I Abandoned My Beast Cubs for the Protagonist... Oops?-Chapter 63: The Great Fur-pocalypse

Hóng Yè burst into the clearing, screaming at the top of his lungs. The teenage Red Panda was sprinting and his amber eyes were wide with terror.

Right beside him was Shěn. The Tiger was maintaining his signature, completely blank, deadpan expression, but his legs were churning like windmills, kicking up a massive cloud of dirt as he sprinted for his life.

"Shěn? Hóng Yè?" Bai Yue gasped, entirely bewildered. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Then, two more figures burst from the treeline.

One was Han Shān. The massive, incredibly powerful Snow Leopard Alpha was actually sweating.

And being practically dragged by the collar beside Han Shān was a man Bai Yue had never seen before.

He had soft, messy, auburn hair, large, terrified brown eyes, and a pair of round, incredibly fluffy red panda ears pinned flat against his head.

He was wearing the simple, slightly tattered robes of a Wandering River scholar, and he looked entirely out of breath and utterly traumatized by the physical exertion.

Yan Shu! Bai Yue realized instantly. Her third husband! The gentle, broken-hearted father!

"Han Shān! What is going on?!" Mo Xiao roared, raising his spear. "Is it a rogue pack?! A Swamp Hydra?!"

"WORSE!" Han Shān yelled back, not slowing down as he sprinted directly toward the safety of the central fire. "DO NOT ENGAGE! FLEE!"

Bai Yue stared in sheer disbelief.

What on earth could possibly make Han Shān, a warrior, tell an entire village to flee?

She looked past the running men, peering into the dark, shadowed treeline.

A high-pitched, chaotic sound suddenly filled the air. It sounded like a million tiny, squeaky toys being aggressively compressed all at once.

Squeak-squeak-squeak-squeeeeeak!

And then, the treeline exploded.

It wasn’t a bear. It wasn’t a hydra.

It was a tidal wave of mice.

Thousands upon thousands of knee-high, aggressively fluffy, violent mice. But these weren’t normal field mice.

They had massive, glowing red eyes, tiny little horns sticking out of their heads, and they were moving with the speed of a furry, squeaking avalanche.

"What in the name of the Great Spirit are those?!" Zhāo Yàn demanded, his jaw dropping in sheer confusion.

"Horned Berserker-Mice!" Yan Shu wheezed, practically tripping over his own robes as Han Shān dragged him into the clearing. The gentle scholar looked like he was about to faint.

"They are highly territorial! Shěn accidentally stepped on their nest! There are millions of them! They only eat two things: root vegetables and fur!"

"FUR?!" Mo Xiao shrieked, instantly looking down at his own completely fur-covered panther body.

"They are coming!" Hóng Yè screamed, diving behind the massive stone cauldron.

"Hide!"

"My tails! They are going to eat my tails!" Zhāo Yàn shrieked. The elegant, usually unflappable Fox Lord completely abandoned his smug persona.

He grabbed all nine of his magnificent, fluffy tails, bundled them tightly into his arms like a massive bouquet of extremely vulnerable fur, and vaulted gracefully to the very top of Bai Yue’s hut.

Mo Xiao didn’t fare much better. The Alpha Panther, a warrior who regularly wrestled giant boars, let out a highly undignified yelp and scrambled up the nearest tree with lightning speed, his claws digging deep into the bark.

The rest of the village followed suit.

Massive wolf warriors were diving headfirst into the river, panthers were scaling the food storage huts, and the crane beastmen simply took to the sky, looking down in sheer terror at the squeaking doom.

Only Shěn remained on the ground. The Tiger assassin had hit a dead end near the cooking fire. With his signature deadpan expression, Shěn slowly grabbed a large wooden bucket, turned it upside down, and placed it directly over his own head, calmly accepting his fate.

"The cubs!" Bai Yue gasped.

She wasn’t furry. She was wearing a simple animal-hide skirt, and the rest of her was just smooth, human skin. The mice wouldn’t care about her. But Ruì Xuě, Yòu Lín, and the panther triplets were basically walking, bite-sized buffets of premium fluff.

"Get behind me!" Bai Yue yelled, dropping to her knees in the dirt.

She grabbed Ruì Xuě and Yòu Lín, shoving them securely under her arms, and barked at Miao Miao, A-Li, and Xiao Hei to dive under her skirt and huddle behind her legs. She turned her back to the incoming swarm, creating a fierce human shield over the five terrified furballs.

A few feet away, Han Shān had finally stopped running. He dumped the exhausted scholar onto the grass.

Yan Shu collapsed onto his hands and knees, gasping for air, his hair falling into his eyes. His round red panda ears twitched wildly as the squeaking grew deafening. He forced his head up, fully expecting to see the village being devoured.

Instead, his large, terrified brown eyes locked onto a figure in the dirt.

It was her.

The cursed female.

The woman who had kicked him out into the snow, who had shattered his gentle heart into a million irreparable pieces. Yan Shu’s breath hitched, a massive wave of old terror washing over him.

But.....what was she doing?

She wasn’t running. She wasn’t throwing the weak to the wolves to save herself. The woman who had once refused to let a crying kit sit by the fire was currently using her own frail body as a physical barrier to protect five beastman cubs from a literal monster swarm. Her arms were wrapped fiercely around the Snow Leopard kit, and she was glaring at the incoming mice with a feral, murderous intensity that Yan Shu had never seen before.

Yan Shu’s jaw dropped. His eyes widened so much they nearly popped out of his skull. Who.....who is that?

Before Yan Shu could process the impossibility of the scene, the furry avalanche reached the center of the clearing.

A rogue faction of the Horned Berserker-Mice, blinded by their insatiable hunger for the sweet tubers boiling in the spicy broth, veered sharply toward the massive stone cauldron.

Which was exactly where Cāng Yáo was currently standing, weeping spicy tears and holding her empty wooden bowl.