The instant the world tilted on its axis, Mai Mingle remembered only two sensations.
The first was clear and intense, driving away all ability to think. A distorted hallucination rose before her eyes. Somehow, she recalled a large tree she had seen in the countryside during an outing more than forty years ago.
It was the ugliest tree she had ever seen. Whether from a fungal or viral infection, its entire trunk was covered in gnarled, lumpy burls, one stacked upon another, a cross-hatching of galls and warts. At first glance, it barely looked like a tree and more like a large, overgrown, diseased mass of brown, twisted, hard flesh.
Drenched in a cold sweat, trembling in agony, she looked down. Where her right calf should have been, she had the illusion of seeing that tree from forty years ago again. She hadn't even noticed when her head had slammed against the ground.
The Slender Patient's long, segmented fingers were wrapped around her calf.
The second sensation wasn't a sensation at all. It was a muffled thud she heard—the sound of something heavy hitting the ground not far from her.
When she first heard it, the pain had blasted Mai Mingle's mind blank; she didn't consider what the sound might be. But something—perhaps the slick floor under her palm or a glimpse from the corner of her eye—struck her like a bolt of lightning, piercing through the hazy consciousness. Her mind lit up.
'...So that's it.'
The Slender Patient had been deliberately torturing her. She'd done almost nothing but bend over and vomit violently while surrounded by the Round Heads. But no one in the hospital ward could have predicted an unintended consequence of this torment.
The tiled floor of the ward was now covered in large, sticky, slippery patches of vomit and gastric acid.
During the recent game of cat and mouse, five or six pairs of feet had tracked back and forth through the sticky filth, smearing it everywhere. In other words, any bipedal creature now risked taking a nasty spill and losing its front teeth on this floor.
'No matter how bizarre a flesh tentacle is, it still walks upright on two feet. If it's going to face-plant, it's going to face-plant, right?'
At this thought, Mai Mingle found a surge of strength in her seemingly tumor-riddled body. As the Slender Patient's shadow loomed over her, she strained to twist her body and finally saw it.
Just a short distance away, a Round Head had indeed just fallen to the ground, its feet slipping as it tried to get back up.
At that moment, if Mai Mingle could have laughed, she would have roared with laughter. 'Think you can run?'
'No matter how grotesque they appear on the surface, they can't escape the underlying logic. It seems the fundamental laws of physics apply even to the strange creatures in the Nest.'
In that moment, Mai Mingle forgot the Slender Patient's existence. She lunged forward, arm outstretched, and seized the ankle of that Round Head.
At the same time, the Slender Patient's hand once again touched her abdomen.
It wouldn't have been surprising at all if she had lost consciousness; what was strange was that she hadn't passed out.
The Slender Patient's shadow floated high above Mai Mingle. She still didn't dare to look at its face, her eyes fixed only on the ankle clutched in her left hand, as if her life depended on it.
In the mind-numbing pain, in the growing emptiness and fear as the Snake Belt was peeled from her body, Mai Mingle still held fast to the Round Head's ankle without loosening her grip in the slightest. A pained grunt that wasn't hers trembled through the room.
"Tell... tell it to back off..." she slurred, gasping for breath. "Or else, I'll never..."
It didn't matter that she couldn't finish the sentence. The residents by the door understood.
A few seconds later, a Round Head in the distance spoke up. "Make her let go!"
The Slender Patient acted as if it couldn't hear, continuing to peel off the Snake Belt bit by bit. Its movements were careful, even gentle—but no matter how delicate its actions, the pain it induced was still enough to make one's vision go dark.
"Hurry up,"
All the Round Heads urged in unison, striding towards the Slender Patient in lockstep. "A mature flesh tentacle cannot be lost. Make her let go, or else—"
"I know." The Slender Patient was clearly wary of the Round Heads. Seeing them advance together, it finally released the hand gripping Mai Mingle's calf—its other hand held the Snake Belt, and it certainly wasn't willing to let go of the Illusion.
The moment it let go, circulation gradually returned to her calf, and it changed from a gnarled tree back into a limb of flesh and blood.
Unfortunately, this didn't help matters.
Mai Mingle watched as a long, pale hand in mid-air unfurled its fingers—each with an unknowable number of joints—and swung down toward her arm. Never mind how much it would hurt on impact; she had no confidence she could withstand the blow and keep her grip from being swatted away.
'If it knocks my hand away, wouldn't all this effort be for nothing?'
Before it could touch her hand, Mai Mingle kicked off the ground, managed to twist her body, and shot her right hand out to grab the Round Head's ankle as well. 'If one hand can't hold on, maybe two can?'
She knew the idea might be naive. She knew she was trapped in a predicament that no ordinary human could fight their way out of.
The world was like a wheel, rolling over people again and again, forcing you to bow your head, to console yourself, to swallow your resentment. Somehow, she had lived this way for eighty-six years. The days that once felt so long, so unbearable, had passed in a flash.
If only she had fought back a little more often, resisted a little longer, perhaps today she wouldn't be so full of regrets she didn't dare to contemplate.
Compared to all the tangled troubles and hardships created by people in the world, these strange creatures were simple, straightforward, almost charmingly direct.
'It's just reaching out another hand. She can do it.'
'She can definitely—'
The thought didn't even finish before Mai Mingle's mind went briefly black, and she knew nothing at all.
When she could see clearly again, she found herself lying on her side, her hands empty, resting limply on the floor.
The Round Head had long since gotten up and retreated into the distance. The Slender Patient was now peeling a section of the Snake Belt from her back. Only one loop remained before it would be completely off her.
'...I failed?'
'Even with two hands, I couldn't hold on to the Round Head.'
Mai Mingle lay on the floor covered in her own stomach fluids. Her body felt as if it were one step ahead, preparing for the return of her eighty-six-year-old self—weak, limp, and heavy.
The Slender Patient extended two fingers long enough to impale a person and flipped Mai Mingle, who was like a piece of dead meat, onto her back, continuing to peel off the final section of the Snake Belt.
As it flipped her over, Mai Mingle's right hand flopped limply onto her own chest.
'...Hm?'
Her fingertips were wet; she couldn't tell if it was blood or some other filth. There was a lot of it under her nails, a thick, uncomfortable layer.
'Wait.'
'...Blood?'
The thought that rose in her mind sent a shiver through Mai Mingle's entire body. As if driven by survival instinct, without a second thought, she scratched at the Slender Patient's hand.
Any contact with the Slender Patient caused her unbearable pain, so it probably never expected Mai Mingle would dare to touch it voluntarily—but there was something else it expected even less.
The instant Mai Mingle's fingernails touched the Slender Patient, it suddenly erupted into a vast, churning mass of shadows.
It was as if her touch caused it the most extreme agony, so painful that the Slender Patient actually threw aside the Illusion. Its long body writhed and trembled, like a startled, grayish-white fog rising in the dim air.
'...Just as I thought.'
Mai Mingle didn't dare to delay. She immediately pushed herself up from the floor, and the Snake Belt, as if alive, instantly coiled back around her body, loop by loop.
As soon as she was on her feet, she quickly extended her hand and flung all the liquid on her fingertips at the Slender Patient. As she did, a thought occurred to her, and she couldn't help but laugh through her gasps, the sound like shattered glass—fragmented, yet sharp and bright.
It wasn't that she had a bizarre personality, to be able to laugh in a situation like this; it was because the scene was genuinely hilarious. In the room, a tall, thin shadow with its head touching the ceiling was twisting, rolling, and flailing its limbs. Beside it stood a woman, facing it, shaking one hand as if having a stroke. It looked for all the world like both the person and the ghostly creature had stepped on a high-voltage wire.
Anyone would have to agree: even if they'd stumbled into a horror movie, it would be a horror-comedy.
"What's going on?" the red-haired man asked dazedly from the other side of the ward. "Did it lose its mind? Did you lose your mind?"
He was standing next to a hospital bed, pushing it towards the door. When he saw the state of the Slender Patient, he was so surprised he actually stopped in his tracks.
The moment Mai Mingle saw him, she instantly understood what he was doing and shouted, "Wait, take me with you!"
In the space of a sentence, she had already dodged around the Slender Patient, sprinted to the hospital bed, and before the red-haired man could react, she leaped and rolled onto it, yelling urgently, "Go, go, go! It's not dead yet!"
The red-haired man looked like he wanted to curse her but also seemed to know he didn't have the time.
"You sure know how to hitch a ride—"
He gritted his teeth and muttered the half-complaint, pushing the bed and breaking into a run. Just as they were about to reach the doorway, the red-haired man vaulted over the side rail, kicked off the floor, and jumped onto the bed. Carried by its momentum, the bed clattered out the door, shooting into the hallway with the two of them on it.
"Don't touch the floor!" the red-haired man yelled, kicking off the wall to send the bed sliding further down the hallway. "That resident is under the floor!"
"So it really was under the floor?" Mai Mingle said, clinging tightly to the hospital bed. "Before I told you not to go out, I saw what looked like a lot of fine lines drawn on the floor tiles between the Round Heads. I knew something was strange then. Thank goodness it wasn't the Invisibility Technique."
"This has nothing to do with any Invisibility Technique!"
As the hospital bed slid past, the floor tiles by the doorway seemed to sense something. Wisps of blood-red lines suddenly surfaced, as if it were an eyeball growing countless bloodshot veins in its anxiety and rage. But since both of them were on the bed and not touching the floor, the "eyeball" could only watch helplessly as they, and the bed, receded into the distance down the hallway.
"What was that all about with the tall, skinny one suddenly going crazy?" the red-haired man asked, not forgetting his question as he pushed off the wall to propel them forward.
The explanation was actually simple: when Mai Mingle had grabbed for the Round Head's ankle earlier, although she hadn't held on, her right hand had broken the skin on its ankle.
Before falling into the Nest, she had been an old woman who was often bedridden. She hadn't cut her fingernails in a long time, and she certainly never filed them smooth. That desperate grab had dug deep into its skin, leaving her nails coated in a layer of the Round Head's blood.
"...Aren't the Round Heads its weakness?"
Mai Mingle helped by kicking off the wall as well. The hospital bed zig-zagged down the hallway, bumping against one wall or the other with every push, making them stutter as they spoke.
"So, whatever's inside a Round Head must also be its weakness, right? So I just wiped that bit of blood on its hand. I honestly didn't expect it to be that effective."
The red-haired man couldn't help but laugh. "Is this really your first time in a Nest? Not bad."
"Will they come after us?" Mai Mingle asked.
"Very likely," the red-haired man said, glancing back down the still-empty hallway. "Get ready. We'll glide a little further, then we'll have to jump off and run for it."
As they spoke, the hospital bed carrying the two of them slid past the window of a room.
In the glass, Mai Mingle caught a fleeting glimpse of her reflection: disheveled hair, a pale face, one side still smeared with filth...
But a smile played on her lips. She was in the prime of her life.