65th Street.
Beneath the clock tower crawling with slime mold.
The Queen standing at the center of the fungal carpet let out a dry, hoarse roar.
Panic and fury surged like a tsunami, spreading restless ripples through her tentacle-like hair.
The mutants around her cried out in shrill, babbling voices.
The mother nest behind her continued producing without pause, yet those frail "newborns" brought her no sense of security.
The continuous deaths of node organisms, especially, had cost her control of the front lines. Her children were suffering meaningless casualties...
Her scarlet pupils were filled with incomprehension.
The relentless barrage had continued for nearly ten nights. Through the grayish-green fog, she could see lives withering away.
Yet she did not understand.
Those humans...
Why couldn't they be killed?
Even after so many days of attrition, they still had the strength to launch an offensive.
What puzzled her most was that through the grayish-green fog, she sensed a string of strangely familiar "ripples."
It made no sense at all.
Those ants that resisted evolution...
Hadn't they already died once?
Beneath the collapsed overpass.
The truck crawling with slime mold slowly backed away as swarms of Gnawers rushed forward, charging toward Old White and his group hiding inside the building.
Before the truck could retreat to the end of the street, a rocket dragging a fiery tail caught up with it and struck its cab dead-on.
The warhead exploded with a bang. Sparks flew throughout the cab as it was pierced clean through by molten metal heated to extreme temperatures.
The cab was its weak point.
More precisely, the driver's position.
As the fungal mass inside the cab was destroyed, the truck broke down on the spot. The fungal mass in the cargo bed stopped writhing, and the Gnawers that had