Mated to the Beast of the Wasteland (Gillian and Merrick) novel Chapter 259

Chapter 259 Our People Were Just Food?

Chapter 259 Our People Were Just Food?

Lily and two flower beasts picked up taint core 79.

71

+20 Free Coins

Dominic dropped them along a set route, and a major hung back in a small aircraft outside, ready to pull them if things went sideways.

Out here at the taint’s source, with no signal and the taint frying everything, even the best tech turned to junk the moment a team lost its beacon.

Dominic took off to run the rest of the squad to their cores and told them to yell for the Sovereign Guard if anything got ugly.

Lily stepped inside and eyed the S-class taint core. It didn’t look much different from the others, except the entrance had been chewed open like a rotten apple, and the fog rolling out of it stank like old meat.

The deeper they went, the blacker it got.

The two flower beasts wrinkled their noses. “Lily, you catching that? Smells like… like flower beast blood.”

Lily had already caught it, and every alarm in her head was ringing. “Keep going down,” she said.

The three of them hugged the rock wall and worked their way lower until they hit the cave floor. The taint was so thick it was clogging their lungs. They’d only been out of this crap for a few days, and their bodies were already fighting it.

Lily couldn’t wrap her head around how they’d ever survived down here. Her wrist terminal was dead by then too. No surprise. If it wasn’t one of the three top-tier wrist terminals, everything else in the wasteland was junk.

“Lily, why’s it so dead in here?” one of them asked.

“Yeah, if somebody walked into my cave, I’d be on them before they got two steps,” the other added.

Lily’s eyes snagged on something shifting in a hollow up ahead. A few slick lumps were piled together, pulsing. “What is that?” she whispered.

Under the paper-thin crimson hide, she could just make out the shape of petals she knew. Her chest locked up. It was a lily, but it had been eaten down to almost nothing-just a pale sliver of the flower’s core and a stripped stem.

1/3

13:07 Tue, Jul 14

Chapter 259 Our People Were Just Food?

71

+20 Free Coins

“So our people were just food for these things the whole time?” Lily’s voice broke. Her knuckles

went white.

The white lily petals had shriveled, half-drowned in a shallow black puddle. There was no way to know how long she’d been dead.

“Rip them apart!” Lily said.

Her roots cracked through the air and split into the bloated blood mass.

The thing shuddered, and the outer skin tore open, showing a half-formed face twisted inside. It was almost fully formed. It had eaten one of her own, and now it was trying on her face.

Lily went ice-cold and stopped pulling her punches. The blood mass was still mid-digestion, nowhere near done with the lily, and it couldn’t hold her off.

She swelled to full size, wrapped her roots around the half-formed thing, and dragged it to the surface.

It wasn’t done. It coiled tight around her roots and shot out feeding tendrils, trying to latch on and swallow her whole.

The Legion major waiting topside took one look at what Lily hauled out of that hole and called it in immediately.

Lily wasn’t the only one pulling out monsters.

Number Three, Four, Five, and Six had barely dropped half their teams when they got yanked right back.

Every flower beast crawling out of those caves was reporting the same thing: blood masses. Most of them hadn’t known what to do at first, but then they checked the Flora Squad’s StarChat.

Gillian had sent word. She was coming in with purge concentrate. They were going to melt every last one.

With Gillian’s orders locked in, the flower beasts worked in teams of three. One pinned the half-formed freak down while the other two drained the taint pool.

By the time Gillian and Merrick got there, sixty blood masses had been dragged out and herded together. Neither of them could shake the dark look off their faces.

Gillian walked up to Ruby. “Ruby, where’s Lily?”

2/3

13:07 Tue, Jul 14

Chapter 259 Our People Were Just Food?

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify