Night fell deep within North Gully Broken Ridge.
"Report! It's empty inside!"
A Hunter in the vanguard lifted the translucent membrane hanging over the entrance with his Bone Blade. As his powerful tactical searchlight swept through the gap, he froze on the spot.
The cave walls were covered in fresh, chaotic, bloody claw marks.
Several Hatching Pod straps as thick as arms had been forcibly torn apart, dangling wetly from the rock walls and dripping. Yet on the scorched, damp ground, there wasn't a single living creature-or even one intact insect corpse. The dense cluster of heat signatures the Vanguard Team's reconnaissance drone had previously captured through the entrance had become nothing but a few deep, empty pits of rotten mud.
"Don't just stand there! Get out!"
[Tom Pie]'s cold, low voice instantly tore through the communications headset.
He hung upside down without a sound in the cliff shadows of the bone slope opposite. His ink-black claw tips pointed slightly downward, aimed squarely at a dark, slick drag mark among the rocks outside the cave.
"They haven't been gone long. The things on the ground... were forcibly dragged out in batches!"
The Hunter's heart tightened, and he looked down for a closer inspection.
Thick, pungent biochemical slime wound northward through the rubble. Slime still dripped from the broken ends of bone spikes crushed beneath heavy loads. Less than three meters ahead, a fist-sized, translucent gray-white fleshy egg was wedged firmly in a rock crevice, half of it crushed by something heavy passing in a hurry.
At the rupture in its membrane, delicate little legs covered in dense barbs still clawed at the air in their death throes.
Squelch!
Without hesitation, the Hunter reversed his grip and pinned it through to the rubble with one stab.
"Fuck... they even packed up