The beast could not withstand that damage, its face was torn off completely, the rest was partially preserved. In general, Earth weapons remained quite useful here.

Sam reloaded and looked around. Taking the corpse, he waited 10 minutes, but saw no one dangerous.

He moved on and soon reached the top.

In this part, trees appeared less often and were not so large, so Sam got a little overview.

Mostly he saw other rock formations of various types and rare vegetation.

But further on the horizon through binoculars, Sam noticed some kind of dark land, there seemed to be no vegetation at all or any special changes in the landscape.

It looked strange, but Sam has probably covered 30 kilometers so far, and given that the goal is at least 100 kilometers, he will have to go there sooner or later.

In any case, for today he decided to take a break and go on further another day.

Sam was somewhere half way home when he suddenly felt that something was wrong.

But he did not even have time to do anything or understand what was going on, when suddenly he was pushed aside with great force, he powerfully crashed his back into a thick tree trunk and passed out.

A little later he came to himself from pain. He was lying with his back against a tree, there was a small deepening under him. But overall he was still in the open.

He felt tremendous pain throughout his body, but essentially he could not move. He clearly hurt his spine or something like that, but the sensitivity remained.

He noticed that his body was literally devoured by some small black beetles. Moreover, they devoured him extremely slowly and there were many of them around his body.

Sam had never felt such pain in his life, thoughts sometimes slipped through his head, but because of the insane pain he could not really collect his thoughts.

He did not last long trying to contain the scream, but in the end he began to scream like a madman.

Little by little, the bugs ate his entire body, even his face and neck. Sam yelled while he had the power to do so. Sometimes he passed out and came back to his senses and yelled again.

He could not understand when it started and when it will finally end, he wanted to kill himself, but he could not really move.

No matter how he shouted, no one came to finish him off, and the bugs somehow still did not devour him to death, although it seemed to Sam that an eternity had passed.

He already could not even scream, no matter how much the bugs ate him, it seemed that his meat and skin were simply growing back.

Sam could no longer scream, there were only tears and snot, he realized that he had already shit under himself.

In this second of realization, he noticed that his flesh was indeed literally regenerating.

It also became obvious that these beetles gnaw at the skin and meat, but for some reason they did not climb to the critical organs of the body like the eyes of the heart and so on, they simply slowly ate its flesh over and over again while it regenerated over and over again.

Sam began to laugh with tears in his eyes, it seemed to him that he had lost his mind. He sat there, experiencing this pain, the rest of the day, and then the whole night.

The next day, Sam almost did not scream or cry, he just prayed to himself that it would all end someday. He tried to summon spiritual energy, but it was useless.

He could not understand why his flesh grows so quickly, and why the bugs are deliberately limited to non-critical places.

Sometimes he could already think sensibly for a while, despite the endless bugs crawling right in his body. He watched his abdominal sinkholes recover and was shocked that his flesh could recover at such a rate.

If this continues, then Sam will forever remain an endless dish for bugs.

Soon it will be night again, these creatures have been devouring him for about three earth days, despite the torture, from time to time Sam tried to concentrate and move his body, or tried to appeal to spiritual energy.

Sam felt the bugs devour his cheeks and nose, he watched them swarm around his body, devour him alive, the feeling of pain was unbearable and this pain was endless, it seemed to him that he was losing his mind.

In his madness, he imagined himself devouring those bugs alive, imagined how he finally chops off his own head, all these and other dreams continued to flash in his head during this unbearable pain.

He saw how his leg was gnawed almost to the bone, but in some ridiculous way the beetles managed to ignore important arteries and continued to feast, leaving Sam alive.

The next day, the beetles looked even a little larger, but Sam's regeneration only intensified, so they, on the contrary, could not cope with the work.

Sam laughed at these weaklings. He began to devour beetles long ago.

He looked for a convenient moment, and when they devoured his lips, he threw them into the esophagus with his tongue or bit them.

He continued to either cry or laugh. The eyes expressed only madness.