According to their footsteps, they should be able to see Anas City on the fifth day, but for some reason, the dense forest spreads endlessly around them, and there is no shadow of any city, not even a road. The GPS positioning in the hands of the soldiers also failed, and the arrow marking them was frozen in one spot and did not move. They tried to contact the nearest squads by radio, but received no response either.
They dared not put off the flares, fearing that they would attract the attention of the horners. In the end, they couldn't use the most traditional compass to locate, but they found that the magnetic field was chaotic. They were caught in a dilemma.
And at night, the strange chants still followed them like ghosts, and the light of the bonfires gleamed in the depths of the woods, like ghost fires that attract people into their traps. However, once it was close to the fire, it was found that the ground was empty, and there was no trace of any fire.
It wasn't until the fifth night of their arrival at the lake that things started to happen.
It was a small lake in the forest, probably formed by the snow flowing from the nearby snow-covered mountain. The water in the lake is peacock blue, with some purple-red aquatic plants floating under it, and sometimes bubbles are seen rising up, or some kind of fish that cannot be seen inside is churning on the water surface, stirring up layers of rhythmic ripples. They camped on the sandbar beside the lake. In order to save the rations they carried, they took water from the lake to catch fish and roasted them on heating stones that could heat quickly and did not burn. The lower lip of those fish protruded much more than the upper lip, with dense fangs, which looked a little scary, but tasted pretty good. Everyone temporarily forgot the trouble of losing their way, and planned to enjoy the rare delicacy during the march.
At this time, someone suddenly said that his brother was gone.
The pair of brothers Ethan in the team numbered 252 also knew that both of them were in their early twenties. They killed someone by mistake during a robbery and were sent to the forbidden city. They were called Little A and Little B. Xiao A said that his brother went to relieve him before, but he has not come back yet.
Wilson called up a non-human positioning device. Although the GPS positioning function has basically been invalidated, the inertial tracking and infrared tracking functions can still be used. He quickly located the location of Xiao B, which is 100 meters away from the camp. The cordon of the collar was not touched, so the soldiers' escape warning was not triggered.
Wilson scolded swear words, and went to the woods to find someone in person with a cigarette in his mouth, and Xiao A followed closely. However, not long after, a shrill scream came from the woods, "No!!!"
Other soldiers and several non-humans, including Samuel, ran over. I saw that the dense bushes had been ripped apart by Sergeant Wilson, and a human body was lying on the ground, but the head was gone. The cross-sections of the blood vessels, throat and trachea on the neck were clearly visible, and the collar that had been put on the neck had also fallen off. In a pool of blood everywhere.
There was no sign of struggle around, and they did not hear any suspicious noises. It's so close to the camp, how come there's no sound at all
Everyone quickly rushed back to the camp, grabbed their weapons and stood by. The non-people who didn't see that scene didn't know what was going on, and thought the Horned Man was about to attack.
Samuel grabbed Ethan who was still sitting on the ground, "The horned man attacked us!"
"Huh?" Ethan quickly grabbed the knife he stuffed in his backpack and looked around, "Where?"
Yeah, where are the horns
The crowd stood in the woods for a while, arrogantly, silently. Ethan suddenly noticed that it was too quiet.
Even if there is no chirping of insects and birds, even if there is no wind, there will be no such sound in nature, right? It was as if the sound had been sucked clean by an invisible mouth.
After waiting for a long time without movement, Wilson made a gesture, indicating that the crowd should be divided into three groups, and each soldier would lead the way to search in different directions. Derek stared at the screen of the thermal sensor carefully, but he didn't even see a beast bigger than a rabbit.
At this time, a female Alpha non-human suddenly pointed to the spherical braids hanging on the tree and said, "I always feel that these things are not hanging casually, you see, standing here, no matter which direction you look at, these takraw balls The placement is the same.”
When she said this, everyone noticed something strange. Ethan looked ahead, there were three on the left from near to far, the one in the middle looked slightly smaller than the other two, and there were two on the right. He turned his head to look to the left again, there were also three on the left and two on the right. He looked behind him and to the right again, and it was the same layout. As he walked forward, he found that with the help of plants, this layout remained the same, and it would not have been obvious if it hadn't been broken.
Derek reached out and grabbed a takraw ball, and said, "I remember that in ancient times, there was an Asian country in the earth that had something called a Bagua Array, which used some walls or furnishings to create some kind of visual illusion. It is said to cause hypnosis at the subconscious level, making people spin around in one place forever and can't get out. Very interesting."
His sarcastic tone of voice made many non-humans very dissatisfied, and Tai Feng asked, "So the reason why we are lost is that we are confused by these things? But how can the Horned people know what the ancient Earth people are?"
"Maybe it's not the gossip array, they developed the array themselves?" Derek shrugged, "I don't understand, don't ask me. But if you give me a computer, I might be able to write an artificial intelligence program to analyze it. "
"Don't talk about that useless." Samuel gave Derek a warning look.
Wilson scolded, "Damn, what's the matter, just pull them all off!" He stretched out his hand and tugged at it. The other non-humans also followed suit, and in a short while the nearby takraw balls were pulled clean. They're going to keep dragging along like this until the nuisance is cleaned up.
Until the female Alpha just turned around, her eyes suddenly widened, showing an expression of extreme horror.
Seeing her expression, Ethan and Samuel also looked back, and their eyes fell on the last inhuman at the end of the line.
The inhuman was unaware, just looked at the three people staring at him inexplicably, spread his hands and asked "What?"
However, before the two syllables were finished, his words stopped. He had never seen one of those twisted trunks that were still standing like coral move, and the color gradually faded into some kind of disgusting flesh-gray. The wrinkled body was like an old pumping pipe. There was a small hole at the top, surrounded by more folds, and landed quickly and silently on top of the inhuman head at the back of the line.
When Ethan and the others turned their heads, they saw that the small hole at the top suddenly expanded and opened rapidly, and the dark red mouth inside was covered with layers of sharp teeth like a meat grinder. The thing wrapped around the inhuman head like a pocket, and the top snapped back again. Everyone in the room heard a clean, sharp knife slicing half-frozen meat.
Everything happened in an instant, and the huge worm quickly retracted into the tree canopy, the inhuman body without its head instantly collapsed to the ground, and the collar rolled into a pool of blood. The whole process lasted less than three seconds, without hearing any screams or struggling.
The three people who witnessed this scene froze until the female Alpha suddenly screamed.
"In the tree! They are in the tree!"
Obviously Wilson also saw the last second of the scene, and shouted with a pale face, "Everyone get down! Pay attention to the top of your head!" Another soldier had already fired several shots at the place where the worm had withdrawn, and the sound of gunshots was in the woods. There were countless echoes.
Wilson kept calling the other two nearby squads, and received some echoes one after another. But judging from the chaotic voice on the other side, they also encountered a similar thing.
"There's a snake-like thing on the tree that can eat people!" The voice of another female Alpha sergeant who led the team was also a little unstable.
"All teams return to the base to gather!" Wilson ordered loudly. Ethan quickly got up from the ground and turned around and ran back with the rest. At this moment, Samuel gave him a sudden shove, and he fell to the ground, only to find that a meat grinder-like mouth was closing in. He almost turned into a headless corpse like those two inhumans!
Ethan's heart was beating wildly, and he broke out in cold sweat. Samuel grabbed him and crawled to his feet, rushing back with all his might. The worm-like thing was still probing from the tree, quickly eating people's heads and retracting back. Wilson and the other two soldiers had been firing, and the sergeant seemed to hit the thing with a shot, and a foul-smelling pool of dark green liquid dripped down and landed right on the face of the nearly eaten man. Hearing that man let out a heart-piercing scream, a puff of smoke rose from his face, and the blood turned out to be corrosive.
The original team of thirteen people was quickly reduced to eight people, but at this time there was a change in the forest, and the bushes shook violently. All the non-humans stopped abruptly and raised their cold weapons one after another, and the three soldiers also pointed their guns at the place where the disturbance came.
Then a man rushed out, the chief of the guard.
Following him were Chen Zeng, Jia Wen, Gray Mao, and a few unfamiliar non-humans. None of these people were numbered by them, so the team kept marching separately when they set off. But at this time, looking at them with disgraced faces, their clothes are covered with grass and leaves, and there are scratches on their faces, they are not much better than them, and most of them have also encountered an incident of getting out of control.
"My own! My own!" Jarvan shouted.
Wilson recognized the chief guard, ordered the guns to be put away, and asked with a frown, "What about Corporal Powell and the rest of your team?"
Gray Mao interjected coolly beside him, "The head was eaten, and the casualties were heavy."
Wilson looked very frustrated and roared, "What the hell is that! I've been serving on this broken planet for three years, but I've never heard of such a thing in the woods!"
"Sacrifice..." Ethan whispered, "I heard from your soldiers before that I saw those horned people performing live sacrifices?"
Wilson stared at Ethan, "So what!"
Chen Zeng sighed, "Using a living person to sacrifice is mostly to summon something. After all, we don't know much about this planet. Who knows what kind of creatures are hidden, maybe monsters awakened from hell. "
Some inhumans shivered behind his words, obviously terrified.
"Don't talk nonsense! The priority now is to go back to the lake and meet the others!"
They had just walked a few steps, when suddenly they heard the surrounding bushes shaking again, and the wind roared. Just wondering if it was another team that lost their way, suddenly I saw a ray of silver light passing by in the forest trees. Wilson yelled, "Crap! Horned!"
The gun had just been raised, and before it had time to fire, an agile figure suddenly rushed over and knocked Wilson to the ground. The person who came was silver-white, slender, with strong arms and long legs bent back like reindeer joints, wearing a heavy short jacket and tight-leg pants. Wilson saw a pair of slender purple pupils staring at him coldly, a short knife across his throat.
At the same time, about a dozen horned people rushed towards the panicked non-people. They jumped as high as cats, literally falling from the sky, slamming non-people to the ground with precision, or knocking people over with their hard feet on their heads. Samuel scuffled with a horned man. The opponent was stronger than he imagined. However, the name of his iron fist was not for nothing. He took the opportunity to punch the opponent in the jaw, and then slashed the short knife in his hand. Inserted into the opponent's chest without any hesitation.
The horned man let out a whimper, and his body twitched violently on the ground, as if it had been electrocuted. He breathed out in no time. Samuel was dizzy and his ears were buzzing with the punch from the Horned Man just now. He immediately looked around for Ethan, only to see a chaotic fight. Some of the non-people were pinned to the ground and their throats were cut, while others were pinned to the ground and beaten to death. He noticed that an extraordinarily tall horned man was carrying Tae-fung, who struggled with all his might, reaching out to him and shouting for help.
Samuel hurried up and knocked down the horned man who was a head taller than him. The opponent was knocked over by his brute force, and Tai Feng also rolled to the side. The Horned Man let out a terrifying roar and threw a punch. Samuel tried to block with his arm, but the opponent was too strong to block. He felt that his whole brain fell to the ground as soon as he was blinded, and the next moment the horned man was already on top of him, one hand stuck to his throat, and the other hand raised a sharp knife full of barbs and stabbed him at him. down. He reached out to grab the other's wrist, but his strength was greatly diminished due to the lack of oxygen. The blood filling his face made him feel like his head was going to explode, and seeing the tip of the knife getting closer to his eyes, Samuel knew that in the next instant that sharp thing would pierce his brain.
Suddenly, the horned man's eyes widened, a sharp purple blade pierced his throat, and blue blood dripped down Samuel's face along the blade. Samuel pushed the dead body away with force, and then saw Ethan staring at him in a stunned and panicked manner, his glasses splattered with blue blood, his mouth open as if deprived of oxygen, gasping for breath.
This is Ethan's first murder.