"Roar—!"
A deafening roar echoed through the tunnels of Blood Mountain as the Plague Champion, drenched head to toe in blood, lumbered forward.
Not far ahead of him, four members of the Alpha Mobile Task Force stood ready.
The grueling, meat-grinder-like battle had inflicted heavy losses on both sides. Nearly three thousand Plague Monks of the Bloodhoof Clan had fallen, while more than half of the Alphas who had entered the Blood Mountain tunnels had been killed, leaving only a little over four hundred.
Countless drones had been destroyed as well. The narrow tunnels were littered with metal fragments and muddy corpses.
It was impossible for just four people to hold back the Plague Champion's advance, yet none of them retreated.
Their superiors had ordered them to hold their ground and fight to the death.
In fact, the moment they received that mysterious biological prosthesis, they had already prepared themselves to die.
The four exchanged glances and held a brief discussion over the comms channel before launching an attack of their own.
Two assault rifles and two Gauss rifles were braced at the end of the tunnel, firing alternating yellow and blue flashes.
Apparently not expecting these humans to dare poke out from cover and fire back, the Plague Champion let out a pained roar. It extended its right arm, which quickly mimicked the shape of a cannon barrel, before a stream of pale red mist shot toward the Alpha-held position.
The dense spore cloud burst apart like an exploding rifle grenade, splashing all four Alphas across the face and rapidly burning through their gas masks.
Fortunately, they had all received Little Feather's biological prostheses. Their specially enhanced immune systems easily blocked the invasion of the Alpha protozoa.
However—
That was not their only problem.
The spreading smoke obscured their