The five of them climbed the stairs to the 32nd floor.

The Queen was still shrieking. The stairwell rumbled with wave after wave of low growls—the horde below seemed to be surging upward in a torrent of blood and chaos.

No one dared to dawdle. They heaved open the heavy metal fire door—

A wave of fetid stench hit them, thick with the acrid bite of gunpowder.

In front of the elevator entrance, the guard’s body lay sprawled on its side. Beside it, half of an ordinary mutant’s remains, still damp and dripping.

This was undeniably good news.

At least the most troublesome guard was already dead.

A-Da kicked aside a severed claw near the stairwell entrance, and was about to say something when a mutant came heaving and rasping around the corner ahead. Spotting the five of them, it immediately lunged, all teeth and claws.

A-Da raised his gun and shot it dead in one go.

Ordinary mutants, as long as they didn’t come in overwhelming numbers, were entirely manageable—far easier to deal with than guards.

The floor trembled slightly. The Queen’s roars were drawing closer.

They turned the corner. It connected to an L-shaped corridor, with a wider area near the elevator entrance. Beyond that lay an open-plan office space.

All of it had been colonized into a hatchery. The light was dim, and every visible surface was coated in thick, dark gray slime. Clustered within the slime were eggs—gray and fleshy—pressed tightly together, orderly and damp, carpeting the floor in dense ranks. Some of the eggs had begun to shift toward deep blue, a sign that they were close to hatching.

“Natasha, guard the stairwell,” Yuri said, pulling out a combat knife, his voice low and firm. “Everyone else—deal with the eggs.”

He drove the blade into a nearby egg that stood half his height, and dragged it downward. Immediately, splatters of pink, teal, and dark purple viscous fluid poured out—impossible to identify, utterly revolting.

Shen Mo and A-Da each took a knife and worked quickly, puncturing the nearby eggs one by one.

The Queen, still shrieking, dragged itself toward them from the far end. But its body was too enormous—its bloated, saturated lower half couldn’t lift itself off the floor, so it could only haul itself slowly through the slime, its movements terribly sluggish, entirely incapable of posing any immediate threat to the intruders.

It could only continue to shriek, emitting that ear-splitting wail—a sound that seemed to resonate through every other mutant in the building, because the frantic footsteps below were growing louder and more frenzied.

The men didn’t flinch. They kept destroying eggs.

Some eggs were a fleshy pink; slicing them open released something like raw egg fluid. Others were a darker, greenish-gray; cracking them released undeveloped embryos along with the slime—they writhed briefly in the open air, then died quickly.

The Queen’s cries grew more and more anguished.

It was also getting closer and closer.

Shen Mo suddenly stopped. He looked up at the approaching Queen, his brow furrowing deeply.

“Don’t stop!” A-Da was working furiously nearby, stabbing through the dense clusters of eggs, sweat pouring down his face. “Natasha can’t hold out much longer! We need to move faster—destroy more eggs!”

Shen Mo, for reasons unclear, sheathed his knife—and raised his gun, unleashing a rapid volley at the Queen.

He shouted, “Drive it back! It’s trying to use its own body to block the passage!”

Yuri heard this and looked up. He saw the Queen rear its upper half upright under the gunfire—while its lower half began to swell and distort, filling nearly the entire corridor.

If the passage was truly sealed off, they couldn’t advance to destroy the eggs behind the Queen—and they’d be trapped in this section.

With the massive mutant horde from the lower floors almost upon them, they’d have no room to maneuver or retreat.

Yuri’s face went pale with the realization. He shouted at full volume, “Attack the Queen! A-Da! Give everything to the Queen!!!”

A-Da grasped the severity at once—but just as the three men raised their guns, frenzied gunfire erupted from the stairwell direction.

The mutants.

The ones from the lower floors had made it up. Natasha alone couldn’t hold them for long.

BOOM!!!

A massive explosion. The floor shook beneath their feet.

Natasha had clearly known she couldn’t hold on—so she’d used a grenade.

Yuri clenched his jaw and took off running toward the stairwell first. “Go back up Natasha!”

—