I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood
Chapter 313: Let the Sounds Drift Through Your Mind

Thud.

The expensive compact folding camera slipped from his limp hand and hit the ground with a dull impact.

That soft sound, in the deathly silence of the underground banquet hall, was like a thunderclap, violently jolting everyone awake from the eerie ritual reenactment playing out before them.

“Aaah—!!”

Wendy, collapsed beside Elsa, was the first to let out a hysterical scream.

Veteran Milo’s face darkened profoundly, but in his eyes was a fear unlike any he’d ever known—a fear even greater than the brutal carnage he’d faced on the battlefield.

“Run!!!”

He practically roared the word.

Whatever could terrify a veteran who’d seen real battle and stared death in the face so many times was no ordinary creature. There, in the gloom just beyond the sickly green candlelight... something was rising.

It was... countless limbs from different people, brutally twisted and stitched together onto a single torso. There were men’s arms, women’s legs, a child’s foot...

The limbs twitched in uncoordinated spasms, as if each retained a separate will of its own.

And at the center, atop the torso, a girl’s head was hoisted by those limbs. The head was grotesquely swollen, nearly twice the size of a normal person’s.

Where the mouth should have been, the skin had torn open to either side, stretching all the way to her ears, forming a black, bottomless gash.

At this moment, reporter Elliot’s eyes were fixed on veteran Milo, wide with disbelief and horror.

But his pupils were already dilating, and a mixture of dark blood and foam leaked from the corner of his mouth.

He was held aloft by that Anomaly, its hand having pierced through his back and chest.

Then, toward the massive head, toward that black, gaping maw... he was tossed in.

Crunch... crunch crunch...

The bone-chilling sound of chewing emerged from the gash.

Sweat trickled silently down the veteran’s stoic, now deathly pale face.

Just then—

“Close your eyes.”

Elsa’s voice cut through the chaos of chewing, screams, and ragged breaths, so calm it was terrifying. It wasn’t a command; it was more a statement. “Everyone, close your eyes.”

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The girl named Wendy was already drowning in screams and despair. She heard that voice.

Closing her eyes—the thought came almost as an instinct.

She just wanted to escape the overwhelmingly terrifying images that were shredding her sanity, to seek even a moment’s solace in the pure darkness that came with shutting her eyes.

She squeezed her eyes shut, even covering them with her hands, curling up like a snail retreating into its shell.

But veteran Milo seemed not to hear.

His employer’s voice jolted him from his extreme fear, but what it awakened wasn’t obedience—it was a survival instinct ingrained deep in his bones.

He clenched his jaw stubbornly, his teeth grinding audibly.

He raised his dagger, his old friend of many years, and stabbed viciously at one of the countless arms supporting the monster’s head, which was slowly turning toward him.

The tip of the blade slammed against that pale skin, but didn’t pierce it.

It couldn’t even cut through the seemingly soft membrane. All it left was a shallow white scratch.

Milo’s battle-hardened muscles, the strength he’d always prided himself on—enough to easily drop a grown man—proved so fragile, so powerless against this inhuman anomaly.

In that instant, the veteran seemed to return to that battlefield where he’d felt so utterly helpless.

Artillery could easily tear a soldier’s body apart.

After a deafening blast, the comrade who had been by the campfire just last night, speaking in his rough hometown dialect about his wife and kids, wondering what to plant when he got home...

He was instantly reduced to a smear of unrecognizable flesh and bone on the scorched earth, leaving not even a last word behind.

Disease could also crush the strongest will.

In the damp, filthy trenches, watching the festering sores oozing on his body, feeling his life force drained bit by bit by fever and infection...

Should he choose to rot slowly in pain and stench?

Or, trembling, swallow that final bullet meant for himself?

Countless pale hands, belonging to different people, reached out.

They easily seized the arm swinging the dagger, grabbed the legs he tried to kick, caught his shoulders, his collar.

He was lifted off the ground by that inhuman strength, suspended in the air.

Milo’s gaze involuntarily fell downward. To that swollen, deformed girl’s head, held aloft by the limbs. To that black gash that stretched from ear to ear.

In its depths seemed to linger dark red bits and a viscous gleam.

He could almost feel the cold, fetid breath of that same maw that had just swallowed and chewed Elliot whole, right below him, in the direction he was about to fall.

Darkness sometimes brings fear. But sometimes, it can also bring... a comforting release.

Milo closed his eyes.

Murky tears slipped from the corners of the tough man’s eyes, falling into the infinite darkness below.

………………

In an instant, the world fell silent.

I’m probably dead, Milo thought.

But his consciousness hadn’t faded. He felt as if he were floating in a warm, soft darkness. So quiet. Too quiet.

Then, he seemed to hear something.

Distant, muffled, as if through a thick blanket.

A heavy thud? Dull, like a sandbag dropping.

The rasping sound of something being dragged? Rough, scraping against stone.

And... something sharper, more rhythmic? Like... cutting? Dismembering? But not quite metal.

Finally, a soft click. Crisp, like an old-fashioned door lock engaging, the sound of some precise mechanism snapping shut.

These sounds came in fragments, intermittent. They drifted into his consciousness, wrapped in that boundless darkness, sliding across his mind as calmly as a stream over smooth pebbles, bringing a mild, numb dullness.

Then, they faded away, leaving nothing. Nothing at all.

………………

After a long time, maybe just seconds, maybe centuries, Elsa’s voice sounded again. Calm, clear, like a bell ringing through frozen silence.

“It’s done.”

Milo’s eyelids trembled.

Then, he opened his eyes.