Chapter 345. Escape
Everyone's face turned grim. Before Charles could come up with a plan, rustling sounds echoed from behind them. They turned around and saw that the Ropelings perched on the branches, as well as the Ropelings peering out of the leaves, had surrounded them. They were trapped!
One of the sailors couldn't take it anymore and let loose a crazed cry before firing his gun haphazardly at the Ropelings before him. The bullets knocked down some of the Ropelings, but too many Ropelings had surrounded them that the sailor's attack was a mere drop in the ocean.
To make matters worse, no one knew how many more Ropelings were lurking in the forest.
"Stop! Did I tell you to open fire?" Charles roared and snatched the gun off of the sailor's hand.
"Why don't we try fire," Audric suggested, "Ropes should be afraid of fire, so we should just burn them down!"
"Mr. Charles, why don't I try talking to them? Perhaps they're friendly monsters!"
Charles had no time to listen to the suggestions of his crew. His keen ears picked up the disorderly approach of a large horde of Ropelings from behind them. Even the web of Ropelings before them showed no signs of stopping—over a hundred Ropelings approached the crew in a bizarre, disorderly fashion.
The crew frantically looked around; the Ropelings they had taken their eyes off of were ten meters away earlier. When they looked at those Ropelings once more after just a mere second, they were horrified to find that those Ropelings were only three meters away from them instead of ten!
Line of sight... movement... line of sight... A light bulb lit up in Charles' mind, and he finally understood the mechanism behind the Ropelings' movement.
"Listen up, everyone!" Charles roared, "Keep your eyes on them! They're not going to move as long as they are in your line of sight!"
At Charles' order, the crew swiftly split into pairs; they cast their wary gazes upon the freakish Ropelings and made sure that not even one of them would make a move by ensuring that every single Ropeling was in their line of sight.
Just over a dozen human eyes weren't enough for the job, but Lily's mice friends came in clutch. Hundreds of tiny bean-sized eyes glared at the Ropelings, and they instantly ceased all movement.
"Don't panic, and move slowly to the left. Just keep staring at them, and they won't be able to make any movement. If your right eye gets tired, switch to look with your left. All right, let's go. Nice and steady!" Charles ordered, and the crew created a spherical formation along with the mice.
The group slowly made their way out of the Ropeling's encirclement. Everyone's eyes were bloodshot; they didn't dare to even blink, but their effort was paying off. They continued moving away from the ocean of bizarre monsters made from brown jute rope.
A cacophony of footsteps soon echoed as Charles led his crew to a mad dash into the colorful forest. They ran desperately, afraid that the freakish monsters would catch up to them.
Charles eventually gave the order to stop upon seeing some of the weaker crew on the verge of vomiting from the sheer exertion. Of course, Charles himself couldn't rest. He shot a grappling hook at one of the tree branches above them and hoisted himself up on the tree branch.
He jumped from a tree branch onto another and looked around thoroughly before he finally heaved a sigh of relief. Those bizarre Ropelings were nowhere to be seen; they were safe, albeit temporarily.
What on Earth were those? Are they living relics from the Foundation? What if they're the native inhabitants of this island? The cogs in Charles' mind turned as he thought while resting.
Soon, Charles and his crew got moving once more. They weren't completely safe here, and Charles wasn't willing to risk spending more time than the minimum of ten minutes for resting.
With a compass in one hand and a hastily-drawn map of the island on the other, Charles led the crew somewhere else. Charles' tentacle gripped a pencil to mark the place where they had encountered the Ropelings with an X on the map.
Regardless of their identity, it'll be best if we avoid and steer clear of those freakish creatures. Charles thought.
Not a word was spoken as the group marched deeper and deeper into the colorful but eerie forest. The encounter with the Ropelings taught every single crew member that they couldn't relax at all on an unknown island. Their faces marred with nervousness were briefly revealed by the flashlights in their hands.
To avoid running into anything like those Ropelings, Lily had dispatched her mice friends as forward scouts. She ordered them to retreat immediately upon seeing anything similar to the Ropelings or the Ropelings themselves.
Time went by quickly, and the mysterious veil over the island slowly unfurled before Charles' eyes. Aside from the Ropelings, there were still other living creatures on this island. Of course, they were either hidden in the ground, concealed in dirt, or hidden in tree trunks.
Most of them were bugs, and the earlier chirping sounds they had heard were produced by these drab-colored insects.
In addition to the variety of drab-colored bugs, there were also many different bizarre plants. Dark honey mushrooms larger than the size of a human, fuchsia that had blossomed into a spiral, and miniature purple bamboos that resembled grass.
The colorful forest became more vibrant in the eyes of the crew as they encountered more and more bizarre plants and insects.
Unfortunately, the crew couldn't really appreciate the colors of the forest, as each and every plant or animal could pose a threat to their lives; it was a fact that didn't allow the crew to rest easy.
Just like that, Charles and his crew continued their journey, and on the fourth day, every single crew member looked visibly exhausted with their nerves frayed.
The days were fine, but the crew had never gotten even a single night of decent sleep so far during nightfall; they were afraid that those Ropelings would show up from out of nowhere and snap their necks.
Charles started thinking of whether to give the order to retreat or not, but then they discovered something bizarre—a hollowed-out tree. The massive tree had been utterly hollowed out, but even more bizarre was the door-shaped opening in the bark.
Their batteries had been exhausted, so the crew carried fire torches for light. The conflagration of torches briefly illuminated a distorted half-face, scaring everyone out of their wits.
Fortunately, their Captain had strode in confidently. They knew their Captain had night vision, so the fact that their Captain had just walked inside the tree without any hesitation meant that there wasn't anything dangerous inside the tree.
Charles looked up and saw a multitude of murals depicting portraits of people in a variety of sizes. The portraits seemed to be looking down at the people down below, and the torch earlier had revealed just one of the portraits.
The portraits were extremely crude, and they were barely better than drawings of cavemen ignorant of art. Charles' eyes as a painter allowed him to see that the individual who had drawn these portraits had done all these haphazardly.
There were forty-three portraits in total, and there were both male and female.
"Captain...there are more here..." Bandages pointed his fire torch somewhere.
Charles followed Bandages' fire torch and instantly saw that the murals had some kind of sequence akin to a storyboard. The drawings were highly simplified, but they were vivid and clear enough to grasp.
The story began with a ship, and it reminded Charles of the shipwreck they had discovered a few days ago. Some figures disembarked and encountered others on land. Those from the ship then started fleeing for some reason, and some of them had been...
Dismembered?
Charles frowned and moved in for a closer look. The grotesque depiction of the dismembered bodies showed signs of torture before they were killed. Charles' eyes roamed from the murals and onto the furnishings around them.
He eventually found a four-meter-wide bed made out of leaves; its size made it clear to Charles that multiple people had once lived here.
I guess the shipwreck survivors once lived here. Where are they now? Did they stumble upon those bizarre creatures made out of jute rope and were subsequently killed?
Before Charles could fall into deep contemplation, the urgent squeaking of rats echoed from outside. He had stayed with those mice long enough for him to know that the rats were squeaking urgently to warn them of danger.
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