Chapter 68: Ambush

The following morning, when everyone assembled, Bunny immediately noticed something strange about the way the others were looking at her.

Their expressions were... peculiar.

What was wrong? Did she have something on her face?

She didn’t find out until they were about to depart. Cyrus brushed past her shoulder and casually murmured, "Guide Bunny certainly seemed to be enjoying herself last night."

Bunny froze. Her entire body turned rigid. Sentinels had extraordinary hearing, which meant... They had heard everything!

Oh God.

She wanted nothing more than to find a crack in the ground and disappear into it.

Under the Sentinels’ teasing gazes, Bunny’s face burned bright red.

The sun had only just risen. Pale morning light was beginning to spread across the horizon as the troops divided into three groups: A, B, and C.

Group A, which included Bunny, had been assigned the most dangerous mission. They needed to penetrate deep into the facility and eliminate the mother alien.

Groups B and C had already split off to encircle the area.

Holding her laser rifle, Bunny crouched low and advanced with the others toward the oil refinery.

Scattered fragments of explosives and chunks of corpses littered the ground. Military boots whispered against the sand. The entire refinery was terrifyingly silent.

Cyrus was the first to sense that something was wrong. Just as Hilan was about to step into the distillation tower, Cyrus suddenly barked, "Don’t move!"

Hilan immediately froze.

Arden pulled a high-explosive grenade from his belt and hurled it into the tower.

BOOM!

The explosion tore through the silence. A moment later, countless aliens that had been hiding inside sprang from their positions and surged outward.

"Concentrate your fire! Push forward!"

The Sentinels instantly formed a protective circle around Bunny. Their weapons erupted almost simultaneously. A storm of bullets tore through the enemy ranks, striking the aliens one after another. Bodies crashed into the sand as clouds of dust exploded around them.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Bunny’s magazine emptied rapidly. Without hesitation, she reached for a fresh magazine attached to her tactical vest.

Three seconds––that was all she needed.

Click.

The new magazine locked into place. She raised her rifle and fired, dropping an alien just as it lunged toward her face.

Its highly corrosive blood splattered across her nano-combat suit, immediately producing a sizzling sound as the acid began eating into the material.

Then several aliens broke through the defensive line and attempted to ambush Illai.

Bunny instantly swung her rifle around. A single blast from her laser cannon sent them straight to the afterlife.

Illai glanced back at her and blew her an exaggerated kiss. "Bunny, I’ll repay you with my life."

Bunny kicked him aside. "Stop flirting in broad daylight!"

The Sentinels’ assault was brutally efficient.

San and Liam were particularly aggressive. At some point, the two had somehow climbed onto opposite sides of a crane, firing down at the enemy while laughing like maniacs.

They were competing to see who could kill more aliens.

"99... 100... 101..."

Liam kept counting without slowing down.

San raised his modified assault rifle and swept it across the battlefield in a wide arc.

When he got particularly carried away, he even fired several rounds into the sky for no reason whatsoever.

The two looked so wild and reckless that they could have been mistaken for a pair of battlefield outlaws.

San laughed.

"Hahaha... Shooting gets boring. Let’s settle this with blades."

He issued Liam a direct challenge, then he jumped from the crane. He landed in a perfect crouch, barely making a sound.

Drawing the laser sword strapped across his back, San rotated his wrist and sent the blade spinning through the air in a beautiful arc.

Then he plunged straight into the tide of aliens like a shadow.

Liam refused to be outdone. One red figure and one black figure surged forward like twin bolts of lightning.

Everything in their path was torn apart, reduced to bloody fragments beneath their overwhelming attacks.

By the time Cyrus even had a chance to intervene, the squad had already broken through to the refinery’s storage area.

Hilan and the others could only stare at Cyrus and the rest of the Sentinels in stunned silence.

Were the Sentinels from 616 really all this terrifying?

At the same time, communications came in succession from Group B led by Xander and Group C led by Rain:

"Successfully broken through the left wing. Report complete."

"Successfully broken through the right wing and moving to rendezvous. Report complete."

According to the radar, the core of the nest was located deep underground. The aliens had almost completely hollowed out the entire oil refinery; a deep shaft in the storage area led downward.

The deeper they went, the higher the levels of radiation and contamination became. Bunny reinforced the mental barriers of every sentinel as the team entered the interior of the nest.

The moment they dropped into the deep shaft, the ground was covered in foul-smelling mucus and alien excretions. Using high-explosive weapons underground carried a high risk of collapse, so firearm use was restricted. Everyone drew cold weapons for close combat.

Bunny carefully observed that each sentinel seemed to favor a different cold weapon—blade, staff, whip, sword, dagger... The fusion of traditional cold weapons with advanced technology created a strange aesthetic of violence.

The red dots on the radar detector flashed continuously. The interior of the nest was as intricate and labyrinthine as a spider’s web. At a fork in the path, the group split into two directions.

Just as Bunny’s squad reached an underground cliff, the radar emitted a sharp, urgent alarm—yet there was no enemy in sight!

Xander’s voice came through the communication earpiece: "Everyone, watch your feet!"

A dense, rustling sound rose from all directions. Bunny looked down and felt her scalp go numb.

They were continuously climbing up from beneath the cliff!

The sentinels released their spirit forms one after another to fight in coordination. Blades flashed and swords clashed; the air was filled with the sounds of chopping flesh and the roars of the aliens.

Hilan and his team were anxiously searching for the queen-type alien when a piercing sonic wave suddenly rose from the depths of the earth. This was a unique ability of the queen. Such high-frequency sound waves could severely erode a sentinel’s spiritual sea.

Bunny’s mental barrier could not be maintained for long. They had to finish this quickly.

Astin was cutting with full enjoyment when some bastard kicked him hard from behind, sending him tumbling headfirst off the cliff and nearly making him eat dirt.

He cursed loudly. "Which motherfucker is that damn rotten?!"

Bunny still injected a portion of her mental power into Hilan’s squad. Hilan shot her a grateful glance before leaping down the cliff first; his teammates followed closely behind.

Yet the excessively massive expenditure of mental power quickly left Bunny physically drained. Gripping her combat knife, her figure swayed slightly. In that brief moment of distraction, a juvenile alien slammed into her with full force and knocked her off the cliff as well.

Below the cliff stretched countless unhatched eggs and a writhing, maggot-like sea of alien bodies—terrifying beyond measure.

If she fell, she would be torn apart and devoured in an instant.