Evan clenched his wand and stared as hard as he could at the dim tunnel ahead.
He wanted to see exactly what was coming out of the end, but he could find no words to describe accurately and concretely the three monsters that were approaching.
Evan could only describe them in a more intuitive way. In front of him, there were three red giant crustaceans five feet tall.
In species classification, they might be closer to fungi.
To be precise, they appeared to be a mixture of crustaceans and fungi.
They buzzed, their slender bodies divided into many knots like insects, and their exposed scales were all thin, uneven folds.
In front of their bodies were six pairs of claws covered with barbs, curled together, seemingly protecting something, intermittently creeping.
Behind them was a pair of huge crimson fleshy wings. The huge wing surfaces were rotten, and the meat on them was slowly falling off!
Soon, a large number of small beige worms crawled out from the inside of their wounds, adhered to the mucus, and pulled the falling meat back to its original position.
The whole process was too disgusting, and Evan couldn't help but gulp.
Fear was like a slender venomous snake, entangled in the dull air around, waving a scarlet tongue, about to suffocate him right there.
Okegiga and Evan did not move.
He raised his wand high ahead, and by its light he saw that the heads of the three monsters were exactly the same as the horrible statues he had seen before.
They had green whirlpool-shaped oval tumors attached to their heads, like a randomly trimmed bush covered with holes of varying sizes.
These creatures were the monsters that Evan saw in the murals along the way. They were not mere Centaurs' imagination as Evan had hoped. They were either summoned from the void or created by magic. In short, they were now existent in reality.
"The creations of the evil god!" Okegiga muttered softy, with obvious disdain in his voice.
Then, without any warning, the strong Centaur charged forward!
He raised his sharp spear high, with an unrivaled momentum and enough power to tear a Dragon apart.
Evan also hurried to follow up. He swayed his wand and sent out several spells to cooperate with Okegiga's attack.
The three monsters, with their huge wings fluttering fast, easily escaped Evan's attack.
They were buzzing, their terrible heads were shaking, and there were subtle changes on them.
Their muscles were squirming, and the holes of different sizes began to change.
Evan felt a faint magic, very strange, magic that he had never encountered before, which was too bizarre.
He wanted to warn Okegiga, but before he could shout out, he saw the Centaur, who was about to reach the monsters, stopping abruptly.
His hands fell weakly on both sides of his body, his eyes closed, and his behavior was very abnormal.
Evan did not know what had happened to this powerful Centaur warrior. Obviously, the magic of the enemy worked, and Okegiga fell under a hypnosis-like effect.
He was completely under their control. He lost his sense of resistance and no longer thought of attacking.
Evan shouted loudly, and the Centaur didn't seem to hear anything. He walked forward on his hooves, getting closer and closer to the three monsters.
Their claws squirmed and slowly opened outwards, revealing what they were protecting in the center.
This time, Evan saw clearly that at the center of their torsos, there were large round reddish-brown mouths with tusks and sharp teeth inside.
The three mouths were chewing and stretching constantly, and the mucosa, viscera, blood and flesh were all mixed together, opening, closing and opening constantly.
Under the control of the monsters, Okegiga bent down and pointed his head at the mouth closest to him, and walked over step by step…
If he was to stuff his head into that mouth full of sharp teeth, the scene would be horrifying. Evan could already picture what was about to happen, and just imagining the sound freaked him out to the extreme!
"Damn!" Evan hurriedly waved his wand and sent out several spells in succession.
The spells moved forward quickly, and when they came into contact with the monster's body, the air around them seemed to turn into a viscous oily substance in an instant. Correspondingly, the speed of the magic light emitted by Evan slowed down considerably.
The monsters easily avoided Evan's attack. He didn't know why the buzz emitted from their bodies was getting louder; were they expressing anger and discontent with Evan, or laughing at his cluelessness?
Okegiga stopped in his place and stared blankly ahead.
After a brief, unintelligible exchange, two monsters flew over to Evan, and the holes in their heads kept squirming.
The strange magic waves flashed by, and Evan's eyes were blurred. The surrounding area became more and more foggy. He didn't know how yellow mist came out of nowhere and covered him.
He was still in the Temple of the Centaurs, but he felt lost, away from his own body.
In the dim yellow fog, Evan couldn't see surroundings and was completely lost, slowly thinking about nothing, only hearing a voice talking to him in the front.
Evan couldn't perceive what the other person was saying. He walked slowly forward. Maybe if he would get close enough to listen carefully, he could know why he came here!
Although Evan felt bad about this in the depths of his heart, he could not stop his body. He moved uncontrollably and slowly bent down…
As he moved closer, the original blurred voice became clearer.
It seemed to be shouting Evan's name, and all the emotion he had felt like it was being taken away. Only endless fear and loneliness remained within him!
Memories of Evan's past flashed through his mind like a slide show….
He knew a black magic that acted on the soul, but at that moment, it was absent from his mind.
Evan remembered coming to Hogwarts, creating a newspaper, working with Harry to defeat the Basilisk, returning to the castle of a thousand years ago, helping Sirius Black catch Peter Pettigrew, his first date with Hermione, and studying magic alone in the middle of the night. The more he went forward, the more his memories became clearer.
Then he remembered his conversation with Gryffindor himself, and the massive eyes he saw outside the Temple which were also in the mist. But now, his feeling of loss was much stronger than it was then.
He remembered how he escaped. Without hesitation, Evan unconsciously raised his wand and shouted, "EXPECTO… PATRONUM!"
The sudden appearance of his Patronus chased away all illusions; and Evan found himself still in the Temple of the Centaurs, with all mist around him gone.
His shoulders were firmly grasped by the claws of a monster, and he was stuffing his head into the huge tusked mouth in the middle of its body.
Under the influence of Evan's Patronus, the mouth was kept from closing in on his head by a silvery white layer.
The actions of the three monsters became sluggish. They seemed to instinctively want to escape, but before they could move, they were violently hit by Okegiga.
The long spear in the hands of the warrior Centaur stabbed their bodies with great force, disrupting them, scattering a lot of their flesh and blood everywhere. The passage turned full of green blood stains.
"Thank you, human!" Okegiga finally stopped beside Evan and said loudly, "You saved me, I owe you my life!"