No Other Choice

The slaughter did not last long.

Although the Cult members chose to release the test subjects after administering the catalyst, the number of those creatures was limited after all.

They did not dare to catalyze and unleash every test subject at once. Once catalyzed, those things became complete mad dogs, blindly hunting every living creature before them. And the more abundant a target's life energy, the more it would draw their favor.

Cult members were known for their vigorous life energy. While the numbers were still low, they could barely keep them under control with their own personnel. But if hundreds of thousands of those things rioted at once, never mind anything else—the Cult members at the center would be the first to be surrounded, beaten down, and hunted by the mob.

So, with their use kept in check, the Starfire cultivators surrounding those people only needed to clear out the ones that charged out.

Even so, the frontline fighters still inevitably suffered considerable losses.

A full two-hundred-man unit had lost nearly forty people in a single assault. Though they had killed twice as many enemies, could that exchange ratio really continue?

This time, Starfire had mobilized fewer than a hundred thousand combat-capable troops from Ice-Snow Mountain City. The rest could not even hold a spirit gun; they were mere cannon fodder, too slow even to fill the lines.

But what about the Cult members on the other side?

Those lunatics had infiltrated from every direction. Had the earlier elite hunts not shattered their morale and courage, forcing them to band together, merely guarding against them would have required nearly a hundred thousand personnel.

And over the past two days, following rigorous reconnaissance, they had finally gained a rough estimate of the Cult's numbers.

By a conservative estimate, they had