The insect’s voice drifted over. Heaven knew where it was coming from now that the insect’s head had exploded.

Zhou Heng laughed wildly.

“Well? What do you think? I was practically raised on scares. When I was three, I watched a magician make a lion appear right in front of me. When I was five, I saw a guy perform a self-immolation act, then walk out of some nook or cranny three minutes later, completely unharmed. And when I was ten, I did something even more impressive: I took on ten delinquents all by myself. Sure, I lost and spent three months in bed, but after that, I’d grown a pair. You think you can pull tricks in front of me without realizing how sharp these eyes of mine are?”

Ignoring the stunned looks on the faces of the sisters, Su Xi and Su Mo, whether they were in front of him or behind him, Zhou Heng lifted his chin and spoke to the insect as if trying to reason with it.

“Since I’ve seen through your act, why don’t you quit pretending? Let me go. It’ll be better for everyone.”

The insect took both hands off Zhou Heng. Zhou Heng cheered, just about to tell the insect it knew what was up.

Then everything changed in an instant.

The gap where Su Xi had blasted the insect’s head open began to writhe with rapidly contracting muscle. Several strips of flesh, like tentacles, shot from the wound and grew in the air. In an instant, they swelled from the thickness of fingers to the size of fists.

The strips of flesh wrapped around one another. A slime of unknown origin coated their surface. Whatever it was made of, it hardened on contact with the air. In just a few breaths, a new layer of chitin had grown back.

In the space of a single breath, the insect had grown a new head.

“W-what kind of black technology is this…?”

Zhou Heng stared, dumbfounded.

“It is merely our instinct. That is not important. Mother, do you feel any discomfort? Is your chest hurting? Is your head spinning? And…”

Any organism fused with an Insect Race queen should experience genetic rejection, causing its bodily functions to collapse to some degree.

In the insect’s countless experiments, even organisms most compatible with the queen’s aggregate form had to undergo a process of destruction and reconstruction.

But Zhou Heng, standing before it, defied all established patterns. He felt no discomfort, and the human components of his body showed no sign of breaking down.

This was almost impossible. Every one of the insect’s rational faculties rejected the possibility.

Puzzled, the insect silently reached out and pressed a finger against Zhou Heng’s chest, lower abdomen, and ribs.

The sensations coming from those places were vastly different from the mammalian anatomy recorded in the insect’s database.

“Mother, your body is so strange…”

Zhou Heng slapped the insect’s hand away and snapped, “Strange your ass.”

“Forget it, forget it. You actors are something else, still stubbornly keeping up the act at a time like this. I’m not in the mood to deal with people who can even fool themselves. Go play by yourselves.”

Zhou Heng turned and headed toward Zhang Xuan and Lu Yile. In a corner where no one could see him, beads of sweat began to seep from his forehead.

He had no idea how the insect had grown a new head just now, but no matter how he looked at it, Zhou Heng couldn’t believe movie-prop technology could pull off something like that.

But whether it was possible didn’t matter anymore. He’d just drag Zhang Xuan and Lu Yile out of here. Once they were out in the wide world, whatever had happened here—and whatever the truth behind it was—would have nothing to do with Zhou Heng.

The insect didn’t bother with Zhou Heng. It simply turned around in silence.

Its hand, with only three fingers, stretched out straight. The chitin along the edges of its palm slowly writhed and shifted. The smooth, oval outline grew slender and sharp, until the outer edge became a razor-sharp biological cutter.

Born as a combat life-form, the insect had dynamic vision and reflexes that ordinary human mutants couldn’t match. Its insect-like strength, a hundred times its body weight, gave it terrifying speed and power.

As if that still weren’t enough, after the queen had given her offspring bodies strong enough to fight, she also gave them all kinds of biological weapons to push their strength and speed to the limit.

Some insects could fire bone spikes from their mouths that pierced thirty centimeters of steel. Others had tails more nimble than hands, yet powerful enough to snap a human in half. The insect now being hunted by human mutants had chitin blades growing from its arms. They rivaled diamond in hardness, but their toughness and ability to regenerate were beyond anything that inanimate diamond could match.

In battles against powerful human mutants, the insect had cut through tanks and sliced incoming sniper rounds in half. Almost every human mutant who dared fight it at close range ended up as a heap of mangled flesh on the ground.

At the height of the fighting, the insect alone had been enough to keep an entire regiment of armed soldiers from taking a single step closer.

Only when a human mutant of the Upper Calamity Species rank appeared, crushing every combat-type insect in its path, did the insect forces finally collapse across the board. The insect had escaped only because its fellow guards had sacrificed themselves.

But clearly, none of the human mutants here—not the one who’d already lost an arm, nor the one holding a gun—was the Upper Calamity Species who had once shattered the insects’ entire defense line.

The insect had no reason to run. It might as well face them head-on.

Facing Su Xi, the insect took the stance best suited for battle.