Chapter 79: Is It Over? No, It's Just Beginning!
The pale white bones looked particularly stark under the mall's emergency lighting.
The skeleton was tightly entangled and pierced by thick roots from the decorative planter, as if it had been one with the fountain since the mall's construction.
Some bones were already broken, scattered in the soil, presenting a bizarre posture.
"Quick! It's her! Sarah Fier!" Deena, the leading girl, shouted excitedly, her voice trembling with emotion.
She carefully pulled a cloth-wrapped object from her backpack, unwrapping it layer by layer, revealing a severed human hand bone!
The hand was completely ossified, its surface gleaming with a grayish-white luster.
"As long as we return her hand to her, making her remains whole, the curse will end! Everything will end!" Flames of hope burned in Deena's eyes.
Her companions—the athletic girl Sam and the nerdy guy Josh—also showed expressions of desperate relief.
They had risked their lives breaking into this sealed mall for exactly this reason.
Legend said that Shadyside had been plagued by disasters for centuries because the witch Sarah Fier, before her execution in 1666, cut off one of her hands and cast a malevolent curse upon the land.
Her followers stole her hand bone, preventing her remains from being complete. As long as the hand was found and reunited with the skeleton, the witch's resentment would subside, and the curse would naturally lift.
And the successive serial killers controlled by the witch would finally rest.
Deena knelt by the pit, hands trembling as she gently placed the hand bone on the skeleton's chest.
"Sarah Fier, we've returned your hand to you," Deena's voice carried desperate pleading. "Please, end all of this! Spare us, spare Shadyside!"
The moment the hand bone touched the skeleton, no earth-shattering phenomenon occurred.
No divine light. No black mist dissipating.
Everything remained as before, terrifyingly quiet.
"Is it over?" Josh adjusted his glasses, asking with uncertainty.
"It has to be... it has to be over," Sam panted, face filled with exhaustion and hope. "Look, they're not moving."
Everyone looked around.
The killers who'd surrounded them indeed remained frozen in their original postures, unmoving, as if they'd truly become soulless mannequins.
Baghead's axe hung toward the ground. Skull Mask's eye sockets stared emptily at them.
A surge of joy—the relief of surviving catastrophe—welled up in their hearts.
"We did it! We actually DID it!" Josh jumped up excitedly, embracing Sam tightly.
Deena also released a long sigh of relief, slumping by the pit's edge, a tired smile on her face.
"Thank God... finally..."
On the second floor, Jennifer also breathed easier watching this scene.
"Master, looks like they solved it."
"You think so?" Edward's gaze, however, never left the static killers. His eyes remained calm, without the slightest hint of relaxation.
He didn't believe things would be that simple.
If a curse that had lasted for centuries could be solved by such a basic "return the artifact" method, it would be pathetically anticlimactic.
Indeed.
Just as Deena and the others were celebrating their victory—
Click.
A faint sound, like bones twisting, echoed in the silent atrium.
The sound was soft, yet it struck everyone's heart like a sledgehammer.
The celebration ceased abruptly.
The smiles on Deena, Sam, and Josh's faces instantly froze. They stiffly turned their heads toward the sound.
The figure in black wearing the skull mask slowly, inch by inch, raised his head.
His hollow eye sockets locked directly onto Deena.
Immediately after—
CRACK—
CREAK—
A series of bone-jarring dislocations followed one after another.
Razor Woman's eerie smile widened even further. She raised her hand and gently stroked her cheek with the razor's blunt side.
The Milkman adjusted his hat.
The little boy with the baseball bat rested it on his shoulder and tilted his head with disturbing curiosity.
And the tallest killer—Baghead—fixed his single eye on the skeleton in the pit, then slowly, as if exerting tremendous effort, lifted his heavy fire axe from the ground, inch by inch!
The axe blade glinted coldly, reflecting the pale, desperate faces of Deena and the others.
"No... NO! Why?!" Deena shrieked in disbelief. "We returned her hand! Why hasn't the curse ended?!"
Hope was instantly crushed, replaced by even deeper despair.
They were wrong. Terribly, fatally wrong!
This ritual, far from lifting the curse, seemed to have flipped a switch, fully activating these killers!
"RUN!"
Josh was first to react, yelling and pulling Sam, trying to flee.
Too late.
The encirclement had completely closed.
They had nowhere to go.
Baghead, holding his fire axe, advanced toward them step by step.
Each footfall felt like it was crushing their heartbeats—heavy and fatal.
Razor Woman approached from another direction with elegant, predatory grace, the razor in her hand tracing silver arcs under emergency lights.
The breath of death, like a tide, engulfed all three.
"Looks like the show's just getting started." Edward stood on the second floor, arms crossed, watching the scene below with keen interest.
Jennifer also shed her earlier relaxed demeanor, expression becoming grave. She could feel that the malice emanating from the killers below was at least ten times more intense than before!
"Master, should we step in?"
"Wait a bit longer." Edward's gaze swept the scene. "The real puppet master should be making his entrance now."
No sooner had he spoken—
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Crisp applause echoed from behind the fountain.
A middle-aged man in an expensive tailored suit, with meticulously styled hair, slowly emerged from the shadows.
He wore a pleasant smile, applauding as he leisurely said, "Truly spectacular performance, everyone. Betting your lives on a mistaken legend—that courage is genuinely commendable."
The man's appearance stunned everyone.
Deena and the others stared in shock, and even the killers who were about to strike stopped their movements at his appearance, as if awaiting their master's command.
"Who the hell are you?" Deena demanded, voice trembling.
"Me?" The man walked to the pit's edge, looking down at them, his smile carrying cat-and-mouse amusement. "My name is Solomon Goode."
Goode!
That surname was infamous throughout Shadyside.
The Goode Family were the town's founders, and for centuries, they'd been the most powerful dynasty in the region, as if blessed by God himself—prospering through generations, producing sheriffs, mayors, and civic leaders.
Meanwhile, across the highway, the town of Sunnyvale thrived while Shadyside rotted.
"It's... it's YOU!" A lightning bolt seemed to strike Deena's mind. She instantly understood, eyes bloodshot. "All of this was YOUR doing! It wasn't Sarah Fier's curse! It was YOU!"
"Oh? Finally, someone with a brain." Solomon Goode nodded approvingly.
He bent down and picked up the hand bone from the pit, tossing it casually in his palm as if playing with an interesting toy.
"But you've got one thing wrong."
"The one who made a deal with the devil was never that poor, pathetic Sarah Fier."
Solomon's face revealed fanatical, devout expression.
"It was our Goode Family."
He gestured grandly at the frozen killers surrounding them.
"Every generation, we choose someone from Shadyside. Someone angry, broken, desperate. We feed their name to the devil, and they become... this." He indicated Baghead, the Razor Woman, all of them. "Killers. Possessed. Unstoppable."
"And in exchange," Solomon's smile widened, "the Goode Family prospers. Our town across the highway—Sunnyvale—flourishes. We get wealth, power, success."
"While Shadyside..." He looked around at the decaying mall with theatrical pity. "Well. Someone has to feed the devil, don't they?"
Deena's face twisted with rage and horror. "You've been sacrificing people from Shadyside for THREE HUNDRED YEARS?!"
"Oh, much longer than that," Solomon said pleasantly. "Sarah Fier discovered the truth. She was going to expose us. So we framed her as a witch, executed her, cut off her hand as a final insult, and blamed everything on her 'curse.'"
He laughed—a genuine, delighted sound.
"And you idiots spent all this time trying to help her rest in peace. When she was the only one trying to SAVE you."
On the second floor, Edward's expression had shifted from curious to cold.
"Devil's deal. Generational sacrifice. Scapegoating an innocent woman." His voice was quiet, controlled. "Classic."
Jennifer's eyes glowed faintly red with anger. "Master, this is—"
"Evil," Edward finished simply. "Not cursed. Not possessed. Not even insane."
He looked down at Solomon Goode, who was still monologuing to the terrified teenagers.
"Just evil. The worst kind."
His hand moved, and Ebony and Ivory materialized.
"And I really don't like evil."
Below, Solomon was reaching for Deena, clearly intending to make her his next sacrifice.
"Now then," Solomon said with disturbing cheer, "let's make this official. Sarah Fier already tried to stop us and failed. What makes you think you can—"
BANG.
The gunshot echoed through the mall like a thunderclap.
Solomon froze mid-sentence.
A bullet hole had appeared in the marble floor, inches from his expensive leather shoes.
He looked up slowly toward the second floor.
Edward stood at the railing, one gun pointed casually downward, smoke curling from the barrel.
"You done monologuing?" Edward called down, voice dripping with bored contempt. "Because I've got a few notes on your whole 'evil dynasty' speech."
Solomon's pleasant expression cracked, replaced by cold fury.
"And who," he said slowly, "the hell are you?"
Edward smiled—cold and predatory.
"Me? I'm the guy who collects assholes like you."
He vaulted over the railing, dropping two stories and landing in a perfect crouch that cracked the marble beneath his feet.
He straightened, guns trained on Solomon.
"Now. Let's talk about how you're going to break your family's little deal with the devil."
Solomon's face twisted into a snarl.
"Kill him," he commanded.
And every single killer in the mall turned toward Edward.
Jennifer sighed from the second floor.
"Here we go again."
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