Free Fall

Several hunters failed to react in time and were pounced on by the leaping mycelial puppets, falling into the "ocean" made of countless limbs and writhing tissues.

In the blink of an eye, they were swallowed up, never to make another sound.

The survivors who had evaded the first wave of attacks had now fallen into the passage blasted open for them by artillery fire, but that did not mean they were safe for the moment—the walls of this passage were formed from a layer of carbonized mycelial puppets. Yet the carbonized layer was not thick enough. As countless mycelial puppets squeezed and tore at it, cracks began to appear in the charred passage walls. Anyone with eyes could tell that these precarious walls would completely collapse before long.

And the hunters were still some distance away from the bottom of the pit.

To reduce the impact of free fall, the jetpacks mounted on the backs of their powered exoskeletons automatically ignited, slowing their descent once more.

"What do we do?! Those things are about to crawl out of the walls!!" a hunter shouted over the team channel.

"Shoot them! Don't you have a gun?" Another hunter had just raised his weapon to fire when he discovered that his trigger had been locked.

More precisely, it was not the trigger that had been locked, but the finger joints of the mechanical arm meant to pull it.

"Fuck! Why is this thing malfunctioning at a time like this?!" the hunter cursed.

"It isn't malfunctioning. I locked it with captain-level authority," Cheng Ming said.

"Then you're the one malfunctioning!"

"You can't open fire!" Cheng Ming said gravely. "If you fire now, it'll only speed up the collapse of the passage walls. By then, those monsters won't even need to crawl out—they'll bury