Chapter Ninety-Eight: The End

David quickly checked the wounds on his body. There were two of them, but they were not nearly as severe as he had feared.

The blood was still flowing, yet not fast; it must have missed the major arteries.

With the death of the parasitic mind worm, the aerial wormhole in the sky shrank rapidly and then vanished altogether.

The tear-winged fliers outside, as if frightened, fled upward into the high air.

But by then no one in Peran City was paying them any mind. In the command room, Lieutenant Eaton’s finger was already pressed against the evacuation alarm, ready to sound it at any moment.

Once that alarm was triggered, everyone in Peran City would have to head at once to the assembly point, and then be escorted by the army out of the city in the direction where the swarm was thinnest.

It was the final option. Without the protection of the city’s defense system, once humanity left the city, what awaited them would be the relentless pursuit of countless insects.

And with so many civilians who could not fight, those ordinary people were, of course, also the most frightening burden of all.

To ensure that the more important elites survived, the army would continuously sacrifice the civilians who had no means of self-defense.

They were the last elite of the city, and the hope of its rebuilding.

And once Lieutenant Eaton pressed that button, it would mean that the military of Granite Star could at any time unleash long-range missiles, or even use orbital cannons and antimatter main guns to flatten the site of Peran City from space.

“Captain, the Number Seven long-range sniper cannon has fired!” the adjutant suddenly cried out.

Lieutenant Eaton’s finger froze. Hope returned to his eyes.

He knew exactly what the Number Seven long-range sniper cannon represented. It held the second-tier sniper rounds capable of killing the parasitic mind worm, and it was precisely those second-tier rounds that had allowed the previous two second-tier armored stone worms to be destroyed.

Otherwise, before the parasitic mind worm even arrived, those two armored stone worms alone would have already destroyed Peran City.

“Connect to the probes over there and check the situation now!” Lieutenant Eaton immediately ordered.

The adjutant tried again and again, but still could not connect to the monitoring probes near David’s Number Five sniper control room.

Beneath the ground around the Number Five control room, protected by special alloy, several data lines severed by psychic spikes sparked with electricity where they touched the steel beside them.

The more he failed to learn what lay ahead, the harder it became for Lieutenant Eaton to remain calm.

Every extra moment now might mean more civilians dying before they could escape in time.

“David, if you hear me, answer!” He operated his identity wristband and connected to David’s wristband, then said in a low voice.

“It’s Uncle Eaton!” Seeing the display on his wristband, David accepted the call and brought up the image. He managed a grim smile and greeted him.

“David, you’re alive. Thank goodness. And the parasitic mind worm?” Seeing that David was still alive, Lieutenant Eaton had already formed a guess, but he still asked.

“I think the parasitic mind worm is dead. Its head was blown apart by the second-tier sniper round. Even if it wanted to live, it couldn’t,” David replied, forcing back the pain. Thinking of the parasitic mind worm, he could not help but feel a lingering fear.

“Good, excellent! I’m going to report your merit, and I’m going to thank you!” Lieutenant Eaton sprang up from his seat and shouted with excitement.

At this moment, he no longer cared about appearances. He waved his arms hard, venting his emotions without restraint.

“David, you’re injured. Wait for me; I’ll send people over at once!” After only a moment of excitement, he noticed the blood on David’s body, and immediately stopped, speaking at once.

“Uncle Eaton, the spatial wormhole outside is gone. The tear-winged fliers ran off—probably a dozen or so escaped!” David reported the situation Shadow Servant had witnessed.

“So be it if the tear-winged fliers escaped. Compared with Peran City being destroyed, this is the best possible outcome,” Lieutenant Eaton said solemnly, shaking his head. Then he caught the meaning of David’s report and asked for confirmation: “The spatial wormhole is gone?”

“Yes, the spatial wormhole has disappeared,” David answered firmly.

“Wonderful. I’ll come right away!” The last of Lieutenant Eaton’s worries vanished. He said excitedly.

In truth, the escape of the tear-winged fliers was no small problem, because if even a few survived and got away, the larvae of Granite Star could use their genes to incorporate the tear-winged flier into future evolutionary paths.

One must know that the evolutionary routes of Granite Star’s larvae had, over countless years of purges and slaughter, been reduced to only a handful of possibilities.

But this could not be avoided. Since the battlefront could not stop these insect swarms from breaking through, it was inevitable that their genes would remain on Granite Star.

The last twenty armored guards from the municipal office rushed onto the southern city wall, and Lieutenant Eaton followed behind them up onto the ramparts.

As far as the eye could see, the wall was covered in corpses. The vast majority were tear-winged flier bodies. The armored guards were all either dead or unconscious, and the heaviest losses were among the medics; on the battlefield, the medics had been nearly wiped out.

They had used flesh and blood to move through this level of battle, treating the wounded armored guards, and what they were gambling with was their own lives.

Soldiers went forward to inspect them and soon reported the condition of the armored guards: the vast majority had simply fallen unconscious.

“These are my men,” Lieutenant Eaton said in anguish when he saw the familiar young faces on the ground.

In the entire city defense battalion, apart from the armored guards, he knew almost every soldier. More than half of them he had personally selected from the recruit training camp, and these medics were still just children.

Looking at the medics, as young as his own sons, lying in pools of blood, his heart bled.

“Bring up the reserve medics. Also notify the city hospitals to send every medical worker they have. We need every wounded soldier to receive the best treatment!” Lieutenant Eaton ordered in a grave voice.

“You twenty armored guards, make sure you hold this section of the wall. We have paid too much for it already.” He then ordered the twenty municipal armored guards beside him.

“Yes!”

The twenty armored guards were equally stunned by the scene before them. There were so many first-tier insect corpses that most of them had never seen anything like it before.

Perhaps only the legendary battlefront could produce such a sight.

“Go check on David’s condition.” Lieutenant Eaton waved to the adjutant and the soldiers behind him.

Stepping through the green and red blood underfoot, they made their way toward the Number Five sniper control room, and before long everyone was stunned by what they saw.

If the pile of first-tier tear-winged flier corpses could still be tolerated, the two gigantic armored stone worm corpses before them were even more shocking than all those flier bodies combined.

Not to mention the parasitic mind worm corpse beside them, slightly smaller but so terrifying at a glance that it chilled the soul.

Very few living people had ever seen the parasitic mind worm, because nearly everyone who did was already dead.

Its notorious name made anyone’s blood run cold, because its method of attack was simply unsolvable. It was said that its only natural enemy was the sniper armored guard.

“Were all the armored guards here killed by the parasitic mind worm in its final burst?” Lieutenant Eaton asked the adjutant after seeing the countless small holes across the whole area.

The thirty-odd armored guard corpses were far less shocking than the three second-tier insect corpses.

“Yes. They were all killed by the parasitic mind worm’s dying strike,” the adjutant confirmed.

Both he and Lieutenant Eaton saw the huge holes in the bodies of the two armored guards. Those could absolutely not have been caused by the parasitic mind worm’s dying strike.

But they acted as though they had seen nothing, and even the soldiers who had come with them said nothing.

These were civilian armored guards. If they were recorded as having died at the hands of the parasitic mind worm, then they would still receive the proper commendation. But if it were said that they had been controlled into attacking David and then killed, the outcome would be hard to say.

Moreover, they did not want the hero David to be troubled by this matter. So the best course was simply to treat them, like the thirty-odd others, as having been killed by the parasitic mind worm.

Seeing that the control room’s gate was gone, Lieutenant Eaton could imagine just how dangerous it had been.

He simply could not imagine what would have happened if David had not been here. In his heart he felt grateful for the unintended act that had drawn David into the war, while also feeling somewhat ashamed before such a child, who was also his son Jim’s friend.