Chapter 390: Different Fates

Should she clear out these toxins?

While Pandora was still considering, she failed to notice that the squad member before her, Jack, had sunk into the deepest confusion of his life.

Jack clutched the head wrapped in white cloth against his chest.

The cloth had been warmed by his body heat, but the thing inside was cold—so cold Jack could feel no warmth at all.

Pandora’s explanation just moments ago had laid everything bare.

The threads wove together, and the answer stood before him, plain as day.

But it was an answer he did not want to face.

His earlier dispute with the squad leader, seen from this new angle, seemed to suggest the squad leader had been right, and he had been wrong.

The Susurrus Mist did have problems, and they truly should have left as soon as possible.

If they had moved together and chosen to leave, they would have faced the Killer Ants together. It might have taken some effort, but at least the squad leader would not have died.

At the same time, having left the range of the toxin’s influence, the squad leader’s mental state would have gradually recovered.

He would have become that calm, steady captain once more—not the cold-eyed, babbling madman.

Which meant... his own mistake had indirectly led to the squad leader’s death?

At the thought that it was his fault, Jack’s pupils began to lose focus.

He sank into turmoil, confusion, and deep self-recrimination.

It was his fault. This was his fault.

He hadn’t followed. He had even led the opposition against the squad leader.

If he had kept his mouth shut and obeyed orders, the outcome would have been completely different.

This thought coiled around his heart like a cold serpent, squeezing tighter and tighter, until it felt as though it would crush his heart entirely.

But the next moment, Pandora, standing before him, turned away.

Her movement cut through Jack’s spiraling thoughts.

Pandora’s gaze shifted toward the lower stairwell, and she said softly:

“They’ve finally come?”

Come?

What’s come?

Jack was puzzled, and his gaze followed hers down the stairwell.

Still not fully free of the whirlpool of self-blame, his focus remained scattered. It took him several seconds to bring the image into focus.

Beyond the mist, figures darted about.

That familiar shape—it was the Killer Ants.

In aura, in strength, in appearance, they were nearly identical, like replicas.

Dark-red chitinous carapace, flat triangular head, compound eyes covering two-thirds of the face, sickle-shaped mandibles—

Exactly the same as the one just now.

And there was more than one.

One, two, three...

Jack counted, his eyelid twitching.

By the final tally, there were seven darting figures.

Seven Rank-2 limit Anomalies!

The successive shocks left Jack feeling numb to the world.

He even doubted whether he, too, had been poisoned—whether this was all a hallucination.

Or was the world truly this absurd?

When they had come upstairs earlier, why hadn’t they encountered even one?

Why now, all of a sudden, did they seem to have materialized out of thin air?

Pandora knew nothing of Jack’s thoughts.

She simply turned back around, her expression unchanged.

In truth, the moment she had killed that Killer Ant, she had sensed the rapidly dispersing pheromone.

It was some kind of warning signal—or perhaps a call for help.

At the instant of death, Killer Ants seemed to release a special pheromone toward their kind, marking the enemy’s location and threat level.

Part of why she had waited here was to understand the situation—to figure out exactly what the support squad had encountered in this building. The other part was simply to handle the cleanup.

When she had come upstairs, she had sensed these Killer Ants were scattered far apart, dispersed across the corridors and rooms of the lower floors like a loosely spread net.

Cleaning them out one by one would have been too troublesome.

Better to let them all come at once.

Crushing one or crushing several made little difference to her.

With her current strength and methods, Anomalies below Rank-3 posed no threat to her regardless of their numbers.

No matter how many ants there were, they were still just ants.

So...

“Let’s finish this quickly.”

Pandora rolled her shoulders lightly, said the words offhandedly, and took a step forward.

That step seemed casual, but her entire body became a blur, vanishing from the mist’s boundary in an instant.

The next moment, pale yellow, nearly translucent blood splattered through the air.

The color resembled diluted honey, tracing arcs before gravity brought it cascading down.

The fight wasn’t exciting this time.

It was a one-sided slaughter.

Shadows surged from the ground, forming pitch-black scythes that reaped the insectoid figures’ lives.

The Witch’s Heartstrings spread like a spider’s web, binding the fleeing Killer Ants one by one, then cutting them apart one by one.

No roars, no struggles, not even a decent resistance.

Those Rank-2 limit Killer Ants, before Pandora, were no different from ants on the ground.

The chitinous carapaces they prided themselves on were like paper before the Witch’s Heartstrings.

Their supposedly lethal blades couldn’t even touch Pandora’s hem.

A few breaths later.

All was silent once more.

The corridor was littered with remains—severed limbs and cracked shells scattered across the floor, pale yellow fluid slowly spreading over the concrete, releasing a pungent, sour stench.

Pandora was unblemished, not a speck of dust on her, not even a stain on the hem of her clothes.

She turned back to them.

“Hm? What’s wrong? It seemed like you still wanted to say something earlier.”

Jack swallowed.

He opened his mouth, his gaze falling on the scattered remains littering the floor, then on the white cloth wrapped around the squad leader’s head cradled in his arms.

In the end, he said nothing.

What he had wanted to say—those thoughts about right and wrong, about self-blame, about what might have happened if—suddenly became meaningless after witnessing this scene.

The squad leader had been right to a certain extent. The Susurrus Mist was indeed not pure—it had been tainted with toxins that were eroding their minds.

But he had also been wrong—the mist was still protecting them, keeping their presence hidden within its cover.

And once they left the mist, the Killer Ants could find them.

Granted, the Killer Ants were scattered across the lower floors of the building; they might not have encountered all of them on the way down.

But killing even one would draw in the others.

That trait meant that if they had chosen to follow the squad leader, they would have been wiped out.

Four half-crippled Rank-2s, facing seven Killer Ants—they had no chance of victory.

So, from a retrospective standpoint, agonizing over right and wrong was meaningless.

The fact was simple: the squad leader was dead.

They were alive.

It had nothing to do with right or wrong. Luck had played the larger part.

Fate had rolled the dice for each of them, assigning each a number.

The squad leader hadn’t picked right.

Neither had he.

He just happened to be the one who survived.