The difference was visible before the combat began, in how the mutants occupied the space. Not the chaotic concentration of the first chambers but a distribution with something resembling the positioning logic of creatures that had survived long enough in a selection system to have learned, however primitively, how to be in a room with others trying to be in the same room.
The weakest ones at the edges… The strongest toward the center.
The cannibalizing had weakened them here too, but the weakening was less pronounced than in the earlier levels.
