Self-Harm

The Zerg tentacle traps' change in behavior came so suddenly that the outsiders had not anticipated it. As a result, in areas the repair robots had already passed through, attacks struck again just when the outsiders believed the area was safe.

This made the outsiders realize that the tentacle traps could pick their targets, inflicting a fairly severe wave of losses on them.

What was more, these Zerg tentacle traps could even bypass the large shield robots at the front and prioritize attacking the rarer types of robots behind them, or the outsiders themselves.

Knox's squad had once lost two Z-series spider-shaped robots and one humanoid robot under such circumstances, without knowing what was happening.

Later, the outsiders discovered that under certain conditions, these tentacle traps would also attack the repair robots and shield-bearing robots.

That was when they had already been exposed and were about to become targets of concentrated fire. At that point, they would attack the nearest enemy unit rather than continue picking and choosing.

But making the tentacle traps reveal themselves in advance was no easy task. Their powerful mimicry could not only evade all detection equipment, but could even imitate a certain degree of damage response.

This turned what had once been simple route-clearing into a task where they had to attack the facilities inside each compartment and damage them to a certain extent before they could determine whether they were disguised tentacle traps.

But doing that was practically destroying the ship themselves. The walls were one thing, but what were they supposed to do about precision instruments and external armor plates?

The precision instruments themselves were probably beyond what the Zerg tentacle traps could mimic. But the problem was that the instruments' outer protective casings contained little technical complexity.

Since the tentacle traps could