The tide of pus and blood not only brutally washed away the black insect swarm, but also reached the first defensive barrier. Thick sandbags and ceramic-metal plates held back the increasingly violent surge. The heat from the flamethrowers and unburned fuel floated on the water, their bright orange-red flames like tiny islands amid rushing currents. Even the smoke from incompletely burned fuel could not conceal the stench of the blood tide. Even Laura Croft, positioned at the highest point of the firing line, nearly vomited from the rotten-flesh reek. Fortunately, a First Secret Regiment soldier beside her handed her a respirator, easing the smell that seemed to cling to her nasal passages like mucus and keeping her from vomiting up bile.
She could not imagine what the Arcanists still standing before the Silver Stone Gate were going through. Yet what she saw next was destined to haunt her for the rest of her life, leaving her no time to consider the people before the gate—strange pinkish-white objects rose to the surface amid the churning red-black tide. At first, no one paid attention to these obstructions. But they became more and more numerous, eventually forming isolated, bloodstained reefs. They looked like incomplete human bodies hastily stripped of flesh and skin with a knife, along with chunks of scattered fat and hairy skin. More strangely, fresh blood vessels and tendons still clung to those bones, as though a horrifying human slaughterhouse lay beneath the water, and this was its sewer.
The black beetles floating on the bloody tide used the liquid's momentum to crawl onto the foremost Alpha Defense Works. Their supernatural mouthparts gradually gnawed through the hard gun barrels and flamethrowers. Blood flowing freely after leaving living bodies seeped through the gaps once it had soaked the sandbags. One soldier accidentally