The plasma rifle flared again. This time, before the green aperture vanished, the white beam plunged straight into it.
A second later, less than twenty meters from the attacker, one of his own comrades screamed.
The man's knee had been struck by a white beam that seemed to fire out of thin air. His leg was severed cleanly at the joint.
It looked as though the shot had come from nowhere, but if one magnified the point of light, they would see a faint afterimage: a tiny tunnel of radiance.
His own attack had been redirected back at his side again.
The screaming soldier hit the ground. The instant he fell, another aperture suddenly opened beneath him and swallowed him whole.
As his body dropped out of sight, blood sprayed upward.
Boom!
The moment the soldier saw the blood, he fired an explosive round into the aperture.
But after the explosion, all it left behind was a crater. The soldier inside his combat suit looked even more grim.
Obviously, the full power of the round had been released into the crater itself. That meant the blast's killing force had never reached the interior of the aperture. He had been one step too slow.
Then the soldier seemed to sense something. He jerked his head up and saw a dismembered body falling from above.
It was the soldier who had just been swallowed.
Without hesitation, he opened fire on his comrade's remains, ripping the body to pieces and blasting it into a mist of blood.
But the enemy did not use the corpse as cover and launch an attack, as he had expected.
Where was it?
Another scream rang out.
Another comrade had failed to dodge in time. A disintegration beam had fired from an aperture opened in a blind spot, and the soldier had been unable to avoid it.
Less than a second after he was vaporized, another comrade's body was torn apart in a grotesque fashion.
An aperture had suddenly opened behind him. As the man backed away, half his body stepped into the aperture. Then it snapped shut, shearing that half of him away.
The remaining half of the corpse had also been punched through by a large hole. It had been caused by the enemy's beam from within the aperture. The penetrating beam continued on and struck another comrade in the shoulder, disintegrating half of it.
This ghostlike style of hunting was the Necrons' phase-shifting technology.
This technology allowed Necrons to move between alternating spatial dimensions, creating shortcuts through space.
Simply put, they created a dimensional pocket and hid inside it. As long as they did not open a passage, attacks from reality could not hit them, and they could not be detected.
At the same time, that dimensional pocket also allowed them to compress space, letting them close the distance to their targets at extreme speed. To outside observers, it looked almost like teleportation.
When the Necrons faced enemy fire, if an attack entered the dimensional pocket and they could open two apertures connecting to the real world in time, the incoming attack would emerge from another exit.
In other words, they could redirect the enemy's own attacks back at them.
[
Goal: Become S.T.A.R.S.: What is with these metal skeletons? Are they using magic? Teleportation?
]
The sudden question came from Claire Redfield. She had recently been preparing to join S.T.A.R.S., the Special Tactics and Rescue Service formed by the Raccoon City Police Department. She was currently undergoing training, so she had barely had any free time to log in.
Now that she had finally joined the stream, this was the scene she saw: soldiers being killed by strange ghosts at terrifying speed. All she could catch were tiny lingering points of green ghost-fire flickering back and forth.
Each flicker meant another soldier had been killed by an invisible ghost.
Yet no one answered her question. Perhaps everyone was too focused on watching the stream.
She glanced at the comments. It seemed they were being attacked by a mechanical race called the Necrons.
Claire adjusted the stream, switching away from the live feed and rewinding it like a movie so she could understand what had happened earlier.
At the same time, she adjusted the playback speed. It took her about ten minutes to understand the situation.
The reason she had been unable to see the "ghosts" when she first entered the stream was simple: they were moving too fast. With her dynamic vision, she could barely catch their silhouettes.
Those "ghosts" were actually Necrons launching attacks through spatial jumps across different dimensions.
As for how she understood that they were using a technology called phase shifting, that came from the conversations between the T'au soldiers and the Astra Militarum soldiers.
And that movement speed, combined with their attack speed, left Claire deeply unsettled.
In her world, the reaction speed of an average person was generally around three hundred milliseconds. Through professional training, athletes could shorten that to about one hundred fifty to one hundred eighty milliseconds.
For soldiers, even harsher training could shorten that reaction time further, to around one hundred milliseconds.
Among the team she planned to join, the person with the fastest reaction time was eighty-five milliseconds. That was practically the human limit.
Yet in those eighty-five milliseconds, one of these Necrons could flash five or six times and kill five or six targets.
That meant a monster like this would be effectively invincible if even one of them entered her world.
Humans would be slaughtered in droves before they could even react, and they would not be able to capture the enemy's figure at all.
Even wide-area explosives would be useless. Even nuclear weapons would not help, because the monster could hide in another dimension.
Now that she thought about it, the ghost mode on Mr. Kain's ship seemed somewhat similar to this technology. It also entered another dimensional space.
Claire adjusted the stream again, dragging it back to the latest live footage.
Hm?
She arrived just in time to see a Necron blasted out of dimensional space.
She rewound slightly and finally understood how it had been killed.
An Astartes warrior had sacrificed one of his arms. After it was severed and fell into that dimensional space, the bomb clutched in the hand detonated inside, destroying the phase-shifting Necron.
Earlier, the appearance of these phase-shifting Necrons had indeed caught them off guard, causing heavy casualties in a very short period of time.
But after paying a certain price, they finally began destroying these special units one after another.
Most of those kills, however, were achieved through mutual destruction.
At present, they had advanced into a vast plaza. At the far end of it, Claire saw a light source radiating an almost impossible brilliance. That seemed to be Mr. Kain and the others' objective.
But blocking the way was an even denser mass of Necrons, surging toward them like a tide.
Because this was a large plaza, there was almost nowhere to take cover.
What followed was an intense exchange of fire between both sides. At the same time, they had to dodge the storm of incoming projectiles.
One misstep, and they were either shredded to pieces or disintegrated into mist.
Then an anomaly appeared.
Centered on Mr. Kain, the escort formation pressed forward. Suddenly, the Astartes at the very front lost their balance without warning and began to fall.
It looked as though some invisible attack was breaking through the escort formation and heading straight for Kain at its core.
In the blink of an eye, the attack seemed to reach him. Kain hurriedly stepped back, and the sword in his hand slashed through the air.
It seemed to touch something faintly.
A tiny spark flashed for an instant, so brief it almost felt like an illusion.
What was that?
Claire slowed the footage again. Only then did she finally see it: a sharp claw tip, roughly the size of a scalpel, had been nicked by his sword. Just as the blade was about to cut deeper, the claw vanished, turning the slash into a strike against empty air.
And when it disappeared, the faint green glow it released looked exactly like the effect produced when those phase-shifting metal skeletons transferred through space.
It was as if this abnormal thing could partially materialize its own body into reality to attack the enemy, without needing to open a dimensional passage into the real world the way those metal skeletons did.
(End of Chapter)
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