System S.E.X. (Seduction, Expansion, eXecution)

Chapter 416 416: The Regeneration Plague

"Open fire!" Jason's command was a thunderclap.

The Royal line erupted in a blinding display of red light. Dozens of high-intensity laser rifles hummed in unison, sending beams of concentrated energy screaming across the sand. The first wave of beast-cultivators was riddled with holes in an instant, the smell of burnt hair and cauterized flesh filling the air as they collapsed into the dirt.

Jason lowered his binocular-display and spat on the roof of the truck. "All that circus for so little action. Is this the best the Unions can do?"

The Scavenger Leader didn't look bothered. He let out a low, guttural laugh that sounded like grinding stones. "You think it's over? Boy, we haven't even finished the introductions."

He clapped his hands twice. Behind the enemy line, the rear doors of dozens of rusted trailers slammed open. Men began to pour out like canned sardines—thousands of them, overflowing from the trucks in a tidal wave of ragged armor and feral eyes.

"Sir! Incoming signatures!" a comms officer shouted to Jason. "Thermal scans show thousands more packed into incoming trailers! Estimated arrival: five minutes. We're going to be outnumbered ten to one!"

"Let them come!" Jason roared, swapping his energy cell. "They're just meat for the grinder!"

But as the words left his mouth, his cocky grin died.

In the clearing, the bodies of the beast-men he had just "killed" began to twitch. The charred holes in their chests and skulls didn't bleed; instead, the flesh began to knit together with sickening, wet pops. Muscle fibers wove through the air like living worms, closing the wounds in seconds. They stood back up, their eyes glowing with a renewed, frenzied hunger.

"Regenerators?" Jason's eyes widened. "Focus fire! Headshots only! Don't let them close the gap!"

"Too late!" the Leader of Celestial shouted, his voice ringing with triumph. "Kill them all! Feast on their marrow!"

The two armies collided like two tectonic plates.

The Royal defense line was forced into a brutal melee. The standard soldiers, despite their high-tech armor, began to suffer casualties as the beast-men ignored wounds that should have been fatal. A scavenger with a wolf's snout took three laser pulses to the gut, kept running, and tore the throat out of a Royal guard with his bare teeth.

"Deploy the Nectar Units! Vanguard, move out!" Jason ordered.

From the central trucks, the super-soldiers who had consumed the Worm Nectar leaped into the fray. Their physical power was terrifying; one Nectar soldier landed a punch that shattered a beast-man's ribcage and sent him flying twenty meters.

"Take that, you freak!" a Nectar soldier yelled, slamming his combat blade through a scavenger's neck.

"Keep dreaming, little human!" the scavenger gurgled, the blade still stuck in his throat as his hands clamped around the soldier's arm, the neck wound already sealing around the metal. "We don't stay dead!"

"Coalesce fire on the leaders!" Jason shouted, directing a heavy turret toward the Union heads. "They're coordinating the healing pulse!"

"You're fighting a tide, Jason!" the Scavenger Leader mocked, parrying a rail-round with his notched greatsword. "Every drop of blood we lose just makes us hungrier! You have the tech, but we have the immortality!"

The battlefield was a cacophony of screeching energy, feral roars, and the sound of breaking bone.

Jason's knuckles whitened as he gripped the edge of the transport. Cold sweat slid down his neck while he watched the tactical feed. "They're just like the specimens we captured in the frozen wastes, but these mutations are far more stable... more powerful," he muttered to himself. The ferocity of the beast-men was one thing, but seeing them laugh as their severed limbs knitted back together was demoralizing for the men.

"Crul!" Jason roared into the command channel. "Connect us to the Research Department now! We need a weakness! We need to know how to kill these things permanently!"

Crul's serene voice resonated in his ear, a violent contrast to the screams of agony and the thunder of gunfire around him.

[ The regenerative level of these subjects has a biological ceiling, Lieutenant Jason. Their metabolism is overclocked to the maximum, but it is not infinite. You must exceed their recovery capacity. Saturate the targets' cells until the mitotic process collapses. ]

"You heard the lady!" Jason bellowed, leaping from the roof of the truck to the front line. "Concentrate fire! Don't spread your shots! Saturate a single target until there's nothing left but ash! Move it, damn you!"

The tactic worked—at first. Groups of ten or twenty Royal soldiers focused their laser rifles on a single beast-man, turning him into cinders before his cells could even react. But the victory was fleeting. On the horizon, the reinforcement trailers opened completely, releasing a human tide that covered the desert as far as the eye could see. It was hundreds of thousands of mutant warriors against barely tens of thousands of Ethan's soldiers. They were being drowned by the sheer weight of numbers.

The defensive line began to buckle. Beast-men threw themselves onto the armored trucks, tearing off metal plating with reinforced claws.

"Enough games!" Jason activated the red security code. "Activate Operation Extermination! Front line, fall back now! Artillery and air support, open fire!"

The heavy Royal transports transformed. From their roofs, massive turrets emerged, firing unstable plasma spheres. Simultaneously, the escort helicopters tilted forward, launching specialized missiles equipped with mana stone cores.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The explosions didn't just shred flesh; the pure mana energy disintegrated the molecular structure of the attackers. Where there were once warriors regenerating, there were now only smoking craters and ionized air. There was nothing left to regenerate if not a single living cell remained.

The Scavenger Leader's face changed for the first time. His mocking smirk vanished as he watched thousands of his "immortals" being erased from the map in seconds by Ethan's technology. He turned toward the man in white, his eyes bloodshot with rage.

"It's your turn to act," the Scavenger growled. "My men are providing the bodies, now do something about those damn metal birds!"

The Leader of Celestial huffed, adjusting a gold-and-crystal gauntlet that glowed with an oppressive light. He looked toward the helicopters still raining death from the sky.

"They are annoying, I'll admit," the Celestial Leader said with disdain. "Bring those birds down. Long-range units, activate resonance!"