Chapter 428: High Ranking Zerg

The extraction liquid quickly bound the remaining green blood into clusters, swiftly hunting them down and disintegrating them with the formula. Then, they excreted them through sweat glands.

Now, Helena was already shaking less. The green tinge in her sweat was being wiped constantly by Grayson. Her skin had started to show its pale complexion.

"That’s better," Grayson said as he put down one towel on the side to ask Chronos to get another one.

"What are you talking about?! I’ve had a zerg inside me for months, I’ll never be better until the doctor says I’ve flushed it all out of my system!"

"Don’t talk, sis. You might ingest it again." Chronos said as he took out another handkerchief to wipe the green slime around Helena’s mouth.

"Bah, I’ll talk as much as I want," Helena said stubbornly. "Grayson."

"Here," Grayson replied as he reached for another towel that Chronos had put down nearby, god knows when.

"There was—"

Helena did not finish what she was about to say, because at that exact moment, the detached arm on the floor started twitching.

At first, they could pass the small twitching off as fasciculation since it was freshly cut.

However, it started making big movements. It moved up the ruined muscle of the forearm from the sealed cut toward the inside of the elbow.

The three of them froze.

Grayson grabbed the pulse gun on the pile.

Chronos kept the remaining ampoule in his body tightly hidden while he grabbed the laser blade and positioned himself at the front.

Helena propped herself up to hide behind Grayson and Chronos, using her remaining arm. She regulated her breathing and moved slowly to prevent decompensated hypovolemic shock1.

The severed arm moved again. Underneath the skin of the elbow, a bulge pressed up, trying to get out.

Then, a small dark point split the skin.

A head was soon seen coming out.

Finally, something that looked like a mutated grasshopper in dark green and black crawled out of Helena’s severed arm. It was no bigger than a man’s thumb, slick with green blood.

Its segmented body was plated in overlapping chitin, the color of tarnished bronze. Its eyes were unreasonably large for its head, but clearly intelligent.

They looked at Grayson.

They looked at Chronos.

They looked at the twitching nerves of the arm they were about to abandon.

Then, they looked at Helena. To the small drawstring pouch that had fallen out from under her. It might’ve fallen out during the amputation.

Now, it was lying half-open by the edge of the pile of weapons.

BANG BANG!

Grayson did not waste time and began firing.

The first shot missed and hit the floor. The small body of a grasshopper reacted faster than the bullet.

The second shot scorched the plating of the supply crate nearby. The grasshopper, light as a feather, quickly moved and used the falling debris to propel itself higher.

BANG BANG BANG!

Grayson fired several times in succession, but all of them missed.

Soon, it landed on the side of the pouch.

Chronos was about to slice it down when an artificial rumbling of the ground occurred and made his standing unstable.

The rumbling of the ground came from Keres, the grasshopper who hooked its mandible1 into the open mouth of the pouch and sucked hard.

A fine powder, silver-pale, lifted in a puff from the pouch’s mouth. Most of it dusted the air, but the small, potent quantity made it past the grasshopper’s mouthparts and into the small, zerg lungs.

Before they could think about what was happening before them, the grasshopper’s body began to twitch uncontrollably. It created not only the rumbling of the ground but also the rippling of its own body.

The chitin splits along prearranged seams. Something larger unfolded itself from inside the thumbnail-sized insect.

Its legs began extruding, torso elongating, and an exoskeletal breastplate snapping itself together across a widening chest.

In less than five seconds, the grasshopper did not look like the mutated grasshopper anymore.

It became a humanoid figure, a meter and a half tall, armored head to foot in segmented insectoid plating.

The hind legs of its base form were still visible, angled like a sprinter’s blocks under the plated thighs.

Bloody red compounded eyes1 glinted under the flickering light.

A mouth that should not have been able to smile was smiling.

"Ah," Keres said, in a voice that clicked rather than spoke. "That feels better."

Grayson continued to open fire using his pulse gun.

The pulse rounds were not as effective as a mecha cannon’s against a Zerg. But at close range, it should be able to make a dent in a zerg’s plate of this size.

Breaking that with precise aim and succession of shots would make it possible for Chronos’s laser blade to cut one part by the joints.

Under normal circumstances, it should’ve worked perfectly. However, Grayson didn’t expect a high-ranking Zerg soldier to appear here. No wonder his shots earlier missed by a hair’s breadth.

Grayson gritted his teeth and fired recklessly as he moved to check out the other guns in the pile.

However, as expected of a high-ranking zerg, it seemed that it already had a backup plan and didn’t let any guns that could pierce it be included in the pile.

Chronos took one glance at Grayson and knew that there was a problem.

The only thing he checked earlier that could bore a hole in this zerg’s body was the bomb, which could alarm everyone upstairs and cause them to run away in panic.

They couldn’t have that.

Chronos gritted his teeth and prayed silently, Hang in there, kid.

Then he quickly left Helena and grabbed another weapon, a plasma blade. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

A plasma blade might not be able to sever the limbs of a high-ranking zerg, but it could dent it. With repeated slicing, he should be able to slice it off.

Grayson quickly realized Chronos’s plan.

"Zero!" he called and threw the plasma blade near him to Chronos.

Chronos abandoned the laser blade in his hand and quickly grabbed the plasma blade.

Now with two plasma blades in hand, he quickly ran to attack one part with consecutive hits.

SKREEEE!!!!!

Keres didn’t just stand there motionless with his huge body.

Fwish! Fwish!

He attacked Chronos like swatting a persistent mosquito, his heavy forelimbs whistling through the air.

The wind from the strikes nearly knocked the breath out of Helena, who was struggling to minimize her presence.

"Too slow!" Chronos hissed.

As an assassin, he was light on his feet, his shadow dancing across the flickering lights. He lightly dodged the strikes, his blades chirping as they deflected a jagged claw.

Clang!

Spark!

Grayson let his pulse gun burst fire in succession to keep Keres’s multi-faceted eyes distracted.

With the sudden change in movements, Keres couldn’t control his strength.

Chronos’s nimble manipulations plunged Keres’s forelegs into the reinforced floor with a bone-jarring CRACK-THUD. The metal buckled under the pressure.

Chronos didn’t hesitate and used those long, trapped limbs like a runway. His boots made a soft patter-patter sound as he sprinted toward the zerg’s joints.

"Stuck?" Chronos mocked, his blade glowing. "Let me help you lose some weight."

Keres let out a garbled, vibrating screech—REEE-CHIRP!—that vibrated the room.

Getting his legs stuck was humiliating, and it irritated him beyond reason.

Due to his temper and huge body, Keres lost his balance, his massive frame tilting with a heavy THUMP against the wall.

I have to get out, Keres thought as he emitted a strained sound like grinding stones. Or else I will be slaughtered like livestock!

No sooner than he thought of that, Chronos reached the primary joint.

SHLICK!

The blade sank deep.

Keres let out a wet, gurgling roar and yanked his leg back. The floorboards tore upward with a screech of tortured metal—SKREEE!

Chronos was sent flailing into the air. He somersaulted as he landed. But the scent of mixed human and Zerg blood hit him hard and made him dizzy.

"Ugh—" Chronos gasped, his knees hitting the floor with a dull thud. The vertigo hit him hard, and he was dry heaving, feeling like he needed to vomit. "Euck...ughh..."

Grayson saw this, his eyes widening. He couldn’t take care of two people at once.

"Hang on!" he barked as he dove toward the pile of weapons, his hand closing around a plasma blade.

VREEE— the blade ignited.

Grayson didn’t just run; he forced his Alpha pheromones to circulate around his body. His veins bulged with inhuman strength.

Thump-thump, Thump-thump.

Keres wasn’t going to wait for Grayson to attack. With a powerful BOING-CRASH, his jumping legs propelled him out of the room towards the corridor.

His antennae flickered—click-click-click—scanning for the fastest way to escape the basement.

If he could escape from here, he could destroy the barrier from the inside and let the lowborns outside in and massacre these humans.

"You’re not going anywhere!" Grayson roared and slammed his heels down, engaging the hidden function of his shoes.

WHOOSH!

The sudden onset or worsening of shock symptoms (such as dizziness, rapid heart rate, or fainting) when an injured person suddenly moves paired, hardened, horizontal mouthparts used for chewing, cutting, crushing, and defensevisual organs found in arthropods (insects, crustaceans) consisting of thousands of tiny, independent units called ommatidia