Not long after, in Eastern Europe, on the outskirts of a specially marked city, at the edge of a withered forest—
What had once perhaps been a lush woodland now had only twisted, charred trunks left, like desperate arms of the earth reaching toward the gray sky.
At this moment, a raider craft, its maglev engines emitting an almost imperceptible low-frequency hum, descended with precise, steady control onto a relatively flat clearing between the trees.
A faint ripple of light shimmered across the hull like water, canceling the optical camouflage. The sleek black body of the craft emerged among the dead branches and fallen leaves.
The side hatch slid open with barely a sound.
Leon stepped out first, wearing a worn work jacket and carrying a backpack stuffed with supplies and disguise gear. His gaze swept the surroundings quickly, assessing potential threats.
Right behind him came Mike in similar civilian garb. He tugged at the gray hood over his head. Last was Maggie, her movements light and efficient.
"Good luck."
The pilot's brief blessing came over the internal comms, his voice kept very low.
The hatch sealed shut at once.
The pilot's hands moved with practiced ease across the control panel as he prepared to re-engage stealth mode and lift off.
However, just as optical camouflage was about to cloak the hull again and the raider craft was starting to rise—
Vmm. Clack. Clack!!
The hull suddenly shuddered in an abnormal but brief tremor, accompanied by an extremely faint, yet to an experienced pilot utterly chilling, rasp of mechanical friction.
?!
Sweat instantly beaded on the pilot's forehead.
His right hand flew over the console, pupils constricting as his eyes locked on several suddenly lit, non-critical warning indicators.
"Damn.
Maglev balance regulator feedback anomaly.
Primary nozzle efficiency slightly degraded."
He cursed under his breath and quickly pulled up the diagnostic report.
After a few tense seconds of troubleshooting, he finally let out a long breath, wiped his sweat, and muttered to himself, "Whew, false alarm. The main maglev engine's inertia damper just needs calibration and maintenance. Damn sand. At least it's not a structural issue."
Meanwhile, Leon and the others on the ground had already switched into mission mode.
"Clear."
Leon spoke quietly as he took a cigarette-pack-sized device from a side pocket on his backpack.
Mike caught on, took the device, and pressed a button.
There was a faint buzzing, like insect wings vibrating. Several disposable micro-drones disguised as fruit flies emerged from the device, scattering quickly in all directions and melting into the dead forest and the ruins of shattered buildings.
They knew that high overhead, Imperial stealth drones were constantly scanning, and that in low orbit Flame Lizard–class warships waited as powerful backup. Even so, for an infiltration mission in enemy-occupied territory, close-range, real-time, small-area situational awareness remained crucial.
These "electronic insects" would serve as the closest eyes and ears around them.
Almost as soon as the drones launched, faint blue, semi-transparent user interfaces began to appear on the lenses of the thin, invisible holo-glasses each of them wore.
Environmental data all around them—
Temperature, humidity, radiation index, air composition—scrolled along the edges of their vision in simple text and numbers.
Real-time environmental models generated by fusing micro-drone feeds with orbital reconnaissance data overlaid directly onto their real-world view, with highlighted outlines and dynamic markers.
Abandoned walls in the holo-glasses revealed blue skeletons of rebar within. Under collapsed beams and columns, triangular spaces large enough to crawl through were marked out.
When Maggie's gaze swept over the ground, the shallow subsurface pipe network appeared in her vision like glowing veins.
Those semi-transparent structural lines floated faintly atop the real scene, as if the entire world had been given an X-ray–like power of penetration.
Moving heat sources appeared as orange points of light at the edges of their view—
Three mutant rats foraging among the ruins, two hundred meters away.
Farther out, several aberrant energy signatures were tagged. The tactical system automatically calculated their movement trajectories and, with dashed lines, predicted their paths for the next thirty seconds.
"Route generated."
Mike's voice sounded over the encrypted channel.
In his view, a virtual path resembling a glowing stream wound through the ruins and trees:
First west, skirting the suburban woods, then to a half-collapsed apartment block, then using the rubble for cover to cross a plaza, and finally slipping into the entrance of an underground passage.
Each turning point on the route carried an estimated time cost and threat level.
Even though the system marked it as the "minimum-risk" path, it was still nerve-racking.
On the tactical map, the area representing the abandoned town glowed an ominous deep red, dense heat signatures bubbling like a boiling froth.
Thermal imaging analysis showed that most of the biosignals on the outskirts of the abandoned town exhibited arthropod characteristics, yet their body sizes were generally far beyond normal ranges, and some signals were accompanied by abnormal energy readings.
More unsettling still was the schematic of the underground sewer system.
Because heavy concrete structures interfered with sensor signals, vast swaths of gray unknown zones appeared on the map.
The projected route threaded through those blind spots, repeatedly triggering "signal attenuation zone" warning markers.
Several key nodes were flagged with question marks and annotated with small reminders: "Structural integrity unknown."
"Looks like our little bug friends have put together quite a challenging welcome route for us."
Mike tried to keep his tone light, but he subconsciously adjusted the holster under his arm. That tiny movement was logged by Maggie's holo-glasses as "Stress response: mild."
When Leon tilted his head back to look up, his glasses automatically zoomed in on targets in the sky.
High above, bio-mechanical hybrid patrol craft cruised, showing disturbing details.
Viscous fluid seeped from the seams of their shell-like armor, clearly visible in the magnified view. The exhaust plumes from their thrusters displayed abnormal spectrums.
When one patrol craft banked, the system immediately recognized the pulse weapon slung under its belly, and its threat rating jumped from "low" to "medium."
"They're sweeping very frequently."
Maggie's voice was calm.
In her tactical interface, an activity pattern analysis of the patrol craft was taking shape, their flight paths weaving together into a dense net in the sky.
Statistics showed that in the past forty minutes, there had been seven flyovers in this airspace, a patrol frequency exceeding what normal security would require.
"Are they keeping constant pressure on the remaining resistance, or hunting for something?"
Her question triggered the system's pattern-matching module, which began comparing the characteristics of known suppression operations versus manhunts.
The alien overlords' purge operations were clearly still underway; the abnormally busy patrol craft alone made that obvious.
For the infiltration team, this meant a significantly higher risk of sudden firefights—but it also implied that something noteworthy might still be in this area.
Whether remnants of the resistance, or other valuable sources of intelligence.
"Either way, stick to the plan. Stay hidden. Intelligence gathering is the priority."
Leon's orders were concise and firm.
Their optical camouflage cloaks switched to dynamic environment mimicry mode, and all data from the insect-drone scouts was bumped to highest priority.
Their movements as they faded into the shadows looked like a dance they had rehearsed a thousand times.
Leon slipped into the darkness of the dead forest first. Mike followed at a five-meter distance. Maggie chose a parallel line to provide flank cover.
Dead branches made the faintest possible sounds under their boots, perfectly drowned out by the distant roar of patrol engines.
Following the glowing path in their holo-glasses, the three figures glided silently through the trees and ruins.
Drones scouted every turn ahead. Optical camouflage screened them across every open stretch.
On the horizon, the silhouette of the city grew gradually clearer, while eerie light from alien megastructures shone in the dusk like beacons guiding them onward.
Leaving the relative cover of the forest's edge, they now faced an open, dangerous expanse—
A dried seabed, exposed as the coastline had receded, riven with a web of cracks.
Visibility here was wide open, with almost nowhere to hide.
"Engage optical camo," Leon ordered quietly, his voice transmitted clearly through their bone-conduction earpieces.
Fortunately, the optical camouflage cloaks blurred and distorted their outlines, blending them into the forest's darkness behind and the gray-brown desolation of the beach ahead, turning them into three moving shadows.
Wrapped in this "invisible" shroud, they began to move quickly yet cautiously across the beach, aiming for the hazy outline of the abandoned town in the distance.
But the seemingly dead beach was far from empty.
Through the augmented-reality overlays in their holo-glasses, they could see the sand and cracked mud teeming with strange alien creatures.
These creatures bore certain insectoid traits—
Chitinous carapaces, jointed limbs, compound eyes—but their overall forms were unlike any swarm Leon and the others had encountered before, whether the Araki swarm or other known insectoids; there was no direct comparison.
Some resembled beetles with scythe-like forelimbs. Others were like many-legged, eyeless burrowers tunneling beneath the sand.
"Steer clear. No contact."
Leon reminded them, slowing his pace and guiding the squad in a detour around the densest clusters of alien life.
As he moved, Mike marked their behavior patterns in his view and said quietly, "If these things were an aggressive swarm like the Araki, there's no way any relatively intact cities would still be standing on this planet. The whole place would have been blasted into a wasteland.
And they're definitely not some all-devouring infection like the Hongmo either.
These bugs look more like something that 'polluted' this world after the alien forces arrived, then got harnessed by them for environmental control and mop-up."
Mike's judgment about swarms was based on this:
A planet truly invaded by a full swarm army would never look like this—some cities occupied, some regions turned into hives, yet the whole scene still maintaining a kind of eerie "order."
Thanks to the optical camouflage and the precisely plotted route, the three of them crossed the perilous dry seabed without incident and finally reached the outskirts of the abandoned town.
"Awoo...!"
The moment they drew close, waves of chilling, overlapping howls echoed from deep within the town.
Those howls brimmed with pain, fear, and an inhuman distortion that would make ordinary people's skin crawl.
"Analyze the source."
Maggie issued the command calmly. Her holo-glasses interface immediately began capturing and analyzing the frequency of the howls.
Before long, the analysis results appeared as text in all three of their views.
After audio noise reduction, reverse playback, and pattern recognition, the system identified fragments of clear English words hidden inside those twisted cries:
"Save me."
"Don't!"
"No!"
"It hurts..."
Seeing those words, all three of their hearts sank.
"It's English. Human language."
Mike's voice carried a subdued fury. "That means the ones howling are very likely humans who've undergone some kind of horrifying mutation or transformation. They might still have fragments of consciousness and memory left and are suffering unimaginable pain."
The nature of their mission suddenly took on a darker shade.
They were facing not only alien invaders, but also human compatriots who had been transformed and enslaved.
"Go deeper. First priority is to locate the source of the voices and assess the state of the mutated subjects."
Leon issued new orders, his tone heavy.
Using the rubble for cover, the three of them slipped into the town.
Abandoned vehicles and household items littered the streets. Walls were riddled with bullet holes and stained with streaks of unknown slime. It was obvious there had once been fierce resistance here, followed by brutal cleanup.
Just then, their earlier insect-drones fed back new reconnaissance data. In the eastern part of the town, they had detected a dense cluster of activity signals and abnormal energy readings.
"Check the east side," Leon signaled.
They moved quietly along crumbling walls until they reached a large, abandoned lumber mill.
The howls were coming from inside the plant, now clearer and more frequent. They found a broken window and peered in.
!
The sight made their scalps prickle.
Inside the spacious but dilapidated factory floor, dozens of ragged "people" were gathered.
They still vaguely retained human silhouettes, but their condition was grotesque.
Most unsettling of all, each of their heads was completely encased in a mass of living tissue, flesh-colored or dark red biomass that hid every facial feature, like a horrible mask grown out of their own flesh and blood.
On top of that, many of these "people" had huge, irregular, torn openings in their abdomens. From those gashes, circles of deathly pale, tooth-like sharp structures had sprouted, opening and contracting in blind, pulsing motions.
Their movements were slow and bizarre, like marionettes on strings wandering around the mill. From where their heads were buried under biomass, those terrifying, agonized howls poured out.
"Jesus..."
Mike sucked in a sharp breath, instinctively tightening his grip on the weapon hidden beneath his cloak.
Leon's expression hardened as he made a quick preliminary assessment. "Visual features match zombie-type organisms. They possess active offensive organs. Behavior patterns suggest potential aggression. Whether they retain basic intelligence or any group coordination is unknown.
As for whether there's any chance of treating these 'people'...
Given our current field conditions and knowledge, we can't say."
Maggie added, "But the fact they can produce clearly meaningful words of distress suggests their brains—or core consciousness—may not be completely destroyed or assimilated yet. There might still be scattered remnants of self-awareness."
Leon nodded and spoke softly over the encrypted channel as he logged and transmitted an observation report:
"Record: Encountered highly suspected human conversion subjects.
Features: Cranial region fully covered by biomass; abdomen and arms show derived offensive organs; capable of emitting howls containing human language.
Recommendation: Bio Division to attempt capture of live samples for in-depth physiological and consciousness-state analysis, in order to evaluate reversibility and study their conversion mechanism.
Note: Targets exhibit signs of pain and possible residual awareness. Any research must comply with established ethical protocols."
Even though the degree of bodily distortion made these zombies look almost beyond saving, as long as there was the slightest possibility of residual consciousness, they held immense research value for the Empire's Bio Division—not only for humanitarian rescue attempts, but also to understand the characteristics and behaviors of these alien organisms.
The three of them remained hidden in the shadows, continuing to observe and record more details about the wretched beings inside the lumber mill, trying to discern their specific link to the alien power that ruled this place.
Every single data point might prove crucial to one day liberating this universe.
______
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