Han Xiao's defensive sector.
The transverse walls had cut the crawlers into sections, with three or four packed into each stretch of passage. The squad's coordination remained precise: drawing aggro, blocking movement, cutting into gaps between scales, one slash and one retreat.
But the speed at which they killed them could no longer keep up with the speed at which the monsters poured in.
Killing one took two to three cuts.
And new crawlers immediately squeezed in through the openings.
The passage grew more and more crowded. The crawlers began piling up in front of the transverse walls—three, five, seven. They trampled and shoved one another, their flat bodies stacked together, clogging the three-meter-wide gaps solid.
And more monsters were still surging in from behind.
The crawlers blocked by their own kind started growing restless.
Their behavior changed. They no longer tried to force their way forward, but stopped instead.
Han Xiao noticed the change.
The crawlers jammed in front of the transverse wall were holding themselves differently from before.
They had originally crawled close to the ground, their whole bodies pressed very low.
But now, the front half of the one at the very front slowly propped itself up, its four forelimbs spreading outward to brace its body firmly, as if looking for a stable point of support.
Then the monster's shovel-like flat head slowly rose.
Its mouth began to open, the front half of its entire head lifting upward like a flip-top lid. The dark red inner walls of its mouth were fully exposed, the wet mucous membrane gleaming with an ominous oily sheen under the daylight.
At the same time, a faint glow emerged from deep within its mouth.
A dark red glimmer.
Like an ember on the verge of going out, yet not quite extinguished.
Anyone