A Serpent's Revenge: Bakunawa's Bloodline

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

[MAYA]

Maya pauses in front of her dorm. She only cleaned the inside and outside of the house this morning, but it is now splattered with blood and, dare she say, guts. The smell is almost enough that she wants to puke, but she didn't eat anything to throw up anything.

If anything, her dorm looks more like a slaughterhouse than a home.

Thankfully, most of the serpents covered the dead bodies, so it spared her a more gruesome image than she would have liked.

She carefully makes her way to her house with a torch in one hand. As she expected, the serpents and aswangs parted ways when she walked. She seems to be the only one of the gods' children that the serpents and aswangs don't want to hurt, and she doesn't understand why.

Is it because I am turning evil and they sense that I am one of them? She wonders and quickly dismisses the thought with an abrupt shake of her head.

She notices that one of the pythons seems to be eating a familiar figure. She didn't mean to, but the torch she was holding ended up illuminating the scene. Right away, she feels sick with fear. Even though the body is broken up and the eyes look like they were scratched out, she can still tell it's Diana. Her once-beautiful face now looks like someone poured acid on it.

The python got so startled at her presence that it quickly spit out the body right at her feet. Maya screams, backing away in horror. Her legs falter, and she drops to the ground just as a humanoid aswang with black skin and batlike wings swoops down to devour the body right in front of her.

She scurries away immediately, not wanting to hear or see what the creature is doing to Diana's dead body.

Looking back at her home, she notices that the door is left ajar. Maya gulps, taking a rake from the ground that she left out in the garden. She starts to head inside, wondering what sort of horror awaits her there.

The lights are cut off, just like the rest of the academy grounds. It seems like someone cut off the source of power long before she got here, but despite that, there seems to be a glow coming from the living room.

More serpents await her, but like the ones that she encountered, they seem to evade her.

Maya notices that the glow is coming from the trap door that she found earlier, but unlike before, it's now open. There's something that's compelling her to get close and lock it. It is telling her that whatever is hidden beneath should not leave the domain. Her legs begin to move all on their own until she pauses at the very end when something seems to be emerging from the water beneath.

It's a man with long silver hair.

Due to its beauty, Maya initially assumed that it might be a Tamawo, an engkanto that lives in the water. However, the figure doesn't appear to have an elf-ish feature.

The man is naked and appears normal above the torso, but it is what is beneath that made Maya realize he is not. Unlike normal people, the man doesn't have legs for feet. Instead, he has a serpent tail for his bottom half. Maya moves back, the slight action causing a creak from the floorboards, catching the man's attention.

Maya is flabbergasted when she sees the yellow serpentine eyes of his. She knew right then that whoever this fellow is, is a child of Bakunawa.

"You?" The man whispers when their eyes meet. His gaze looks surprised mixed with another expression that Maya can't fully comprehend.

Her gaze falls to one of his hands, which holds a peculiar round pebble. Something seems to have grasped a hold on her consciousness because the first thought that comes to her mind is to reach out and grab it.