“Alien beasts!”
“Run!”
Nobody could tell who shouted.
The ground was collapsing beneath their feet. Massive mounds of creamy white flesh were wriggling up from the ground.
The street was pure chaos.
Civilian zergs ran all around, trying in a panic to escape, but their path was blocked every way they went.
There was a small cub, his leg caught in a sinkhole. He tried to pull it back up, but the broken bones were caught between a wriggling sand worm and the hard earth.
His breathing was fast. Even cubs knew how dangerous alien beasts were.
He fell backwards, his broken leg hanging on by a piece of skin. His whole body trembled in fear, knowing that he could no longer run away.
The cub screamed, unable to hear his own voice among the countless others.
He screamed until his head was directly torn off by the worm that emerged next to his leg.
His tiny body fell backward, never to be identified.
Many zergs fell into mental collapse, completely zergified into insect war machines of varying species.
In a blind terror filled frenzy, they bit and clawed at the towering sand worms emerging from the underground. Their wings, as sharp as blades, sliced through the slimy flesh easily, but they were like paper cuts on their towering bodies.
The sand worms, after completely emerging, used their photoreceptors, similar to maggots, sense their moving prey.
Unlike maggots, they are alien beasts that only eat living prey.
Their fat bodied convulsed as they moved, seeking out the panicking zergs.
Auren watched, completely frozen, from his second story apartment window.
He had never seen an alien beast before.
He felt a primal terror, an instinctual fear of the zerg’s ancestral enemy.
If he could have a mental collapse and zergify, he would have done so the moment they started emerging from the soil. But, male zergs only had one humanoid form.
He stood completely still, hoping against all odd that they might go back underground.
However, they didn’t.
The sand worms opened their massive mouths, round holes on one end of their bodies, and revealed thousands of teeth. Their mouths undulated as they moved, dripping a brown acidic liquid that burned through everything they touched.
Sand worms surrounded the street filled with mindless zergs.
The zergs struggled against the worms, but their scales sizzled and burned under the dripping acid that came out of the worms’ bodies.
The worms waited until their prey was exhausted, then swallowed them into their mouths, like whales swallowing tiny shrimp.
Crunch. Squelch. Crunch. Squelch. Crunch.
The convulsing mouths, now closed, tore through the zergs’ hard bodies.
Blood dripped out from the tiny opening.
Auren, a hand over his mouth, held back a scream. He backed away from the window, almost stumbling, and hid in a corner, hoping not to be seen.
He whimpered softly, hugging his knees against the thin walls.
“Female father…”
The sand no longer swirled into the air with hurried each step. It was instead soaked with red and brown fluids.
The street that Auren was living was a residential district filled with civilian zergs. Any zergs that once served in the military were either very low ranked or disabled early on in their careers.
High ranked officers did not live on this planet unless they were criminals. And, in that case, those criminals weren’t found of throwing their own lives away for they sake of some third tier planet residents.
No, they would have been the first to get away. Even before the alien beasts emerges, they would have sensed them and been long gone.
Sand worms aren’t particularly known for their individual power.
On their own, they could even be considered weak in terms of alien beasts.
However, they never appear alone.
Together, a horde of sand worms could exhaust and consume a small legion of B rank military zergs with ease.
When they emerge from the earth, they are endless in number and extremely hunger. They feel no pain, only a mad hunger that drives them to eat any moving creature that enters their sight.
Years ago, the Marshall led his troops into alien beast territory, expecting mammalian and snake type beasts. Their starship landed on the only flat ground on that planet, a flat land with just sandy dirt.
The legion followed behind the Marshall, an army of large mecha. They traversed the large desert, expecting to find large snake type alien beasts in the area, then mutated animal beasts among the forests surrounding the desert.
Things didn’t go as expected.
The ground shook violently, the sandy dirt instantly collapsed. The legion was unable to stablize the mecha for flight and all fell into an enormous burrow.
They felt something soft beneath them and realized too late that it was the acidic slime of the sand worms.
The acid corroded the mechas at an impossible speed. Many zergs escaped their mechas, but some were melted alive among their screams and turned into food for the worms.
The Marshall called for all zergs to immediately fly out to regroup.
When they flew up to the surface, they saw a sinkhole where the starship was. The entire ship fell into the corrosive acid, along with all their supplies besides their packs and all communications with the base.
The legion spent over a month on that planet.
They spent every day battling alien beasts. Their only food was the flesh of their enemies and couldn’t even send out an SOS message when they fell ill from it…
They knew before that alien beast meat was mildly toxic, but it would kill them slower than hunger. Their nutrient solutions had run out quickly, as well as their healing agent injections. They could only make due with fighting through the poison.
When a search team came, almost half of the legion had died. Almost everyone who survived was suffering from poison or massive injuries.
After returning from that mission, many of the military zergs suffered from PTSD for a long time, unable to look at any kind of worms.
That incident served as a reminder for all military zergs what the weak sand worms were capable of.
The sand worms that filled the street below had finished consuming everything in sight.
Slowly, they left, leaving behind a trail of sticky, acidic, brown slime. It burned dents into the ground wherever they went.
There was only silence after the worms left.
Even the insects and animals didn’t make a single sound.
Auren knew.
It was a complete massacre.
He breathed in a long breathe and forced his trembling legs to stand. Bracing himself on the wall, he looked down.
A smell of iron, acid, and other unidentifiable body fluids hit his nose violently.
He vomited into the street from the window.
Even that made him more nauseous. It mixed with the blood below and congealed together.
He really couldn’t look at it anymore.
Closing the window, he decided to go to the roof to figure out where to escape to. He figured that he might be able to see from there what the situation was like in the rest of the town.
There were a few other zergs alive in the building. There was an old female zerg to the left of his room who was blind and unaware of the situation, and a young female zerg to the right, wheelchair bound and missing legs.
He knocked on the old zerg’s door.
“Hello? Who is it?”
“I’m the resident to your right. Something is happening outside, so stay here until it’s safe.”
He didn’t reveal all the details. There was no point scaring someone who couldn’t run away.
His other neighbor was probably already aware, so he hurried up the many flights of stairs until he reached the hatch leading to the roof.
It was very hard to open. The metal door, left unused for many years, had almost rusted sealed.
He pried at it with his entire body weight until it suddenly slammed open, flinging him back without warning.
Cautiously, he peeked outside.
Seeing no sand worms in his immediate vicinity, he let out a sigh of relief.
He observed from the edge, the wind blowing heavily on him as if to drag him away to his death.
Past the blowing dust, the streets were soaked in crimson as far as he could see. In every direction, sand worms traveled in small groups, searching farther out for more prey to feast upon.
In the direction of the bar, he saw something strange.
Just like that night he followed Faious tailing a mysterious zerg, he saw a female zerg dressed in a long black cloak, sneaking towards the bar.
No, there was at least three of them, each coming from a different direction.
Although he wasn’t particularly close to his coworker, he owed him a lot for helping him many times. But, there was no hope of warning him or fighting off the attackers.
He ran out the building and headed towards the bar on instinct, even though he knew he was too powerless to do anything.
Blood dripped from Faious’s partially zergified claws, while the boss held an energy gun, still smoking from a recent blast.
The two of them were half drenched in blood, but most of it was not their own.
Bodies lay littered on the floorboards, blood quickly soaked through the cracks. They were torn apart from claws and bullets. There were even severed intestines scattered across the ground.
But, the two zergs responsible were unfazed.
More attackers came through every entrance.
Faious knew what they were after. A dead zerg couldn’t talk. But, he would never die until the day his rage was quelled.
Most of the attackers were A rank military zergs.
He dodged their wings, which sliced the air and building every which way.
His claws tore through them at every chance.
Blood splashed back at him, eventually soaking him crimson, like a demon from hell.
If they were attacking anyone else, their target would be long dead. However, going after an S rank, even one not at peak strength, was a losing game.
Faious was once at the pinnacle of S rank.
Even if he was disabled, if a few A rank assassins could kill him, it would be a disgrace.
The boss periodically shot through the zergs’ hearts, killing them without mercy.
Even the walls of his own building were not spared from the powerful bullets, leaving gaing holes in the old wood.
“Which noble lord did you offend, you brat?”
“This many A rank assassins is ridiculous even for you!”
Faious felt a little bit guilty for destroying the bar. Of course, he didn’t offend anyone, if anything, he was the one that was wronged.
Actually, maybe he did offend them by being alive after they tried to kill him.
“That duke.”
“Fuck.”
“You said the duke!? You don’t mean…”
Realization and horror dawned on him.
The bar owner decided to shut up and focus on killing all of the attackers.
In actuality, he wasn’t sure how to bring up the topic. It was a subject that was very sensitive to every female zerg.
The attack lasted for almost an hour.
Faious slowly lost control of himself. He tore through the attacking zergs like a beast running on instinct. His violet eyes glowed like an animals’s eyes in the dark building and his pupils turned into vertical slits.
When they were finally done, there was not much left of the attackers.
They left no survivors. They already knew who sent them, so there was no point leaving a ticking bomb.
