Chapter 66: Taotie Queen
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"Boom boom boom——!!"
It was difficult to say how much time passed.
The battlefield, once drowned in flame and death, now lay still beneath a shimmering haze of dissipating heat.
The air sizzled with lingering radiation, the aftermath of a force that could turn cities into scorched wastelands.
But unlike the nuclear warheads created by humans that poisoned the earth, this destruction left no stain behind.
Within Miraluz's chest, the atomic reactor devoured the fallout absorbing the light of its own devastation.
What should have been a dead zone... became clean once more.
There would be no fallout. Not this time.
On top of the Great Wall, the soldiers of the Nameless Order looked on in stunned awe.
The silver-white dragon hung motionless in the sky, its wings casting a shadow longer than the wall itself.
His glowing scales shimmered against the pale sun, his breath misting faintly from his snout.
Below, the battlefield was nothing but charred ruin.
It was devastation on a scale that no non-nuclear human weapon could compare to.
Too strong.
That was the unspoken thought etched across every soldier's face.
If such a creature were to turn against them, no wall could hold, no weapon could harm, no army could stand.
And yet… Miraluz did not attack.
He stood, proud and silent, as if waiting.
"One million gene points."
The words echoed in Miraluz's mind, satisfaction glinting in his draconic eyes.
He grinned. With this, his next full skill upgrade was within reach.
But the battle wasn't over.
His expression darkened as he turned his gaze to the wasteland.
Despite the obliteration of nearly the entire Taotie horde, he knew—the Taotie Beast King was not among them.
They were also the queen.
She must be near.
With a flick of his tail, Miraluz scanned the land.
With a thought, he accessed the system's panel and poured gene points into one of his core skills.
[The Viper Gene "Telepathic Perception LV5" is upgraded to "Super Perception LV1 (0/100,000)", and the perception range is expanded to a radius of 500 miles, not only limited to the macro level, but also can go deep into the micro level. ]
The world trembled.
Suddenly, his perception expanded.
Five Hundred in every direction. It was not just sight—it was presence.
He could sense the heartbeats of creatures burrowed in caves beneath the soil, the vibration of tectonic plates hundreds of kilometers below, even the crystalline structure of minerals forming in volcanic heat.
And beneath the northern plains… he saw it.
A world of tunnels. Vast and ancient.
Dug deeper than human technology had ever dared.
The Taotie were not simply beasts—they were builders.
Their lair sprawled like an empire beneath the crust, its central cavern pulsing with a familiar dark presence.
Miraluz narrowed his eyes.
The Taotie Queen.
It wasn't the Beast King—but it was close.
The matriarch, swollen and throbbing with power, is embedded in the walls of her brood chamber.
And surrounding her, thousands of survivors. Wounded, enraged, desperate.
Preparing to defend their mother.
A distant tremor ran through the earth as Gray crouched low, the muscles beneath her armored scales rippling with tension.
Steam hissed from her nostrils.
Her glowing yellow eyes locked onto the twisted rock ahead, where the faintest scent of bile and rot leaked from unseen tunnels.
Behind her, the ranks of the Jurassic Alliance stood waiting, silent, breathing hard.
A thousand mutant dinosaurs crowded the subterranean basin, lit by the flickering flames of chemical torches mounted on the cave walls.
Velociraptors paced in formation.
Therizinosaurs tensed their curved claws.
The Carnotaurus twins stood shoulder to shoulder, their nostrils flaring like war drums.
The Queen was near.
Miraluz's voice echoed across their shared telepathic link, calm but cold.
"Gray. Lead the charge. The nest must be broken."
Gray answered with a guttural snarl and reared up, releasing a shriek that split the silence like a blade.
Her wings snapped wide, dust and bone swirling in the updraft.
Her tail lashed, smashing a nearby boulder into shards.
No speech. No hesitation.
She lunged forward, and the charge began.
The dinosaur horde surged after her, roaring like an avalanche of teeth and fury.
Dust fell in curtains from the cavern ceiling as their mass thundered down the twisting tunnels that led to the Queen's lair.
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The Brood Chamber
If hell had a heart, this was it.
Pulsing green light radiated from the slick walls, crawling with writhing Taotie spawn.
Their larval bodies twitched in mucus-filled pods.
The stench of ammonia and blood hung thick in the air.
Bioluminescent veins pulsed like infected arteries along the walls.
At the center of it all—swollen and horrifying—was the 2nd Gen Queen.
She was fused into the stone like a tumor of living death.
Thirty meters tall, her form barely resembled anything natural.
Her lower body was a nest of pulsating flesh, buried deep in the mountain's root.
Her upper torso resembled a malformed centipede, plated in obsidian chitin.
Her head, massive and crowned with jagged horns, slowly turned as her eyeless face "looked" upward.
Gray didn't wait.
She tore through the outer perimeter with brutal precision.
The first Taotie guards barely had time to scream.
Raptors darted in ahead, sinking their claws into joint gaps and tendon strips.
They moved like shadows, vanishing behind pillars, leaping over brambles of bone.
Therizinosaurs surged after them, slashing through defenders with sickle claws as long as scimitars.
Their strikes were clean and devastating—limbs flew, blood sprayed across the walls.
"Scatter and hit them from all sides!" Gray roared across the link.
"Don't let them group!"
But the Queen was ready.
From her bloated body, fleshy pods burst open—birthing fresh Taotie spawn, hissing and biting before their feet even touched the ground.
Her guardians—hulking brutes layered in dark bone like natural tanks—stepped forth with earth-shaking steps, carrying massive cleaver-like limbs meant for tearing dinosaurs apart.
Gray was the first to meet them.
Three of them charged her at once. She dropped low, using the slope of the chamber to her advantage.
The first brute swung high—she ducked beneath the blow and bit down hard on its exposed neck, tearing a chunk of flesh free.
It screamed—but the second slammed into her side, throwing her into a wall of eggs.
Gray snarled, tail whipping with a sonic crack.
It caught the brute's leg and shattered the bone.
As it fell, she pounced, her claws digging deep into its throat. Blood fountained.
The third slammed into her back—but she twisted mid-air and slammed it against a pillar, cracking its skull.
But she didn't emerge unscathed.
One of her wings was torn. Her flank bled freely where acidic bites had sunk through her outer scales.
A fang had lodged near her shoulder.
She roared in pain—but did not falter.
Her wounds started closing.
Behind her, the Carnotaurus twins charged, carving a line through the densest part of the hive.
One of them took a spear of bone to the side—but kept running, dragging the impaled Taotie behind him before flinging it into a burning pit.
Above, Dilophosaurs rained venom from the ceilings.
Their acidic spit corroded flesh and shattered defenses.
Some Taotie shrieked and clawed at their eyes, blinded as raptors leapt from the darkness to finish them.
The Queen shrieked—an ear-splitting psychic screech that rattled skulls.
Gray stumbled.
Every dinosaur did.
Their minds were assaulted with waves of alien emotion—pain, loss, hunger, ecstasy.
It was not a sound, but a psychic attack—a mother calling her brood, commanding obedience.
"Don't fall for it!" Gray bellowed.
"Hold the line!"
Some raptors screamed and lunged at each other, already confused by the Queen's call.
A Therizinosaur turned and cleaved two of its own kin before Gray roared again, her aura breaking the mental haze.
BOOM!
An explosion shook the chamber.
A Dilophosaur team had destroyed part of the egg line, igniting the queen's incubators.
Flames washed across the floor.
The Queen reared back in pain, vomiting bile and releasing dozens of umbilical tubes from her torso—each one connected to still-growing spawn.
The tubes thrashed like snakes, spraying black slime.
And then…