066 Under Attack - Part 4 - Mark’s POV

  "Is it just me," I said plainly, brushing a branch out of my way, "or are we going in circles?"

  "Yep," Greg answered without hesitation. He crouched low, scooped up a handful of dirt, sniffed it thoughtfully, then shoved a fingerful into his mouth and tasted it like some kind of deranged sommelier. Without missing a beat, he wandered off toward a nearby tree, unzipped his pants, and began to pee.

  Out of all the eccentrics I’d met in my life… and there were plenty, Greg easily took the top spot. In terms of crazy, my mom had it in spades, no question. In terms of being serious, Professor Merrick probably topped the list. But Greg? Greg was a category all his own.

  Merrick stood nearby, arms folded, gazing thoughtfully at the dead minotaur and the equally dead ESPer lying crumpled by the roots of a gnarled old tree. His face was unreadable, but there was a sharpness in his gaze that told me he was already piecing things together.

  "I suspect," Merrick said after a moment, "that these two might have something to do with our predicament."

  Yeah, no shit… we kept returning to this place.

  Greg finished his business and sauntered back over, adjusting his pants as casually as if we were on a picnic. He shrugged. "Couldn’t say for sure. Maybe? Maybe not. Very dead minotaur. Very dead ESPer. Kinda sus, but not conclusive."

  I rubbed the back of my head, feeling frustration mount. We’d been walking through the woods for what felt like hours. The trees all looked the same. The path always seemed familiar. No matter how far we went, we ended up back here… to the bodies.

  Merrick turned slightly, the barrel of a handgun appearing almost magically in his hand. Without ceremony, he raised it and fired, once into the minotaur’s skull, and once into the ESPer’s.

  The shot into the minotaur was uneventful. Just a wet, meaty thud.

  The shot into the ESPer, though... that was different.

  The "dead" man’s eyes snapped open. In an instant, he twisted out of the bullet’s way with shocking speed and bolted into the trees, stumbling and half-running like a drunken deer.

  "Don’t let him get away!" Merrick barked, already sprinting after him.

  And just like that, the Professor was off, tearing through the forest faster than I thought humanly possible. His coat whipped behind him like a cape, and he vanished between the trees within seconds.

  I tried to follow, pumping my legs, heart hammering in my chest… but Merrick was ridiculously fast. I barely made it ten feet before Greg, with a loud, gleeful "Thwip!" sound, whipped a vine from somewhere and started swinging after them like a half-baked Spider-Man.

  "Show-off," I muttered under my breath, stumbling over a root.

  Still, I didn’t stop. Wherever that fake corpse was running to, and whatever had trapped us in this forest loop, I had the ugly feeling we were just scratching the surface of something far worse.

  And I wasn't about to be the one left behind to find out.

  Strange. I stopped in my tracks, something gnawing at the edge of my mind. I turned to glance over my shoulder, and there it was… the dead minotaur, lying in exactly the same spot as before.

  I frowned. That wasn’t right. I’d been running full tilt; I should’ve put some real distance between us. Tentatively, I took a step backward, thinking maybe my sense of direction was just fried. Nothing changed. The minotaur was still there, looming in my vision like a cursed statue.

  “Ah, fuck… I was the one who got left behind.”

  I tried turning around and bolting in the opposite direction, hoping to break whatever weird loop this was. But after only a few frantic strides, my heart dropped into my stomach.

  The minotaur was still there.

  Very much still there.

  "Shit," I muttered under my breath, the pieces coming together. I wasn’t just stuck in some random space loop… it was a mini-maze, centered around the dead minotaur like it was some kind of grim anchor. I could move all I wanted, but I wasn’t getting away.

  Slowly, with an awful creaking noise like a tree about to snap, the minotaur began to move. It pushed itself upright with lumbering, sluggish motions, like a puppet learning how to use its strings for the first time.

  The stench hit me a second later, an overwhelming wave of rot and bile that nearly made me gag. Worms began to slither out from the bullet holes Merrick had left in its body, spilling onto the ground like blackened spaghetti.

  "Fuck," I breathed out, my pulse skyrocketing.

  It was extremely rare, but it could happen. Mutated cryptids with dual or unique attributes. In this case, the minotaur hadn't just been a big slab of muscle and rage… it had transformed into an undead variant. A minotaur and a zombie, all rolled into one delightful nightmare.

  I whipped out my butterfly knife with a snap, the blade glinting with whatever courage I could scrape together. Stylish, sure. Expensive, absolutely. Practical against a walking tank made of rotting meat and undeath powers? Not a chance in hell.

  I desperately wished for a shotgun. Hell, even a half-loaded handgun would’ve been a dream come true right now.

  The minotaur raised one massive arm and swung. I barely dodged, throwing myself back as the fist smashed into a patch of grass. The ground trembled from the impact, and where its fist had landed, the grass instantly withered into black husks.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Great. Not just strong, but apparently toxic too.

  This minotaur wasn’t just a bad match for me… it was a goddamn death sentence. Give me a lich, a vampire, even a swarm of wraiths. I’d take any of them over one bulky bastard like this. I hated the heavy hitters. Always had.

  They didn’t go down with clever tricks or fancy footwork. They needed firepower, brute force. Things I didn’t exactly have in spades right now.

  The minotaur turned its hollow, maggot-eaten gaze toward me, its chest heaving with wet, rattling breaths. I tightened my grip on the butterfly knife, feeling sweat bead down my spine.

  If I were going to survive this, I needed to think fast.

  And more importantly, I needed to get the hell out of this mini-maze.

  No matter how fast I ran, it felt like I was stuck in some cruel joke. I could swear I made at least ten steps, running full tilt, but the minotaur was always there, looming just one step behind me. It didn’t make any sense. No way something that big could move that fast. I could see its punches coming easily enough, and there was just enough time to dodge every swing… but that wasn’t the problem.

  My stamina wasn’t infinite.

  Eventually, I'd slow down. Eventually, I’d slip. And when I did, it would crush me into a human pancake.

  I needed a plan. Something desperate, risky… anything was better than running myself into the ground like an idiot. Gritting my teeth, I shifted my stance and went for it. Low slashes, dashing quick steps, anything I could pull off without getting wrecked instantly. I targeted its ankles, specifically the back where the tendons were more exposed.

  The butterfly knife gleamed briefly before slicing into rotting flesh. Black ichor oozed from the wounds. It wasn’t deep, but it made the minotaur stagger slightly. Its massive arm swung toward me, grazing my coat with a terrifying hiss. I didn’t think. I tore off the coat in a panic, leaving it in the minotaur’s grip as I stumbled free, heart hammering against my ribs.

  Sweat poured down my forehead, and every muscle in my body screamed for a break, but I forced myself to keep moving. Again and again, I darted in, slashing at the ankles, abusing every angle I could find.

  Finally, with one last desperate cut across both heels, the beast buckled.

  The ground shook as it crashed down on all fours with an earth-shaking thud.

  I panted hard, my vision swimming from the effort, watching in horror as the minotaur began to crawl toward me. Its arms were still powerful, dragging its massive body forward with terrible strength.

  If I let my guard down for even a second, if I so much as blinked, it would lunge and end me. I could feel it… a cold certainty crawling up my spine.

  Knife trembling slightly in my grip, I backed away, mind racing for the next move. I couldn’t afford to hesitate. Not now.

  Not if I wanted to live.

  I kept walking forward, tracking Professor Merrick and Greg. Thankfully, Merrick had the good sense to leave markings behind. Small scratches on tree bark, broken branches bent a certain way, a few stone piles here and there… simple tricks, but they worked. It helped that I had a little bit of training in everything. A little bit of martial arts, a little bit of shooting, a little bit of survival training, basically enough to make me dangerous but not enough to make me an expert at anything.

  I stopped every so often to let the minotaur catch up, since it was still crawling after me like some nightmarish puppy. If I had a choice, I would have broken into a full sprint already just to find Merrick and Greg, but no, I had to drag my undead party crasher along with me… because I was still trapped in its mini-maze!

  I stared at the thing and sighed. Might as well solve the problem now rather than regret it later.

  The obvious idea was to behead it, but even holding the sharpest butterfly knife on the planet, trying to behead a minotaur with it sounded like a bad joke. If I wasn’t an ESPer, it would have been flat-out impossible. Even with my ESP, it wasn’t like I could just slice clean through in one go.

  Didn’t mean I couldn’t get creative, though.

  Grimacing, I maneuvered the minotaur’s neck onto a big rock, using the angle to pin it down. Then I picked up another, smaller but heavy stone and started beating on the back of its neck. Over and over. Harder each time. Chunks of rotting flesh and black ichor splattered around with each hit. The worms… god, the worms… writhed from the wounds, squirming out like something from a horror movie. I made sure not to let even a single one touch my skin by ensuring my cognitive invisibility was always active. Even a graze from this stuff could be fatal or at least permanently screw up my day.

  Finally, with a sickening snap and a squelch, the head came off.

  I gagged slightly at the smell but got to work. I wasn’t just killing it for fun. There was a reason.

  I pulled off my belt, looped one end around one of the minotaur’s horns, and tied it tight. The other end, I fastened to my pants. With that, I basically had the world's most disgusting balloon tied to me.

  I walked forward again with a little more ease. I didn’t need to keep adjusting my pace anymore. The stupid minotaur, or at least its detached head, followed at my exact speed now, bobbing slightly behind me like the worst party favor imaginable.

  “Yeah, this is normal. Totally normal,” I muttered to myself.

  After what felt like fifteen minutes of trudging through this cursed forest, dragging the beheaded minotaur head like the world's worst pet rock, I finally stumbled into a small clearing.

  There, I found Professor Merrick and Greg standing over a man tied to a tree with thick, writhing vines. The guy looked rough, skinhead, prison jumpsuit, barefoot, and with enough bruises on his face to make him look like abstract art. Greg stood with one foot casually propped on a root, arms crossed like some lazy sheriff, while Merrick stood a few paces back, gun still in hand but lowered.

  Greg turned when he saw me. His eyebrows shot up. “What the hell happened to you?”

  I looked down at myself. Torn coat, bloodstains, a rotting minotaur head tethered to my waist like a grotesque accessory. Yeah. Fair question.

  “The minotaur trapped me in some kind of... mini-maze," I said, catching my breath. "I couldn’t walk away without bringing it along. Prof, any ideas how to deal with this?”

  Instead of answering me directly, Merrick looked back at the prisoner, his voice cold. “You heard the boy. Tell us what you know.”

  The skinhead swallowed hard. His eyes darted between Merrick, Greg, and me. He probably thought he was surrounded by lunatics… which, to be fair, wasn’t entirely wrong.

  “I don’t know much, man,” the man croaked out. His voice was hoarse, like he hadn’t had water in days. “They told me to set the trap. That’s it.”

  “What kind of trap?” Merrick asked, his tone deceptively calm.

  “The labyrinth!” the guy cried. “It’s ESP-based, sacrifices a cryptid or two to twist space around. Makes people loop around until their minds break.”

  Greg clicked his tongue. “Real friendly stuff. You know who ordered it?”

  The man hesitated. I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down. For a second, I thought he might lie, but Merrick raised the gun slightly, not aiming at him, just enough of a reminder.

  “I don’t know,” the skinhead mumbled finally. “They say they are a member of the ESPer Association, so… I don’t really have a say.”

  My stomach twisted. No... no way. But someone related to the Association? Or was it the Association itself? Who was someone high up enough to order this insanity?

  Merrick didn’t seem surprised. He nodded slowly. “Which one? Give. Me. A. Name.”

  “I don’t know!” the man said quickly. “They wore masks, okay? Masks! All fancy-like, with feathers and gold and shit! I just did what I was told!”

  “So a group of people,” Merrick lowered his gun again and exchanged a glance with Greg. Greg shrugged, not particularly concerned.

  I decided to speak up. “So what do we do with him?”

  Greg grinned. “We could tie him to the minotaur. See how he likes it.”

  The prisoner paled, obviously picturing that exact nightmare.

  Merrick sighed. “We’ll keep him alive. For now. We might need him later.”