"..." Yan Yu'an's expression suddenly froze. The next second, she turned and pounced on the corpse that had just crawled out from behind her, viciously plunging her fists into its chest.

"Is this considered tsundere?" Sun Hang muttered under his breath, turning to look at a shadow huddled against a monument, trembling. "What do you think?"

In the time that followed, Sun Hang's expression changed like a Sichuan opera face-off, turning angry as if ready to spew fire one moment, and then somber and drip-like the next—rage, jealousy, anxiety, fear, greed, despair... various negative emotions vividly displayed on Sun Hang's face, each change signalling that a shadow attached to the monument had been completely "devoured".

The area of shadow on the monument quickly shrank, and the suppressive effect on the corpses crawling out from the graves greatly strengthened, sometimes causing them to freeze in place like robots that had suddenly malfunctioned, or fall into the abyss overhead as soon as they emerged from the grave.

"The last one."

Sun Hang crouched at the top of the monument, consuming the final shadow.

An overwhelming despair surged from within him.

He saw the dark mass of strange creatures like a tide landing from the ice-free port of Murmansk, foxhound fighters spiraling down into the sea with long trails of black smoke, and hundred-meter-long tentacles tearing through the water's surface, smashing the metal-and-concrete defenses at the port into one ruin after another.

The next moment, Sun Hang seemed to be in the cockpit of a carrier aircraft about to take off, scenes on both sides quickly retreating as his mother ship slowly sank, a plane parked at the runway's edge sliding backward, its snapped securing locks whipping out like a whip, instantly slicing a ground crew member who failed to dodge into two.

Amidst the engine's almost mad roar, the plane sped along the already heavily slanted runway.

The aircraft carrier's bow tilted high, nearly forming a forty-five degree angle with the sea, a massive vortex forming around the ship's hull, people constantly sliding off the deck, falling into the whirlpool... before their bodies could be shredded by waves and undercurrents, the terrifying monsters engulfed in the vortex swarmed up, fighting over the blood feast falling from above.

Sun Hang turned to look back, only to see a mouth larger than the carrier breaking the sea surface, the giant jaws filled with sharp teeth snapping together, steel screeching an agonizing distortion as fire erupted, and the ship's siren's final wail was utterly swallowed by that abyss-like giant maw.

Deformed wings brushed past the porthole, Sun Hang felt all his blood rushing to his brain, unable to distinguish between the cannon's roar and the shouts of the soldiers in the back seat, the surroundings seemed to suddenly darken, an extremely huge shadow appearing above the sea...

The next scene, the battlefield had shifted from the port to urban alleyways, bizarre creatures with characteristics of both animals and plants ran wild on streets stained with blood and blackened by smoke and fire, the entire city reeking with the salty stench of seawater and choking gunpowder, a soldier from the Siberian Federation shouted "Ura!" and leaped from a rooftop, erupting into a brilliant burst of flame among the hoards of creatures.

The creatures didn't stop, even when their bodies were blown to bits, those writhing limbs kept crawling forward, only to be devoured by their pursuing kind, transforming into nourishment for other creatures.

Street barricades fell one after another, soldiers screamed as they were torn apart and devoured, the defenses retreated again and again, until the remaining dozen soldiers backed into a crossroads, horrified to find there was no escape left. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

Creatures were surging from all directions, every road was crowded with thousands upon thousands of creatures, their overwhelming numbers even filling the skies with rapidly passing monstrous shadows.

No air supremacy, no artillery support, no heavy weapons, and not even unified command... the city's munitions factory had been destroyed by creatures' precise strikes two days ago, and the city defense headquarters had turned from a four-story building into a solid concrete lump in the fourth hour of the creatures breaching the urban area—no one knew if those officers entombed inside were still alive, for all soldiers within 200 meters of the headquarters had melted like wax statues... this region had completely become a zone of death, anything living stepping within would turn into a puddle of mushy meat in seconds, becoming the viscous filler between the crevices of floor tiles.

Ammunition depleted, guns misfired, the wounded left untreated, vehicles ran out of fuel couldn't be started, Sun Hang could only watch as those creatures smashed open locked doors, storming into buildings amidst the screams of civilians—the screams and gunshots didn't last long before they were replaced by the sounds of flesh being torn and chewed.

This was a feast of flesh and blood, famished monsters climbed ashore, swarmed into the city, and devoured the limbs of the land's rulers in big mouthfuls... For thousands of years, people once at the top of the food chain were terrified to realize they were no different from livestock awaiting slaughter.