by <unknown>
"Bang!"
Walter barely had time to react before the gigantic limb tumbled from the sky above and crashed into him, turning him into a splatter of meat decorated with a fine mist of red!
Walter's blood splattered everywhere and painted the cheeks of his nearby comrades but not a single moment was spent mourning his death. They locked their eyes at what was in front of them and focused on escaping the attack range of these tentacle-like limbs.
To their demise, more monstrous limbs emerged from the ground. Soon, there were ten, then twenty, then thirty...
Everywhere they looked, they saw the stark red, colossal tentacles! These tentacles came in varying sizes. The largest among them stood erect from the ground up and pierced several hundred meters into the sky above. It was several meters thick and looked like a dragon summoned from beneath the earth!
In an instant, the farm region was turned into a blood-red jungle with countless bloodied tentacles posing as trees!
"Bang!"
Without caution, yet another tentacle emerged from the ground and cut off the group's path of escape. A desolate look appeared on Alex's face. He knew that the gap in strength between himself and this monster was astronomical. There was no way they could make it out of this alive.
"Swoosh!"
The tentacles that cornered the group and made them sitting ducks whipped downward at them. Alex closed his eyes and accepted his violent fate.
However, death did not come for him even when he expected it. With his eyes shut, his ears were filled with a bizarre creaking sound. Soon after that, thick and freezing liquid dripped from above and crawled along the surface of his skin. Something was melting...
Wordless at how he was still alive, Alex slowly pried his eyelids open. He saw the towering tentacles whirling and squealing in pain. The surface of these tentacles looked like they were both burning and melting at the same time. The tentacles that could not retreat underground in time soon melted into a puddle of bright red liquid...
"Who saved us?"
Alex looked around him in wonder. Soon, his sight landed on a figure that loomed over them in the night sky above!
There was nothing that could describe the rush of emotion that flooded over Alex at this moment. Eyes widened, he looked at the mysterious savior whose glare resembled sharp diamonds hovering above them. The vicious glare of this mysterious savior seemed to carry an inexplicable power that melted the tentacles in the vicinity!
"Who is this? He must be an Alpha-level psionicist!"
Alex suddenly drew the connection. He was practically jumping for joy at this point, "It's the commander! The commander is here to rescue us, we're safe!"
The others followed Alex's line of sight and gazed at the figure above as well. The mysterious savior hovered over the cloudless night sky only illuminated by a moon-shaped arc. His arms elegantly folded behind his back. The world beneath his feet was a dreamlike spectacle. Countless tentacles twitched and squirmed for dear life. Their wailing deaths were marked with puddles of bright red liquid falling onto the ground.
...
"It came, at last."
Chen Chen hovered over the farmland. His overpowering Field had enveloped the entire farmland in a split instant. From the moment he arrived, he could sense the scent of subspace energy that burst from the ground below like erupt volcanoes.
So, he made his move.
After all these years had passed, even Chen Chen himself did not know the complete measure of his powers. With just a simple glance, he was able to corrode all of the hostiles in the area!
This was done using the extreme precision of his Field manipulation that allowed him to alter substances down the most minute cell component. With this power, he managed to instantly pulverize all of these hostile beings from a cell level, which was why the destruction resembled melting from a surface-level observation. This was the result of the cytoplasm of the cells imploding!
"Just as I thought, it's the subspace presence..."
Even after effortlessly eliminating the threat, Chen Chen kept his guard up. He looked beneath his feet and tried to sense the quality of this energy seeping out of the soil. The thick, musty scent of sulfur suggested that it came from the depths of the subspace!
"What are you guys waiting for?"
Chen Chen looked at the special task force members whose lives had just been pulled from the clutches of death. They snapped themselves awake from their daze and quickly ran off into the distance.
After they ran far away enough, Chen Chen squinted at the ground and summoned a thunderous burst of energy!
It was like a nuclear bomb detonated, except there were no sparks nor any indication of an explosion. Instead, it was only a wave of shockwaves fanning open. Even the surrounding air was repelled by the shockwave and spread to the borders of its rapid expansion!
Within seconds, the shockwave tore through the ground at overwhelming speed and force until a gaping pit spanning tens of thousands of square meters was carved underneath Chen Chen's feet!
"Thump, thump, thump!"
Only then could the chaotic tumbling of rocks and boulders crashing onto the soft ground below be heard. The entire scene seemed like a terrific landslide summoned by an earthquake!
Enormous clouds of dust were kicked up, then immediately pulverized into nothingness by an invisible force. After the dust scattered, a large pit more than a hundred meters wide and up to fifty meters deep appeared!
To Chen Chen's surprise, what greeted him in this underground space was not an octopus-like cosmic creature he was expecting. Instead, it was an enormous cave shaped with woven twines of flesh and muscles!
From where Chen Chen stood, he could see the structure that caved downward further into the ground. Shelled inside the cave structure were countless organs and clumps of flesh. The organs were still moving and squirmed as if they were still functional. All of the tentacle limbs encountered when he arrived at this place must have emerged from this cave section!
Chen Chen could sense an ominous presence that tugged at his soul coming from somewhere deep within the cave.
It must be the subspace!
Chen Chen arrived at this conclusion immediately. Somehow, the Northern American Headquarters was transformed into a bridge connecting reality and the subspace!
Upon Chen Chen's discovery of the subspace, he felt a hostile presence rushing at him. Once again, he pried inside the cave with Field but quickly realized that his Field could not advance beyond the mouth of the cave.
It was like crashing into an indestructible wall. It would appear that Field was unable to come in contact with the subspace, much less be used to destroy this channel between the two dimensions.
This was not an unexpected discovery. This time, Chen Chen converted to using the psionic power that welled inside his body!
"Bang!"
The psionic power proved far more effective and successfully burst through the mouth of the cave and entered its passages. Meanwhile, the clumps of flesh and organ were instantly pulverized by the sudden force and burst into fine clouds of mists!
"Roar!"
Somewhere deep inside the subspace came an aggressive, angered roar. However, it was too late for any retaliation since Chen Chen had destroyed the passage. The tunnel leading to the subspace began closing in on itself rapidly!
Within seconds, the subspace channel closed up completely. All that lingered were faint traces of sulphuric smell...
"No, we're not done yet..."
Chen Chen shut his eyes and swept through the underground base with his psionic power. With his psionic power, he sensed the presence of several smaller octopus creatures. These creatures were without physical shape or form and could not otherwise be detected with psionic intervention.
Upon discovering these lingering creatures, Chen Chen crushed them as effortlessly as one would squish an ant. Then, he extended his arm outward and summoned a black slate from the center of his palm!
"Z
oom!"
Once again, an invisible force expanded outward in all directions, instantly purging whatever subspace presence that remained in this area, restoring it to a balanced state.
After this was done, Chen Chen looked around pensively before taking his leave and traveling to Detroit at supersonic speed...
Half an hour later, Chen Chen spotted several psionicists wandering around the orphanage.
On the outside, they seemed completely ordinary, except that their inside was completely corrupted with the subspace's energy. Chen Chen probed inside their bodies with his psionic concentration and discovered that their insides were absent of any internal organs. What took the place of their organs was a curled-up subspace octopus.
"Boom!"
In an instant, these psionicists imploded along with the intrusive monster using them as a host, both vanished without a trace from the world.
With Chen Chen's current psionic detection range, it took him another hour to perform a complete inspection on the city's inhabitants. He managed to discover several other psionicists with the subspace creature hiding inside them and took care of the issue appropriately. It would appear that there were some that managed to slip through the cracks in the city.
It was almost day by the time he had finished taking care of all these unwelcome presences. The sun slowly inched across the horizon.
Even after accomplishing this task, Chen Chen's duties had not come to an end yet. Without taking a break in between, he headed for the desert next...
After the eventful night, Chen Chen's final destination would be a secret base located in a desert in the Northern America Continent. It was the base where the psionicist child was housed. The boy who was the origin of everything that happened so far.
However, while Chen Chen was on the way there, Little X delivered an update.
"Sir Godfather, that desert base has been destroyed."
Little X's voice was toneless. "01 delivered the bad news. He says that he lost contact with the base some time ago. It seems like the same thing that happened in the Northern American Headquarters must've happened to the desert base as well. A channel to the subspace has been opened."
"That's fine, I'll take care of it."
There was hardly any notable expression on Chen Chen's face. It was not sadness or anger. By this point, the deaths of hundreds of thousands were merely a statistic for Chen Chen. He did not see a reason to be sentimental over mere numbers when he was in charge of overseeing the progress of the human species as a whole.
"It seems like our speculations were wrong."
Little X expressed, "It would seem that the psionicist boy's ability isn't to materialize monsters from the dream world but to establish a portal with the subspace."
"This possibility did occur to me back then, but I didn't have concrete evidence then either."
Chen Chen remarked, "Looks like I've arrived just in time. Based on the intel we've gathered so far, we can conclude that the boy is a node for the subspace creatures to arrive into the real world, where they would then hide in the belly of existing psionicists.
"These things aren't too problematic by themselves. The only trouble is that they cannot be detected without resorting to psionic powers."
Chen Chen frowned. "The real trouble lies with how they are able to harvest the organs of their victims and use it to expand their portal that links the subspace with the real world. This is how they transport larger and more monsters from the subspace to the real world."
Based on Chen Chen's findings, the psionic monsters were only found in the body of the psionicist. This suggested they survived by absorbing the psionic energy of the psionicist while ordinary people that could not produce psionic energy to sustain them were simply used as resources to establish the subspace channel.
This explained the hundreds of deaths of common people overnight.
"That's probably it."
Little X replied, "The first human being to be parasitized by these subspace octopuses should be the psionic detective called Sean. Even before his death, he was completely oblivious to the fact that his internal organs had been completely feasted by the monster. All that remained of him was his skin structure by that point. What's haunting is that his mind was still somehow preserved through it all, which was why nobody immediately sensed anything peculiar."
"This is the primary threat these things posed, the way they can meld into human society without even the hosts themselves discovering."
Chen Chen pondered. "They tend to be active after midnight. That's when they harvest human organs in mass so they can expand the dimension bridge and prepare for the large-scale invasion..."
After forming this conclusion, Chen Chen arrived at his destination - the secret military base located in the middle of a desert.
The base had already been razed to the ground by this point. Still, it was not difficult to spot the precise location of the base since a subspace passage that was much larger than the previous passage hovered over the destroyed base. Chen Chen arrived just in time to see a nightmarish monster shaped like a monster that was slowly crawling out of the passage. The Lovecraftian creature had to be at least several hundred meters long...
The moment it saw Chen Chen, it unleashed a deafening noise that sounded like its roar!
The sand covering the desert was kicked up into the atmosphere as a strong sulphuric stench filled the air...
Chapter 625: Subspace Calling |
The skin of this octopus monster was painted with a coat of red like fresh blood. Judging by its shape and form, it was merely a far larger and mature version of the tiny octopus creatures Chen Chen had exterminated in Detroit!
"So, those little octopus monsters sucking organs out of their hosts are this guy's offspring?"
Chen Chen looked at this monstrosity and wondered.
The moment Chen Chen saw the octopus monster, his mind immediately went to another monster that he was very familiar with. Although this gigantic monster in front of him did not completely resemble the Consciousness Stealer, there were certain traits that the two creatures shared. Furthermore, there seemed to be some kind of internal connection between the two monsters...
Another thing that Chen Chen was not expecting was to identify a seemingly human-like emotion underneath this creature's brazen eyes. Immediately after that, he felt a strange emotion arising from the depths of his mind.
Was this creature trying to communicate?
Chen Chen was baffled by this impression. He silenced all the voices in his head and focused on this concealed voice. To his surprise, he managed to make out the message this creature was attempting to deliver to him, it was a question -
"Dependent of Alosorthoth, you dare oppose the Great Asmontis?"
Chen Chen knew that Alosorthoth was the name of the Consciousness Stealer. He discovered it previously in the Consciousness Battlefield.
So, this octopus creature presumed that he was a dependent of the Consciousness Stealer?
Chen Chen understood now. This body which he resided in now was his avatar in the end dimension. It was not so much as a body but more so an immense concentration of the psionic energy of countless inmates. This body had been slumbering for several decades since. This creature may have formed an albeit understandable assumption that he was a dependent of the Consciousness Stealer.
"I'm not a dependent of Alosorthoth."
Chen Chen mirrored the way this creature communicated with him and responded accordingly, "This is the territory of humans. If you want to enter, you're going to have to offer something in exchange!"
Chen Chen planned to make use of this opportunity and extract some information or come to some sort of negotiation with this creature. Unfortunately, his plans had to be discarded almost immediately because this mere suggestion seemed to have enraged it!
"Roar!"
Its thunderous voice echoed across the desert and it started to lumber out of the passage furiously. Sensing its intentions, C
hen Chen immediately flung out a large reality anchor and rooted it deep underground by propelling it underneath layers of sand using Field!
"Zoom!"
The air in the atmosphere changed and took on a strangely stagnant quality. The octopus monster immediately sensed the changes as well. It realized that its psionic energy was constrained within this space!
Sensing this, thousands of large tentacles emerged from a section of its body and they lurched altogether at Chen Chen. There was hardly a room for escape amid the intricate webs of tentacles!
"You can't even defeat Alosorthoth, how do you expect to overpower me now that your psionic power has been nullified?"
Chen Chen glided with an almost nonchalant quality in the air above while the tentacles that drew close to him burst into clouds of red mist and their shattered pieces rained down below!
Each time the tentacles were destroyed, they regrew within seconds. Their regenerative abilities made them seem indestructible!
Chen Chen raised an eyebrow upon noting this. He proceeded to unleash a stronger burst of Field concentration from his body. This time, he went all out!
Chen Chen had raised his Field to unprecedented levels by now, but the essence of Field's strength was not in its sheer volume but its concentration!
Field's dangers lay in its ability to obliterate his enemies on a cellular level. The interwoven limbs shaped like tentacles sensed the incoming danger and trembled!
It only took a second and like snow melting under summer weather, all of the tentacles which Chen Chen's Field swept across immediately corroded. Both skin and muscle tore away immediately and melted into the void!
"Never should've come here!"
Chen Chen denounced the octopus monster that was still halfway through crawling out of the passage. At this moment, his concentration of Field held a resemblance to a furious, raging storm that bent and twisted the atmosphere at its will. It barged through all resistance and went for the creature!