities, the one fans loved most was his power to make people see what they feared most.
“See” wasn’t quite the right word.
Claytor’s ability actually manifested a person’s deepest fears into reality.
He would use that power to torment anyone who had heard the flute’s song, driving them to the brink of despair with their own nightmares before personally appearing to claim their lives.
That premise gave rise to some of the franchise’s most infamous scenes: bathing in a pool of blood, leeches crawling into every bodily orifice, and a pregnant woman’s stomach being ripped open from the inside by the monster growing within her.
Thanks to those unforgettable horror sequences, the series rebounded from its slump and reached new heights of popularity.
Of course, more powers didn’t always make for a better villain.
As Claytor became increasingly overpowered, the gap between him and his victims grew so extreme that the visceral thrill of watching a slasher film began to disappear.
So after Claytor had mass*cred ordinary civilians, SWAT officers, Navy SEALs, and even astronauts in space, the director finally decided to revive the struggling franchise by borrowing another intellectual property owned by the same studio.
That franchise was Blood Camp.
The result—a crossover combining the two iconic slasher series—was the legendary (though not in a good way), spectacularly awful cinematic disaster:
Gary vs. Claytor.
**TN
Oh, I thought there would be a Freddy VS Jason version. Who is this Claytor? Is he from Texas Chainsaw?