On the field, when the music stopped, everyone in the formation halted their performance and waited for the next instruction—except for Gracie, who continued moving.
This ti, the school cheerleading team was performing a modified pom-pom routine that incorporated elents of ballet. When the instructor called for a stop, the girls had just reached the climax of the dance.
Completely imrsed in it, Gracie didn’t notice anything unusual.
Her gaze was unfocused, and her smile seed welded onto her face. No matter how she moved, the curve of her lips didn’t change in the slightest. Following music that didn’t exist, she danced on the field in complete rapture.
Ever since she was little, Gracie had dread of the stage.
She loved the feeling of the spotlight shining on her—being seen, noticed, praised, and recognized. She loved flowers, applause, cheers—everything that had nothing to do with her once ordinary self… So even though her stomach hurt terribly, even though her insides churned, even though her body was drenched in cold sweat and the urge to vomit was impossible to suppress, she still insisted on stepping onto the stage today.
Had her tenacious will finally overco the weakness of the flesh? Not long after the performance began, she felt a warm, tingling sensation suddenly rise from her abdon. It split into two streams—one surged upward along her throat, rushing straight to her head, while the other spread downward in a prickling wave…
Ah, her body felt so comfortable—was she in heaven?
The smile on her lips grew ever more radiant, and her movents beca increasingly frenzied.
On the field without music, at so point, a deathly silence had fallen.
The instructor, the two doctors, the surrounding cheerleaders, and even the hundreds or thousands of spectators in the stands—all of them stared wide-eyed in horror at the unaccompanied performance in the center of the field.
Blood was continuously pouring from Gracie’s nose and mouth.
Blood stread down, soaking the front of her clothes and staining her top red. Beneath her miniskirt, an unstoppable flow of blood poured out like a spring, running in rivulets down her straight legs. In re monts, she looked as if she had just been pulled from a pool of blood, drenched in crimson.
And yet, the girl seed completely unaware of it all.
Maintaining that bright, chanical smile, she lowered her upper body. Holding her pom-poms, her arms and torso curved into smooth, graceful lines. One leg extended backward while the other balanced on its toes, as she perford an elegant arabesque turn in place.
It was a classic ballet movent. Combined with the pom-pom routine, it evoked the image of a graceful swan poised to take flight, a flower clasped in its beak.
A crimson swan, tireless, spun on the spot—once, twice, three tis… As she danced freely and with abandon, the blood flowing from between her legs was flung outward by centrifugal force. So of it splattered onto her miniskirt, but more scattered into fine droplets, spraying outward from her as the center, weaving a dense, delicate web of blood in midair.
After the spin, Gracie bent her knees, crouched, and then rose swiftly into a graceful leap.
This leap was the most difficult and visually striking part of the entire cheer routine.
Amid the crowd’s cries, Gracie clutched her pom-poms and took a powerful step forward. The muscles of her front leg tensed as she lifted it with all her strength, while her back leg pushed forcefully off the ground—tap!
Using the explosive force of that push, Gracie lifted her chin high, spread her arms, and extended her legs into a straight line front and back, soaring into the air like a bird.
In that instant, ti seed to stretch endlessly.
Holding their breath, the onlookers watched in a mix of terror and fascination, captivated by the breathtaking leap. Her slender figure suspended in midair seed to have broken free from gravity itself—so unrestrained, so free, and yet so elegant. From her balance to the engagent of her core muscles, from head to toe, from fingertips to the ends of her hair—everything could only be described as perfect.
This was a leap that could be called art—so beautiful it was hard to believe it ca from a college girl with no ballet training.
Inappropriately, Everly was reminded of the serows leaping across cliffs from a text she had studied in her previous life.
Along with the overwhelming visual impact ca a familiar sense of panic and fear. Her heart sank heavily at that mont, and a chilling cold spread like a net, enveloping her from behind.
Amid her sixth sense’s frantic warnings, Gracie’s long suspension in the air finally ca to an end. Her front leg tensed as her toes touched the ground, her back leg drew in, and she landed steadily.
The perfect landing had just been completed when, as if the last thread holding her together had snapped, the girl’s body suddenly swayed forward and backward in a very obvious way.
“Ah!”
“Watch out!”
People in the stands ca to their senses, their cries rising one after another.
On the field, the instructor and two school doctors hurried toward Gracie, trying to catch her before she fell.
But they were a step too late.
Right before everyone’s eyes, the girl’s body began to convulse in a strange, unnatural way—like a seizure—her limbs and even her head jerking violently. Then, like a robot that had lost power, she fell straight backward onto the ground.
Crash!
Just monts ago she had been dancing, but when Gracie hit the ground, her body seed almost like a water balloon bursting. Fine cracks appeared across her smooth skin, and foul-slling blood poured endlessly from every part of her body.
In the blink of an eye, a circular pool of blood had ford beneath her, surrounding her entirely.
“Ahhhhhh!!”
“D-did soone just die?!”
“What happened to that girl—why did she suddenly collapse…?”
At the sight of this, waves of screams erupted from the stands. So people couldn’t bear to watch any longer and stood up to leave. Others raised their phones toward the field, instinctively starting to record. There were even those who, treating it like a spectacle, tried to rush down from the stands for a closer look.
People moved in all directions, and the stands quickly descended into chaos.
Misha, worried about Gracie, saw people running toward the field and glanced at Everly, clearly tempted to follow. Everly stopped her.
“I don’t think there’s any point in you going over now,” she said, pulling Misha toward the edge of the stands, away from the pushing, surging crowd.
The position there was higher, with a clearer view. Using the binoculars Everly handed her, Misha quickly understood what her friend ant.
There was sothing inside Gracie’s body.
It looked sowhat like a white shoelace—a flat, strip-like object about the thickness of a wrist. Its color was white with a faint pinkish-yellow tint, and through the binoculars, she could see segnted, grid-like patterns along its surface.
It was clearly alive.
When the school doctor rushed forward to support Gracie, soone saw her throat suddenly bulge outward in a horrifying swell. Then, her tightly shut mouth snapped open, and from the dark cavity, the head of the white strip erged—featureless, yet covered in suction cups.
At the very tip of the white strip was a ring of densely packed, curved sharp teeth. As it forced its way out of the girl’s body, those teeth tore and dragged along flesh from the stomach, esophagus, and mouth. By the ti it crawled out of her mouth, its body was sared with blood and chunks of tissue, making it appear almost entirely pink.
The school doctor had never seen anything like it. His eyes widened as he froze in place, not even hearing his colleague beside him shouting repeatedly, “Run!”
“Run? What do you an run? What is that thing—so kind of parasite? But how could sothing that big even exist inside a human body…”
A pinkish-white blur shot through the air. At its tip, bone-white teeth reflected a cold, chilling gleam that nearly seared the school doctor’s vision.
In panic, the doctor failed to react at all. He fell backward onto the ground, and in his shrinking field of vision, the rapidly enlarging, terrifying head of the white strip was reflected in his pupils.
Just as it was about to bite into his face, a figure suddenly darted in from the side and forcefully grabbed his arm.
The 1.8-ter, heavily built school doctor was completely unprepared. He was yanked by the arm and dragged nearly two ters backward.
“Stop freezing up! Run!”
Teacher Britney’s anxious shout rang in his ear. The doctor jolted and finally snapped out of his near-death stupor, scrambling to his feet in a panic.
He ran a few steps, but for reasons even he didn’t understand, he suddenly stopped and looked back.
A few ters away, Gracie’s body was still twitching on the ground.
But it wasn’t because she was still alive. It was because the white strips inside her were frantically forcing their way out—from her mouth, eyes, nose, and even between her legs.
One strip, two strips, three… each ergence dragged out large amounts of blood, minced flesh, and even eyeballs from her body. At one point, as many as four white strips simultaneously burst out of her mouth.
They were like sea snakes bound by rubber bands, writhing and crawling madly inside her oral cavity, scrambling to escape without any regard for how her lips had already been stretched to their limit.
In that mont, the girl lying on the ground had beco nothing more than a cocoon imprisoning those monsters—a shell that must be torn apart for them to reach freedom.
Riiip…
Amid the chaotic noise, the school doctor thought he heard a faint, nauseating tearing sound.
Realizing what was happening, his body began to tremble uncontrollably.
Reason told him this place was dangerous and that he needed to leave imdiately—but the damn curiosity of a human being kept his legs rooted in place.
So he stood there, trembling, watching, observing, helplessly staring as the white strips—through relentless struggle—finally managed to tear Gracie’s lips apart.
The upper and lower lips of the corpse turned into strips of rotten flesh, hanging limp and flaring outward like a wilted trumpet flower. Inside the gaping mouth, the four freed white strips, unwilling to be left behind, fought and wriggled their way out in a desperate surge, dragging their long bodies completely free from the girl’s insides.
As their contents were pulled out, Gracie’s swollen throat briefly deflated. But soon, more white strips followed one after another, continuously erging from her trachea, ensuring her neck never returned to anything resembling a normal shape.
By this point, the first white strips to have escaped her body had already begun hunting.
Leaving the human body did not slow them down—in fact, it made them even faster.
The mont they hit the ground, they lashed their tails as if so internal engine had been switched on, surging forward at an absurd speed. They split the low grass apart and charged toward the surrounding crowd.
“Run!” Seeing that the doctor was no longer moving, Teacher Britney grabbed his arm and shouted at the top of her lungs toward the cheerleaders. “Run! Everyone run! Whatever’s inside Gracie is alive—it’s attacking people!”
As if to confirm her words, rustling sounds erupted all around them from the grass at their feet. Blades of half-finger-high grass parted in waves as pink-white shapes one after another shot upward into the air.
No one knew how they could jump so high.
With no limbs at all, their flat bodies still lifted themselves nearly two ters into the air, rising effortlessly to a height where they could look down on everyone below.
With Teacher Britney’s warning, most people managed to avoid the first wave of attacks.
Only the school doctor—who had been standing in the innermost circle, still frozen in shock and lacking athletic ability—was a fraction too slow in escaping. A white strip extended what looked like a ribbon-like tail, gently looping around his neck.
“Ahhh… ahhhhhh! Help!”
A shrill, desperate scream echoed across the field.
———————————————————————————————
Author’s Note:
There was a missing ti detail earlier—“late May.” This is to clarify that this match took place between late May and early June. No need to go back and search; you now have the information.
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That’s really only one chapter for today…
By the way, as you’ve probably already guessed, the inspiration for this story cos from The Ugly Stepsister and the “tapeworm” episode of Arican Horror Story.
I didn’t ntion it earlier to avoid spoilers, but it seems most of you already figured it out anyway, haha.
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