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Chapter 150: The Mysterious Space
The walk to the Southwest took five days on foot.Ethan was not in a hurry. The Southwest had fallen. The dead were already dead. Walking faster would not bring them back. Walking slower would give him time to see what the pocket had actually become.Without the snow, he could see it.There were no plants. The soil was not black. It was the color of rust and old iron, and it smelled like turned earth and blood, and when he knelt and rubbed it between his fingers he understood. It was blood-soaked. Not a film of it. Saturation. The top layer of the ground was the color of human life. He let the dirt fall. It ran through his fingers and settled back into the field, and he did not brush his hand clean until he was sure he had gotten all of it off.Corpses lay everywhere. Soldiers. Aberrations. Somewhere in a dip off to his left, a pile of monster dead rose like a low hill, and flies were already moving on it. He recognized a uniform sleeve half-buried at the base of the hill. He did not
Chapter 149: Hiss. The Loss Is Too Great
Mr. Wu was the first to move."Command center," he said. "Now. He said command center. We go."He did not look back. He did not send scouts ahead. He herded his column the way he had herded it for three days—hand signals, sharp words, a quiet promise that the next ridge was the safe one. Behind him, from three directions, Mr. Jin and Qingwu and the other rescue teams were already converging on the center.* * *Ethan waited.He waited inside the Landlord Space, sitting on the edge of one of his own furrowed fields, watching through the eyes of his planting sprites as the world outside calmed. The snow stopped. The mist stopped. The whispering stopped. For a few seconds there had been a gap—a disconnect, a blind spot where his territory vision had simply gone dark—and when it came back, the field outside was not the field he had left.He stepped out.He did not get three steps.He felt it before he saw it. A gap in the network. A place where a tree should have been, where a tree had be
Chapter 148: Almost Swatted Dead
Ethan ran like a man who had somewhere to be.He had somewhere to be. Center command center was five miles east, and his legs carried him over the broken ground faster than they had any right to, his boots eating the frozen earth in long, loose strides. Behind him, the chickens he had sent west were already meeting the thing. He could feel it through the colony—a flicker of consciousness, a pop as one bird after another stopped existing.The monster noticed him running.He knew it the way you know a camera has locked on to you. The ground behind him went silent. The cawing stopped. Then the silence folded forward, and in his peripheral vision the presence that had been half a mile behind him was suddenly a hundred meters away, and then suddenly on top of him. It did not run. It did not fly. It teleported, in jumps of hundreds of meters, leaving a bruise in the snow wherever it landed.Ethan's sanity did a backflip. He had seen a lot of ugly things in the last six months. He had seen a
Chapter 147: Crisis
The ground shook.Tianhe Ren felt it before he heard it—a low, even throb in the soles of his boots, the kind of vibration that came from something very large moving very slowly under the soil. He paused and put his hand on the dirt. The throb steadied. Then it deepened."Do you feel that?" he said to the soldier beside him.The man rubbed his hands together. "Them fighting? That's a lot of chickens against a lot of worm. I'd expect the ground to shake.""It's getting faster."The soldier shrugged and went back to bandaging a leg.Tianhe did not shrug. He had been in the field for six years. He had a feel for the air before an ambush, the way a room went quiet half a second before the gunshot. That feeling was on him now. His skin was tight. The hair on his forearms stood up."Captain." He raised his voice to carry over the noise. "Ethan. I don't like this. Something's coming."Ethan looked back over his shoulder. He did not seem surprised."You're right," he said. "Tentacles. Big one
Chapter 146: More Than One Traitor
"Fell," Ethan said. "Your whole war zone fell. And you walked out with forty-two men."He did not say it as an accusation. He said it the way he said everything, level and unhurried, but his eyes did not leave Tianhe's face. He had seen enough battlefields to know that a clean collapse meant one thing, and a collapse that left a handful of officers alive to carry the story meant something else entirely.Tianhe's mouth set. He did not look away."Commander Zhenghui Song turned. The relief force we went in with was two hundred thousand. He lured us into a kill zone. He burned us from the inside out. Command center was overrun before we realized what was happening. Men who had fought beside him for twenty years died covering our retreat so that one platoon could walk out with the warning. That's all that walked." His voice did not waver until the end. "I would have taken the fight. I would have stood and died. I would have followed him to the last second. That is the part I cannot swallo
Chapter 145: Chickens Eating Bugs Makes Sense
Ethan stared at the writhing white mass at his feet and did some quick arithmetic.One hoe swing killed roughly two hundred bugs. To clear the ground under him at that rate would take the rest of his life. Worse, the mother—he was now certain there was at least one, probably more—was pumping out replacements faster than he could swing. He understood now how a single domain could blanket an entire battlefield. It was not a spell. It was an assembly line.He needed a bigger tool.The voice talisman at his wrist lit."Dad." Qingwu's voice came through small and annoyed, with a wobble at the edge that told him she had been waiting a while. "I want chicken."Ethan stopped mid-swing.He looked down at the bugs. He looked up at the snow. He looked back at the bugs.Chickens ate bugs.It was the oldest rule on the farm. It was the first lesson a child learned. It was so obvious, so stupidly obvious, that he stood there with the hoe in his hand and laughed out loud. The universe had just hande
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