The moment they charged, Evelyn Ford aimed the Gatling gun at them.
"BRRRRT..."
As the men fell, the houses behind them were reduced to rubble.
The grey wolves lunged forward one after another. Ethan Dawson and the other three formed a circle with Evelyn Ford, each one guarding the others’ backs. With their seamless coordination, they had already gunned down half of the pack.
Everyone’s face was spattered with warm wolf blood, which trickled into their mouths, tasting metallic and bitter.
"Evelyn Ford, I’m out of bullets!"
Hearing Quincy’s voice, Evelyn Ford quickly retrieved a pack of bullets from her dimensional space and tossed it to him. She then mowed down a grey wolf that was poised to lunge. Watching their packmates fall one after another, the surviving wolves began to snarl and howl, but Evelyn Ford felt no mercy. ’They’re controlled by Patrick, and hundreds of humans have died in their jaws. A life for a life. It’s perfectly fair.’
The sound of children crying echoed from a stone house. After half an hour under the constant spray of machine-gun fire, Stone Village was littered with corpses, and blood flowed in rivers.
Stepping over the corpses of the grey wolves, Evelyn Ford kicked open the door of the stone house. The people inside were huddled together in a corner, indistinctly murmuring pleas for mercy.
Evelyn Ford also saw the girl who had been standing next to Patrick earlier. She was incessantly muttering a single word: "Monster."
Evelyn Ford leaned in, her face drenched in blood, and the girl shrieked in terror.
Finally, in a woodshed behind the latrine, Evelyn Ford found two women with their arms and legs bound in chains.
One of the women had already gone insane. The other was completely numb. When she saw Evelyn Ford, covered in blood and holding a gun, her eyes blinked once before she broke into a wide, chilling grin.
Evelyn Ford hacked through the chains with an axe and continued her search for other captives.
After an hour-long search, they had found one or two chained individuals in every single house—both men and women.
"We found 28 kidnapped outsiders. There are 86 native villagers, including 15 children and 10 elderly."
Ethan Dawson reported the tally to Evelyn Ford. She glanced at the bound villagers—every one of them, from the children to the elderly, was tied up. Among the crowd were four of Patrick’s family members, huddled in a corner with their heads lowered, their thoughts impossible to guess.
The air was thick with the stench of blood. Wolf corpses carpeted the village paths, and a river of blood stretched for nearly a mile.
Night fell, and snowflakes began to float down.
Evelyn Ford looked toward the village entrance and saw Ronan Kendrick walking in, dragging someone behind him.
It was Patrick. He was dead.
Only when they saw that he was dead did the villagers finally react, glaring at Ronan Kendrick with eyes full of hatred.
Patrick’s father began to wail, his voice a raw, hoarse scream.
"You’ll all die a horrible death! A horrible death!"
"You’re the one who deserves a horrible death."
Evelyn Ford pulled out a handgun, aimed it at his head, and fired. The man’s eyes bulged, a look of eternal grievance frozen on his face.
Ronan Kendrick tossed Patrick’s corpse in front of them. Patrick had two gunshot wounds, but the fatal injury was a stab to the chest that had pierced his heart.
The Red Wolf and the grey wolves were dead. And now, so was he.
Patrick’s grandparents clutched his body and began to wail. From their grief-stricken words, Evelyn Ford pieced together the full story.
The wolf pack had sent word to Patrick: many outsiders had arrived in the Rocksea Forbidden Zone. As usual, the pack was supposed to lure them all into the woods.
But this time was different. This group included two young girls, Wendy and Zoe. Patrick, desperate for healthy women to "correct" his family’s deformed genes, couldn’t contain his curiosity and came to see if they would be suitable.
Those two pieces of Dried Meat... they were pieces of his own flesh.
But during his inspection, he had also become fixated on Ronan Kendrick’s face—it was the handsome appearance and physique he had always coveted. He assumed everything would go as it always had, with the wolves handling any problems for him. He never imagined that these people would possess weapons he was powerless against.
Learning that this monster had targeted Zoe and Wendy, Officer Graham and Quincy were both seething with rage.
Over the past twelve years, their village had murdered no fewer than five hundred people. Most were devoured by the wolves, while a smaller number were imprisoned and forced to reproduce.
Evelyn Ford tossed a few knives in front of the captives who were still somewhat lucid, then gestured toward the bound villagers.
"You can have your revenge now."
The woman she had rescued from the woodshed looked at Evelyn Ford, then picked up a long blade from the ground and shakily rose to her feet.
She walked up to one of the villagers and plunged the blade into his stomach.
With her taking the lead, the other lucid captives grabbed the remaining knives and surged forward.
Evelyn Ford led her people away. Even after leaving the village, they couldn’t escape the stench of blood in the air. Evelyn Ford glanced back. The snow was falling heavier now, and soon, everything would be buried, as if none of this had ever happened.
"I can’t believe such a horrible village was hidden in here."
"If those two expedition teams hadn’t exposed the secrets of the Rocksea Forbidden Zone, these villagers wouldn’t have been rounded up for research. Maybe none of this would have happened. When you put it that way, it’s hard to tell who was right and who was wrong."
"But the magnetic field is what made them this way. If they just stopped having children and moved out of the Rocksea Forbidden Zone, they wouldn’t pass on their flawed genes."
"Are you an idiot? They’ll be obsessed with ’improving’ their genes until the day they die. They were even fantasizing about taking Ronan Kendrick’s face for themselves. For people living in such an isolated, backward place, reproduction is the most important thing in the world, even if the planet was ending. Even with inferior genes, they’re still determined to pass them on."
"What about the people we rescued? A few of them have gone completely insane. It’s so tragic. They were all locked in pits, their bodies covered in whip marks."
"They’ll probably leave."
"Who knows."
...
Exiting the woods and returning to the road they had come in on, Evelyn Ford brought out two RVs.
"We’re covered in blood. We need to get cleaned up right away."
"Evelyn Ford, let me get a look at that Gatling. It’s my first time seeing one up close."
Evelyn Ford removed the ammunition feed and handed the Gatling to Ethan Dawson.
She was drenched in blood and desperately needed a shower.
While the others had to wait in line to wash up, Evelyn Ford and Ronan Kendrick went directly into her dimensional space to get clean.
"Back at Stone Village, I heard several explosions. Was that your doing?"
Evelyn Ford noticed that some of her explosives and gas canisters were missing from the space.
"When I found him, he was entering a cellar that must have been their dungeon. I thought he was trying to hide, but it turned out he was raising a lot of snakes in there. He was planning to release them."
Evelyn Ford was surprised. "Don’t tell me he could also use Snake Taming?"
"It’s a possibility."
Ronan Kendrick fell silent for a moment. "When I blew up the snake pit, he had a complete breakdown. He pulled out a knife and killed himself. It was suicide."
"He got what he deserved."
If Patrick had been born with a normal body and appearance, if he hadn’t been warped by hatred and twisted ideology, with his skill in Beast Taming, he would never have walked a path to his own destruction.