The sunset sank beneath the sea, and night had fallen peacefully over the Ring Island harbor. Yet Fries Port, two hundred nautical miles away, was bustling with activity.
Firelight flickered through the forest. Explosions and gunfire rose and fell in waves, while the comms channel was filled with noisy shouts, occasionally accompanied by the roars and wails of mutants.
The remote weapon station atop the "Husky" tracked vehicle kept firing, pouring 20mm rounds into the pitch-black jungle. The grenade launcher mounted on its side boomed from time to time, bursting into flashes of fire mixed with smoke and dust among the trees.
The convoy under siege belonged to a scientific expedition investigating the ruins of Shilong City.
Half an hour earlier, they had reached the ruins of a signal receiving station, intending to recover the coordinates and identification codes of astronomical observation satellites stored on the local server's hard drives.
If they could reconnect to those satellites, they could retrieve the access logs and historical IP addresses stored in their memory, lighting up a large number of high-value exploration targets on the map.
For the excavation of the city's ruins, that signal receiving station was the key to opening the first door of a maze.
However, no one had expected that after the Jungle Corps vanguard entered the signal receiving station, they would find themselves facing a gigantic mutated ant nest!
In truth, the moment they saw tunnels a meter across, everyone had felt a sense of foreboding. When they entered the database, that bad feeling swiftly became reality.
Dark green mutated aphids packed the passageways so tightly that there was barely anywhere to step. This place had been transformed into a pasture where mutated ants raised aphids!
A mutated soldier ant nearly as tall as a knee quickly spotted