"Eli!!!"
Not far away, Alpharius let out a despairing roar like an enraged lion. He pulled the trigger frantically, trying to fight his way over, but the tide of xenos held him back.
Impaled on the tentacle, Eli convulsed violently in pain. His face turned ashen in an instant, and life drained from his body at a terrifying, visible rate. He knew he was beyond saving.
Yet there was not the slightest trace of fear of death on the young mortal's face.
He laboriously lowered his head and looked at the "ice-cold face" below him, now utterly stripped of composure by shock. Somehow, he tugged at the corners of his mouth and managed a hideously awkward, guileless grin.
"Idiot..."
With the last shred of clarity left in his life, Eli struggled to raise his left hand, which was covered in filthy blood.
In it was a high-explosive armor-piercing grenade.
He had scavenged it from the corpse of a fallen Alpha Legion Space Marine during the chaos. For a mortal, its recoil was enough to shatter his arm, but that no longer mattered.
With his blood-covered teeth, Eli bit down hard on the grenade's safety pin and pulled it out.
Then, following the tentacle that had pierced his chest, he used the last of his strength to shove the grenade, flashing with lethal red light, straight into the xenos leader's disgusting, fang-filled maw, which had opened in surprise and fury!
"Feast on this, you giant maggot!"
BOOOOM-!!!!!
A Space Marine-grade armor-piercing grenade, designed to blast through heavy tanks, detonated at point-blank range inside the xenos leader's most vulnerable mouth.
A blinding ball of plasma surged up through the dark pit!
The terrifying blast blew the xenos leader's enormous, bloated head into flying scraps of flesh and green slurry. With its death,