Chapter 335: Into the Forest (End)
Like its snakeskin, the snake in her hand was equally unpredictable in size.
In the painting, the giant snake’s body had been thick enough for two people to wrap their arms around, and its massive form had been able to fight the Red-Skinned Giant to a standstill. After its death, it had been wrapped around the Red-Skinned Giant’s waist, becoming a long, slender belt. Now that it was in Everly’s hands, the snake’s corpse had changed size yet again, becoming a small snake about half a meter long and as thick as a thumb.
Almost all of the snakeskin had been stripped from its body, making it impossible to tell what species it had been. Its bright-red flesh was exposed to the air. It felt soft and cool in Everly’s hand, slightly damp and extraordinarily strange to the touch.
After handing the snake over to Everly, the Sacred Tree’s true form changed direction and lunged at the Red-Skinned Giant once more.
As for Oseiwa, when it realized that its “belt” had been taken away by the Sacred Tree during the battle, it flew into a rage. It immediately turned its attention toward Everly, who was holding the dead snake, casually grabbed a dismembered corpse, and hurled it toward her with all its strength.
Everly had been constantly on guard against attacks from the Red-Skinned Giant.
Before the corpse could reach her, she had already pushed off with her toes and swiftly fled her original position. The next second, the corpse whistled through the air and narrowly missed Everly, crashing into the male executive who had been slacking off behind her.
“Ah!”
The male executive was struck head-on as if by a speeding train. His entire body was sent flying backward uncontrollably, his spine slamming directly into the hard banyan tree with a faint crack. Blood flowed from his nose and mouth as he lay motionless on the ground, and before long, he stopped moving altogether.
The banyan tree’s aerial roots caught the scent of blood and rustled their way over to the male executive. They tasted it a couple of times, discovered that the blood belonged to a modern human, and, for some unknown reason, withdrew their roots while grumbling angrily.
“Taba ya!”
Having missed its attack, the Red-Skinned Giant let out an enraged roar. It grabbed a stone from the ground and raised its hand, intending to hurl it at Everly. Hearing the roar, the surrounding Carib people also temporarily abandoned their assault on the Sacred Tree and instead began throwing stone axes and spears at Everly.
How could the Sacred Tree possibly let them have their way!
With a clear cry, it lowered its center of gravity and sprang forward. Its four limbs spread wide in midair before it clamped tightly around the Red-Skinned Giant’s arm, squeezing like a vise. The tremendous force twisted the joints in the giant’s arm, and the continuous creaking of bone rang out. The stone it was holding became impossible to keep a firm grip on and fell to the ground.
Even while dealing with the giant, the Sacred Tree did not forget about the Carib people. It swung the vine-like tentacles growing from its shoulder blades. The long tendrils lashed out like whips, viciously striking the red-skinned natives and sending them fleeing in all directions amid their ceaseless cries of pain. For the moment, they were completely unable to mount any effective attack.
But the Sacred Tree could not hold out for long.
The Red-Skinned Giant’s free left hand kept pounding furiously at the Sacred Tree wrapped around its right arm. After several solid punches, the Sacred Tree’s skin caved inward, spiderweb-like cracks spreading across it as blue-green sap seeped out.
If the blood packs could not replenish its strength, it would not be long before the giant killed the Sacred Tree!
Fortunately, Everly had already pulled the snakeskin from her waist pouch and draped it over the dead snake in her hand.
The snakeskin had originally come from this very snake. The moment the two came into contact, the snakeskin immediately seemed to acquire a will of its own and spontaneously wrapped itself around the dead snake’s body.
Because the skinning had been done so roughly, the edges of the snakeskin were slightly torn and ragged. As a result, after it wrapped around the snake, a long, narrow strip of bright red where the scales were missing appeared along its belly.
This was a mark representing humiliation and hatred. According to the painting, hundreds of years ago, the Red-Skinned Giant had followed this very red mark, used its fingernails to slit open the giant snake’s belly, and torn off its snakeskin.
And now, the moment for revenge had arrived.
Flesh began to grow, completely bonding the snakeskin to the snake’s body. Tiny, bead-like keratinous bumps emerged from its belly. The instant they came into contact with the air, their soft surfaces hardened, forming layer upon layer of white, shell-like scales.
In the blink of an eye, the newly formed scales covered the ugly scar.
At the same time, “Thump!” A faint heartbeat, almost imperceptible, sounded as a slight tremor suddenly came from the dead snake’s chest.
The heart, which had been still for who knew how many years, began beating once more. Cold blood flowed through its veins and was pumped throughout its body. All traces of decay vanished. The stiff, icy snake body seemed to be jolted by electricity, its tail tensing as a violent tremor ran through it.
The Green Snake had come back to life.
As its body regained its flexibility, the white film covering its eyes also vanished in an instant, revealing a pair of majestic, razor-sharp golden snake eyes. Its tightly closed mouth opened, and its slender black tongue flicked rapidly in and out. After an interval of several hundred years, the Green Snake once again released its own hiss: “Hiss…”
With that single breath, it expelled all the foul air within. From this moment onward, it had also broken free from its shackled past and achieved a new life of freedom.
Having finished its declaration to the world, the Green Snake closed its mouth, curved its neck, and turned around. Wisdom gleamed in its golden vertical pupils as it looked at Everly. Then it lowered its head slightly and gave her a small nod.
Afterward, its cool, smooth scales slid across her skin as its slender tail gently swayed. With elegant movements, the Green Snake slithered down Everly’s arm and landed on the ground.
The moment its belly touched the ground, an astonishing scene unfolded. The Green Snake’s body suddenly began expanding as rapidly as a balloon being inflated. In just a few moments, its body had swollen until it was thicker than Everly’s waist.
“Hiss, hiss…”
The giant snake coiled on the rocky shore, its head held high. Its slender vertical pupils gleamed with a cold, sharp light. Its neck curved like a drawn bow, poised to strike. It fixed a fierce, predatory gaze on the Red-Skinned Giant in the distance.
“Shriek—!”
Hearing the Green Snake’s cry, the Sacred Tree’s true form released Oseiwa’s right arm. Its scarred body sprang backward and landed nimbly on the ground, releasing an impassioned cry toward the sky.
The snake and the tree briefly locked eyes in midair.
The next second, one green-blue streak and one gray-white streak moved simultaneously, as if they had planned it beforehand, charging toward the Red-Skinned Giant.
……
The three mythic creatures became locked in combat, a sight that could only be seen once in a thousand years.
Unfortunately, Everly had no time to stop and admire it.
To buy time for the giant snake to revive, the Sacred Tree’s true form had fought several opponents at once and suffered severe injuries. To make matters worse, the Carib people possessed extraordinary physical strength. Even after Everly and the other three had hacked away at them for ages, they had barely managed to deplete many of their blood packs.
Therefore, after returning the snakeskin, Everly immediately grabbed a spear and rushed back to the battlefield where the humans were fighting. Together with her three companions, she began another grueling battle.
The Carib people were completely focused on dealing with the giant snake and the Sacred Tree and had no interest in fighting the survivors. This inadvertently created an opportunity for Everly and the other three.
Dodge, block, flying kicks, thrusts… The four formed a square formation and moved around the perimeter of the battlefield like wolves waiting for an opening. Whenever a Carib person became isolated, they immediately swarmed over and worked together to kill them.
They fought tirelessly. Whenever a spear in their hands broke, they simply picked up another from a corpse. When their exhausted hands could no longer grip their weapons tightly, they tied the weapons to their hands with strips of cloth. If one of them was surrounded, the other three rushed to their aid…
Every additional enemy they killed reduced the pressure on the Sacred Tree and giant snake fighting in the inner circle. And when the corpses were carried beneath the banyan tree by the other survivors, they could also replenish the Sacred Tree’s health and restore its strength.
Even with Everly and the others’ help, the battle between the three mythic creatures continued for more than half an hour despite the two-on-one advantage, finally drawing to a close only after that.
Toward the end of the battle, the Red Giant Oseiwa, clearly showing signs of decline, decided that it had nothing left to lose and began eating its own people and the corpses scattered across the ground.
Those corpses were all people who had died in the plane crash. They had been dead for more than half a day, and their flesh had already begun to decay slightly, giving off a strange stench. Oseiwa “tasted” two of them and found them to be of very little use, so it stopped eating such useless fare and focused instead on eating humans.
The Sacred Tree could draw strength from the flesh and blood of the Carib people, so naturally, Oseiwa could do the same. The reason it had not done so before, Everly guessed, might have been because Oseiwa was a “god of faith,” a deity born from belief.
The power of such gods was closely tied to the quality and number of their followers. When they had few followers, their power was relatively weak. But with tens of thousands of believers, moving mountains and filling seas would be no difficult feat for a god of faith.
Oseiwa’s only followers were the Carib people. As long as these people existed, it existed. Once its followers disappeared, Oseiwa would not die immediately, but it would continue to weaken over the long years that followed, eventually fading away in misery.
A moderate amount of fear and awe could indeed make believers more devout, but there had to be a limit. No god of faith with any sense would destroy its own foundation by draining the pond dry and consuming every last one of its few followers.
Unless the god itself had already reached a critical point where its very survival was at stake.
Unfortunately, after being caught between the Sacred Tree and the giant snake, Oseiwa had been forced down this path of slow s**cide.
In its desperate situation, it threw up its arms and cried out. The surrounding Carib people received its command and immediately charged into the battle despite the danger, one after another “offering” themselves to their chief god’s mouth—Sophia said that in their culture, those who died for Oseiwa would become part of the chief god and gain eternal life from then on.
This large-scale “s**cidal” feeding genuinely threw the giant snake and the Sacred Tree into disarray for a while. Fortunately, in the end, this final struggle before death still failed to turn the tide.
At the moment the Red Giant’s strength was exhausted, the giant snake seized its opportunity. It climbed up from behind, following the giant’s legs, then wrapped its body around the giant, coiling around it again and again. Light flowed across its scales as every muscle in its body tightened with tremendous force—
“Creak… creak-creak…”
The constriction of a snake was already immensely powerful, let alone when the snake doing the constricting was no ordinary serpent. Oseiwa’s bones could not withstand the pressure and were broken one after another by the giant snake’s coils. Without the support of its skeleton, its body immediately became like a water-filled sack, soft and fragile.
Oseiwa’s face swelled to a terrifying blue-purple. Lowering its head, it laughed wildly as it made its final counterattack with the only part of its body it could still move. It slammed its forehead against the giant snake’s body, opened its mouth, and gnawed and tore at it with its teeth…
“Splurt!”
At that moment, two sharp, tentacle-like vines reached over its shoulders from behind the Red-Skinned Giant and plunged into its eye sockets from either side. Countless fine plant roots began multiplying and growing wildly inside Oseiwa’s brain, spreading out from the tendrils as their center.
“Ggh… gh-ggh…”
Oseiwa opened its mouth wide, a dying wail escaping from its throat as the roots writhed within.
Streams of foul blood dripped down the vines. The rapidly multiplying roots pierced through bone like drills and forced their way through the skin. Before long, countless black holes appeared across the giant’s crimson head. Dense banyan roots emerged from them, growing longer and longer, thicker and thicker, until they reached their limit—“Crack!” Amid splattering blood, the giant’s head was violently torn apart.
“Bang!”
The once-mighty god crashed to the ground, falling into the dust. The instant its red body touched the earth, it transformed into a great heap of rotting bones, withered branches, and mud.
By then, apart from Everly and the other survivors, there was not a single Carib person still standing on the rocky shore.
The crisis was over…