God Ash: Remnants of the fallen.

Chapter 134: New Threat [BONUS CHAPTER].

Manny, Dan, and Hunter were the second group to arrive at the base right after Cain and Susan. They looked battered and worn out, but they all wore smiles on their faces, even Hunter who wore a frown almost all the time had a huge grin on his face. They looked even closer than before.

"Miss. Amanda! Prepare some booze! We, brothers, brought in a big haul today. It's time to celebrate!" Manny yelled as they approached the base.

"Manny, shut the fuck up. You are being rude... Thanks for all the hard work, Miss. Amanda." Hunter scolded.

"No. I thank you guys for all your hard work!" Amanda replied while bowing slightly to the group of young men.

"Hehehe! It's fine, no need to thank us... " Manny said, while rubbing the back of his head, embarrassed at the respect this grown woman was showing them.

After chatting with Amanda cordially for a while, the three guys entered the base and we were led to a room that had been reserved for them.

The room was fairly large and was just large enough to contain the three of them. The dining table in the room had been removed, and replaced with a double bed that took up a lot of space in the room. However, this was enough for the three guys as they didn't seem to care at all.

"Let's begin, shall we?" Hunter said in his deep brooding voice.

"Sir, yes sir!" Manny and Dan responded promptly with a flimsy military-like salute, prompting Hunter to smack his face in annoyance.

A faint light appeared in his hands as over detailed map appeared within it. We quickly spread the map on the ground.

"According to Cain's plan, the next place we target... is the central region..." Hunter said with a dark expression. His words made it seem as those the place he spoke about was the very entrance to hell itself...

"We just got back from clearing out a portion of the Wasteland.  Don't we need rest?" Manny said as he picked at his ears and let out along tired yawn.

Hunter drew a complex magic rune in the air with his finger. The rune reflected deep within his eyes, but was gone after a very brief second, "Unfortunately, we do not have the liberty to rest. I've had an off feeling about the central region for a long time. The mana in the skies above that place is polluted by dense devil energy, and the scouts I sent all disappeared. Their life signals?

Gone in the blink of an eye... And trust me when I say this, but my scouts are not so easy to kill..." Hunter had a serious, yet unbothered look on his face as he went through the information in his head.

"What do you think it could be?' Vincent asked with a cold expression.

"Anything related to those devils can be nothing short of a natural disaster. So rest up... We move in the next five hours..."

***

Deep within the central area of the university, a structure not of this world could be seen undergoing construction. It was shaped like a honeycomb and was crawling with monsters of all shapes and sizes.

There were {Bladed Devils}, {Speed Devils}, {Hulking Behemoths}, {Sentinel Drones}, {Hunters}, and even more variants of these monsters all crawling in and out of the hive-like structure in the thousands. The entire place looked like it had been thoroughly cleaned by these terrifying beings, and the landscape and topography had been terraformed to suit their tastes.

The ground in the area was covered in black sludge with glowing red veins that transferred what looked like deep dark red blood into the hive. The nearby buildings had been transformed into all types of strange-looking structures that bore no semblance to any buildings that could be man-made.

The entire sky and ground were covered in this sludge that was somewhere in between solid and liquid. It made the entire area look like a very creepy swamp. A swirling pillar of grey clouds that was coming from the sky was being attracted into the hive by an unknown device, or entity. The devils all around were either busy patrolling, or were carrying dead human and mutated beast corpses.

They carried them straight into the hive, where they would be transferred deeper into the hive to an unknown location where God knows what happens. The entire place smelled foul like a mixture of decaying corpses and tar.

Some devils were gathered together, where they shared the corpses of killed humans and mutated beasts they had caught for consumption. It was a very sickening sight. Even more creatures were coming in from all directions with even more prey they had caught.

One oddity to be noticed, however, was that all women that were pregnant were not eaten by any of the devils. Instead, they were taken directly into the hive. These women shockingly had not been killed, only knocked unconscious.

They were separated from the group of already dead humans, and taken into another part of the dark and damp hive, where they were placed on special tubs filled with a glowing green liquid.

Right now, there were almost a hundred women in various tubs that were fed a green fluid from the ground through tubes that look like tree roots into the tubs. They were all unconscious, but every single one of them appeared to be unconscious, including those that had already been there for some time. These women had been found when these monsters had completely conquered the entire central area.

As of this moment, all the people that had been in the central area had been killed. The only living humans that were still alive were the women in this place and the babies in their wombs.

Suddenly, from a tub beside the wall, some movement was noticed. This tub contained one of the pregnant women who had been captured earliest. The movement gradually increased until the fluid inside the tub began to spill out. As the shaking increased, the movement within the tub was increasing as well, and the color of the liquid within it also changing as well.

At first, it changed into a light pinkish color, then a light red. The color intensity gradually deepened until it because a deep crimson hue of red.

The shaking eventually stopped. Whatever was within the tub was no longer visible. There was a momentary silence before an extremely pale white hand emerged from within. None of the red fluid stuck to its skin as it slowly came out.

Slowly, the entity that lay in the tub gradually stood up. It possessed a human figure, with a petite stature. It was the very definition of perfection. Long white hair, and skin with no spots or patches. However, the only oddity in this creature was its pure white orbs that were in the place where its eyes were supposed to be.

It sat up in the tub for a while, before a hint of clarity appeared on its face. Suddenly, its face contorted as it began to bawl its eyes out. It continued to cry for a while until finally, some other changes were observed in the room.

From an entrance to the room where all the tubs were placed, a strange creature that looked like a gremlin with a head that was too large for its thin boney body walked into the room with wobbly steps. It swiftly approached the crying humanoid that was still in the tub with the red fluid. In its hand was a tube that was filled with a glowing red substance.

It was attached to a sharp needle, making the device in its hand resemble a large syringe. It quickly got onto the tub and stabbed the crying unsuspecting humanoid in the tub. As the syringe penetrated the flesh, the humanoid in the tub stopped crying until it eventually went silent. It slowly closed its eye as it seemed to lose consciousness.

Just when its eyelids had shut, they opened very quickly, and the center of its eye was already contaminated with a bright splotch of red. It looked at the gremlin-like creature who was still injecting the red fluid into its arm and with super fast reflexes, it grabbed the gremlin by the neck. The gremlin-like creature began to struggle violently, as a panicked look began to appear in its eye.

It tried biting, scratching, and clawing at the arm that held it, but it was unable to do a single thing, much less even leave a single mark on the arm.

Slowly, the entity in the tub brought the gremlin to its mouth, opened its mouth to reveal a set of pure white neatly shaped teeth, and began taking huge bites from the gremlin. Sickening crunches were heard, as the monster was devoured in less than ten seconds.

After it was done with its meal, it licked the blood off its arms and let out a quiet burp. It got out of the tub with wobbly steps, to reveal a female human child figure aesthetically looked about 15 years old. It looked just like a human, except for its abnormal eye color and somehow odd body shape.

In certain areas of its body, small boney spurs were growing out of the flesh, making its formerly almost perfect figure look extremely terrifying. When it got out of the tub, it could be observed that the female human who had been in the tub previously was no longer present. As for what happened to the mother of the oddly shaped super-sized newborn, that can only be known in the future.

For now, the poor humanoid creature just followed its basic instincts in search of food as it slowly became accustomed to walking.

Meeting a blade devil that was transporting a batch of dead humans and mutated beast corpses as it walked through the eerie passages of the hive, before the blade devil even had a chance to move as it caught sight of the figure approaching it, the humanoid creature approached the blade devil with unbelievable speed on its four limbs and quickly tore into the cargo the blade devil was carrying.

As if by protocol, the blade devil quickly left the humanoid to its devices. It looked at the humanoid creature as it violently ate all the corpses. It turned to look at one of the walls that now had an eye growing out of it. The eye was observing the creature as it feasted on the meat in front of it.

"Is it finally time, mother?!" The blade devil said in a voice filled with reverence towards the eye on the wall before it was also torn apart and eaten by the ravenous humanoid. As soon as the creature finished with its meal, it noticed that it was being observed. On instinct, it turned around at insane speeds only to see it was being stared at by the eye on the wall.

The eye began to glow with a strange light that seemed to resonate with the humanoid creature.

Moving closer to the wall, the creature put its palm on the eye of the wall. Various fleshy tendrils extended from the walls and attached themselves to the head of the humanoid creature. Suddenly, the light of intelligence began to shine in the eye of the creature as it opened its mouth and uttered in a quiet angelic voice a word that was beautiful as well as terrifying...

"M... mother?"...