Uplifting Journey

Among the sparse forests on the edge of the vast grassland, a female African elephant several meters tall is leading a family of elephants, most of them female, with a number of more than 20 elephants walking on the elephant trail.

This road, which is very conspicuous among the vegetation and has been trampled back and forth by the largest species on land for a long time, is unusually smooth and solid, allowing the behemoths it carries and weighing several tons to walk comfortably.

They are qualified to be leisurely - their huge size and terrifying weight allow them to crush any hunter who dares to attack them. Whether it is a liger or a crocodile, it takes extraordinary courage to attack a giant elephant.

On this earth continent, no natural creature would take the initiative to challenge these seemingly docile herbivores unless they were dizzy from hunger.

Except for the human beings who use their wisdom to create tool weapons to arm themselves, thus jumping to the top of the food chain.

In front of the road where the elephant herd was walking, four men with shotguns on their backs and dusty clothes got off the off-road vehicle. While observing the elephant herd in the distance with binoculars, they approached the elephant road in the forest.

In the half-open trunk of the off-road vehicle that was left guarded by one person, you can see large and small white ivory with a bloody smell.

Familiarly checked the status of the guns and knives, several men worked together to set the traps taken from the car just in case near the elephant trail, and then they squatted a little far away under the cover of plants We talked in a low voice——

It's so small. These female elephants can't grow their teeth because of what they eat.

This is not bad. Some time ago, I even saw a whole herd of elephants without tusks.

No way?

Who told you not to read some books? I know a little about this. I remember that this is called natural selection, right? Hehe, or artificial selection——

Anyway, the elephant herds with long tusks are wiped out first, and the remaining elephant herds are genetically short or toothless, and their offspring are naturally more likely to be tuskless.

So, in the future, elephants will have no tusks to produce? Hey—the price of ivory is still soaring? I should save more good ones.

Ghost knows how many years it will take? Maybe the elephant herd in this area will be extinct before then, but what do we care about in the future? It's useless to think too much, and it's enough to get money now.

Yes. Hush, they're coming soon.

Perhaps because the poachers were too active on this land, the female elephant, the leader of the elephant herd, vaguely sensed something, and she led the group of elephants to a stop, wandering around and neighing uncomfortably.

Tch, can you still smell the car after parking so far away? It's getting more and more difficult.

The leading middle-aged hunter made a gesture, then he adjusted the position of the shotgun behind his back, and led the others through the woods.

Pushing aside the messy branches and stepping on the accumulated leaves all the way, the poachers slowly approached the elephant herd around an arc.

Experienced humans have already summed up many effective hunting rules. They delineated the main targets tacitly, and drove the elephants to move with the movements they made.

The vitality of an elephant weighing several tons is terrifying, and the body can still struggle and be active for a long time after being hit by a bullet.

Even if the weapons in their hands are powerful, if they want to actually kill the target, they still need to get very close and hit the relatively weaker denomination of the elephant from the front to ensure that the attack can directly destroy its brain.

This is quite a test of skill and courage. If there is a slight mistake, the elephant that has not been killed once will frantically charge and crush the enemy in front of it.

Being hit by a car might be better than getting hit by an elephant attack.

But skilled poachers haven't given the elephants a chance to fight back.

After some tugging and entanglement, the middle-aged poacher walked around in front of the leader female elephant who was alone. He looked at the huge beast less than ten meters away and stared at him, shaking his head and snouting. Speed ​​raised the double-barreled shotgun.

Boom—

Amidst the dense gunpowder smoke, a huge creature several meters high fell to the ground.

Finished a kill neatly, the middle-aged man blew on the muzzle of the gun, and then he slowly opened the chamber and replaced the shotgun with new bullets.

——The gun is really a good thing. Even a huge creature dozens or hundreds of times his weight can be easily dealt with by moving a finger. This is powerful, and it is the power of human beings beyond nature.

Looking at the huge creature whose legs, feet, and body were still slightly twitching, the middle-aged man shook his head, and was about to rush towards the direction where the elephant screamed from the other side.

But the moment the middle-aged man wanted to look away, a blood-red color fell from the sky along with the howling wind, blasting a fleshy cave on the tough flank skin of the giant elephant.

What is that? A red eagle? The middle-aged man who still had red afterimages in his eyes froze in his footsteps. He stared blankly at the huge blood hole in the elephant's body. The bottom of my heart gradually spread——

The sound of flesh and blood tearing and bones breaking continuously spread from the elephant carcass. There seemed to be a monster in the blood hole, swallowing the surrounding food.

Several tons of giant elephant carcasses are shriveling and shriveling at a speed visible to the naked eye. As several blood-red tentacles passing through the flesh are torn, the wounds of the elephant's face being shot before are exposed to the air, and the middle-aged poacher finally returned. Come on.

The man who muttered silently in the mouth of the monster didn't have the courage to use the weapon in his hand to fight against the unknown creature in front of him. He forcibly controlled his body that was trembling with fear, trying to slowly back away with the slightest movement.

However, in the forest covered with layers of fallen leaves and dead branches, it is very difficult to move without making a sound.

Along with the sound of the man trampling on the branches and leaves, the elephant carcass, which seemed to have only a layer of skin left, suddenly stopped wriggling.

In the next moment, a black and red insect-like creature no bigger than a man's palm jumped out of the elephant's wound, and rushed towards the poacher with extremely quick movements.

Fack!

In an instant, the middle-aged man broke through his limit in the face of a huge threat to his life. He burst out with all his potential and swung the muzzle of the gun in his hand, aiming at the monster rushing to his feet and pulling the trigger.

The bullets erupting from the muzzle accurately hit the high-speed moving black shadow, and the powerful metal bullets split the weird black shadow in two on the spot.

However, the front half of the monster's body still rushed to the man's feet due to inertia, and it swung its sickle-like joints in the air, and inserted its sharp teeth and sharp joints deeply into the man's feet after touching the ground in an instant. wrist.

The severe pain hit in an instant, but disappeared in an instant. In a panic, the middle-aged man grabbed the hot gun barrel and hit his feet with the handle of the gun, trying to get rid of the attack of the unknown creature.

But soon, in vain, he saw clearly the strange scene on his feet—the remnant body of the strange insect was merging into his feet as a whole in a supernatural way.

Terrible numbness spread from his right foot, which had no abnormal wounds, and half of his body was stiffened by the unknown toxin. The man fell to the ground, and then he saw that the second half of the strange insect had been interrupted before. The body, right next to his face, twisted and transformed into a complete individual that was smaller, and at this moment, its jointed limbs were curled up and ready to pounce.

But the next moment, the monster stopped its movements.

In the fear that froze his soul, the middle-aged man saw an existence that looked like a human being at the place where the elephant carcass had been, but whose breath was absolutely inhuman, and slowly stood up from the remaining flesh of the elephant.

The trembling that originated from the life instinct desperately reminded the middle-aged man that what appeared in front of him now was a terrifying monster that was higher up the food chain.

Under the man's desperate gaze, the ferocious monster crawled back like an obedient pet, quickly jumped onto the outstretched palm of the man, and slowly merged into his palm after being looked at by him for a while.

The Asian young man with streamlined muscles all over his body slowly walked in front of the collapsed middle-aged poacher. As he walked, a layer of black leather-like clothes was woven and formed on his body.

The young man squatted down, looked at the man with eyes full of fear, and spoke a fairly standard international language: Now, what century is it in?