Chapter 65: The Griffin Family's Counterattack
Lake Quahog. Moonlight pierced through the damp, cold mist rolling off the water, illuminating two figures on the isolated shore.
However, if anyone could clearly see what these two people were doing, no one would mistake them for a romantic couple.
"Jesus Christ! You... you fucking monster! What the hell are you?!" Jeremy screamed, scrambling backward across the muddy ground. He stared in absolute horror at Meg, who he'd just stabbed directly through the heart, now looking down at him with cold, utterly inhuman eyes.
"Heh," Meg said, her voice distorted and echoing strangely. "Lucky for me I am a monster. Otherwise I'd actually be dead right now."
Meg pulled the hunting knife from her left chest with a wet, sucking sound. No blood poured from the wound—instead, something dark and viscous oozed out before the flesh seemed to knit itself back together.
She hadn't expected that while they were supposedly enjoying the moonlight together, Jeremy would ask her to close her eyes. She'd thought it would be her first kiss—finally, someone who found her attractive.
Instead, a cold blade had punched through her sternum.
Looking at the panicked, whimpering boy before her, Meg felt something inside her die—the last shred of romantic hope dying on this twisted, horrible night.
Yet for some reason, Meg suddenly needed to know why he'd done it.
"Why did you try to kill me?" Meg asked, her voice cracking slightly. "Even if you just wanted to play with my feelings, I wouldn't have hated you this much! Was I really that disgusting to you?"
But Jeremy was completely beyond rational thought at this moment. When Meg had faced genuine mortal danger, her true nature had awakened—the cosmic horror that lurked in her genetics, the eldritch reality that even she didn't fully understand about herself.
And how could an ordinary teenage boy be qualified to witness an Old God, even if it was just a low-dimensional projection of one? He couldn't look directly at her true form without his sanity shattering.
Therefore, Meg's question went unanswered. Jeremy, as if staring into the infinite void itself, had completely lost his mind. He'd soiled himself and could only repeat in a broken whisper, "Monster... monster... monster..."
Seeing she wouldn't get any real answers, Meg felt a surge of pure rage. She plunged the hunting knife into Jeremy's skull with a sickening crunch, then twisted her wrist violently before yanking it free.
She turned and started walking back toward the barbecue area, leaving Jeremy's corpse cooling in the moonlight.
Meg was genuinely worried now about whether Lois and the others had encountered danger. Although Chris was there—and Meg believed that even if something happened, he'd handle it—she was still family. She needed to make sure everyone was okay.
As Meg rushed back toward town, Lois was dealing with her own pair of human traffickers.
Lois, looking absolutely deranged with wild eyes and blood-spattered clothes, had tied the unconscious Dean to a wooden chair. She laughed maniacally and asked Missy, "Can you tell me what your endgame was here? Why did you try to kidnap my family? What's the angle?"
Even though Missy possessed genuine psychic abilities and years of psychiatric training, facing this situation now made her tremble like she was having a seizure. Her eyes revealed absolute terror.
Precisely because she had psychic abilities and understood human psychology, she could better comprehend just how insane the woman before her truly was.
Cold rage, burning hatred, manic joy—rapidly shifting mental states churned within this woman's mind, and each emotional state was pushed to an absolute extreme.
If the human psyche were compared to steel, then even steel, after enduring so many extreme temperature changes, would shatter into fragments.
But Missy could psychically sense that this madwoman's spirit was becoming increasingly solid with each shift, as if these extreme emotions had appeared thousands of times before in this woman's life.
They'd long since tempered Lois's spiritual will into something that transcended normal human limits.
So when Lois asked her question, even though Missy was terrified beyond measure, she forced herself to speak through chattering teeth: "Bodies. We steal bodies. My husband developed a brain transplantation surgery that can remove a portion of someone's brain tissue—their consciousness, their memories—and transplant it into a healthy host body.
Using this technique, our family has secretly accumulated enormous wealth in this town over the past fifteen years. Those elderly and disabled people outside? They're our clients. Rich people who want young, healthy bodies."
Lois nodded thoughtfully, then moved the steak knife slightly away from Missy's face before asking again, "So that's the scam. What about my useless husband? Have you killed him already? Or does someone actually want Peter's disgusting body?"
Feeling moisture on her cheek, Missy couldn't tell if it was her own tears or blood from where Lois had been slowly carving shallow cuts.
Hearing Lois's question, she didn't have time to focus on which it was and quickly replied, "No, no! He's still alive! Someone saw his genetic potential and put down a deposit to reserve him in advance!"
Hearing this, Lois looked genuinely surprised. "Oh? Someone saw Peter's potential? That's news to me. I didn't know my husband had any potential beyond eating and complaining."
"It's because of your son," Missy explained desperately. "His incredibly strong, athletic physique made a wheelchair-bound client imagine that your husband must have those same genetic gifts. That he could develop that kind of body given time."
Having gotten her answer, Lois burst into genuine, unhinged laughter. She swung the steak knife in her hand repeatedly, lightly grazing Missy's face several times, making the psychiatrist flinch and recoil in terror.
"Peter... Peter has potential?! Oh God, that's truly the funniest joke I've heard in years!" Lois laughed until she was gasping for breath, tears streaming down her face from the dark hilarity of it all.
After her maniacal laughter subsided, Lois stood up from where she'd been straddling Missy's legs. Her words seemed to imply she'd let her go. "Alright, seeing as you've been so cooperative and honest, I'll spare your pathetic life."
Just as Missy began to breathe a sigh of relief, she suddenly sensed through her psychic abilities that Lois's emotional state had shifted again—the telltale sign of her changing her mind.
"NO!" Missy screamed, trying to throw up her hands defensively.
But she wasn't nearly fast enough to stop the knife in Lois's hand. As a woman who could somehow give birth to an Old God's projection without dying—as a woman who'd survived raising three incredibly abnormal children while married to Peter Griffin—Lois possessed extraordinary, almost supernatural potential.
And at this moment, with her dark side fully awakened, this dormant physical potential had also activated.
This allowed her to perform some genuinely miraculous feats.
Such as driving a steak knife through an adult man's skull from eight feet away with perfect accuracy.
The knife flew like a thrown dagger, embedding itself in Dean's forehead with a wet thunk. His head snapped back, and he died instantly without even a final gasp.
Looking at her husband's corpse—at Dean's lifeless eyes and the knife protruding from his skull—Missy let out a wail of pure anguish.
The catalyst of this extreme grief caused a noticeable surge in her psychic abilities, her powers spiking from the trauma.
But this was clearly useless against Lois, whose mind was already fractured in ways that made her immune to mental manipulation. So Missy didn't even try.
Instead, she played her last card—pure psychological warfare.
"Your daughter was lured away by my son Jeremy," Missy said through her tears, her voice dripping with malice. "If the plan hasn't changed, she should already be dead. Stabbed and dumped in the lake like garbage."
"Oh?" Lois chuckled darkly, turning back to face Missy. She seemed completely unconcerned about Meg's supposed death. "Are you talking about Meg?"
To Missy's astonished, uncomprehending gaze, Lois laughed genuinely. "If your son wasn't heavily armed with multiple weapons, he probably couldn't do anything to my daughter. Meg's physically stronger than most grown men, even if she doesn't look it.
So instead of worrying about my daughter, you should worry about your precious son. I wonder what kind of horrible death he's experiencing right now?"
Missy hadn't expected her desperate plan to enrage Lois into making a mistake to fail so spectacularly. Worse, she'd just received news that made her even more desperate—that her son was likely already dead.
Missy closed her eyes in anguish, her face contorted with a death wish. "Just kill me. Please. Just fucking kill me and get it over with."
Looking at Missy, who was actively begging for death, Lois leaned down close to her face. She slowly wiped the blood from Missy's cheek with her thumb, then brought it to her own lips thoughtfully.
"You haven't seen your business empire collapse yet," Lois said softly, almost lovingly. "You haven't seen your son's mutilated corpse. You haven't watched everything you built burn to ashes. How can I possibly let you die before experiencing all that delicious suffering?"
Lois hadn't forgotten this woman's malicious intent—the plan to literally steal her body and consciousness. Driven by pure vindictive rage, she wanted this woman to witness the complete destruction of everything she'd ever worked for, and then die drowning in regret and despair.
Otherwise, wouldn't this whole awakening be pointless?
Emitting a disturbing, guttural laugh that didn't sound quite human, Lois walked over to Dean's weapons display. She selected two intimidating machetes from his collection, testing their weight and balance.
To hell with being the responsible mother. To hell with being the patient housewife!
Lois didn't want to care about propriety anymore. She just wanted to kill every single one of these body-snatching cultists and paint this entire town red.
She had some frustration to work out, after all.
And fifteen years of repressed rage was about to be released all at once.
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