Chapter 287: Posthumous Work (6)
When Everly fled from the ruins, the weeping woman had still barely resembled a human. Aside from the tentacles that had burst from her shoulders, the rest of her body had not yet undergone any mutation.
Yet in the span of only a few dozen seconds, by the time the woman’s attention had been drawn by the little monster’s cries and she charged over for revenge, her appearance had changed completely.
The skin covering the woman’s upper body had split apart into dry, cracked plates like drought-stricken earth. From the fissures, not only bright red muscle tissue but also countless tentacles protruded. Her face had suffered the worst of the transformation—even the places where her eyes and mouth should have been had become fertile ground for writhing tentacles.
And yet, her lower body remained entirely human.
The result was a grotesque creature with a grotesquely swollen upper body perched atop two thin, stick-like human legs. As she staggered forward with great difficulty, she looked like a walking bouquet of writhing tendrils, her appearance unsettling to the extreme.
The larger monster moved slowly, but the sheer number of tentacles covering her body gave her an exceptionally long reach. Although the tentacles had completely overtaken where her eyes should have been—meaning she should have been unable to see—she could still pinpoint Everly’s location with uncanny precision. Like a volley of arrows, countless tentacles shot toward Everly with a rapid whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
Left with no other choice, Everly darted between abandoned vehicles, weaving and dodging through the obstacles around her until she finally escaped the larger monster’s attack range.
By running, she had successfully avoided the monster’s tentacles—but at the same time, she lost her chance to finish off the little monster.
Fortunately, the larger monster’s true target was not Everly, but the little monster pinned to the ground.
Once she had driven Everly away, she gave up the pursuit. Instead, she knelt beside the little monster and gathered it into her arms, her forearms completely covered in writhing tentacles as she embraced the creature lying on the ground.
“Say she has no maternal instincts, yet the moment she heard her baby crying, she rushed over to help. But if you say her maternal instincts are strong…” the scene that followed said otherwise.
Without even bothering to pull out the steel pipe, the larger monster grabbed the little monster on both sides and gave it a violent yank toward herself.
Riiip!
With a sickening tear, a long gash split open across the little monster’s head as the woman wrenched it free from the steel pipe.
Yellow-green fluid and what looked disturbingly like intestines spilled out through the opening in its skull. The little monster’s body went limp, collapsing bonelessly before gradually ceasing to move.
The larger monster seemed completely unaware that anything was wrong.
Lowering her head, she gently adjusted the now-loosened swaddling cloth before cradling the little monster back into her arms. Then she stood, swayed unsteadily back to the ruins, resumed the kneeling, weeping posture she had held before, and froze once more into the exact composition depicted in the painting.
“…”
Watching the entire scene from a safe distance, Everly couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
Wasn’t she trying to kill me just now? Why did she stop chasing me halfway through? And what’s with going back to her original position? Does the larger monster have to periodically return to the pose from the painting?
After pondering it for a while, Everly decided she needed to find a way to kill both monsters.
Earlier, she had stabbed the little monster with the steel pipe. Although it had been injured, she herself had suffered no adverse effects. That meant these monsters could be attacked—destroying them wouldn’t trigger some disastrous consequence where damaging the painting also killed the people trapped inside it.
Moreover, the two monsters were the central figures of Scars and the most extraordinary beings in this painted world. They might well possess the key to returning to reality.
Perhaps if she killed them, she would immediately escape from the painting.
With that in mind, Everly temporarily withdrew from the ruins and headed deeper into the city.
She needed to find a weapon.
Most of the items she carried had been used up during her battle against the gallery’s tentacles. At the moment, aside from the Weather Balloon and the Sacred Tree Bracelet, she had nothing with significant combat value left. And neither of those was something she could use casually.
Because the state of Ascamona enforced strict firearms regulations and prohibited the open carrying of guns, Everly hadn’t brought one with her to the exhibition.
As a result, she now had practically nothing. She was starting from scratch, and there was no way she could defeat those monsters with her bare hands.
Everly reasoned that since the cars lining the streets were tangible enough for her to tear off a hood and pull out a steel pipe, perhaps she could find something equally useful elsewhere in the city.
She picked a road at random and proceeded cautiously, keeping her guard up as she walked.
The surroundings remained eerily quiet. Only the occasional strains of music drifting from storefronts along the street broke the silence.
Other than the larger and smaller monsters, Everly didn’t encounter another living soul. The only signs that this place had once been a thriving metropolis were the scattered flesh and severed limbs lying everywhere, along with the vehicles clogging every road.
Whatever catastrophe had reduced the city to this deathly silence must have struck with terrifying suddenness.
Passing an open-air café, Everly stepped inside to take a look.
Among the overturned tables and chairs, she found a half-eaten slice of cake still sitting on one of the tables. Beside it rested a small women’s handbag containing bank cards and cash.
If the disaster had given people even the slightest chance to react, the bag’s owner would never have abandoned it on the table.
What struck her as strange was that, judging by their design, the banknotes looked almost identical to U.S. dollars. Yet the writing printed on them wasn’t any language Everly recognized.
The characters twisted and sprawled across the paper like a child’s random scribbles, utterly devoid of any discernible pattern. Even two bills of the same denomination bore completely different text, with no similarities whatsoever—something that should have been impossible in the real world.
In fact, it wasn’t just the money.
Everything Everly had seen written since arriving here—street signs, shop names, advertising slogans, and more—appeared in the same incomprehensible tadpole-like script.
At first, she had assumed the painting was based on a country that spoke an obscure language. But now it seemed more likely that the written language of the painted world itself had somehow become corrupted into meaningless gibberish.
The unintelligible writing made Everly’s search for supplies much more troublesome.
Every time she passed a shop, she had to walk up to the display window—or go inside altogether—just to figure out what kind of business it was.
After spending far more time than she’d expected, Everly finally gathered everything she needed. Along the way, she also stumbled upon a gun shop.
Although the store had clearly been looted at some point and many of the weapon racks had been stripped bare, she still managed to pick through the firearms, ammunition, and equipment scattered across the floor and recover quite a few useful items. It was, by all accounts, a fruitful haul.
On her way back, she passed a clothing store and decided to stop in and change out of her women’s business suit.
The temperature inside the painted world was already low. Whenever the wind blew, icy drafts slipped through the gaps in her clothing, chilling her from head to toe. She could even see faint wisps of vapor every time she exhaled.
Everly had no idea how long she would be trapped here. Her business suit was too thin and awkward for combat, so she wanted to replace it with something warmer and easier to move in.
The racks in the store were filled entirely with summer clothing, further suggesting that the catastrophe had occurred during the summer.
Fortunately, there was a stockroom in the back, where the previous season’s autumn and winter clothing had been stored. Everly picked out a fleece-lined tracksuit, removed her suit jacket, and pulled it on.
She had assumed that would be enough to keep out the cold.
Instead, the moment she stepped outside, a gust of wind swept over her. It felt as though she had fallen into an ice cave. Rather than warming up, the cold pierced even deeper into her bones.
Has the temperature dropped again?
Cold weather dulled muscle responsiveness, and with another fight against the monsters looming, Everly wasn’t willing to risk even the slightest disadvantage.
So after remaining outside for only a short while, she hurried back into the clothing store and put on a thin wool sweater over her other clothes.
“Hss…” she hissed through clenched teeth.
It turned out that adding the extra clothes had made virtually no difference. Even with the sweater on, it wasn’t long before Everly was as cold as she had been before.
What on earth is going on? Could it be…
After standing there in thought for a while, Everly returned to the clothing store and changed back into her own women’s business suit.
Sure enough, when she went outside again, she still felt cold, but not with that eerie sensation of icy drafts seeping through her clothes from every direction.
That led Everly to a disturbing suspicion.
The objects in this painted world were false.
They looked like clothes, but they provided no warmth when worn. By the same logic, the food and water scattered throughout the city would probably do nothing to satisfy hunger or quench thirst, no matter how much she consumed.
It was terrible news.
As a living person, Everly could still grow tired, thirsty, and hungry inside the painted world.
Without food or water, an ordinary human could survive for about three days. But as time dragged on, the body would become progressively weaker. Eventually, she’d lose the strength to move, lingering on with little more than the barest semblance of life.
That meant she had to find a way out of the painting as quickly as possible, while she still had the strength to act.
Putting the matter of clothing out of her mind, she slipped back into the only garment that could actually keep her warm—her suit jacket—gathered up her newly acquired weapons and equipment, and hurried back to the street where the larger and smaller monsters had been.
After being away for some time, she discovered that the larger monster had somehow reverted to her original human appearance from Scars.
When Everly arrived, the woman was seated before the collapsed building in exactly the same posture and with exactly the same expression as in the painting, cradling her infant as she wept in utter stillness.
At first glance, she looked less like a living person than an astonishingly lifelike wax figure, radiating a strange, almost sacred beauty.
Wait… the larger monster can turn back into a human?
The unsettling development was so unnervingly sinister that Everly felt her scalp tingle.
Having learned her lesson from their previous encounter, she didn’t rush in recklessly. Instead, she found a spot with a clear line of sight, arranged the items she needed one by one, then dropped to the ground, put on her protective gear, pulled her old friend—the Barrett—out of the weapons crate, aimed at the woman’s head, and gently pulled the trigger.
“Bang!”
After a deafening gunshot, the woman’s head exploded like a watermelon, blown to smithereens. Blood, brain matter, flesh, and bone flew everywhere, staining the ground around her a mix of red and white.
“Bang!”
With the second shot, Everly hit the swaddled bundle in the woman’s arms.
The fragile bundle, along with the infant inside, was split clean in half by the immense force, sending blood and a translucent, gelatinous fluid flying in all directions.
Bang!
For the third shot, Everly kept up the assault, aiming at the larger monster’s knees.
The fourth struck its abdomen.
Then came the fifth.
The sixth…
Everly knew there was no way the monsters would die that easily.
She refused to let her guard down. Round after round, she fired into the vital areas and major joints of both creatures, continuing until every last bullet she had was gone. Only when the two monsters had been reduced to limp, mangled heaps of flesh did she pick up the homemade incendiary bombs she had prepared in advance, rush forward, and hurl the gasoline-filled glass bottles at them one after another.
She had thrown only a few bottles when the larger monster’s body began to regenerate.
Countless tiny buds of flesh sprouted from the woman’s wounds. Some rapidly swelled into the same fleshy tentacles Everly had seen before, spreading out around the woman as a protective barrier. Others fused together, growing into muscle, bone, and skin as they reconstructed her ruined body.
If she kept throwing the bottles now, the tentacles would easily swat them out of the air.
Using tricky angles, Everly managed to land several more throws. Only after she’d exhausted every bottle did she sprint back to her Barrett, level the rifle at the two monsters, and fire the single precious armor-piercing incendiary round she had been saving.
BOOM!
The explosion thundered across the street.
A shower of sparks erupted, and in an instant, the two monsters before the ruins were blasted into countless fragments.
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