158: Chapter 158 The Hunters Appear

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Washington.

Main underground drainage pipe.

Dave was woken up by a gust of cold wind.

He had lived underground in Washington for nearly a year.

Since being laid off, his job was gone, his apartment was gone, and his wife had run off with the kids, sending him divorce papers shortly after.

He signed them, spent his last bit of money on alcohol, and crawled into the sewers after finishing it.

Though it was terrible here, at least it provided shelter from the wind and rain.

He slept at the corner of a branch pipe, using cardboard to make a bed and a plastic bag stuffed with old clothes as a pillow.

He moved his stiff fingers and reached for the flashlight by his pillow.

The flashlight was gone.

Then came a sound.

A sound he had never heard before.

It wasn't rats, nor flowing water, nor the snoring of other homeless people.

It was a wet, squelching sound of something moving.

It came from deep within the pipe.

Dave sat up, his eyes gradually adjusting to the darkness.

There was a light in the distance of the pipe.

It wasn't sunlight, but a faint, blue-green fluorescence.

The fluorescence illuminated the walls of the pipe.

Dave crawled over and saw it clearly.

The pipe walls were covered in a layer of grayish-white material.

It wasn't moss or mold, but a substance he had never seen before—like resin, or the solidified secretions of some organism.

It covered every inch of the pipe walls, spreading from the floor all the way to the vaulted ceiling.

The fluorescence was emanating from within this resin.

There were people encased in the resin.

Dave recognized them.

George, who slept at the corner thirty meters away.

Martha, who always begged at the pipe entrance.

And that tall, thin guy who never made a sound and always huddled in his sleeping bag; no one knew his name, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that they were encased in the resin like insects in amber.

Their eyes were wide open, their mouths agape, and their limbs frozen in a struggling posture.

George's lips were moving.

Dave crawled over and pressed his ear close.

George's voice was as thin as a mosquito's, repeating the same sentence over and over:

"It hurts... there's something in my chest... it hurts so much..."

Dave's heart suddenly tightened.

That wet sound was getting closer.

It wasn't coming from ahead in the pipe; it was coming from above.

He slowly looked up.

Hanging upside down from the vault of the pipe was something.

A massive fan-shaped head, like a beetle or armor from a nightmare, gleamed with a skeletal luster under the fluorescence.

Its tail trailed behind it, ending in a long barbed tip that was slowly swaying.

The tail barb scraped across the resin on the pipe wall, leaving a new trail of mucus.

A massive ovipositor was connected to the rear of its body. With every contraction, a new egg slid out of the birth canal and landed in the resin nest.

The top of the egg slowly opened like a blooming flower.

Dave wanted to run, but his legs wouldn't listen to him at all!

The massive creature hanging upside down lowered its head, its fan-shaped head aimed right at him.

It had no eyes, but he knew it was watching him.

More sounds came from deep within the pipe.

It wasn't just one; there were many.

They surged out of the darkness, smaller in stature but just as pitch-black, with the same fan-shaped heads and long barbed tails.

They crawled along the walls, hung from the vault, and slithered across the ground, too many to count.

The last thing Dave saw was one of the monsters lunging toward him.

Within its gaping maw was another, smaller mouth, filled with sharp teeth.

Then came excruciating pain.

Then, there was nothing.

Deeper in the pipe, at an abandoned pump station.

The entire space was covered in resin.

The walls, floor, and ceiling were all encased in the grayish-white secretion.

The resin layer was so thick that the original concrete structure was no longer visible. The fluorescence shone from within the resin, bathing the entire pump station in an eerie blue-green light.

A Xenomorph, a full size larger than those around it, had fixed itself in the center of the pump station.

Its body was over four and a half meters long, and its ovipositor extended from the back of its body, occupying nearly half of the pump station's space.

The ovipositor contracted incessantly, and with each contraction, a new egg slid out of the birth canal.

She was surrounded by Drones, at least forty of them.

They were dragging new hosts into the nest.

Homeless people, addicts, two maintenance workers who had wandered in by mistake, and a teenage boy who had gotten lost in the pipes.

The hosts were fixed to the resin walls, their limbs spread wide, their chests torn open from the inside by Chestbursters.

The Chestbursters had already molted into new adult Xenomorphs and were crawling out of the gashes in the hosts' chests. They were covered in mucus, and their exoskeletons had not yet fully hardened.

They crawled to the edge of the resin nest and waited quietly.

When the Queen laid her sixtieth egg, the ovipositor contracted violently.

An egg slid out of the birth canal and landed in the very center of the resin nest.

It was a full size larger than the ordinary eggs, and its shell wasn't dark brown, but dark gold.

The Drones all turned their heads at the same time toward that egg.

They then spontaneously gathered around it, forming a defensive circle. No command was given; they simply knew that this egg was different.

Tonight's harvest was exceptionally bountiful; not a single person from the homeless settlement upstream—over thirty people—had escaped.

The hosts were dragged before the Queen.

They were still alive, their eyes open, making incoherent sounds.

Some were praying, some were begging for mercy, and some had already gone insane, only capable of repeating the same sentence over and over.

"It hurts."

The Queen lowered her fan-shaped head, leaning in close to this batch of new hosts.

The ovipositor contracted one last time.

Six new eggs slid out of the birth canal and landed in front of the hosts.

The tops of the eggs opened simultaneously.

On the surface, the stray dogs suddenly began barking in unison.

They faced the direction of the sewers, their tails between their legs, their whole bodies trembling.

After a few barks, they retreated into corners, burying their noses under their front paws.

The Queen raised her head, her fan-shaped armor aimed at the pipe opening at the top of the pump station. The opening led to the upper levels, to the surface, and to the city that was still slumbering.

A low-frequency hiss, inaudible to human ears, emanated from her throat.

All the Drones in the pump station stopped moving at once as the hiss traveled through the pipes.

Through the branch pipes, the main pipes, and the feeder pipes. Every corner of the nest.

In the darkness, countless Drones looked up simultaneously.

They began to move—upward, toward the city.

There were over two hundred of them, and the number was still increasing.

...

The Appalachian Mountains.

The crash site.

A temporary shed had been erected at the edge of the impact crater.

Searchlights illuminated the bottom of the crater as bright as day.

The main force of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation had already withdrawn.

Hudson, as the person in charge of this operation, had left with the samples and the database, leaving behind a platoon of private security and an engineering team responsible for cutting up and loading the ship's wreckage.

The foreman, Ramirez, had been doing heavy lifting for twenty years and had transported all kinds of big rigs.

But he couldn't move this ship.

He had never seen the metal of the hull before; the plasma cutter only left a shallow mark on it without even causing any discoloration.

"Fuck," Ramirez muttered, throwing his cigarette butt to the ground and crushing it. "What the hell is this thing made of?"

"Boss," a young worker approached. "How about we set up the shed first and switch to laser cutting tomorrow?"

Ramirez looked at the sky, then back at the ship at the bottom of the pit.

The gap in the hull was pitch black, like a half-open mouth.

"Alright, tell the boys to put some back into it. Get the shed up before dawn."

"Mr. Hudson said he'd be back in three days to pick up the goods."

The worker gave a shout of acknowledgment and turned to carry some steel pipes.

The wind in the forest suddenly stopped.

Ramirez's hand had just touched his cigarette pack when his movements froze.

It wasn't because he heard something, but because he didn't.

The birds had stopped chirping, the insects had stopped buzzing, and even the sound of the wind through the treetops had ceased.

Then he heard a metallic scraping sound coming from deep within the forest, like a blade sliding over stone, or like something breathing.

Ramirez's flashlight shone toward the forest.

The beam swept over tree trunks and bushes, passing over a transparent silhouette.

The silhouette moved slightly; when the beam followed it, there was nothing there.

"Who's there?!" He raised his flashlight, his other hand reaching for the pistol at his waist.

A short, sharp scream came from behind him.

Ramirez spun around to see a guard lifted into mid-air, two cold, gleaming blades piercing through his back and out his chest.

Blood was still dripping from the tips of the blades.

The guard's mouth was open, but no sound came out. His limbs twitched twice before he went still.

The blades retracted, and the guard's body slumped to the ground. There was no one behind him.

Then the air rippled, and a tall figure emerged from the transparency.

Standing nearly two and a half meters tall, dark silver exoskeleton armor covered its entire body. Strange patterns that Ramirez couldn't understand were etched into the breastplate.

The helmet wasn't the usual mesh design; it had the silhouette of a falcon, with metal wings unfolding on both sides that glinted coldly under the searchlights.

The red visor stared at Ramirez as if looking at an insect.

The wrist blade on its right hand was still stained with blood, its surface reflecting the lights from the shed.

A Female Predator.

Before Ramirez could even raise his gun, a series of screams erupted from his communication headset, followed by silence and the crackle of static.

The guards on the perimeter had been wiped out in less than ten seconds, without a single gunshot being fired.

The workers and guards inside the shed panicked instantly, firing wildly into the dark forest. The bullets hit the air, triggering ripples of blue plasma shield sparks.

One guard turned and bolted toward the edge of the forest, but hadn't gone ten steps.

A metal spear shot out from the darkness, impaling his chest and pinning him to a tree trunk.

A Cat-face Predator hung upside down from the canopy, its wrist blades snapping out to slit the throat of another guard trying to raise his gun.

Its build was a size smaller than the Female Predator.

On the other side of the shed, a guard hoisted a rocket launcher.

Before he could aim, a plasma bolt blasted out from the forest.

The guard and the rocket launcher were blown to pieces.

The shockwave overturned a nearby engineering vehicle.

An Elephant-face Predator stepped out of the forest, standing over three meters tall and three times the bulk of the Cat-face.

Its helmet resembled a heavy elephant trunk, and a smoking plasma cannon was mounted on its left shoulder.

A heavy blaster axe in its right hand dragged on the ground, plowing a scorched furrow.

Ramirez's legs gave out.

He wanted to run, but his knees hit the ground.

The Female Predator walked toward him.

Her wrist blade retracted into the gauntlet, and her right hand gripped his chin, forcing him to look up.

The red visor was less than twenty centimeters from his face. The sound of breathing came from the helmet—low and slow, like the whimpering of a large feline in the dark.

Her left hand pressed against the ship's hull. The etchings on the hull suddenly lit up, and a red light from the top of her helmet swept over the entire ship. The black box was activated.

Inside the helmet, images began to flicker on the display.

The final recording before the crash.

All restraint devices inside the cabin were locked, and the Queen was fixed onto a central platform.

Then the ship lost control and plunged into the atmosphere.

The restraint devices were damaged in the impact... the Queen broke free... the hatch was smashed open from the inside.

Dozens of Drones swarmed out of the ship and vanished into the night.

Then came a close-up of the Queen.

A fan-shaped head and a massive ovipositor.

A clear number 6 was branded onto her forehead.

The Female Predator closed the recording.

The red visor swept over the ship's wreckage one last time before focusing on Ramirez.

The wrist blade snapped out again, flashed across, and Ramirez's head rolled to the ground.

The Female Predator turned and walked toward the forest.

Her figure began to distort after three steps and became completely transparent after five.

At the edge of the forest, dozens of semi-transparent silhouettes appeared simultaneously.

Although the styles and designs of their armor varied, their uniform dark-black armor, shoulder cannons, and wrist blades signified they shared the same origin.

Now, they fanned out in a battle formation.

This wasn't an ordinary rite-of-passage hunt; it was a global purge operation targeting an Absolute Contaminant.

Once the Number 6 Queen spread through a human city, the entire planet would fall to the Xenomorph nest. Even clans with long-standing feuds would join forces to snuff out the contamination at its source.

Cat-face crouched on a tree trunk, while Elephant-face stood on the outer perimeter with his plasma cannon.

Another figure, even bulkier than Elephant-face, stood behind the Female Predator like a silent iron tower.

It hadn't participated in the slaughter; from beginning to end, it simply stood there, watching.

In the canopy, a figure wearing a Lone Wolf helmet crouched on the highest branch, wrist blade pressed against the trunk. An infrared scope had already locked onto the downtown area of Washington, a dozen kilometers away.

The Female Predator waved her hand.

Over a hundred hunters turned simultaneously and moved toward Washington—transparent and silent.

In the night sky, the starlight was suddenly blocked out.

It wasn't a cloud.

The edges of a cloud are blurry, but the edges of this thing were sharp and clean.

It was transparent, but not perfectly so, like a giant sheet of glass suspended in the air. Behind the glass, the faint outline of a metallic skeletal structure could be seen.

A triangular mothership, over three hundred meters in diameter, hovered three thousand meters above Washington.

With full-spectrum optical cloaking, the US Army's radars could only pick up a faint gravitational anomaly. The people on the ground were completely unaware.

Like a massive, invisible piece of glass, it blocked the starlight over half the city. Its cold gun ports were already aimed at the ground, awaiting only the commander's order.

The Female Predator looked up, her red visor aimed toward the mothership.

A moment later, she lowered her head and walked toward the city.

Her figure vanished completely.

Only corpses, the still-burning engineering vehicles, and that silent black ship remained in the forest.

The gap in the hull remained open, like a half-open mouth.