"Zhang the Fourth's... Zhang the Fourth's little girl?! Didn't they all die?" someone choked out, voice trembling with tears. A ripple of terrified movement went through the granary. Could someone have survived outside?
"Shut... shut up! Hold your breath!" the village chief hissed, eyes bloodshot and wide, his warning a guttural animal snarl. But it was too late! The crying sound, as if sensing the living presence and turmoil within the granary, changed. No longer sorrowful weeping, it suddenly twisted upwards into a piercing, metallic shriek of laughter—like rusty iron scraping glass!
"Hah! Hahahahahaha------!!!"
The sound was impossibly high-pitched and distorted, drilling into their skulls! Utterly inhuman! The dam of terror broke.
"Aaaaaah------!!"
CRASH!
A colossal impact slammed onto the granary roof! Thick rafters and the tiles covering them shrieked and exploded in a cacophony of splintering wood and shattering clay—as if struck by a ten-thousand-ton hammer dropped from the sky!
THUD! A mass denser than the darkness itself, reeking of decayed flesh so thick it instantly choked the air, crashed down through the shattered roof!
The earth seemed to shake!
The firepit was smothered by the violent downdraft, plunging the space into near darkness before sparks erupted as debris rained down. Agonized screams mingled with deafening crashes. The thing landed squarely in the densest part of the crowd! Villagers caught beneath the impact had no time to react. Their bodies—crushed! The sickeningly clear sounds of bones snapping, flesh bursting, and viscera pulping filled the air, tearing at their very souls! Thick, hot fluid mixed with gore and bone fragments sprayed wildly, splattering stunned faces nearby.
The thing stood up.
It towered over two meters tall! Its body was a hulking mass like a moving black boulder, shoulders nearly scraping the granary beams! It was covered in filthy white hair over a foot long, not lying flat but writhing like countless greasy, living worms in cold sludge! Its massive head tilted slightly down. Where a face should have been was a nightmare of swollen, hardened flesh and jutting bone. Only the eyes remained visible, deep-set within fur and bony ridges—two orbs of pure, cold, lifeless, murky yellow!
Like grave wax oozing from a long-buried coffin! Two dagger-sharp, grotesquely curved yellowed tusks jutted from torn black lips, tips glistening with wet shreds of rotten meat and dark, viscous slime! One tree-trunk-thick arm casually reached out, grabbed a man frozen in terror by the neck, and yanked him towards its maw—there was no visible bite! The man's face was still frozen in ultimate terror as his entire shoulder, half his chest, and the ripped-out heart and lungs were torn away in a horrific spray of blood, bone, and rending tissue!
"Aaaaagh------!"
"Monster!"
"Dad... Dad! It's killing us------!"
The stench of blood and viscera intensified a thousandfold! After a split second of petrified silence, the survivors erupted into inhuman wails and hysterical shrieks! Primitive survival instinct overwhelmed millennia of ingrained fear. Men, eyes bloodshot, roared guttural cries, raising hoes, rakes, sickles, and sharpened stakes, charging from all sides to rain blows down on the monstrous giant!
THUD! THUD! THUD! The impacts sounded like heavy rain! Hoe blades struck the thick, matted white "armor," meeting resistance like striking oil-soaked rawhide! Sickles hit and their blades curled! Thick wooden clubs splintered on impact, jarring hands until palms split! The colossal creature swayed slightly, the tiny impacts and noise seemingly stoking its infernal rage! It unleashed a roar like a massive bubble bursting in hell's magma—
"GRROOOOAAARRR!"
Murder flared in its yellow eyes! Its massive claws, tipped with foot-long, dead-black talons like fused hooks and scimitars, stopped feeding and began a frenzy of sweeping, slashing destruction!
It was a tiger among sheep! Irresistible, annihilating force!
SWIPE! A man who'd just driven a pitchfork into the creature's flank was caught by a sweeping arm. Man and fork were hurled through the air, his body twisting unnaturally like a wrung rag before smashing into the rough stone wall five yards away with a sickening crunch!
SLASH! A clawed hand, grey talons gleaming, descended like an executioner's axe. It split a stocky man wielding a woodsman's axe from skull to sternum! White brain matter and steaming organs sprayed out like a grisly fountain!
STOMP! A young man scrambling to hide behind a grain bin was crushed under a massive, rag-wrapped foot like a ripe melon pulped into the blood-soaked muck!
This wasn't a battle. It was pure, one-sided, merciless slaughter! The granary instantly transformed into a primal abattoir of horror!
Chaotic, writhing bodies... hoarse, despairing screams... the air thick with spray after spray of hot blood and gore... the cloying, tangible stench of decay... These fragments hammered against Li Erwa's terror-shattered mind. His "weapon" was long gone. He was caught in the tide of fleeing bodies, pushed and jostled, stumbling backward... until his spine slammed hard into the wooden railing of the stairs leading to the granary loft!
The impact jarred him, vision blurring with tears and the haze of blood mist. His gaze swept dazedly over the monstrous face of the thing still "feeding" nearby—
That massive face, matted with filthy hair, tusks protruding... Within the grotesquely distorted brow ridge, the torn contours of the mouth and nose... Why... why did it carry a trace of something terrifyingly, heart-stoppingly... familiar?!
His father... who should have been resting peacefully in the earth of the southern slope?!
The thought struck Li Erwa like lightning, shattering his last shred of consciousness. Fear ceased to be a mere feeling; it became a sucking void, freezing him to the spot, leaving nothing but hollow silence in his very bones.
Slumped against the wooden ladder, he watched in frozen horror as the massive, gore-smeared creature ripped off the village chief's arm. It gnawed on the limb like a rodent, the chilling crunch of bone and flesh echoing in the air. Downstairs... in that hellish slaughterhouse on the first floor, anyone still standing was vanishing at terrifying speed. Mustering the final dregs of his courage, Erwa struggled to his feet and fled upstairs.