The battle ended far faster than Everly had expected.
At first, watching the two sides exchange moves and counter each other, Everly had thought the fight would drag on for quite so ti.
However, from the mont Natalie declared she would get serious, the situation underwent a complete reversal.
Everly had never witnessed such a one-sided fight—
Now transford into a puppet-like mannequin, Natalie advanced toward Bloody Mary in the darkness, her stiff joints moving slowly, step by step.
Sensing the danger, Bloody Mary wiped the smile from her face. She raised her hand, attempting once again to snap her fingers—a gesture that seed essential for her attacks, much like a magician needing to wave a wand before casting a spell.
But this ti, the snap never ca.
“Sever.”
Maintaining that unsettlingly bright smile, the mannequin spoke in a childish voice, issuing a curse from deep within.
Crack.
The mont the word fell, an invisible force wrapped around Bloody Mary’s raised wrist. Her slender arm twisted violently, as if caught inside a spinning machine—bones breaking, flesh contorting. Even her long fingers warped under the force, shattering and distorting into a mangled, broken shape.
“Ahhh—! Damn you, you—!”
Bloody Mary’s vicious curse was cut off halfway by the mannequin’s next spell.
“Silence.”
With that simple word, her throat and neck suddenly bulged, forming a strange outline beneath the skin. Sothing unseen seed to expand inside, stretching the flesh thin. A dull, dark red glow flickered beneath her neck, accompanied by a searing heat.
It was as if a burning mass had been forced straight into her throat.
“Ghk… gh—”
Bloody Mary glared at Natalie with venom, clutching her throat tightly with her remaining right hand, trying desperately to force whatever was lodged inside out.
She wasn’t human—this level of damage wouldn’t bring her down.
In fact, in just a few steps’ ti, the arm Natalie had twisted out of shape had already returned to normal. Once the broken bones fully recovered, she would be able to use her snapping attack again.
Still, the continuous damage enraged the ancient entity. This was just a witch who had existed for barely a century—far younger than herself. She needed to teach this arrogant little thing what respect ant.
Suppressing the fury surging in her chest, Bloody Mary pretended to falter, deliberately showing weakness as she waited silently for the mannequin to approach.
One step. Two steps. Three—
Now!
The humanoid creature covering her throat lit up with fierce intent. Raising her now-restored left hand, she pressed her thumb and index finger together, preparing to unleash her strongest move—
“Lose your limbs.”
The calm, offhand sentence fell into Bloody Mary’s ears with overwhelming weight.
Without warning, a violent wind rose. Invisible currents stirred the surrounding darkness. Thick fog crept in from all sides, endless and suffocating. Within the black mist, anguished wails and piercing screams echoed one after another, turning the surroundings into sothing like a vision of hell.
“Don’t kill it! Pony is my only friend!”
“Why, why, why?! I didn’t do anything wrong—why are you treating like this?!”
“Waaah… ahhh…”
The piercing cries drew closer and closer. At last, from the darkness on the left, sothing horrifying erged.
It was a creature made entirely of heads.
Countless human heads—so shouting, so screaming, so crying, so begging—linked together into a tentacle-like mass. Each head looked as if it had been bleached, drained of all natural color. Hair, eyes, lips, skin—everything was a lifeless, corpse-like pale.
Their white eyes were wide open. They had no bodies, no limbs—only long, soft necks, like strands of noodles, stringing the heads together like grapes. Where a “stem” should have been, there was instead a strange tubular structure covered in fleshy growths.
This grotesque entity extended itself out of the darkness—like sothing reaching in from another world—its target locked onto Bloody Mary’s left arm and left leg.
As it drew closer, the heads along the tube stretched their necks, opening their mouths wide to reveal rows of sharp, slick teeth. With a disturbing eagerness, they lunged at her intact limbs.
Crunch… crack…
Each bite tore away large chunks of flesh. Even bone, normally hard, seed brittle under their teeth. The wet, grinding sounds that followed were those of chewing.
After a few quick bites, the heads crushed what they had taken and swallowed. Their faces showed a kind of lingering satisfaction. Slight bulges traveled down their thin necks as the food passed through, and soon, murmured, fragnted whispers began to spill from their mouths once more.
“So fragrant! So fragrant!”
“It’s the taste of a b*lly…”
“Why did you kill Pony?! Why?! Why?!”
Before one round of murmuring could even finish, another wave of attacks had already begun…
Bloody Mary did possess powerful regenerative abilities—but in front of these vulture-like heads, even the strongest regeneration only ant more flesh for them to devour.
What made it worse was that there wasn’t just one of these head-tentacles.
Even as the creature on the left had just erged, another tentacle made of heads appeared from the darkness on the right.
The heads fed without restraint—sucking her blood, devouring her flesh, gnawing her bones. Fresh tissue had barely begun to grow at the edges of her wounds before it was torn away and eaten again, leaving her no chance to fully recover.
Bloody Mary swore that in all her long existence as a monster, at worst she had only ever been sealed away—never had she been reduced to such a miserable state.
“Enough! Enough! You win—make these hatred-born monsters get away from !”
With the bones in her legs shattered, she lost her balance and collapsed onto the dusty ground, shouting hoarsely with her newly healed throat.
Tap.
The wooden mannequin took its final stiff step, stopping beside Bloody Mary’s feet and looking down at her from above.
“I’m glad you’ve finally recognized reality.”
As she spoke, the mannequin’s waist joint bent forward with a sharp click. A rough wooden hand reached out and grabbed Bloody Mary by her blood-soaked, tangled blonde hair.
Then, like dragging a sack, Natalie began to pull the struggling Bloody Mary along, heading toward the mirror at the end of the corridor.
With their “bait” being dragged away, the strings of heads stretching out from the darkness followed, lunging after them like hyenas, greedily biting at Bloody Mary’s limbs, preventing the evil spirit from regaining any ability to move.
From beginning to end, Bloody Mary could only offer faint resistance through her neck and mouth.
When she saw where Natalie was heading, her flushed face instantly turned pale.
“Y-you… what are you doing… where are you taking ?! Since you know my na, you should know I was once a witch persecuted by the Church—just like you!”
“Persecuted by the Church… so you chose to fall into darkness, beco a mirror-bound evil spirit, and go on to persecute others?” Natalie said slowly, her grip not loosening in the slightest.
“Damn it—let go!”
“Hey! Let go of —now!”
Bloody Mary’s fear grew stronger. She struggled helplessly on the ground, like a fish placed on a hot griddle. But Natalie’s wooden body was imnsely strong—no matter how much she thrashed, she could not break free from the mannequin’s grip.
At last, they stopped in front of the mirror at the end of the corridor.
It was a large full-length mirror, nearly two ters tall and about forty centiters wide. The rectangular fra was made of carved wood with decorative patterns. It leaned slightly against a board behind it, its design classical and its surface clean and polished.
Everly stood behind them. The beam from her chest flashlight illuminated the mirror, reflecting Bloody Mary’s frightened face within it.
Natalie extended her free hand toward the mirror. With her clumsy wooden fingers, she dipped into the blood flowing from Bloody Mary’s wounds, then raised it and drew a perfect five-pointed star on the mirror’s surface.
In occultism, the pentagram is a classic “seal symbol.” It is commonly believed that the intersecting lines form a “door” used to confine demons, trapping them within the pentagon at its center. Because of this, in Church texts, the pentagram is also known as the “seal of demons” or the “witch’s cross,” frequently appearing in various ritual and religious contexts.
Seeing the symbol, a deep, overwhelming fear and despair appeared in Bloody Mary’s eyes.
“No… no, you can’t… we are of the sa kind! You can’t do this!”
She widened her eyes and, full of resentnt, glared at Natalie beside her through the mirror.
Unfortunately, the Curse Witch was unmoved.
“According to legend, if Bloody Mary is sealed into the very mirror that summoned her, and that mirror is then shattered, she will perish along with it and return to hell.”
Speaking in a calm, emotionless tone, Natalie placed both hands on either side of Bloody Mary’s head. With a forceful motion, she slamd her head straight into the mirror marked with the pentagram.
No expected sound of shattering glass ca.
The mont her head made contact, the hard mirror surface rippled like water, smoothly swallowing Bloody Mary’s body. First her forehead, then the back of her head, followed by her neck and torso—and even her severed limbs, which had begun to regrow flesh after escaping the head-tentacles…
In just over ten seconds, Bloody Mary’s wildly struggling body was completely devoured by the mirror.
After she disappeared, the smooth mirror surface trembled twice, then began a second violent fluctuation.
From within those surging waves, a small pinkish point suddenly erged.
At first, it was only fingertip-sized—impossible to identify. But as ti passed, more of it surfaced: the bridge of a nose, cheeks, chest, shoulders, the back of the head…
Finally, Everly could see clearly—it was a young girl, unconscious and weakened, as if in a deep sleep.
Or rather, it was Sara herself—the original body that had been replaced by Bloody Mary.
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