"John is back!"
The shout echoed across the blood-soaked plains, though it was nearly drowned out by the chaos of war. John had spent five gruelling hours circling the perimeter of his base walls, a journey that was less a travel and more a harvest of the cores.
By the time he finally reached the northern front, he found his friends exactly where he expected them: on the ground, submerged in a sea of yellow monsters.
They were currently engaged with the tenth wave, a terrifying, staggering legion of over one hundred and fifty thousand monsters. The escalation had reached a tipping point where the landscape itself seemed to be composed of nothing but the writhing, skinless bodies of the yellow swarm.
The previous wave had taken the team more than two hours of non-stop combat to clear, and they had already been grinding against this tenth wave for over an hour.
