"We can't just sit here and wait to die."
Curt's voice was hoarse. He tightly gripped a poker he had snatched from beside the fireplace, trying to make himself look a bit more composed.
Right at that moment, a thin gas carrying a sickly sweet scent quietly seeped in from the vents.
Colorless and practically imperceptible, it quietly plucked at everyone's taut nerves.
Curt's gaze suddenly lost its focus, and his previously firm resolve to work together shifted.
"Listen, we need to split up."
"That way, we'll divide their targets. There's no way they can chase all of us at once. Our chances of survival will be higher."
As soon as the words left his mouth, the air instantly fell dead silent.
Even the most panicked of them, Jules, found the suggestion utterly absurd.
Yang Yi had been leaning against the corner, watching this farce with great interest. Hearing this, his eyebrow twitched imperceptibly.
He took a step forward.
*Smack!* A crisp, resounding slap echoed through the room.
Yang Yi had slapped Curt right on the back of the head.
"Did you get your head slammed in a door?"
"Don't you know that in horror movies, everyone who splits up ends up dead?"
The burning pain on the back of his head instantly dispelled the strange fog in Curt's mind.
Recalling what he had just said, a fine layer of cold sweat instantly soaked his back.
*What did I just say?*
To think he would actually suggest something like that.
However, reality didn't give him much time to dwell on his lingering fear.
*Crash—!*
A massive boom shook the room.
The cabin's already rickety front door was smashed to pieces by a brute force.
Amidst the flying splinters, a tall, burly figure blocked the doorway.
It was the father of the Buckner family. He wielded a bear trap, half of his face already rotted away.
Immediately after, the window panes shattered one after another.
All the members of the Buckner family crawled in from outside in twisted, grotesque postures.
An extreme thirst for the flesh of the living burned within their hollow eye sockets, thoroughly turning this cramped cabin into a death trap.
A siege had officially begun.
"Ah—!"
The students let out terrified screams, instinctively using the tables, chairs, and sofas inside the cabin to defend themselves.
Dana hurled a desk lamp with all her might at a zombie's head.
Holden used a chair to desperately hold back another encroaching figure.
The scene was utter chaos, everyone caught in a desperate struggle for survival.
Meanwhile, in a corner unnoticed by anyone, Yang Yi and Tomie were secretly slacking off.
These protagonists really had some skills to actually manage to hold off the zombie assault.
"The RV! We need to get to the RV!"
Curt made a prompt decision and roared.
He kicked open the back door and led the group out of the cabin, sprinting madly toward the battered RV.
The engine roared to life, and the headlights pierced the darkness. After the tires spun wildly in the mud, the vehicle finally surged onto the road they had arrived on, carrying everyone's hopes.
However, just as they thought they were about to escape, the RV seemingly slammed into an invisible wall. The front of the vehicle instantly caved in, and everyone was violently thrown forward by the immense inertia.
The area was sealed off by an invisible barrier. No matter how frantically Curt stomped on the gas pedal, the vehicle couldn't move forward a single inch.
They were trapped.
...
Meanwhile, hundreds of meters underground at the secret organization's headquarters.
The atmosphere inside the central control room was oppressive.
A supervisor, his eyes bloodshot, stared fixedly at the red alarms continuously popping up on the giant screen.
"Report! The South American branch's sacrifice has failed!"
"The European branch has been completely wiped out! Sacrifice failed!"
"Africa... has also failed!"
One piece of bad news after another poured in, sinking the hearts of everyone present to rock bottom.
"What about the Japanese branch?"
The supervisor asked, clinging to a final shred of hope.
A technician pulled up the feed, his expression turning incredibly bizarre.
"Reporting to the supervisor... The ghost required for the Japanese branch's sacrificial ritual—the one meant to be purified by the little girl—is missing..."
(At this moment, that very ghost had already made its home inside Miko's Myriad Soul Banner.)
The entire control room fell into a deathly silence.
The sacrifices across all global branches had been declared complete failures.
The seals were about to break, and the slumbering Old Gods would be released.
The end of human civilization was imminent.
It was unknown whether the "Restart Project," the headquarters' final contingency plan, would actually work.
...
Outside the RV, Curt and the others had fallen into utter despair.
Ahead lay an invisible wall, and behind them lurked grotesque monsters.
For a moment, they were completely cornered with no way out.
That night, the group had no choice but to return to the cabin.
Later, behind the cabin, they discovered an opening covered in weeds and vines.
Through the overgrowth, the faint outline of an entrance to an old tomb could be seen.
The group pushed open the tomb's stone door.
Behind the door was not the decaying burial chamber they expected, but a massive elevator platform brimming with modern technology.
As if drawn by an unseen force, the group stepped into the elevator.
The elevator began to slowly descend.
The sights on both sides left them absolutely terrified.
As the elevator went down, countless massive, transparent alloy cages came into view, neatly arranged below.
Imprisoned within each cage was a terrifying creature straight out of legend.
There were vampires with bared fangs, their eyes flashing with a bloodthirsty red light.
There were werewolves howling and transforming under the simulated moonlight within their enclosures.
There was a "Hell Lord" whose entire body was pierced with sharp blades and iron hooks.
And there was a monster with the emaciated upper body of a human and the ugly, slime-covered tail of a fish, staring dead at the elevator with its murky eyes.
Looking at these horrifying monsters, Curt, Dana, and the others instantly realized the truth.
They remembered the items in the cellar.
The ancient diary, the cursed necklace, the eerie puzzle box, and so on.
It turned out they hadn't been choosing fun "adventure props" back then.
They had been choosing these monsters.
*Ding—*
The elevator reached the bottom floor.
The doors slowly opened, revealing a dark, deep alloy corridor ahead.
At the end of the corridor, a heavily armed squad of organization staff, wielding high-tech energy weapons, had been waiting for a long time.
Their faces devoid of any expression, they raised their weapons in perfect unison.
Their mission was to execute these intruding "sacrifices" on the spot.
At this moment, a sickeningly excited, cruel smile suddenly crept onto Tomie's breathtakingly beautiful face.
"My turn."
At some point, she had slipped over to a control panel, where a red button was blinking.
It was the release switch for all the cages.
*Rumble—!!!*
Instantly, a deafening roar echoed throughout the entire underground facility.
Thousands of doors were unlocked at the exact same moment.
The imprisoned monsters surged out of their respective cages.
Roaring and snarling, they lunged at the staff members.
The grandest of carnivals had officially begun!
The entire facility lobby was reduced to a living hell.
A massive spider suddenly dropped from the ceiling, its eight razor-sharp limbs acting like spears as it instantly tore several staff members to shreds.
The "Hell Lord" held another Lemarchand's Box, and countless chains shot out from the void, dragging several guards into agonizing torment.
Vampires transformed into swarms of bats, darting through the crowd at high speeds. With every reformation, several staff members collapsed, drained dry of their blood.
Werewolves completely unleashed their wild nature, roaring as they effortlessly ripped human bodies apart.
A gargantuan snake opened its gaping maw, swallowing wailing humans whole.
Countless exploding zombies detonated themselves amidst the crowd, sending green corrosive liquid splattering everywhere.
An ancient mummy chanted archaic curses incomprehensible to mortals.
The screams of the staff, the gunfire of weapons, and the roars of the monsters rose and fell in a chaotic symphony.
Blood and severed limbs dyed the cold alloy floor a deep, gruesome crimson.