sbdcsierra Chapter 425 Mantis Man!
Chapter 425 Mantis Man!
The movements were stiff and strange, as if the joints couldn't bend, which was not how a normal person should behave!
Yang Qing, being a woman, had never seen anything like this before. She gasped in fright, clutching Zhong Yuemin's clothes tightly from behind, her body trembling uncontrollably.
Zhong Yuemin's eyes were cold. Without further hesitation, he pulled the trigger!
"Ta-ta-ta! Ta-ta-ta!"
The crisp gunshots echoed violently and deafeningly in the sealed cave, the bullets hitting the torso of the "figure" with precise accuracy, producing dull "thud" sounds.
What's chilling is that after being shot several times, the thing only paused for a moment, but didn't fall down immediately. It continued to move forward stubbornly!
Zhong Yuemin remained calm and continued firing until half a magazine was empty. Only then did the eerie "figure" seem to have lost all its strength, sway a few times, and fall heavily to the ground, no longer moving.
The air was filled with the smell of gunpowder and an indescribable, strange odor. The cave returned to deathly silence, with only the faint echoes of gunfire making everything before them seem even more terrifying and unpredictable.
Zhong Yuemin made a gesture and lowered his voice to say to Yang Qing:
"Stay here and don't move." He picked up the machine gun, and the muzzle moved slowly with his steps, quietly approaching the crooked dark figure.
Only when you get closer can you see clearly that it is definitely not a human.
It is about the height of a person, with a small head and huge eyes like a praying mantis. Its appearance is very similar to an alien. Although it has four limbs, its hands are not human hands, but sickle-shaped structures like the forelegs of a praying mantis. Its body is dark green, and it looks like a "human-shaped praying mantis".
Having lived two lives and witnessed countless horrific scenes on the battlefield, Zhong Yuemin still felt a chill run down his spine. This thing was even more terrifying than the aliens in the movies!
Yang Qing had followed along unnoticed, and upon seeing the twisted creature on the ground, her voice trembled uncontrollably:
"What the hell is this?"
"do not know."
Zhong Yuemin frowned, his gun never leaving the monster.
"Judging from the way it was walking just now, it seems that it was seriously injured before."
He noticed several deep cracks on its shell, from which a thick, dark green liquid was oozing.
"Injured? Were you injured by someone else?"
"Come on, stay close to me."
Zhong Yuemin's heart sank; he had a bad feeling.
The two cautiously descended along the underground river and soon came to a fork in the road.
The sight before him made Zhong Yuemin's pupils shrink. Dozens of corpses lay scattered on the riverbank pebbles. Judging from their clothing, they were the scientific expedition team members and security personnel they were looking for.
Not a single body was intact.
Severed limbs were scattered all over the ground, and there were many wounds from being cleaved or severed by something sharp. Several heads were missing.
The strong smell of blood assaulted the senses, and even Zhong Yuemin, who had crawled out of mountains of corpses and seas of blood, felt his stomach churn. Yang Qing, who was next to him, covered her mouth abruptly, her face pale, and she almost vomited.
"They, how could they..." Her voice trembled, choked with sobs, "Was it...was it that monster from before?"
Before the words were finished, a piercing scream suddenly came from the depths of another underground river fork.
"Hold!"
Zhong Yuemin cursed under his breath, then charged forward with his gun at the ready.
Rushing into the side cave, the view suddenly opened up, but it was a scene of hell on earth. Zhang Haiyang, Ning Wei, Da Long, Wang Ye and most of the others were here, being besieged by dozens of humanoid mantises wielding sickle-like forelimbs!
The ground, the rock walls, and even the dome overhead were covered with these green mantis monsters. With each swing of their scythes, they left afterimages and splattered blood. Several team members had already fallen in pools of blood, clearly being used as "food" in the hunt.
Ahead, Ning Wei and Zhang Haiyang, along with several others, were back to back, desperately parrying with entrenching tools, shouting at the top of their lungs:
"Run outside! Don't come any closer! Run!"
A flash of ferocity crossed Zhong Yuemin's eyes. Without the slightest hesitation, he charged into the fray, simultaneously tossing his spare AK-47, which was hanging on his chest, to Ning Wei, whose firepower was about to be cut off.
"Ning Wei, catch!"
"beat!"
The machine gun in his hand was the first to spit fire, "rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat!"
A precise short burst of fire instantly blew the heads off several mantises that pounced on it, splattering dark green juice everywhere.
Upon seeing the arrival of reinforcements, Zhang Haiyang was overjoyed, almost to the point of tears:
"Yuemin, why are you so late? If you had been even a fraction later, we would have become this beast's meal!"
He eliminated several nearby mantis monsters, but these monsters showed no sign of retreating. They frantically crawled out of the dark cave, their numbers increasing endlessly. These beasts, seemingly fearless of death, retreated from the fork in the road as they fought their way out. Once outside the fork, a Type 67 grenade appeared in his hand. He pulled the pin and threw it into the fork.
Zhong Yuemin shouted,
"Everyone back up, back up quickly, get away."
Zhong Yuemin, Ning Wei, and the others also fled backwards. Then, a loud rumble sounded behind them, and the entire underground cavern seemed to shake. Debris tumbled down from the fork in the passage, completely blocking the entrance.
The beasts couldn't get out, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Not daring to linger, they continued downstream along the underground river. After walking for about half an hour, with no monsters chasing them, they finally stopped to rest. The original group of thirty or forty people had dwindled to only about twenty. Morale was low, and the atmosphere was very somber.
Haiyang spoke first, "Yuemin, where did you get this AK47 and grenades?"
"Found it," the same excuse. At this point, I'm too lazy to explain. Even a mantis in human form has appeared; it wouldn't be surprising if he found a tank in a cave.
He then asked Wang Ye what those humanoid mantises were, since Wang Ye was from Bureau 749 and had seen a lot, he might know something.
At this point, Wang Ye didn't hide anything and told the truth.
"In our bureau's encrypted files, deep in the Kunlun Mountains, besides the record of 'Death Valley,' there is another bizarre mystery that is known as the legend of 'Mantis Man.'"
"Mantis Man?"
Everyone was filled with doubt and curiosity!
Wang Ye paused, glanced around at the surprised and uncertain faces of the crowd, and continued:
"It is said that as early as the 1960s, a geological exploration team with a special mission accidentally discovered a deeply hidden cave while conducting exploration in a certain area of the Kunlun Mountains."
An advance team went in to investigate, but... only one member, who had completely broken down mentally, escaped.
In his fragmented, dying screams, he mentioned 'giant mantis,' 'green monster,' and 'blade-like arms'... The images described closely match the monster we just encountered. I think they are the same species—the so-called mantis-man!