Harem Legion: Queens of the Apocalypse

Chapter 254

Opportunity like this didn’t come twice. Magnus Specter watched the flower‑spotted giant serpent clamp its jaws onto the sleeper coach. The beast shook its head wildly, jaws gaping, but the coach was wedged tight between its fangs, refusing to budge.

Magnus leapt off the vehicle. While sprinting, he shouted for the women to scatter and take cover. In a blur, he closed the few dozen meters, sprang upward, and clamped both hands onto two of the serpent’s scales.

A chill stabbed into his palms. His boots barely found balance as he landed against the serpent’s rolling body. One glance down told him enough—his palms looked like someone had hacked them with a cleaver, skin peeled back and raw.

So the damn thing’s scales were blades. Teeth clenched, Magnus triggered the Life Crystal in his left hand, ready to seal the wounds. But the serpent must’ve felt the burn of the Super Fire Crystal’s red glow on him. It twisted its body hard. Magnus slipped, tumbling down its flank and slamming into the ground. Three more deep gashes tore open across his torso.

A roar ripped from his throat. Healing himself mid‑roll, he cursed the serpent, its ancestors, its future offspring—every last one. He tumbled until his back hit the base of a building where the serpent couldn’t easily reach. Chest heaving, he leaned against the wall, spitting rage at the damn apocalypse, the damn serpent—damn everything.

Once the Life Crystal finished knitting his flesh, Magnus pushed himself up. The serpent was still tearing through everything around it, biting at shadows, smashing walls. And Magnus could only curse—because hell, he didn’t yet have a better plan.

This was a commercial street. The Ice Regiment team had seven sleeper coaches and nearly five hundred women. Those still outside—barely thirty—each carried either a Super Fire Crystal or, for most, a Metal Crystal. Following Magnus’s order, they split into two squads: one firing upward at the bats, one covering the ground against the rat beasts. Bullets sprayed in every direction as they fought and retreated. One squad ducked into a ruined fried‑chicken shop for cover.

But the moment they entered, two massive sparrows burst from the shadows, wings thrashing. The front line women fired blindly into the pitch‑black interior.

One sparrow—big as a motorcycle—took more than ten rounds before its wings failed. It crashed, flailing. The other fell soon after.

What now? Was he really about to be outplayed by a damn beast?

Just a long worm. Damn it.

Magnus growled, pulled an automatic rifle from his storage space—then froze. The serpent had snapped at random into the air and caught a giant bat’s wing and half its body.

The bat shrieked, twisting, and instinctively bit down on the serpent’s lower jaw. But it recoiled instantly, as if it had bitten pure flame. Screeching, it tried to fly off. The serpent didn’t care. It simply opened wider and swallowed the bat whole.

The serpent could eat bats. But bats couldn’t do a thing to the serpent.

Magnus’s mind flashed back to the lumber mill—rats eating centipedes when prey was scarce. On the second red‑light surge, chickens, ducks, geese—all ate centipedes and spiders. Sparrows and bats ate mosquitoes, even centipedes, but never each other. And yet this serpent devoured bats like nothing.

Magnus felt something click in his head. A thread of understanding. But now wasn’t the time. The serpent had already gulped down the bat and begun searching for its next target.

From its lower jaw all the way to its belly...

Magnus Specter had been raked by those jagged scales more than once. The sting still burned on his skin, and that pain finally made one thing clear: from the beast’s lower jaw all the way down its underside, there wasn’t a single scale. Bare flesh. Soft. That had to be its weakest spot.

He drew a slow, steady breath, tightened both hands around his automatic rifle, and poured a full burst straight into the flower‑striped giant serpent’s exposed underjaw and belly.

People always talked about hitting a snake at its “seven‑inch” point, but that saying wasn’t precise at all. “Seven inches” was really just the heart. Hit a normal snake’s heart and it dropped on the spot.

But serpents weren’t built like people. Their hearts shifted around. When a snake swallowed something massive, the heart had to move or it’d get crushed. So the real “seven inches” wasn’t fixed. And Magnus had no way of knowing exactly where the heart of this monstrous thing sat. He could only guess and rake bullets across the lower belly.

A grenade followed.

The blast went off right under the serpent’s abdomen. The lower body ruptured, and its head was blown clean into two halves. One half was flung several meters away. Yet the beast still clung to life—its remaining tongue stump thrashed on the ground, and its tail whipped the earth in furious spasms.

If he didn’t rush in now, he’d be nothing but a coward. And Magnus knew it.

He dragged a bloody hand through his hair, pushed off the ground, and sprinted toward the writhing bulk.

Serpent blood spurted wildly from the torn belly. Magnus launched himself forward like he was butchering a chicken, slamming down over the rupture, using his own body weight to choke the fountain of blood.

The air filled with a scorched‑meat smell. Heat and thick gore soaked him from head to toe.

The Super Fire Crystal’s effect shocked even him. Snakes were notoriously hard to kill—tenacious things. But against the heat blazing from the crystal embedded in his body, the beast’s flesh charred in under a minute. The wound went black, shriveled, and the giant serpent finally went limp. Dead to the last twitch.

Magnus uncorked a bottle of strong liquor, took a heavy swig that burned hotter than the blood steaming on his skin, then tossed the empty bottle aside. He leaned back against the serpent’s blackened belly, breathing hard.

Blood smeared his mouth, his clothes, his boots. The stench was everywhere. He sucked in great gulps of air and glanced around. The world had fallen silent.

Two sleeper buses still stood at the far edge of the battlefield—untouched, intact. They hadn’t moved an inch; the women inside were too frightened to come out.

Five other sleeper buses, one off‑road vehicle, and an infantry carrier lay overturned. Whether anyone inside was alive, he couldn’t yet tell.

And those two squads who’d used Gold Crystals—they could be anywhere by now. Smoke still drifted through the streets.

Magnus pushed himself upright and started checking the overturned buses. Three were burnt husks. The remaining two had rolled, but inside each were more than fifty female team members, all still breathing. No rats or bat beasts had rushed them—only because each bus had one woman empowered by a Super Fire Crystal guarding the driver’s window, blocking any threat, and every other opening had been tightly sealed.

He found the far‑off crane next. The two women in its cab were shaking so hard they could barely speak. Beasts skittered past the crane from time to time, keeping them frozen in terror.

Step by step, he worked through the mess. He directed the crane to lift the overturned sleeper buses back upright. He checked every cabin, treated the injured inside, then searched the streets until he found more than thirty survivors from the Gold Crystal teams.

Their situation was the same—each group protected by a single woman blazing with Super Fire Crystal power, keeping the rats and bats at bay.

When everything was finally handled, only then did Magnus let himself stop.

His gaze fell on the two massive, sundered halves of the flower‑striped giant serpent’s corpse lying across the ruined street...