Eighty steps, fifty steps, twenty steps...
Just as Sun Hang came within ten steps of the monument, the figures clinging to it finally changed.
Like some kind of liquid, those figures suddenly began to boil. Swollen bubbles continuously rose from within them, while their hair and beards danced like raging black flames. Sun Hang even seemed to hear faint crackling sounds.
But they did not move. They remained connected to the monument, though it was impossible to tell whether they could not separate from it or simply were unable to... Yet as the figures mutated, rustling sounds came from the surrounding graves. The soil sealing the graves began to crack, and fine dirt and pebbles rose "upward" like the seepage from that Anomalous Corpse earlier, followed by large chunks of compacted earth.
The upside-down space left Sun Hang slightly disoriented, but even more striking than that was the rancid, sour stench of death pouring from the cracks in the graves.
"Colonel Yan, I have a question for you." Without turning around, Sun Hang stared at the monument before him.
"Speak." Yan Yu'an surveyed the cracking graves around them vigilantly as she replied in the briefest words possible.
"At Baikal City's Heroes of the Fatherland Cemetery, were the dead buried or cremated?"
"They should all have been... cremated?" Yan Yu'an answered uncertainly.
"Then do you think the things crawling out of these graves should be skeletons or ashes?"
"How would I know?" The Willow Leaf Blade's fire-control program had been deleted, and all the armor's built-in weapons and ammunition had been exhausted. The assault rifle in her hands was Yan Yu'an's only remaining ranged weapon. Looking at the restless graves around her, the tension in her heart rose to its peak.
"Then again, this isn't the real Heroes of the Fatherland