Watching the monster before him struggle to turn and leave, only to collapse and start convulsing after a few steps, Nick went up and fired into its abdomen from the side, severing its spine.
The front of this kind of monster's skull was extremely thick, like a layer of bone armor. It could easily shrug off not only the buckshot from his shotgun, but even the pistol rounds fired by the Uzi. It was practically a small living tank.
But that was all. Wild boars in Canada had likewise evolved bony plates that could stop small-caliber bullets, but they were still no match for larger-caliber firearms.
The group still had a reasonably ample supply of ammunition. The Russian Nikolai's mini Gatling and the fully automatic shotgun in Nick's hands were both weapons that delivered maximum damage at close range.
These monsters only looked frightening and probably weighed less than half as much as a North American wild boar. They were not actually much of a threat, and after the initial panic passed, everyone slowly calmed down.
Nick had used nothing but ordinary 12-gauge buckshot throughout the fight simply to conserve ammunition. Half his ammunition stock consisted of high-explosive shotgun rounds designated FRAG-12.
These shotgun rounds came in three types. The HE round could penetrate a quarter-inch-thick cold-rolled steel plate before exploding. The blast and fragments of the HEFA fragmentation round had an effective lethal radius of two meters, while the HEPA armor-piercing round could penetrate roughly half an inch of steel armor plate.
Nick had saved all these main courses especially for the Predators. The monsters before them might have been tough to kill, but 5.56 NATO rounds were enough to handle them.
"What happened? Why did all the rest run away?" The Russian Nikolai stopped the whirring Gatling in