Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 496 Salute
"..." Yan Yu'an's expression froze for a moment. The next second, she turned around and pounced on a corpse that had just emerged from behind her, fiercely plunging her fists and swords into the corpse's chest.

"Is this considered being arrogant?" Sun Hang muttered to himself, turning to look at a dark figure trembling as it clung to the monument. "What do you think?"

For a period of time afterward, Sun Hang's expression changed like a Sichuan opera face-changing act, sometimes so angry that he seemed to be breathing fire, and the next second so gloomy that he seemed to be dripping water—rage, jealousy, worry, fear, greed, frustration... all sorts of negative emotions were displayed very directly on Sun Hang's face, and each change of his expression meant that a dark shadow attached to the monument was "devoured".

The area of ​​the shadows on the monument shrank rapidly, while the suppression effect on the corpses emerging from the graves greatly intensified. Sometimes they would even freeze in place like a robot that had suddenly crashed, or fall directly into the abyss above as soon as they emerged from the grave.

"The last one."

Sun Hang crouched atop the monument, swallowing the last dark shadow whole.

An overwhelming sense of despair welled up within him.

He saw a dark, surging mass of strange creatures landing at the ice-free port of Murmansk. Foxhound fighter jets, trailing long plumes of black smoke, circled and crashed into the sea, their hundreds-of-meters-long tentacles tearing through the water and smashing the metal and concrete fortifications in the port into ruins.

In the next instant, Sun Hang felt as if he were in the cockpit of a carrier-based aircraft taking off. The scenery on both sides rushed past, while his mothership was slowly sinking. A plane parked at the edge of the runway slid backward, and the broken anchor bolts lashed out like whips, instantly ripping a ground crew member who couldn't dodge in time in two.

With the engines roaring almost frantically, the plane hurtled off the severely tilted runway.

The bow of the aircraft carrier was raised high, almost forming a 45-degree angle with the sea surface. A huge whirlpool was forming around the ship, and people kept sliding off the deck and falling into the whirlpool... Before their bodies were torn apart by the waves and undercurrents, the terrifying monsters caught in the whirlpool swarmed up, fighting for the bloody food falling from the sky.

Sun Hang turned his head and looked back. He saw a maw larger than an aircraft carrier burst open the sea surface. As the upper and lower jaws, full of sharp teeth, snapped together, steel made a loud, twisting and breaking sound. Flames kept exploding, and the ship's whistle's last mournful cry was completely swallowed up by that abyss-like maw.

The deformed wings brushed against the porthole, and Sun Hang felt all the blood rushing to his brain. He couldn't distinguish between the roar of the machine gun and the shouts of the soldiers in the back seat. Suddenly, everything seemed to darken, and an enormous shadow appeared on the sea...

In the next scene, the battlefield has shifted from the port to urban street fighting. Monsters with both animal and plant characteristics are running rampant through streets stained with blood and blackened by smoke and fire. The entire city is filled with the salty smell of the sea and the pungent smell of gunpowder. A soldier from the Siberian Federation shouts "Hurrah!" and leaps from a rooftop, then explodes into a dazzling spark amidst the monsters.

The monsters did not stop. Even though their bodies were blown to pieces, their writhing limbs continued to crawl forward, only to be swallowed by their catching-up kind and turned into nourishment for other monsters.

Barricades were breached one after another, and soldiers screamed as they were torn apart and devoured. The defensive line retreated again and again, until the remaining dozen or so soldiers reached a crossroads, where they were horrified to find that they had nowhere left to go.

The monsters are surging in from all directions. Every road in sight is crowded with hundreds or thousands of monsters, and even the sky is filled with those deformed shadows that fly by at high speed.

Without air superiority, artillery support, heavy weapons, or even unified command... the city's arsenal had been destroyed by the monsters' precise strikes two days earlier, and the city defense command post, which had been a four-story building, had been reduced to a solid block of concrete in the fourth hour after the monsters entered the city. No one knew if the officers sealed inside the concrete block were still alive, because all the soldiers within two hundred meters of the command post had melted away like wax figures... This area had completely become a no-go zone for life. Any living thing that stepped into it would turn into a mushy mess within seconds, becoming the sticky filling in the cracks between the floor tiles.

With ammunition exhausted, guns exploding, wounded people unable to receive treatment, and vehicles running out of fuel unable to start, Sun Hang watched helplessly as those strange creatures smashed open the tightly closed doors and broke into the building amidst the screams of ordinary people—the screams and gunshots often didn't last long before being replaced by the sounds of flesh being torn apart and food being chewed.

This was a feast of flesh and blood, as ravenous monsters crawled ashore, flooded the city, and devoured the limbs of the land's rulers... For thousands of years, the people who had stood at the top of the food chain realized with horror that they seemed no different from livestock waiting to be slaughtered in the pen.

A scorching hot bullet casing hit Sun Hang's face, pulling him out of his dreamlike state. He found himself back on the surface of the Baikal Remains, panting heavily. Yan Yu'an was kneeling beside him, the gauntlet attached to his arm blade riddled with nicks.

Wang Xiyi stood a little further away, holding two blue fireballs in her hands, looking as if she was about to throw them away.

Zhong Ling was still surrounded by a group of undead. The first undead, which was moving freely, had removed the armor from its arms, and half of a mutilated corpse was hanging from each of its own claws.

"You're back?" Sun Hang looked up at the sky. The azure night sky replaced the pitch-black abyss. On the Siberian plain, where there was almost no light pollution, the stars in the Milky Way were clearly visible.

"When did we get back to the ground?" Wang Xiyi was taken aback and withdrew the fireball from her palm.

"I...I don't know either..." Yan Yu'an said intermittently. The side effects of the enhancer had begun to take effect. She felt as if all the tendons in her body had been broken. Even four times the dose of painkillers could not completely block out the pain. "The...the battle ended...too suddenly."

The first monstrous creature shook off the corpse skewered on its claws and silently returned to Zhong Ling's side.

"Is the purification complete?" Wang Xiyi asked Sun Hang. "Are there any impurities left?"

"It should be gone." Sun Hang shook his head, and the next second, as if sensing something, he turned his head to look to the side.

The iconic golden dome of the veterans' sanatorium was less than a hundred meters away, and the red five-pointed star at the top of the dome still emitted a faint glow even in the darkness.

A large group of eerie soldiers stood darkly against the walls of the sanatorium, holding weapons and "staring" at Sun Hang and his companions with their unfocused eyes.

After a brief eye contact, the leading soldier slowly raised his hand and gave Sun Hang a standard military salute.

Sun Hang smiled at them, and then the group of strange soldiers disappeared from their original positions as if they had never appeared at all.

"So...it's all settled?" Wang Xiyi walked to Sun Hang's side and looked at the veterans' sanatorium not far away. "Didn't one of those strange soldiers just salute us?"

"All done." Sun Hang nodded. "Let's go back for a late-night snack." ...

……

Temporary rendezvous point outside the remains of Baikal.

The once empty wilderness was now filled with all kinds of vehicles, and thousands of fully armed soldiers stood ready. Ganna, wearing a thick military overcoat, was walking back and forth on the frozen mud, breathing on his hands and rubbing them as he walked.

As per Sun Hang's orders, the reinforcements remained outside the Baikal Remains, and the monster hunters were strictly forbidden from approaching the Baikal Remains—the frontline camp was ready to launch a general offensive against the Baikal Remains, but Sun Hang's words forced the arrow that was already nocked to be released.

Gan Na sought advice from Pei Zongjun, but the other party's answer was always the same: unconditionally obey Sun Hang's orders.

This person with the highest authority in the Heavenly Pivot Tower seemed to have boundless trust in this young hunter named Sun Hang… Ganna actually trusted Sun Hang as well, after all, Sun Hang's achievements were undeniable. The combined achievements of all the monster hunters of the past decade or so probably didn't match the prestige of "destroying Chimera Seventeen and repelling the Eternal Night." In Ganna's eyes, Sun Hang was like a rising star in human civilization, a torch burning brightly in the darkness, a miracle worker who turned the impossible into the possible, and…

But just half an hour ago, the communication between this new star and the rear was cut off without warning.

The rising star seemed to have vanished like a fleeting shooting star.

Ganna had been pacing back and forth in front of the truck for a full half hour, glancing at his watch almost every few seconds, silently counting down the time Sun Hang and the others had lost contact.

"Thirty-one minutes and twenty seconds... thirty-one minutes and fifty seconds..." Ganna let out a long breath, and the breath he exhaled instantly condensed into a thin layer of white frost on his beard. He made up his mind that if he still couldn't contact Sun Hang after thirty-five minutes, he would restart the general attack plan on the Baikal Remains.

No…no…Ganna shook his head vigorously again. What if Sun Hang and the others had just encountered some special circumstances? Would launching a full-scale attack disrupt their plans?

Perhaps we should send an elite squad in to search for their trail first?

No, no, no... one elite squad isn't enough, we need to send in several more...

Sending more teams might not even help them find them... So let's just send everyone here into the remains of Baikal... Since discovering the remains of Baikal, they haven't conducted such a large-scale operation, sending thousands of people into this eerie city at once...

Since things have come to this point, let's just launch a full-scale offensive...

Just as Ganna was in a state of great distress, the little girl named Xue Yue suddenly tugged at the hem of his military overcoat.

"The city... seems to have calmed down."

"Calm down, then calm down! I can't calm down at all right now... Wait, what did you say?" Ganna suddenly turned around, startling Xue Yue so much that she took several steps back.

"Don't frighten the child!" The fisherman immediately stepped forward and shielded Xue Yue behind him. "Little sister, don't be nervous, speak slowly."

“Before… this city was shrouded in a heavy negative atmosphere… from a distance, it looked as if the whole city was wrapped in black fog,” Xue Yue said. “But now… the black fog has dissipated, and I can feel that the city has become calm… all those negative emotions have disappeared.”

“Could it be…” Ganna’s eyes widened as an unbelievable thought popped into his mind.

Did Sun Hang and his team succeed?
At that moment, a technical officer suddenly ran over, excitedly shouting, "Report! According to drone observations, the 'anti-spy film' above Baikal's remains has disappeared! In addition, the buildings and land within the city have stopped moving!"

"Have you captured any trace of Sun Hang and his group?" Ganna asked hurriedly.

"We've got them on camera! They're currently in the C19 area, moving here along road Y3L9!"

"Is anyone hurt?"

"Lieutenant Colonel Yan Yu'an appears to be injured. In addition, the puppeteer has lost five of his controlled monstrous remains. Apart from these, Mr. Sun Hang, Night Fury, and the puppeteer himself show no obvious signs of injury."

"Great! Great!" Ganna clapped his hands with ecstatic joy. "I knew it! I knew he could create a miracle! Just like back in Shuzhou!"

He no longer cared how Sun Hang did it, and he didn't even want to know whether the remains of Baikal had been successfully purified—for Ganna, as long as Sun Hang could walk out of the remains of Baikal alive, that in itself was already a miracle.

"Report, report, report, report!!!" Another communications soldier stumbled up to Ganna, panting, and said, "The radio at the front-line camp received a Morse code message. It was sent on a public channel, and after tracing the source, we determined that the sending location was in the central area of ​​the Baikal Remains!"

"A telegram from the remains of Baikal? What does it say?" Ganna asked hastily, his tone even more excited than the communications soldier.

"The telegram was written in the former Siberian Federation military cipher. After being deciphered by technicians, the content was confirmed to be—" The communications officer paused, then said with unwavering conviction:
"We will hold this place forever, never retreat, never surrender, until we are completely wiped out."

(End of this chapter)