The stairwell was narrow. Height gave an absolute tactical advantage—by holding the stairs above and firing downward, anyone in the lower position had almost no way through.
When Natasha had been alone, she could barely manage. But once Yuri, Shen Mo, and A-Da arrived, the mutants surging upward were cut down almost completely.
Gradually, the bodies piling up on the stairs grew higher—but the mutants kept coming, endless and relentless, surging upward in an unbroken wave.
“Damn it!” A-Da swore. “My ammo’s almost gone! How are there still so many?!”
Everyone else’s ammunition was running critically low as well.
“Retreat!” Yuri hurled a hand grenade and pulled back, holstering his weapon.
The others fell back with him, hauling the heavy metal fire door shut with all their strength.
There was a resounding crash as the door shuddered violently. But seconds later, the howling surged again—more mutants were charging up the stairs, slamming into the metal door with frenzied, rhythmic impacts—bang, bang, bang.
“What now?!” Natasha looked to Yuri.
Yuri’s face was drenched in sweat. He raised his weapon and ran toward the Queen’s position. “No time to waste. We can’t keep stalling—we need to deal with those eggs now…”
His words died in his throat.
They saw that the Queen was already dead. Its colossal body filled the entire corridor—thick and solid as a row of heavy sandbags, leaving not even the thinnest crack of space.
Bai Youwei stood there with a small knife, puncturing the eggs they’d missed one by one. She sighed. “The eggs here aren’t even a fifth of the total. Now that the Queen has blocked the path, the only way to deal with the remaining eggs is through the stairwell.”
The building’s stairwells ran along both the east and west sides. They could take this side’s stairwell down, then come back up via the other side’s stairwell from the 31st floor.
But the stairwells were now swarming with mutants—exact numbers unknown—and their ammunition was nearly exhausted.
“Use grenades?” A-Da asked, hesitant.
Yuri shook his head. “The stairwell is too narrow. A grenade’s lethality is severely restricted in there—it won’t cause anywhere near enough casualties.”
Shen Mo studied the Queen’s body, thinking. “What if we try to blast through it?”
Yuri wrestled with the idea briefly, then gave a tight nod. “Let’s try.”
The Queen’s bulk was so enormous they worried one grenade wouldn’t be enough, so they used two—placing them at the lower-right and upper-right corners of the corridor.
Once everything was set, the five of them sheltered around the corner near the elevator bank.
Bai Youwei covered her ears and pressed herself close to Shen Mo. The thunderous blast went off, deafening—waves of heat scorched their cheeks, and a savage stench washed over them all.
She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling ash, debris, and what could only be slime spattering onto her face. When she opened her eyes, black smoke from the explosion was drifting through the air, and several chunks of ceiling had come down, trailing small tongues of fire.
The mutants beyond the stairwell door went still for a moment, startled into silence.
The five of them covered their noses and ran around the corner. The floor was a landscape of ash and smoldering debris—and the Queen’s body had been blasted open in two enormous craters.
The craters were slick and viscous. Within them, unmistakably, were densely packed pale pink eggs that hadn’t yet been laid—about a dozen of them sliding free from the blasted cavities, wrapped in dark viscous fluid, slowly filling the holes back in.
The Queen was like a thick wall of impenetrable mud—their path forward was completely sealed.
From the stairwell direction, the mutants stirred again—slamming, scraping, the metal door clanging relentlessly—as though at any moment it might give way.
Ahead: the Queen’s impassable body.
Behind: mutants about to break through.
Ammunition nearly spent.
If the elevator hadn’t been destroyed, they could at least find another way around. But now—they seemed, once again, to be in a dead end.
—