That afternoon, the Scarlet Skull cult's territory was still in chaos, with explosions and roars ringing out one after another. While a certain troublesome little girl was still having the time of her life playing with the Warp Daemons, the great emergency evacuation of refugees organized by the abandoned mining base finally began.
Though it was called a retreat, Darius was a seasoned veteran and had no intention of giving the daemons any chance to approach or attack the refugee column.
So!
Once the retreat officially began, the refugees were mobilized and filed out through the cleared abandoned subway exit, forming a long line as they hurried toward the mountains in the west. But instead of spreading his soldiers along both sides to defend passively, he simply turned the retreat into a targeted military operation.
Under the orders of officers at every level, most of the base's elite soldiers were dispatched in squads to attack the Warp Daemon outposts along the retreat route and hold them. As they eliminated stray daemons, cut off possible routes for reinforcements, and protected the mass evacuation, they also managed to rescue scattered survivors who had made it this far by hiding in buildings and ruins.
Among them was Wang Qing, the former junior officer of the planetary fleet who had been rescued by Annie at the beginning and had enlisted almost with the first wave. She was part of an assault squad that had just wiped out a group of a dozen or so daemons holed up in a small residential district. To their surprise, they rescued more than a dozen refugees in terrible condition who had crawled out of a foul-smelling underground drainage ditch.
The refugees clung to the squad as if they had found their saviors, refusing to leave and trailing behind