Chapter 54: The Master Chief and the Warrior's Inner Demon

The staff sergeant leading an armed legion of hundreds of insects, and indeed more than a hundred, strongly resembled an octopider.

It seemed to lack legs; presumably, its two legs had also mutated into tentacles.

Its tentacles splayed out in all directions like the legs of a spider or the spread of a gigantic, flared skirt.

Atop this skirt sat a grotesquely twisted, tumor-like torso and a tiny head half-buried within the hardened flesh.

This morphology was both cowardly defensive and possessed of formidable offensive power.

Because it stayed so low, its splayed tentacles hugging the ground constituted a natural crawling posture, while its head was so tiny and the cyst upon it was so enveloped by chunks of flesh that it was virtually invisible!

Yet it possessed so many tentacles that every single one not used to assist movement was coiled around a firearm.

True to its title of "Staff Sergeant," its solitary firepower alone rivaled that of an entire squad!

It remained unfurled under the drone's searchlight for merely a fraction of a second before plunging back into the darkness.

Chen Yuezhou fired another rocket launcher. This time it was a standard explosive, but the insect moved with such blistering speed that it evaded the main blast radius, suffering damage to only one side of its tentacles!

Chen Yuezhou's brows furrowed deeply. Qin Tianshu managed to haul himself up from behind the machine gun turret, firing wildly toward the highway.

It was useless. Missing the vital spots was equivalent to missing entirely; the staff sergeant was already within fifty meters of the armored gun vehicle!

Yu Shuang and Zhao Bohan were stationed at the rear windows, but sticking their heads out meant taking bullets; every single one of the insect's tentacles could fire independently in a different direction!

Liu Weiyun's scream pierced the interior of the vehicle!

They were done for!

Yet, when the staff sergeant closed in to a distance of about seven meters, Chen Yuezhou dropped his rocket launcher and leaped out from the roof of the vehicle in a single bound.

His movement was as light as flying, his agile form resembling a goshawk pouncing on a rabbit as he lunged at the staff sergeant!

The staff sergeant spotted the human leaping toward it. The gun barrels on at least three of its tentacles spun around and fired in rapid succession at Chen Yuezhou.

Even so, it could not catch up to Chen Yuezhou.

Qi An stared wide-eyed as Chen Yuezhou's body spun mid-air, landing with pinpoint accuracy directly atop the staff sergeant's head!

Wielding only a large-caliber pistol, his body slammed down right into the center of the staff sergeant's skirt-like base, while the barrel of his gun pressed firmly against the creature's minuscule head.

With a point-blank shot, the facial features—lumps, cysts, and all—literally blew apart!

The staff sergeant's screech was cut short abruptly. Every writhing tentacle on its body froze, and all its weapons dropped to the ground.

Meanwhile, Chen Yuezhou showed no signs of the bone-jarring impact one would expect from a high-altitude fall. Treading upon that ruined head, he fired two consecutive shots to obliterate a pair of surviving ordinary worker insects that were hurtling toward him!

This sequence of maneuvers left everyone dumbfounded. No one could fathom how Chen Yuezhou's body could possess such astonishing flexibility, as if he practiced some legendary martial arts lightness skill!

The staff sergeant was as dead as dead could be. Following that barrage of poison gas and massive explosions, very few ordinary worker insects survived, and everyone's taut nerves finally seemed able to slacken.

Yet Qi An noticed Chen Yuezhou's drooping left arm. His fist relaxed and then clenched shut again, the skin on his hand turning pale.

"He needs purification," Qi An said.

Chen Yuezhou felt he needed no such thing. Even though his mental reinforcement value had dropped yet again at the beginning of the year, he had not yet reached the point where fighting a single staff sergeant required purification!

Xu Le's voice came through the comms: "Boss, stop fighting! Your contamination level is at fifty-two percent, I'm heading over right now!"

"Negative!" Driven perhaps by the effects of the corruption, a surge of irritable fury filled Chen Yuezhou's heart, and he fired several more rounds to blast away a few corrupted insects that had rushed within a hundred-meter radius.

Qi An had already reached Chen Yuezhou's side. "You need purification!" she stated, reaching out a hand.

Chen Yuezhou turned his head and saw that she had actually been carried over by Yang Yuning. His dark brows knitted tightly together.

He had already made it clear: once injured, they were to stay away from the front lines!

He said in a deep voice, "Unnecessary! Get back to your bunker."

Qi An paused for a second. "Oh." She tugged at Yang Yuning. "Let's go."

This prompt obedience actually caught Chen Yuezhou slightly off guard. Qi An added, "That corrupted insect creeping along the edge is actually two of them. There's another one clinging to its back, likely intending to ambush you."

Chen Yuezhou instantly looked in the direction Qi An pointed; indeed, a creature was stealthily approaching.

Qi An had already turned away. Chen Yuezhou killed the corrupted insect with a single shot, flicked the muzzle slightly, and with blinding speed blew apart an infant insect that leaped out from behind the carcass, screaming as it charged toward them!

Even Yang Yuning was startled by this marksmanship, but Qi An showed no reluctance to leave.

Her wristband was flashing red with alarms. Too many corrupted insects had died here, and the stench was far too potent; the rest of the squad's contamination levels were reaching their limits, and she still had to rescue them.

Chen Yuezhou turned to look at her, his gaze complex.

Yet Qi An's heart suddenly skipped a beat.

There was another insect at the rear of the convoy!

Her perception was fuzzy; this creature likely possessed a stealth capability.

You Zi had once said that every higher-level intelligent insect had its own traits, and stealth was surely one of them!

Qi An hurriedly concentrated her mind, confirming a few seconds later that the insect was located... right beside Sun Yiran's vehicle!

She immediately shouted at the top of her lungs, "Sun Yiran! There's an insect outside your car window!"

Her voice was never particularly loud, but this shrill cry cut through the curtain of rain and reached Sun Yiran, whose hearing was exceptionally sharp.

At that exact moment, Sun Yiran heard an unusual sound as well. Thrusting the muzzle of her gun out the window and locating the source by ear, she fired a shot.

The pale, slender corrupted insect shrieked, retracted its tentacles, and vanished instantly beneath the car.

Sun Yiran almost lost her grip on her firearm. She yanked herself back into her seat, covered her ears, and watched her contamination level spike!

However, the apprentice priest did not attack her again. Instead, skimming along the underbelly of the cars and the puddles on the asphalt as if gliding over nothingness, it darted past the second and third vehicles like a wisp of ghost shadow.

Its objective was crystal clear: it headed straight for Qi An, who had been able to pinpoint its location!

Yet, as it dashed underneath the armored gun vehicle, it hesitated for a fraction of a second.

It could sense the intensity of the human mutation response nearby, and Qi An's was the lowest—virtually nonexistent!

The apprentice priest changed direction on the fly, scrambling up the front windshield by means of the armored vehicle's ornate exterior fittings.

Qi An's warning rang out immediately after: "The insect is on the front windshield of the gun vehicle!"

The armored vehicle was bulletproof, but the windshield glass had been smashed by Qi An and Sun Yiran during the previous battle and remained shattered to this day.

Li Yi was occupying the driver's seat. Qi An was not overly worried, intending instead to attend to Sun Yiran's purification.

The apprentice priest poked its head out over the front window. Forewarned, Li Yi already had his gun barrel locked onto it the moment it emerged!

The apprentice priest shifted all of its eyes toward Li Yi. For reasons unknown, with the weapon's muzzle leveled right at it, the creature actually smiled.

Its mouthparts split open in an expression that closely approximated a grin, and every single one of its pitch-black eyes clearly mirrored Li Yi's face.

Li Yi's finger rested directly on the trigger. Yang Yuning was charging toward the spot, raising his sniper rifle; Yu Shuang and Zhao Bohan, who had been at the rear windows helping Chen Yuezhou clear out the remaining corrupted insects, were now spinning around to raise their weapons as well.

This single moment seemed to stretch, expanding infinitely until even the cascading curtains of rain appeared suspended in mid-air.

Li Yi, the Class-A special operations soldier, found himself utterly unable to pull the trigger.

His finger was held back by some inexplicable force, refusing to budge no matter what he did!

From his youth, fleeing toward the base alongside other survivors, the jade Buddha statue he had clutched tightly in his hand seemed to materialize before his eyes once more.

He tried to grasp it, but his fingers closed on empty air.

The grand temple appeared before him once again.

The deity's statue was gone; the hall was empty and desolate, leaving only that single mural that inspired boundless terror and awe!

Li Yi loosened his grip on his gun.

The spark of his spirit and will plummeted into the abyss.