The Twin-Headed Giant

The chicken essence monster would eat anything, and after consuming its inner core, Tu Ran found she could eat all she wanted with gusto.

The hook snake could see a person's past and future, and swallowing its inner core gave Tu Ran that same ability.

The carnivorous vine could induce hallucinations.

So if she ate its inner core, she'd probably gain a similar power.

But how exactly was she supposed to use this power?

Tu Ran needed a test subject.

Unfortunately, this dense forest had nothing but trees and grass, plus a few half-dead vines—no animals or anything else she could experiment on.

Just then, Tu Ran noticed insects flitting through the air.

These were the same colorful fireflies she'd seen in her hallucination earlier.

Now that she looked again, they were all pitch-black and ugly as sin.

Since they'd crossed her path, she might as well try her newfound ability on them.

Locking onto one insect, Tu Ran silently commanded: Fall!

The insect buzzed on, unchanged.

Tu Ran refused to believe it.

Fall!

She tried silently commanding again.

The insect flew away.

Tu Ran: "..."

Did she have to say it out loud?

But the carnivorous vine didn't have a mouth, and it hadn't shouted anything either.

Whatever—she might as well try.

Tu Ran drew her pistol, aimed at a giant sequoia's trunk, and fired.

At the same time, she shouted at an insect that flew past her: "Fall!"

The shout was drowned out by the gunshot.

The insect looped around in the air a couple of times and flew off.

Tu Ran: "..."

There went a perfectly good bullet.

She holstered her gun in defeat.

Forget it—she'd just let things take their natural course.

Tu Ran picked a direction at random and decided to keep walking that way.

Since compasses were useless in this world, and Tu Ran couldn't tell north from south anyway, she just went by gut feeling.

Every so often, she'd pause and carve a few marks into a tree as a trail marker.

This world had no concept of time either; day and night came with no rhyme or reason.

A day could be twenty-four hours, or forty-eight, or eighty, or a hundred.

Everyone who entered this world still followed Federation standard time.

Tu Ran stopped at nine o'clock Federation time, found a giant sequoia that was easy to climb, scrambled up to the treetop, and picked a fork in the branches as her "night" spot.

In reality, the sun was still blazing directly overhead.

The sequoia's leaves blocked most of the light, so Tu Ran wouldn't get sunburned.

She pulled a compressed protein biscuit from her food pack and took a bite.

This was her first meal of the day.

After a couple of swallows of nutrient solution and several big gulps of water, she set a six-hour timer, draped a leaf she'd picked over herself to block the light, and closed her eyes to sleep.

Even in sleep, she didn't let her guard down.

The timer hadn't even gone off when Tu Ran heard heavy footsteps approaching at a slow, dragging pace.

It sounded like a hundred-year-old man leaning on a cane, shuffling along in slippers—slow and ponderous.

Tu Ran snapped awake. She didn't immediately throw off the leaf to look.

Instead, she poked a small hole through the middle of the leaf with her finger.

Peering through the hole, she observed the situation outside.

Was that... a giant?

She was stunned by the humanoid figure before her.

She was currently perched on a branch of a massive sequoia, at least twenty meters above the ground.

But this man walking toward her direction was at her eye level.

His head was level with hers.

His eyes were each the size of her head.

And right now, those eyes were looking straight at her, with a melancholy expression.

He seemed to think of something and let out a sigh. The rush of air hit the leaf over Tu Ran, nearly blowing it—and her—off the branch.

Luckily, Tu Ran reacted quickly and grabbed on just in time.

She crouched on the fork, not daring to move.

Given the size difference between her and this giant, in his eyes she was probably no more than a caterpillar clinging to a blade of grass.

Tu Ran continued to observe him through the leaf.

When he turned, she realized that this thing couldn't simply be called a giant human.

His appearance was radically different from a human's.

From the front, his upper body was that of an adult human male.

No clothes, all muscle.

But when he turned around, his lower body was that of a horse.

And that wasn't all—at the end of the horse's body, another human torso sprouted.

The human at the rear looked furious and resentful, arms crossed over his chest, nostrils practically pointing at the sky.

Two human heads sharing one horse body.

Tu Ran's eyes nearly popped out of her head.

She steadied herself and quietly placed her wrist over the hole.

She needed to record this species.

So far, so good.

The two heads didn't notice her.

They walked right past her.

Then, at that moment, Tu Ran's timer went off.

The instant the vibration sounded, Tu Ran's heart jumped into her throat. She immediately shut it off.

She silently prayed those two hadn't heard it.

Just treat it as a caterpillar farting.

The terrifying part was, the heavy, dragging footsteps stopped.

Tu Ran was too scared to even breathe.

This is it, this is it.

She saw the two who'd already passed turn back around.

It was the angry-looking man leading the way.

His head-sized eyes scanned in every direction, searching for the source of that faint vibration.

Tu Ran's hand slowly moved to her pistol.

The angry man's gaze swept around in circles but he couldn't find where the sound came from.

He threw his head back and roared, then slammed his fist into the nearest tree on his right.

The tree snapped clean in half on the spot.

It grazed past the tree Tu Ran was in.

And crashed to the ground.

Tu Ran: So that's how all those broken trees happened...

Then, the next second, something even more troubling happened.

The angry man's gaze landed on the tree she was in.

He hadn't spotted her—he just wanted to take out his rage on this tree.

If this tree fell, she'd probably go down with it. At this height, even if she didn't die from the fall, she'd end up half-crippled.

Tu Ran's mind raced, and she came up with a risky plan.

The moment the angry man swung his fist, she'd leap onto his arm.

Using that as a buffer, she'd slide down their connected bodies and hit the ground running.

She was small and easy to hide—all she had to do was duck into some bushes and they'd never find her.

Plan settled, Tu Ran kept her eyes on the angry man's movements, calculating the angle and direction of his punch.

She had to avoid jumping too early and slamming straight into his fist, ending up as a splatter of gore.

The angry man's fist, swinging like a wrecking ball, was already cocked high.

The distance to the trunk was shrinking.

Ten meters, eight meters, seven meters...

Closer, just a little closer. Tu Ran stared at his fist, counting down in her mind.

A little closer and she could jump.

But just as Tu Ran was about to spring, that fist that could pulverize anything suddenly pulled back, moving farther and farther away from her.

Before Tu Ran could figure out what was happening, a deafening crash rang out like a landslide or a tidal wave. The ground shook, and Tu Ran clutched the branch for dear life to avoid being rattled off.

But the leaf covering her didn't survive—it fluttered down.

Tu Ran's face went white in an instant.

Nervously, she looked toward the twin-headed monster.

The two men had started fighting each other for some unknown reason.

That sound just now had been them tripping over the fallen trunk.

While the two were still locked in their scuffle, Tu Ran quickly plucked a fresh leaf and covered herself with it again.

She poked another hole in the middle to keep watch.

Because their bodies were connected, each one controlling two of the horse's legs, their fight was absolutely ridiculous.

They'd tripped over the trunk, and as long as one of them refused to get up, the other couldn't get up no matter what.

At this point, both were lying on the ground. The angry man wanted to stand, but the melancholy man lay on the ground like a corpse, refusing to cooperate.

The angry man twisted his upper body desperately, swinging his fists trying to land a hit, but he just couldn't reach.

He started jabbering something in a language Tu Ran didn't understand, but from his tone, she guessed he was cursing up a storm.

He said a lot; the melancholy man only replied occasionally.

And every time he replied, the angry man got even angrier, kicking anything within reach.

The ground beneath him was getting gouged out into a pit, dirt flying everywhere.

Tu Ran thought back to that big pit she'd fallen into earlier—it was probably from these two stomping around.

This wasn't the time to stick around and watch the show.

Seeing that the two didn't seem to be getting up anytime soon, Tu Ran decided to slip away.

If these two stood up and went at it here, all the surrounding trees would suffer—and so would she.

Tu Ran carefully crawled to the side of the trunk facing away from them.

She climbed down slowly.

When her feet finally touched the ground, she poked her head out to check on the fight.

The two were working together to get back on their feet.

Tu Ran cursed under her breath and sprinted in the opposite direction.

To be absolutely safe, she grabbed a leaf from the ground and draped it over herself as she ran, blending seamlessly into the surroundings from above.

She ran a full three hundred meters before she heard the thunderous crash of trees falling behind her.

The ground trembled beneath her feet.

Tu Ran stopped and looked back.

She couldn't tell if the fallen tree was the one she'd been hiding in.

But as more giant trees toppled one after another, she began to feel grateful she'd made the call so quickly.

Once she was far away from that human-headed, horse-bodied monster, Tu Ran wandered aimlessly forward.

She'd completely lost her sense of location.

Even if she wanted to retrace her steps now, she couldn't find the way back.