The Carnival Cluster was gradually fading away.
It wasn't being completely wiped out—in fact, it was practically constantly regenerating. No matter how many they killed, new carnivalers would keep emerging from the fog. They could never kill them all. But once the Heavy Deep Divers brought by Xu Jiali had eliminated enough of the entities to cross some kind of "critical point," Yu Sheng observed that they had begun to "recede" at a visibly accelerating rate.
First, the colorful line-figures in the outer areas gradually retreated from sight. Then the entities near the "battlefield" melted back into the fog. Finally, the entities eliminated on the battlefield stopped regenerating altogether.
The streets winding through the dense fog finally began to quiet down. The pulse rifles in the deep divers' hands ceased their roar, and the beam sabers cut down the last few carnivaler entities. Fluttering scraps of paper blanketed the street in a thick layer before being swept up by the wind and rapidly turning to dust.
But these battle-hardened soldiers did not relax completely. They still maintained a loose combat formation, dispersing into groups of eight to twelve around the area. While monitoring the entire neighborhood, they also ensured that every group remained within the sight of at least two other groups at all times, in case some "mechanism" in this bizarre fog was triggered. Meanwhile, more soldiers took various small devices from the storage compartments of their Power Armor and set them up nearby to collect environmental data. Through some kind of "umbilical cord" device connected to their armor, they transmitted the data back to the control center.
Xu Jiali explained all these details from the side.
"This is our 'umbilical cord.'" The burly man, who was already nearly two meters tall and stood close to two and a