Chapter 324: Into the Forest (4)
“Uwah!”
The moment his spear struck the IT worker, the tribesman who had thrown it let out an excited shriek. Dancing with delight, he hurried over to the man’s body.
Grabbing the spear embedded in the IT worker’s chest, he yanked it free. Then he dropped to his knees and, like a blood-drinking beast, buried his face in the gaping wound. Oblivious to everyone around him, he greedily gulped down the hot blood gushing from the injury, smearing the overflowing blood across his face and body.
“Oh no! That savage… h-he… he killed Gilbert!”
The Black fitness coach, hiding behind the same tree as Everly, couldn’t help crying out in horror.
There was no time to mourn Gilbert’s death.
The other two tribesmen launched their next attack almost immediately.
Realizing that throwing spears alone wasn’t reliable enough, they abandoned ranged combat this time. Slipping their crudely made stone axes from their backs, they split up and charged toward Everly’s scattered group from opposite sides, shouting incomprehensible battle cries.
Everly wasn’t carrying any real weapon.
Even in the land of the free, airline passengers still had to go through security screening. Only knives within strict size limits were permitted in the cabin. Larger blades, firearms, and ammunition all had to be checked under tightly regulated procedures.
As a law-abiding citizen, Everly naturally wasn’t carrying a gun. The only thing on her that could barely qualify as a weapon was a folding knife with a blade only half a finger’s length. That was already the maximum size allowed in carry-on luggage—anything longer would have had to be checked.
As the tribesman swung his stone axe at her, Everly nimbly sidestepped the blow. In the same motion, she drove her folding knife hard into the side of his neck.
“Huh?”
The moment the blade touched the tribesman’s neck, Everly realized something was wrong.
He was clearly made of flesh and blood, yet his skin felt as tough and resilient as the bark of an ancient tree. She hadn’t quite put her full strength behind the stab, but it was still more than enough to pierce an ordinary person’s windpipe.
Instead, the razor-sharp tip barely managed to break the skin.
The unexpected result made Everly’s eyes widen instinctively.
“Move!”
Seeing Everly under attack, the Black fitness coach roared and lunged at the tribesman from behind, trying to wrestle him to the ground.
The coach stood nearly six-foot-three, broad-shouldered and powerfully built. The muscles on his arms were nearly as thick as Everly’s thighs.
With a physique like his, subduing a scrawny tribesman barely over five-foot-seven should have been effortless.
Yet when his massive body slammed into the tribesman, it felt as though he had crashed headlong into a solid boulder.
Bang!
The tribesman remained rooted in place, not budging an inch. Instead, the coach staggered backward from the impact. Before he could even process what had happened, an overwhelming force seized his arm and casually flung him away.
His body—weighing well over a hundred kilograms—was effortlessly tossed through the air by the much slimmer tribesman before crashing hard into a nearby tree.
Agonizing pain shot through his internal organs. The coach doubled over uncontrollably, his eyes filled with shock and terror.
What the hell…? How could that savage be so unbelievably strong?!
“Ora!”
Although the coach had failed to restrain him, he had succeeded in drawing the tribesman’s attention. Seeing one prey already down, the tribesman temporarily abandoned the slippery Everly. Raising his stone axe, he charged toward the now helpless coach with another guttural battle cry.
“N-No… Damn it! What kind of monster is this?!”
The coach shouted in panic, kicking frantically at the ground, but no matter how hard he struggled, he couldn’t get back to his feet.
Just as the coach was about to die beneath the descending axe—
Squelch!
A gleaming knife shot out from behind and plunged deep into the tribesman’s eye socket.
The axe froze in mid-swing.
The fitness coach’s fear-stricken eyes reflected a familiar figure.
It was that girl.
The beautiful young woman from their group—the one who looked so slender and delicate—had somehow appeared behind the tribesman like a ghost.
Her left arm was locked tightly across his chest and around his neck, restraining him from behind. In her right hand, she gripped a small knife whose blade flashed coldly as she drove it again and again into his eye.
As she moved, her sleeve rode up, revealing the muscles in her arm.
Unlike the “show muscles” built through hours in the gym with weight machines and protein shakes, her muscles weren’t especially bulky or eye-catching. Instead, they possessed remarkable elasticity and explosive power.
As a fitness coach, the Black man recognized them immediately.
Those were muscles forged through years of rigorous training and countless real fights—not workouts designed for appearance.
Wait… Didn’t she say she was just a college student?
How does she look even more capable than I am?
The coach stared in utter disbelief.
Everly stabbed with everything she had.
Every thrust put her entire body behind the blade, as if she wanted to drive not just the knife, but even the hilt into the tribesman’s skull.
Naturally, the tribesman wasn’t about to let himself be killed.
He bent his elbows and hammered backward at the girl behind him. Every strike viciously targeted her vulnerable spots—her throat, her chest, anywhere a blow would do the most damage.
The coach had experienced the tribesman’s monstrous strength firsthand. He knew those elbow strikes were anything but harmless.
Yet the girl simply gritted her teeth and endured the crushing blows.
Her hand never stopped moving.
She kept driving the knife deeper into his eye.
Once.
Twice.
Three times…
Each stab sank farther than the last.
Before long, the blood pouring from the wound was streaked with pale, white brain matter.
Powerful as the tribesman was, once his brain was destroyed, death was inevitable.
After a brutal struggle, he gave out first. Blood streamed from his mouth and nose, his limbs convulsed violently, and he finally collapsed into a limp heap.
What was truly frightening was that even then, the girl named Everly wasn’t satisfied.
She pulled the blood-soaked knife free, then reached behind the tribesman’s back and drew out one of his spears. Gripping it with both hands, she backed away several paces.
She broke into a short sprint.
With one powerful push of her leg, her tall, slender body leaped high into the air like a nimble deer. Aiming the bone spearhead at the empty eye socket, she threw her entire body weight behind the strike and drove it downward with all her might.
Crack!
The unmistakable sound of bone shattering echoed through the forest.
The spear pierced cleanly through the eye socket and punched straight through the tribesman’s brain.
Bright red blood gushed out.
In the blink of an eye, the executioner ended up just like the IT worker he had killed moments before—a grotesque “specimen,” pinned to the earth by a spear.
“…Phew. That thing was ridiculously hard to kill.”
Only after finishing him off and confirming he was completely dead did Everly let out a long breath.
She removed the tribesman’s weapon pouch and rummaged through it, looking for something more practical. Her tiny folding knife was simply too small to use comfortably.
She had expected to find nothing but bone knives, stone axes, and other primitive weapons.
Instead, to her surprise, she discovered a standard-sized medium straight knife.
The blade was matte gray-black, about twenty centimeters long, with practical serrations along the spine. Made from high-carbon steel, it combined hardness with excellent wear resistance. Its solid craftsmanship carried the unmistakable rugged feel of military equipment.
The blade and handle were covered in small nicks and scratches, suggesting it had seen years of use. Its sheath was nowhere to be found, likely lost long ago.
Since these tribesmen were still using weapons fashioned from bone and stone, they clearly didn’t possess the technology to manufacture a knife like this.
Everly suspected the tribesman had taken it from another hiker. A full-tang military-style medium straight knife like this was sturdy, compact, and extremely versatile—an essential piece of gear for many experienced outdoorsmen.
Compared to it, her little folding knife instantly lost all appeal.
Without hesitation, Everly claimed the straight knife for herself.
Then she held the weapon pouch out to the fitness coach, signaling for him to pick something suitable.
“I-I have to stab them too?” the coach asked. Apparently imagining something horrific, he stared at Everly’s blood-covered hands and nearly jumped out of his skin.
Everly rolled her eyes.
“Anthony and the others are being surrounded. If you don’t help, are you planning to collect their bodies afterward?”
Her reminder jolted the coach back to his senses.
Only then did he remember Anthony and Sophia, who were still fighting on the other side of the woods.
At the beginning, the three tribesmen had divided their roles clearly. The one in the middle had been busy drinking blood, so Everly’s pair and Anthony’s pair had each only needed to deal with a single opponent.
But not long ago, after the blood-drinking tribesman had apparently “finished charging up,” he suddenly looked as though he’d been injected with adrenaline. Veins bulged across his forehead, his muscles swelled, and, roaring like a beast, he charged into Anthony’s fight.
Anthony’s combat skills were unquestionably excellent. Even with Sophia—the team’s “scholar,” whose combat ability was effectively zero—to protect, he had managed to fight the first tribesman to a standstill.
But once the second tribesman joined the battle, the balance was shattered.
Anthony was immediately forced onto the defensive.
Fortunately, Everly had already finished off the one on her side.
Seeing the apparent male lead locked in a desperate fight, she grabbed her newly acquired weapon and rushed over with the fitness coach to reinforce him.
A small but razor-sharp folding knife flew in from the side.
At the same time, the clear voice of the young woman rang through the forest.
“Go for the eyes! Their skin is unbelievably tough—ordinary blades can’t get through it. But their eyes are a weak spot!”
Anthony caught the weapon Everly threw him with one hand.
“Thanks.”
Without wasting another second, he turned the blade toward the first tribesman’s eyes.
Meanwhile, Everly and the fitness coach were already locked in combat with the second tribesman.
In terms of sheer strength, this tribesman was even more powerful than the one Everly had killed earlier.
But no matter how formidable their bodies were, their eyes remained glaringly obvious weak points.
With the coach’s assistance and a much better weapon in hand, Everly finished him off in only slightly more time than it had taken to kill the first.
After delivering the final blow, she turned around.
Anthony’s fight had also reached its conclusion.
A minute later…
After confirming that all three tribesmen were dead, the four of them gathered around the IT worker’s body.
During the fighting, no one had noticed exactly when his heart had been removed.
Now there was a fist-sized cavity in the center of his chest. It was completely empty, save for a pool of dark red blood.
Strangely enough, the missing heart was nowhere to be found nearby.
After searching the area, everyone gradually turned their suspicious gazes toward the second tribesman’s corpse.
He lay stiff on his back, staring up at the sky. His mouth hung half open, revealing a mouthful of broken, bloodstained teeth. A long trail of blood still streaked his lips and chin.
The blood might have been his own.
Or it might have been the IT worker’s, dripping down while he drank from the man’s wound.
If the tribesman had been willing to drink human blood, was it possible he had eaten the IT worker’s heart as well?
Whenever cannibalism was involved, people instinctively felt a deep sense of revulsion and disgust.
Because it represented the collapse of a fundamental boundary.
You were a human being.
Yet in the eyes of certain members of your own species, you were no longer simply a person.
You could also be food—
something to be consumed, chewed, and digested.
With that, the boundary between civilization and savagery vanished in an instant.
Humans became beasts, and beasts donned the skin of men.
Nowhere was truly safe anymore. For the rest of your life, you would live under the shadow of becoming someone else’s meal.
The thought left everyone deeply unsettled.
Everly fared better than the others, feeling only a faint wave of nausea.
Of the four, the fitness coach had the weakest stomach. He could no longer hold it back and doubled over beside a tree, vomiting uncontrollably.
“Urgh… Ugh! What the hell is going on? I’ve lived in America my whole life, and I’ve never heard of wild men existing anywhere here—let alone cannibals like these!”
Sophia’s face had also turned pale.
Suppressing her own nausea, she examined one of the tribesmen’s bodies while casually correcting him.
“They’re not wild men—they’re primitive humans. Generally speaking, ‘wild men’ refers to unidentified humanoid creatures whose existence hasn’t been conclusively proven. But what we’ve encountered are clearly human beings. They simply maintain a much more primitive way of life and have never entered modern civilization. In anthropology, people like them are collectively referred to as primitive peoples.”
It was Everly’s first time hearing the distinction.
She thought to herself, No wonder the director made the heroine an anthropology professor.
At this point, it was becoming increasingly obvious that these cannibalistic primitive people were the source of the horror in this movie.
Where had they come from?
Why did they eat people?
What kind of beliefs and culture did they have?
And why were they blessed with such extraordinary physical strength?
An outsider would never be able to answer questions like these.
This was precisely the moment for the anthropology professor to step in and enlighten the curious audience watching from the other side of the screen.