It had been surrounded, a more precise word would be "besieged", by 30 metallic figures that looked rather similar to the one which broke its cradle in the first place. The sight was growing hopeless to the beast. The situation already felt hellish when it encountered the one knife-wielding machinery at first, now there were more, 30 of them.
Had the creator of this world decided to end its life there?
The beast regained its serenity. Knowing its fate, its arms crossed over its shoulders, as soundlessly it hovered in the space, at center of the siege formed by the 30 machineries. Its expression was undisturbed, yet its shaking tail with a raised tip and its quivering pupils had exposed the fear of death as well as the desperation for an escape within itself.
The beast intended a gush from the fishnet!
Because of its worsening condition and that metallic figure who stood in the dark with the deadly weapons, a gush did sound far-fetched at the moment.
Author's text be like :
the beast was surrounded by about 30 mechs.
三十多
(the next sentence)
There were exactly/literally 30 mechs.
整整三十
(the sentence after that)
These 30 mechs/metallic beings surrounded it carefully.
Me: ??????
Let me put this into math form:
about 30 = x > 30 > y OR +/- 30
a.k.a any number - 28,29,30,31,32 would make the sense of about 30.
exactly / literally 30 = 30 and only 30.
I don't know if the beast was having hallucination out of fear or it has really poor math that it could not make out the number of mechs hunting it down.
Wait, maybe the author uses omniscient pov again to describe.
Well, he's the one who wrote a popular piece.