Star Rank Hunter

Chapter 411: Underground Hatchery

The low-flying aircraft swept over the residential district. A hail of gunfire sent the surrounding biochemical beastmen crumpling to the ground one after another.

Spotting the aircraft, a few biochemical beastmen relied on their incredible leaping ability to vault into the air. They spread their slender arms and swung sickle-like claws toward the figures standing on the lowered boarding ramp. However, the moment they launched themselves, their heads exploded mid-air. Gray matter splattered in every direction, adding an eerie touch to the chaotic, bloodstained streets.

Leaping beastmen were constantly gunned down. Even the winged ones fared no better, plummeting like rain amidst the relentless “thwack, thwack” of headshots.

The human survivors—whether standing frozen in the open or peering from the corners of ruined buildings—were dumbfounded. They had no idea who these arrivals were, but this sheer, devastating combat power sent shivers down their spines.

No matter how strong someone was, flesh and blood had weaknesses. These biochemical beastmen were no exception. If one failed to strike their vital spots, unloading countless rounds into them wouldn’t necessarily put them down. Hitting those weak points, however, changed the equation entirely. The residents of this district had once fantasized about achieving such one-hit kills, only for the cruel reality to crush those hopes, leading them to gradually demonize the monsters in their minds.

They had never placed their hopes on any planetary government, as none existed here. The people who once ran the pharmaceutical factory were the true masters of this world. But when the facility was shut down and abandoned, the locals had simply been discarded alongside it, left to become food for these abominations.

The spectacle unfolding before them finally rekindled a sliver of hope.

Thump, thump, thump!

Several supply crates plummeted from above. One crashed down directly in front of the four people who had been leading the escape earlier.

At the moment, not a single living biochemical beastman remained in their immediate vicinity. Only mangled corpses littered the ground.

The aircraft had already soared past them, its final destination unknown. ‘This crate couldn’t possibly be a bomb... right?’ Forcing his still-trembling legs to move, the leader of the group took a deep breath and approached it.

Opening the crate with trembling hands, he found it packed with firearms and micro-grenades. As if to ensure they grasped how to use them, the supplies included a manual printed in both the local language of the R Star Sector and the Star Alliance Common Language.

While Lung and his peers wouldn’t have given these weapons a second glance, to the desperate residents, they were a massive upgrade from the ancient, near-obsolete scrap metal they currently wielded.

The air-dropped firearms were straightforward and easy to operate. Despite their limitations, they provided a massive lifeline to the locals.

The crew aboard the aircraft had no time to worry about what the survivors thought of them. They were simply following their plan: swoop low over the city, clear out a swathe of beastmen, and get properly warmed up for the fight ahead.

In the distance, biochemical beastmen continued to pour out of the pharmaceutical factory—both massive brutes and smaller, nimbler variants.

“It looks like these beasts breached the surface less than twenty-four hours ago,” Kang Man said.

Yet, in just twenty-four hours, they had managed to reduce this district—and this entire planet—to a slaughterhouse. The sheer severity of the outbreak was glaring.

The aircraft gradually approached the perimeter of the factory. A wide, circular clearing surrounded the facility, though its broad transport routes were now fractured, buckled, and severely cratered. Rubble from explosions and the mangled wreckage of pharmaceutical machinery lay scattered everywhere. Amidst the debris were the butchered, incomplete remains of both humans and biochemical beastmen.

Why incomplete?

Swarms of smaller biochemical beastmen kept scuttling out from the underground levels, voraciously feeding on the dead. They didn’t discriminate. Human flesh or beastman carcass—even corpses of their exact species, perhaps their direct kin—it all became fresh meat for these newly hatched horrors.

The aircraft didn’t touch down immediately. Their first objective was to sweep the designated landing zone clear of hostiles to secure their insertion. They couldn’t use heavy explosives; if any critical data had survived in the underground labs, a massive blast would obliterate it.

“I’m going in first!”

Before anyone could respond, Wheeze vaulted from the aircraft in a gray blur. He was the vanguard. His mission wasn’t to exterminate the beastmen, but to plunge into the underground levels and assess the situation. If no salvageable data remained, they might as well just drop a nuke on the entire area.

Kang Man and a few others had initially worried if the cat was up to the task. Those doubts vanished the second Wheeze’s shadow blurred across the ground. Beastmen unfortunate enough to stand in his path suddenly found giant holes punched straight through their torsos. Wheeze had no intention of weaving around obstacles; he took the most direct route, resulting in the blockers being directly pierced through.

Kang Man raised an eyebrow. He stopped worrying about the cat.

Wheeze began streaming data back for Kang Man to process.

“There are no human survivors left down there,” Kang Man said, scanning the cat’s feed. “Nothing but biochemical beastmen.”

Powerful signal jammers enveloped the area, making remote scans impossible; the only way to map the layout was from the inside. Wheeze had carried several micro-detectors into the facility, planting them at strategic points. His tiny stature and incredible agility were proving to be a massive asset.

“The sensors are in place,” Kang Man announced. “We can proceed to the next step.”

Following a round of confirmations, Kang Man brought the aircraft lower. The team dropped from the boarding ramp in two squads of eight. The second squad laid down suppressing fire from above to cover the first squad’s descent. Once the first group hit the dirt and secured the perimeter, the second squad leaped down to join them.

Moving in tight tactical formation, the team advanced on the factory. Their initial sweep had carpeted the ground with beastman corpses, heavily thinning the local horde and alleviating the pressure. Close-quarters combat wasn’t even necessary; their concentrated crossfire mowed the monsters down before they could cross the fifty-meter mark.

Cillin was still wielding his PTS S. His squadmates hadn’t paid much attention to it at first, until they noticed he wasn’t even aiming directly at his targets, yet multiple targets would drop almost simultaneously. The gun in his hand was exceedingly miniature compared to standard-issue assault rifles, but its lethality was completely disproportionate—it was arguably even more devastating.

Czedow was the other major anomaly on the team. Not only had he skipped the biohazard suit, but he also didn’t even carry a gun. Instead, a halo of crescent-shaped metal blades hovered around him. The moment a beastman breached their perimeter, those blades would streak out and cleanly slice their heads open. Once the immediate area was cleared, a portion of the crescent-shaped metal blades flew back, sinking seamlessly right back into his body.

Yue Lou and the others watched this display with violently twitching eyelids. ‘Is this guy really not human?’ they wondered. ‘Or is he some bizarre mutant strain of humanity?’

“Holy meow, there are so many eggs down here!”

Wheeze’s voice echoed over the comms channel simultaneously as he pushed a live video feed to everyone.

The footage revealed a massive, subterranean honeycomb structure. Lodged inside every single small cell was an unhatched embryo. Some were encased in hardened shells, while others looked like artificial embryos wrapped in translucent or opaque membranes. The membranes pulsed rhythmically, matching the heartbeat of the monstrosities growing inside.

Right on camera, a small biochemical beastman shattered its shell and crawled free. Jagged spines protruded from its back, and tough, overlapping plates armored its body. Its reptilian eyes were completely cold. Dripping with mucus, the creature exhibited none of the fragility typical of a newborn—it radiated lethal vitality. Locking onto Wheeze, it opened its jaws, unleashed a guttural, oppressive hiss that chilled the blood, and lunged. It was astonishingly fast, significantly out-speeding the lumbering adult variants Cillin’s team had been slaughtering along the way.

Unfortunately for it, its opponent was Wheeze. The cat casually swatted the creature—which was roughly his own size—out of the air, pinning it to the floor. With a casual exertion of force, Wheeze’s paw punched cleanly through it with a sickening crunch. Noticing the thing was still twitching, Wheeze stomped on it a few more times.

“Their shells are tougher than those big lumbering idiots up top,” Wheeze reported.

Cillin and the others exchanged grim looks. They couldn’t afford to waste any more time culling the adult stragglers on the surface. They needed to link up with Wheeze immediately.

Kang Man sent a supply cache of cryo-guns and ultra-high temperature incendiary tubes down to Cillin’s squad. In a confined, subterranean hive like that, these tools would be useful.

Referencing the layout mapped by the sensors, the team simply blew a massive hole through the floor, creating a direct shortcut to the underground levels. The moment the rubble cleared, several small biochemical beastmen leaped out of the pit, radiating pure malice.

Cillin met a lunging, saber-toothed hatchling with his blade, smoothly cleaving it cleanly in half. Horrifyingly, the upper half of the severed creature was still alive, and it spat two streams of venom at Cillin.

Cillin sidestepped to avoid it. The venom splashed against the wall where he had just been standing, instantly corroding two deep holes into the surface. As the acid slid downward, it melted deep grooves into the wall, emitting a loud hiss. The creature didn’t stop attacking until Cillin split its skull open.

“Be careful, don’t let these things get close. Aim for the head.”

“These newly hatched guys seem to be getting trickier,” Knight grunted. He wrenched his combat knife out of the wall, flicking his wrist to dislodge the dead hatchling impaled on the blade.

“We need to pick up the pace,” Ci Jincheng said. “This entire place is just one massive underground hatchery. If there are other hatcheries like this elsewhere, we’re going to be in huge trouble once this new generation of biochemical beastmen fully hatches.”

The squad moved rapidly toward Wheeze’s coordinates. For now, there weren’t many of the newly hatched small biochemical beastmen around. If they waited until the peak incubation period arrived, it would be hard for them to make it out alive.

The bombings of the pharmaceutical factory hadn’t harmed this subterranean level. The surface was a complete mess, covered in debris, but that was strictly limited to the top. Down here, the facility was preserved very well, though many of the instruments had already been moved. The personnel had likely taken them when they retreated, directly destroying whatever they couldn’t carry to prevent the data within from falling into anyone else’s hands.

By the time Cillin reached the vast, honeycomb-like hatchery chamber, Wheeze was enthusiastically swatting with his two front paws, pinning down and killing a freshly hatched beastman.

Physically, the new generation leaned much heavier into their feral, animalistic traits. However, their intelligence was obviously higher than the large ones they had encountered previously. That was the most troublesome part. The beastman Wheeze had just killed had known how to launch a sneak attack. While the front two beastmen pounced at the cat, it had lingered on the side, waiting for an opportunity. Although it had still ended up dead, for these biochemical beastmen possessing higher intelligence, the threat they posed was much greater.

Ci Jincheng led four others to scout the adjacent rooms, hoping to recover residual data from the remaining instruments.

Cillin shot Czedow a nod. Tearing his gaze away from the massive incubation nest, Czedow went with Ci Jincheng to see if they could help recover any data information.

“Allen, record this. These are all evidence,” Lung said over the comms, speaking to Allen on the aircraft outside.

Allen could receive the live feed they were transmitting. All of this would become evidence of the “Miracle” company’s crimes, to be made public soon.

“Yeah, I know. Don’t worry!” Allen’s hands never stopped moving. Ever since he arrived, he had been constantly busy sorting through the information.

It seemed that the large biochemical beastmen from earlier were nothing but laborers. Their role was to go out and resolve trouble, hunt down prey, and provide a food supply for these soon-to-hatch small biochemical beastmen.

“This is so incredibly fucked up!” Knight swore over at the incubation nest. At the same time, he hoisted his cryo-gun and began firing at the unhatched eggs.

A white beam swept over the unhatched eggs, and the egg surfaces rapidly froze over.

“It’s no good, it’s still too slow. We should just set it all on fire,” Knight said.

For such a massive incubation nest, this freezing speed was simply too slow. The incendiary tubes weren’t performing much better; the building material of this incubation nest was quite special, resistant to both cold and high temperatures. Even if the weapons were effective, their efficiency was low.

The small biochemical beastmen were breaking out of their shells faster and faster. For now, they could still comfortably deal with them.

Cillin patted the increasingly frustrated Knight on the shoulder. “Let me.”

Cillin notified the others through the communicator to put their protective suits on properly, and then he pulled out a gun that neither Knight nor Pride had ever seen before. Wheeze knew it, though. Upon seeing Cillin take out this gun—and especially upon seeing the type of bullets Cillin was loading into it—Wheeze ignored his “toys” over there and hurriedly retreated back to Cillin’s side.

The other few people backed away according to Cillin’s instructions, keeping their distance from the massive incubation nest.

After loading the bullets, Cillin raised his hand and fired toward the incubation nest.

A soft pop, pop sounded out, but the resulting visual impact left the others clicking their tongues. Lung, in particular, watched the effects caused by the bullets Cillin fired. His pupils shrank, and then he smiled. He hadn’t expected Cillin to find the answer so quickly.

Lung and Cillin had gone to Sea Paradise together. The sea beast crystal specimens lying in the Underwater City were still vivid in his mind. Lung had always wondered about the formation method of those crystal specimens, and his technicians had later analyzed the special properties within them for him. Because of this, Lung had paid extra attention to it. He just hadn’t expected to be able to witness such a scene today.

Over there, Ci Jincheng was leading a group in an attempt to recover information from a destroyed synthesizer. He suddenly noticed that the liquid in the shattered potion bottles around them was rapidly drying up. The few biochemical beastmen they had just killed began to shrivel, turning into things resembling mummies.

A biochemical beastman charging toward them was transforming at an incredibly fast speed in the eyes of Ci Jincheng and the others. Its muscles seemed to atrophy. Its flesh and skin dried out, sinking inward and clinging tightly to its bones. With every step of its charge, it looked as if a wind-drying process had been forcefully accelerated. The dry, hardened epidermis tore and cracked from the running motion, and the blood inside dried up before it even had time to flow out. Finally, the severe dehydration of its body left it unable to continue moving. A crescent-shaped metal blade beside Czedow flew over and sliced into it with a snick. The dried blood and flesh at the incision looked exactly like sliced jerky.

A chill shot up the spines of Ci Jincheng and his men, rushing straight to their heads.

‘What in the world just happened?!’

That’s right, Cillin had told them to put their protective suits on properly earlier... So this was what he meant. If they hadn’t worn their protective suits, they would probably already be exactly like that mummified biochemical beastman by now.

“What... is this?” asked Feng Haichao from beside Ci Jincheng.

“Water Bullets,” Czedow said calmly, retrieving the crescent-shaped metal blade that had flown out.

“Water Bullets?”

The few men were puzzled; they had never heard of such a thing. Children’s toys did have similar names, though.

“Yeah, you’ll know once you head over there later.” Czedow didn’t say anything more. He continued searching for data that could be recovered.

Over at the incubation nest, Knight and the others stared dumbfounded at the scene before them.

Where the bullets touched, freezing began to form, and it rapidly spread outward to the surroundings. Some biochemical beastmen that had just hatched or broken their membranes still had their clawed finger bones gripping their eggshells, glaring fiercely in the direction of Cillin’s group, seemingly ready to charge over in the next moment. Some that had just breached their membranes were shaking, trying to fling the mucus off their bodies... All of these were as if they had been frozen in place, covered by a layer of crystal-like substance. They themselves also became a part of the crystal, resembling ice blocks from an extremely cold region. However, the temperature here hadn’t changed much, showing that what lay before them was not formed by ordinary freezing.

The incubation nest, which possessed thousands of unhatched eggs, was now a place sealed off by “ice crystals.” It retained all its appearances from before it was sealed, including the cold, fierce glares of the newly hatched biochemical beastmen who hadn’t had time to react. Everything seemed to have stopped at that exact point in time, so vividly.

The specific gauge of Water Bullet Cillin used was one of the more highly lethal ones among his current Water Bullets. The crystallization effect was also much stronger, which was why the surrounding water vapor had been forcibly absorbed so quickly.

After looking at the massive “ice nest” before him, Knight turned toward the few biochemical beastmen on the ground who hadn’t been sealed because they jumped out of the nest, but had died or were near death due to severe dehydration. He popped out the wrist blade in his hand and made a cut. Not a single drop of blood oozed out; it truly was like cutting dried meat.

Knight was just about to express an opinion when he turned his head and saw Wheeze. The cat was holding a mummified biochemical beastman with its curved paws, opening its mouth to bite down. Then came the crunching sound of chewing, which seemed incredibly bizarre under such circumstances.

Everyone: “...”