While everyone waited with taut nerves for the next strike from the sky, or the thunderous crash of landing pods hitting the ground, a stranger, more earthbound horror quietly seeped in from the rear flank they had thought relatively "safe."
At first, there were a few abrupt reports, out of rhythm with the gunfire elsewhere.
Then came short, piercing screams, swiftly swallowed by the background roar of battle, but enough to alert the soldiers in the nearby trenches.
"Behind us! Seven o'clock! Movement!" a lookout screamed into his communicator, his voice tight.
Soon, a figure slowly "flowed" out of the Smoke and darkness in the abandoned no-man's-land behind the Defense Line, amid shell craters and burning vehicle wrecks.
The thing was about three meters tall and barely maintained an upright human outline, but its "body" consisted of countless dark worms as thick as thumbs, constantly writhing, coiling, separating, and merging.
The worms were coated in thick secretions that reflected an ominous glimmer. They crowded together in dense masses, mimicking the shapes of a head, torso, and limbs, yet possessed no fixed features or joints, only a nauseating, ceaseless collective writhing.
It "held" a twisted weapon that looked like some forced fusion of biological shell and metal, its muzzle flickering with sickly green light.
A soldier of the Vernas Regiment sheltered behind a half-collapsed bunker tried to fire a warning shot.
But just as he raised his Lasgun—
Whoosh!
A slender green ray flashed from the monster's weapon, swift as a viper's flicking tongue.
There was no explosion.
The green light struck the soldier and the sandbag behind him.
Before the soldier could even scream, his entire body, along with his armor, the weapon in his hands, and even the sandbag he had leaned against, disintegrated in the green light, becoming