A Happy Family?

Seedy let out a guttural screen upon seeing the many-handed monster. It didn't seem to like it, holding out its vines aggressively. As for the monster, it didn't seem to care, only progressing towards them further.

Mia's eyes widened.

"I-I think this thing is way out of our league. We should run!"

Jack put a finger on his chin and tilted his head to the side.

"But we already started playing a different game! Look at how much fun he's having!"

He pointed towards the corpse that was being held by the monster, who promptly tossed it to the side after the movements stopped. Although there were no apparent eyes, the monster visibly turned its attention to their group.

Jessica's breathing was a little intense. Although Mia wanted to run pretty badly, even tugging on her sleeve, Jessica herself remained still the entire time. It was like she was frozen in fear. Yet, she was able to speak.

"W-We need to fight it, because that's the right thing to do."

Mia furrowed her brows rather intensely.

"What the fuck are you talking about? How is that related to anything?"

Though against her protests, both Jessica and Jack ended up running towards the big scary monster instead of away. As for the monster itself, it welcomed that, reaching out with two giant hands towards the both of them.

Jess strafed to the left, almost fully dodging the hands save for being grazed by her side. As for Jack, he directly jumped over the hand, landing on top of the arm, and running alongside it.

Seedy didn't just stand by and watch either. Though it found it quite hard to initiate the fight, when one of the hands got close it latched on with all of its vines, and bit deep with its petals lined with teeth. It dragged its mouth along, leaving countless deep red lines into the hand before biting off a large chunk of flesh.

At the same time, Jess held her razor between two hands and cut into the monster's skin. On top of that, Jack slashed the arm while countless other hands reached towards him in a fury.

The monster let out a garbled cry from somewhere as it thrashed around violently.

Jack had a surprising amount of agility, dodging the various hands reaching out towards him despite not even looking at them. Though like he was completely insane, he continued getting closer to all of the hands.

As he got closer to the center of the monster, the hands became more abundant. In the end, he got grabbed simply due to the sheer number of hands reaching out towards them. But while the hands increased in number, they also became smaller.

Jessica let out a gasp when she saw this.

"Jack! Be careful!"

She only had a razor, and realistically could only do so much damage. However, while her face itself was warped in horror and concern, her eyes were strangely calm. Calculating, even.

She continued attacking the arm, but not in a messy rage. Instead, after pinpointing a specific location, she suddenly dug the razor in deep. With grit teeth, she pushed through the flesh of the arm despite it seemingly getting stuck on something.

Then, the hand of the giant arm suddenly fell limp.

Many other smaller hands reached out towards Jessica as though wanting revenge, but she was able to back off before they latched onto her. Seedy did pretty good as well. The monster attempted to retract one of its giant hands, but Seedy wrapped all its vines around the wrist, preventing it from getting away.

Not only did that help Jack scale up, but Seedy also found himself with a big meal, continuing to chew and eat away at the giant hand until it was just a mess of blood and bones.

On the other hand, Mia just stood there dumbfounded, with a pale face.

"...What the fuck?"

With the number of hands grabbing onto Jack, it seemed like the souls of the damned were attempting to drag him down to hell itself. However, he himself had a smile so wide that it tore the skin of his lips.

"Haaahah... HAHAHAHA."

Although the laughter was initially ominous considering the situation, it was still normal at first. But Jack's excitement showed through as it continued ramping up, until it became completely psychotic.

He grabbed one of the wrists of a hand similar in size to him before biting down, directly removing a finger. At the same time, he ripped out another hand using his other arm. Naturally, the many arms weren't just watching him do that.

They also grabbed onto his limbs and pulled rather hard, all the while more hands were holding him firm in the center. However, they weren't able to do anything. In fact, Jack simply pulled back even harder, gradually causing the flesh on some of the small weak hands to tear from the base.

He continued to bite down into anything, whether they were fingers, hands, or even just the side of the arms. It was almost like he was in a dream where there was candy all around him, and he was having the time of his life eating it.

The only difference was that this was flesh and blood.

His clothes and body quickly became dyed red. It did not take long for his hair to be matted in blood too. Jess also continued delivering hits that cut through important muscle, disabling the larger arms of the creature.

However, her eyes were actually on the main legs. She was rather ruthless, intending on making it impossible for the thing to run away. As for Seedy, he had consumed most of the main giant hand, before using his vines to rip out the weaker ones and chomp down on the medium ones.

The monster continued letting out guttural and muffled cries of pain. However, they quickly changed in nature. Its first cries were angered. But now, it was afraid. Afraid of the very things that were supposed to be afraid of it.

The many-handed monster moved very clumsily. While it did have many appendages, it definitely did not have the coordination to use each and every one of them perfectly. In fact, it was incredibly clumsy to the point that it would regularly miss a stationary target.

And now, it began trying to run away.

The hands clumsily attempted to push Jack away, but he simply held on by grabbing them instead. Seedy also grabbed onto several different arms, but the monster relaxed them so that they were more easily torn off and continued running.

Jessica's eyes suddenly sharpened as she ran through the mess of legs and arms.

They attempted to push and kick her away, but they moved too slowly to have any meaningful resistance. Jessica ducked down when she got close, and with a flash, swiped the razor blade against one of the heels.

Blood spurted out violently, while the razor itself got caught into the heel itself. However, the damage was done, as the tower of limbs collapsed onto a knee, or perhaps more accurately, many different knees.

It attempted to continue pushing itself forward with its other legs, but the sheer mass made it so that it could only move at a snail's pace. In fact, it was even slower since many of the limbs got caught onto nearby stalagmites, hooking them into place.

Seedy dragged itself over and continued to engorge itself on the meal that tried to get away. As for Jack, he still remained in the mess of hands, quickly breaking each finger with surprising deftness. Whenever all the fingers were broken, he quickly moved onto another hand, while an uncomfortably wide smile was on his face.

Almost like a child playing with bubble wrap.

The hands weakly put up some resistance in the form of trying to move away, but that did little other than delay for perhaps a second or two each time.

Jessica wasn't doing all that much better, muttering to herself something about the right thing to do, as she pulled out the razor blade before continuing to cut into various parts of the monster's body.

Mia slowly walked up with the lantern in one hand, observing it all. Her face was pale, while her eyes were widened. She was very unsettled, as any normal person should be.

There was an insane woman ripping into the flesh of a barely alive monster and chanting some sort of mantra.

There was a child, laughing as he continued breaking fingers, causing crisp cracking sounds to fill the air one after another.

Then, there was a literal monster, eating the flesh of another one in an incredibly messy fashion.

In the end, a shaky smile formed on Mia's face.

"Y-You guys did such a good job! I'm so proud of all of you!"

Jessica smiled and opened her mouth a little too widely.

"Of course! I did the right thing! That's always something to be proud of!"

Jack raised up two arms into the air, both of which had bent fingers that already turned purple.

"Look at how cool they are! I worked extra hard on these ones."

Seedy held up two sets of bones, imitating him, and let out a triumphant gurgle.

Mia took a deep breath, calming her emotions. She hadn't blinked for quite a while, but didn't notice that just yet.

"Now that we've had our... fun, we should go search for more, don't you think?"

Right after she said that her eyes suddenly caught onto something.