However, I personally reserve my judgment on this particular viewpoint.
Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of dream lore knows that, with a period of study, it is hardly difficult to erase one’s presence within the dreamscape.
The voice from the front continued its monologue, and Konehl-Ghervil began to discern the source of the unsettling feeling.
It was unmistakably Lalviye-Komel’s voice; she had been listening to it for hours and knew it intimately.
Upon closer listening, she could detect a mechanical cadence to the voice, each unnatural pause punctuated by an entirely different timbre.
This secondary tone was distinctly younger, almost childlike, devoid of the mature confidence she had come to expect, its pitch singular, hoarse, and piercing.
“Lalviye-Komel?”
A chill permeated the summer air, prompting her to roll up the window to seal out the draft.
She attempted to interject, but her efforts proved futile.
The other person seemed not to hear her.
They continued speaking in that bizarre, unsettling tone:
“Considering your identity… everyone defaults to the second possibility…”
“Yet, the moment I first saw you, I knew… things were not so simple, perhaps the first possibility is the correct one…”
If this was intended as a joke, it had crossed a line, terrifying someone in the middle of nowhere with such a grotesque voice.
“Miss Lalviye-Komel?”
She called out again.
Receiving no response, the voice continued its strange monologue, oblivious.
Now, she desperately wished this were merely a prank.
After driving for what felt like half a day, they should not still be in such a desolate wilderness.
She distinctly recalled Lalviye-Komel mentioning she knew the way to Lily-of-the-Valley Street.
The book lay flat on her lap, pressed tightly by her anxious thighs.
She reached into her pocket, finding only a few cold coins.
At a moment like this, even the smallest item for self-defense would have offered some measure of comfort.
There was no other option.
Her gaze fixed on the rearview mirror, she slowly edged towards the middle of the seat.
As her reflection shifted with her movement, she finally caught a glimpse of the face in the driver’s seat when she was nearly centered.
In an instant, her heart leaped into her throat.
It could no longer be called a human face.
The once purple hair had transformed into long, grey fur, and the eyes, now glowing red, had lost their original violet hue.
Two long, pointed fangs protruded from a snout, accompanied by a long nose, black whiskers, and a grotesque, fur-covered rat’s face!
She clapped both hands over her mouth just in time, stifling the scream that threatened to escape.
This was starkly different from her previous encounter with the Ratmire White Rat, where escape and evasion had been possibilities, and even after being caught, the dizzying impact had blurred many details.
Now, trapped within the confines of the vehicle, the rat-like face was less than a meter away, every horrifying detail starkly visible.
What was she to do?
Jump from the car?
Leaping from the moving vehicle seemed her only viable option.
With her eyes still fixed on the rat-like face in the rearview mirror, she simultaneously reached for the car door.
Just as her fingers brushed the door handle, the rat-like face, which had been intently focused on the road ahead in the mirror, suddenly met her gaze.
Its fanged mouth split into a wide, unsettling grin, and a long tongue flicked out to lick its pointed teeth.
“Where do you think you’re going~”
Overwhelmed by terror, she cast all caution aside, pulling the door handle with a surge of desperate strength and forcing open a narrow gap.
“Clang.”
A violent jolt shook the car, instantly widening the gap.
Instinctively, she gripped the door handle with all her might, only to be yanked violently from the vehicle.
The immense inertia ripped her grip away, sending her spinning to the ground and tumbling several times before she finally came to a halt.
The car had not been traveling at high speed; her initial plan for jumping would have allowed her to dissipate the momentum with a few somersaults at most.
However, the sudden jolt had arrived too abruptly, leaving her no time to react.
Lying prone on the ground, she gasped for air, taking three agonizing minutes to recover from the swirling dizziness in her head and the searing pain in her body.
Relying on a vague sense of direction, she turned her head to look back toward where she had been flung.
Ten meters away, the thick trunk of a tree lay diagonally across the car’s front left side.
The black hood was deeply caved in, its internal machinery and parts forced outwards.
Had it struck the tree?
No, at the speed they had been traveling, it was impossible to fell such a thick tree.
Rather, the tree must have fallen directly onto the car.
She pushed up with her hands, attempting to rise, but halfway up, she collapsed back to the ground.
A searing pain shot through her left forearm, rendering it utterly useless.
It was undoubtedly broken.
Then…
After a moment to compose herself, she saw that the driver’s side window was shattered, and the door was twisted and deformed.
A few strands of purple hair emerged from the crack in the window and door, along with half of a head tilted at an unnatural angle.
The occupant was not a rat.
What, then, had she just witnessed?
She curled her body, using only her right hand to support herself, expending nearly all her remaining strength to shift from a prone position to a seated one.
She systematically checked her body: head, hands, torso, thighs, and calves.
Aside from a few scrapes, her left hand – the one she had used to try and open the door – was broken, yet otherwise, she seemed largely unharmed.
“Remarkable luck,” she murmured.
“Even my socks are still intact.”
Perhaps this was an advantage of her light weight and small stature.
She vividly recalled that before she fell ill at the age of six, she had always managed to get up unscathed from every fall.
Once, in a moment of childish mischief, she had even tumbled from a second-story window, suffering nothing more than a minor fracture to her calf and a week of a sore backside.
The driver, however, had not been so fortunate.
Utterly motionless, she slumped against the twisted, mangled door, blood dripping from her hair onto the metal, pooling into a small, vivid crimson stain by the deformed wheel.
She shuddered to imagine the outcome if the car had been traveling any faster, for either Lalviye-Komel or herself.
Perhaps they would have been flattened into a gruesome pulp?
There was no time for such morbid speculation; she had to extricate Lalviye-Komel from the wreckage immediately.
Beneath the vehicle, not only blood but also gasoline steadily seeped out.
The bizarre occurrences preceding the crash suggested that this was no ordinary accident.
She found it utterly implausible that both her sight and hearing could have simultaneously betrayed her.
Cradling her broken left arm, she approached the car and used her right hand to check.
The purple-haired woman was still breathing, merely unconscious, it seemed.
At least she was alive.
With the tree and its branches obstructing the way and the door severely warped, it would be difficult enough to assess her injuries, let alone rescue her.
Circling to the passenger side, she found the door only slightly deformed.
Gripping it with her right hand, she braced her left foot against the car body and pulled backward with all her might.
“Bang—”
“Screech—”
Amidst the grating scrape that emanated from an indeterminate point,
The door finally yielded.
The sight that greeted her made her already dust-streaked face contort in dismay: a branch as thick as an arm had pierced through the seat, barely grazing the woman’s lower abdomen.
While it hadn’t inflicted significant harm, it had effectively pinned her within the narrow confines created by the door, the seat, and the branch.
The idea of dragging her out from the passenger side was clearly unfeasible.
Brushing away the debris from the passenger seat, Konehl-Ghervil squeezed inside to examine her.
Pushing aside her hair, she found the blood originated from a wound on her forehead, likely sustained during the impact.
Additionally, her left foot was trapped in a crevice, its injuries unclear.
Most other visible injuries were superficial.
The front windshield, being of good quality, bore cracks where the tree had pressed against it, but it had not shattered, thus preventing secondary injuries.
All in all, it was a stroke of misfortune tempered by luck, though the presence of internal injuries remained uncertain.
Now, her options were either to break off the arm-thick branch impaling the seat or to somehow move the entire tree.
Lacking immediate tools for the former, she resolved to attempt the latter first.
Ten minutes later, she leaned against a branch, utterly exhausted.
Her strength alone was utterly insufficient to budge a tree over ten meters long.
After all, even a moving car had been brought to a complete halt beneath its weight.
After half an hour of strenuous effort, she had managed to move it less than a centimeter, her energy utterly wasted.
“Lalviye-Komel, can you hold on if I go for help?”
She directed the question to the unconscious woman.
The only reply was the rustling whisper of wind through the tall grass.
This was the wilderness, and she couldn’t bring herself to leave Lalviye-Komel here alone.
With no other recourse, she decided to investigate the base of the fallen tree.
It was over ten meters long, its roots buried in the nearby grass.
As she walked over, her already uneasy mood grew even more tense.
She suddenly realized that the sounds emanating from the grass might not be caused by the wind after all.
Half of the fallen tree’s roots were obscured by weeds, but the exposed portion revealed a dense pattern of small, circular indentations, without any cracks, and the break itself was clean and complete.
This was no natural felling; merely gazing at those indentations.
Her mind automatically conjured an image of a horde of rodents gnawing away at the base, creating a massive gash that barely held the tree upright, meticulously controlling its direction, and then cunningly awaiting their arrival.