Chapter Ninety-Six: The Desperate Wolf’s Fang

The heroine had been born on the battlefield and had taken countless lives.

For years, her only wish had been to drive the alien monsters off this planet. To that end, she had not hesitated to kill herself more than a hundred times. A woman this ruthless toward herself was even more merciless to others.

The confirmation of the Beastman Corps had already won her over to some degree.

Though she did not fully believe him yet, it was already worth a try.

With the ability to be reborn without limit, she had no fear of being deceived.

Even if she killed the wrong person, a single bullet could restore the world to its former state.

But if what that man said was true, if he really could eliminate the temporal anomalies and secure victory in this war, then she would gain far more than she had bargained for.

So from the very beginning, she unleashed a merciless barrage of firepower.

As expected, such forceful tactics drove the temporal anomaly directly into the open. A man turning into a giant wolf was something almost impossible in the real world.

That made the heroine trust Gao Ning’s words a little more.

She gripped her machine gun and swept it again and again across the field, while terror robots rushed in to fight at close range.

The giant wolf was agile, moving with astonishing speed so that even the terror robots could not keep up.

Though suppressive fire pinned it down, the giant wolf darted and feinted at the edges of the encirclement, luring most of the bullets into empty air or into the bodies of innocent recruits.

Then a large number of terror robots suddenly activated from all directions.

The battle line was compressed even tighter.

Potato finally reacted as well. Relying on his nimble movements, he evaded several attacks from the terror robots, then suddenly reached down and pressed a palm to the ground. The fist-sized slab of concrete beneath his feet split open at once, and he dropped straight through.

The terror robots rushed after him, but the ground sealed itself shut again.

The heroine’s eyes widened in shock. She clenched her teeth and added more force to her fire, the muzzle of her gun relentlessly tracking the giant wolf.

“All units, press in! Compress the wolf’s movement range. How much longer until the Beastman Corps arrives?”

Her roar rang out as she issued the order. Layer upon layer, the terror robots surged forward again, tightening the net.

The instant her words fell, a hundred-man squad of Beastmen tore open a tent and charged out of a barracks. Roaring wildly, they hurled themselves at the giant wolf, each one lunging forward as if they had no regard for their own lives.

The heroine was startled, but did not think too deeply about it. Her gaze never left the giant wolf, and she meant to shoot it down.

Wolf Fang was both shocked and furious, thinking that the other side had set an ambush in advance.

But how could that be? The world’s time was locked in a loop. No matter what arrangements you made, as long as the heroine fired a bullet, everything would be forced back to its original state.

It had not even been an hour since the restart. How had the other side managed to send Bentley to his vicinity without a sound?

Neither of them had seen it: two minutes earlier, a cluster of genetically mutated figures had appeared abruptly within the camp. Gathering together, they had been staring at the commotion with stunned expressions, only to transform into Beastmen amid miserable howls.

Gao Ning was giving it everything he had.

Potato was as slippery as an eel, scurrying all over the underground passages.

No amount of troops could do any good.

Wolf Fang was different. Though he could transform into a giant wolf and gain tremendous speed and agility, he was still flesh and blood.

Every fight drained a great deal of stamina.

The main Beastman force was about to arrive. By then, a single wave forward would be enough to swamp the entire front, and neither the human army nor the monsters would be able to withstand that sheer crushing force of numbers.

In fact, the moment the Beastman main force appeared at the front lines, the military had already noticed. The high command was thrown into uproar, and orders came down one after another, demanding that troops be organized at once to resist.

When humans saw these bizarre Beastmen, they labeled them alien monsters without the slightest hesitation.

After so many years of war, the army had become like a startled bird at the snap of a bowstring.

In the struggle against the alien monsters, there had been the occasional victory, but on the grand scale they were retreating steadily.

For humanity, this was the hardest thing to accept. After five years of war, with the power of the entire world behind them, they still had not been able to do anything about a single meteorite, and instead had lost vast swaths of land to the biochemical weapons that came with it.

To speak of it was a humiliation.

Emergency military orders were sent to the front. Emergency orders were issued in the barracks. Large numbers of troops were mobilized, and soldiers donned the most advanced exoskeletal armor. Supported by transport aircraft, they were dropped in waves along the front, hoping to hold back the Beastman horde.

Thus, before the Beastman army even had a chance to meet its true enemy, it collided with human forces.

Human firepower was fierce, but the Beastmen were simply too tough and too thick-skinned. Machine-gun fire was almost useless; only grenade launchers could drive them back a few steps, and only concentrated volleys of heavy fire could truly bring them down.

Even that was not the worst of it. After so many years of fighting, humans had already accepted the fact that the monsters were formidable, but what was this sheer scale?

Three hundred thousand troops rolled forward like a black tide, nearly dyeing the ground blue.

Those towering bodies, more than two meters tall, packed so densely that the eye could not see the end of them, sent a chill crawling over the scalp. It was not at all the same as encountering alien monsters with their swift movements and lightning-fast attacks.

The Beastman army advanced in a broad front, shattering tanks when they met them, smashing apart missiles when they came under attack, and tearing through human units wherever they found them.

They killed whoever stood in their way, and slaughtered whatever blocked their path.

The human side even deployed thermobaric bombs, but all they did was clear away a tiny portion.

Once the flames faded, the shockwaves could do nothing to the Beastman force.

Worse still, as the war continued, the ground troops that came into contact with the Beastmen at the front actually began to mutate one after another, transforming into new Beastmen and joining the opposing ranks.

This discovery left the commanders aghast.

But aside from concentrating more long-range fire, they had no way to stop the Beastmen’s advance.

They could only watch helplessly as the front-line soldiers were ripped to pieces, as the Beastman army crossed the plains and surrounded the forward camp.

Like a tidal wave, the Beastmen poured into the camp, swallowing Wolf Fang and the human army alike.

Potato, crouched trembling beneath the earth, had once wanted to seize the chance to rescue Wolf Fang, but he had never found an opening.

Now the entire camp, and even the land for several kilometers around it, was occupied by densely packed Beastmen. No matter how well the giant wolf could jump, no matter how great his agility, he could not escape such an absurd encirclement.

Potato shivered so hard he nearly bit through his own tongue, burying himself even deeper underground.

The gap was too vast. Victory was impossible.

He had given up.

Wolf Fang was just as desperate.

Prolonged combat had drained him of immense stamina, yet his attacks were useless against the terror robots and the Beastman army.

The werewolf virus was helpless against genetic mutation.

It could kill Beastmen, but it could not turn them into werewolves.

And even if he were allowed to keep killing, how many could he possibly kill? Three hundred thousand troops would crush him to death sooner or later.

Despair was the truest description of it all.