Mountain Road Horror (Part Two)

The seriousness on Mo Fan's face was enough — no one dared hesitate a moment longer.

Even Mo Fan, a man who could never walk away from money, had made such a snap decision to abandon everything. That alone told them something truly terrifying was coming.

"Move — faster!" Mo Fan kept blinking forward using his Shadow Element abilities, urging the others as he went.

Retracing their path, Zhao Manyan, Zhang Xiaohou, and Chenying swallowed their questions and threw themselves down the mountain passage at full speed.

"What the hell — when did all this lava get here?!"

A vivid crimson carpet of flame had appeared across their path without warning, threatening to cut off their retreat entirely.

"What are you, stupid?" Mo Fan shouted without breaking stride. "This lava isn't seeping down naturally like a stream — there's a massive surge of it pouring down from above us!"

When they had passed through here before, the molten rock had been barely a trickle, tucked harmlessly into rock crevices and grooves in the cave walls, posing no threat to anyone climbing the winding path. But now it was spilling out onto the road itself.

That made everything clear. The lava was being driven down from above, and the speed and volume were only increasing — nothing else could explain those channels overflowing. A small overflow would have been manageable. But this much accumulation in such a short time meant something worse: if the surge reached a narrow choke point anywhere above them and filled it completely, the lava would pour straight down the path unobstructed.

Once the entire passage was full, everyone trapped on this mountain road would drown in liquid fire with no way up and no way out.

"Holy hell, it's a whole pool now!!" Zhang Xiaohou cried.

"There's a massive surge coming down from above —"

"Do you hear that? There's a sound."

"Who cares about sounds right now?" Zhao Manyan snapped.

"No — it's a different kind of sound."

As they sprinted downward, a deep, rhythmic rumbling reached them from somewhere higher in the cavern. It was still distant enough to be faint, but unmistakably there.

Chenying stopped and pressed herself flat against the rock wall to listen.

**Boom... boom... boom...**

The color drained from her face. She turned toward the others, and what they saw in her eyes said everything — raw panic, nothing held back.

No one needed Chenying to say a word. They all already knew.

Lava.

A tidal wave of it, roaring and churning as it barreled down through the winding passage above. The thunder of the rushing torrent and the crash of molten waves against the stone walls had merged into that single, bone-deep sound Chenying had pressed her ear to the rock to hear.

They had all walked this passage with their own feet. They knew exactly what it was like. If a true flood of molten rock came surging down from above, not one of them would walk away.

Only now did they fully understand why Mo Fan had ordered them to turn back. Any slower, and every last one of them would have been swallowed alive.

The group had still underestimated the lava's speed — or perhaps underestimated how high they had climbed. Even after all this frantic running, they still hadn't reached the bottom, and many of the spots they passed through had already formed wide, spreading pools of liquid flame.

And it was getting worse: the thundering roar from behind grew louder with every second, until even the rock walls of the mountain tunnel began to shake.

**Clang!! Clang!!**

At the worst possible moment, that jarring metallic screech rang out again. No one spared it a single thought — until they looked ahead at the narrow opening that led to the wider passage below and found it completely blocked by a creature armored head to toe in blazing red. Every heart sank at once.

"What in hell is daring to block my way?!" Zhao Manyan screamed.

This was their only lifeline. The flame-armored creature crouching in that bottleneck wasn't just cutting off their escape route — it was causing the lava to pool and accumulate there without stop.

With nowhere to drain into the space below, the molten rock backed up and spread outward, transforming that stretch of passage into a blazing lake dozens of meters across.

The creature seemed entirely indifferent to the lava surrounding it. It simply crouched at that single downward opening, two round, armor-encased heads jutting from its body.

Two faces — half-human, half-beast — both with wide mouths stretched open. The lava was clearly no more than a warm bath to it. It lounged there soaking, watching Mo Fan's panic-stricken group with an expression that blended smug amusement with cold menace.

One face sneered. The other glared with quiet malice. Together, they were like the two-faced wardens of death itself.

"We're done for, we're done for!" Zhang Xiaohou wailed.

The rumbling from behind was close now. Very, very close. It could only be one thing — the roar of a lava flood.

They had thought Mo Fan's quick thinking would save them. Instead, the creature that had made those strange sounds earlier had chosen this precise, catastrophic moment to seal off their only escape — hitting them while they were already down.

A lava lake continued to grow before them. One glance at the thick shell of that two-faced armored creature was enough to know it wouldn't go down quickly or easily. For a terrible moment, no one knew what to do. Trapped between two kinds of death, they felt the cold despair of a door slammed shut with them inside.

"Forget it — I'm going through!" Both Zhang Xiaohou and Zhao Manyan roared at the same moment, ready to charge straight across the lava lake and cut the creature down.

"Save the revenge for later. Follow me first." Lingling's voice cut through the chaos.

"You have a plan?" Mo Fan asked, a spark of hope breaking through.

"Not sure if it'll hold," Lingling said. "I was watching our surroundings the whole time we were running down. I spotted a large opening that branches off to one side. The lava flood is pouring straight down, so if we shelter in that side chamber and seal the entrance completely with Earth Element magic, we can buy ourselves time away from the main surge. The problem is — if the lava eventually fills every cavern in here, we'll either suffocate inside or get burned alive when it seeps in."

"No other options," Mo Fan said. "We make for that side chamber now. Swift Star Wolf — lead the way!"

"We have to move fast, or —" Xinxia began.

She didn't finish. She didn't have to. Everyone already knew: if they didn't reach Lingling's side chamber before the molten tide came crashing down on them, there was nothing left for any of them.