Special Mutants
Xu Huo walked a short distance through the city. The televisions in shops, phones discarded along the roadside, and laptops in homes that still had power were all showing news reports, aside from the warning that kept popping up. Judging by the timestamps, the city had been completely overrun less than half a day ago.
Though there were signs of Alien activity in many places, he hadn't seen a single living one so far. The occasional bodies he found—two or three at a time—had been crushed by collapsed buildings, with little sign of a fight.
If District 017 had only begun evolving recently, it wasn't strange that it had no Players capable of taking on the Aliens. But a city should have armed forces. Even without cannons, it should have had a few guns. It shouldn't have been completely defenseless.
Xu Huo checked the nearby police and fire stations. The vehicles, firearms, axes, and other equipment had all been taken. Perhaps they'd received advance warning and evacuated. The blood and debris scattered around the city were also out of proportion to its size. That was good news; at least it meant most people had left ahead of time.
After walking a little farther, he spotted relatively intact human limbs inside the belly of an Alien whose chest and abdomen had been pierced by rebar from a building. The other Aliens had retained something of a human shape, but this one had mutated strangely. Its head had swollen to more than twice the size of an ordinary person's. The section from its mouth to its neck seemed to have undergone a special evolution: a small iron rod stuck into its mouth hadn't torn its throat open. Instead, it had pushed up the skin along with it, creating a bulge