“Cease fire! Stop shooting, everybody!”Amidst the constant attacks, Trevor’s voice finally came through, telling everybody to stop attacking the creature. Moments later, quiet returned to the small forest alcove they were located in.Looking at the place where the unknown tentacle creature had just been, all that was left was a hole in the ground and the remains of the creature lying scattered about in broken and unrecognizable pieces.“Is that it?” someone asked in the silence that followed. This question carried a profound befuddlement at how easy it was to take down the creature that had suddenly appeared.Despite how terrifying and gruesome it had appeared at first glance, the unknown creature was surprisingly easy to defeat, giving the operatives a false sense of reality as if everything had just been an illusion.“Don’t let your guard down, everybody. We don’t know if there are more of them.”Noticing that the atmosphere was becoming very strange, Trevor quickly warned his men

This was Trevor’s brilliant plan: to claim that the only non-human creature that attacked them was one that had escaped from their lab during the last incident that had caused him and Conrad to cross paths.Regarding how that issue was handled, after Trevor had completely swept clean any traces of the experiment that was conducted on Cale, leaving only enough evidence to prove that it was an ordinary research laboratory, Trevor assumed the identity of the lead researcher to meet Conrad and stall him until Hive arrived.During that time, Conrad investigated the lab himself while questioning the staff remaining who were present but didn’t manage to find anything. Normally, even though Trevor had moved swiftly, he wouldn’t have been able to clean up everything—he especially wouldn’t have been able to do anything about the researchers present. But because Cale had left with many of the researchers and guards, most of whom were directly involved with experimenting on him, leaving only thos

Trevor didn’t know what to do… this situation had already surpassed what he could handle. Facing such destructive beings, Trevor was powerless to resist. Among their lineup of operatives, none of them possessed the strength or power to engage in battles of this scale.But without the strength to resist, they were but mere meat on the chopping block.Their fate was looking dismal all because of this creature that was obviously an exotic beast which had snuck into the fortress by some means. It didn’t have a face on its body, but Trevor could swear that if it did, the creature would definitely be smiling sinisterly at them with a snide expression.Right now, the only thing Trevor could hope for was that Conrad would quickly deal with the beast enough so that it wouldn’t have the time to focus on them, allowing them the window of opportunity to finally make a run for it.“We can’t just keep standing here,” Trevor suddenly said to his men.“We must look for other ways to escape, and if th

[Sacrifice!]Some time into the battle, the exotic beast, who was driven into a corner, was forced to perform a drastic move.The battle had only been commencing for less than five minutes, and during this time, many of the surviving Hive operatives had become blood bags for the exotic beast, who used them to replenish its lost vitality. As a result, fewer than ten Hive operatives were remaining, including Trevor, but now they were also attacking the exotic beast alongside Conrad in order to take it down quickly.This ended up making things inconvenient for the exotic beast. It was already losing, but the addition of Trevor’s group—although less threatening to it—was endlessly annoying.Therefore, the exotic beast planned to retreat using a move that would leave it in a severely weakened state for a very long time.This move was called sacrificing and was the same one it had used in the very beginning during the beast tide that had allowed it to sneak into the fortress undetected.By

“What in the blazes! Why’s it attacking me? I didn’t provoke it or anything!”Seeing the tentacle-like root shooting straight for him, Cale was dumbfounded as thousands of expletives went off inside his head, cursing the exotic beast for its shamelessness and the unmitigated attention it was suddenly showing him.“Damn tree, why don’t you focus on the ones attacking you and leave me alone!”Jumping to the side, Cale managed to avoid the first attack of the exotic beast, but that wasn’t the end. Although the large tree root missed its target, it continued moving forward without stopping, only to suddenly make a turn in the air as it returned to attack Cale. This time, the tip of the root actually splintered off into three parts.“What!”Surprised, Cale watched as the three individual smaller roots traced an arc in the air and attacked him from three different directions, blocking all routes of escape so that he was forced to face them head-on.“That’s just not fair!”Finding a gap in t