Alien Relic Hunter

"If it were just bat rats, this number could be handled..." Ke Lan said. At this time, Valentina no longer used her dagger to chop the bat rats that came out from under the lifting platform. She directly controlled them. The mecha rushed forward - the efficiency of crushing was much higher than slashing.

In less than ten seconds, Valkyrie's outer armor was covered with green bat-rat blood, looking like cyberpunk-style fluorescent graffiti, but even so, there were still countless bat-rats. They rushed towards the machine without fear of death. They stepped on the corpses of their companions and kept climbing up. Soon, Valkyrie's body was covered with layers of bats and rats... They gnawed them with their sharp teeth. Through the outer armor of the aircraft, even Ke Lan, who was sitting in the cockpit of another aircraft, could hear the heart-wrenching, intensive scratching sound.

Valentina simply let the machine squat down, and then directly activated the energy shield.

A brilliant screen of light flashed across the darkness, and with Valkyrie as the center, a blank area with a radius of several meters was instantly cleared.

Including those bat rats that climbed onto Valkyrie, at least three thousand bat rats and more corpses were vaporized in this short moment, and a disgusting burning smell suddenly filled the area. The entire shaft.

"This is not normal... Although small rodents like bat rats are ferocious in nature, they are still fundamentally different from low-level creatures without brains, such as cleft palates... Seek advantages and avoid Harm is the nature of living things. If so many companions were killed, the remaining bats and rats should have fled in all directions..." Ke Lan thought with some confusion.

"Is it because there is something driving them? A mind-controlling rat king? Or some kind of pheromone that makes them crazy?"

"No... none of these assumptions are valid... The four-eyed, six-legged bat rat is one of the indigenous creatures on Alpha Planet that has been studied more thoroughly by humans. There is no such thing as a rat king or a crazy pheromone. Things exist…”

"Then why are they trying to stop us at all costs? Could it be that... this is the nest of these bat rats?" Ke Lan's expression suddenly froze, and the corners of his mouth twitched unnaturally, "This luck... Isn’t it too much to memorize?”

Creatures such as bat rats belong to the bottom of the food chain of Alpha indigenous creatures. Their individual strength is very weak. Even if they appear in groups, they cannot pose a great threat to humans with advanced weapons. It is no exaggeration to say that just by relying on A Valkyrie machine, even without weapons, can easily kill tens of thousands of bat rats in a large nest.

but--

If there is a bat rat nest underneath this shaft, it means that the underground passage that originally had only one straight path may have turned into a super complex underground maze...the power of these inconspicuous little things to transform the terrain It's so terrifying, as long as you give them enough time, even the entire rock formation can be completely hollowed out.

"No, we have to get back to the ground!" Ke Lan suddenly woke up and grabbed the winch, but just as he pushed the winch again in the opposite direction, there was a sudden "click" at the bottom of the lifting platform. There was a crisp sound - Ke Lan felt that the winch in his hand suddenly lost its unique sense of resistance, and the entire lifting platform quickly fell to the bottom of the well.

"Fuck, what kind of shabby safety device is this? It doesn't break when it should break, but it doesn't break when it shouldn't..." Ke Lan cursed, opened the cockpit door, and shouted to Asano Akira: "Get to the cockpit. Come in! Prepare for impact!"

"What's going on? Aren't we going down?" Valentina clung to the edge of the lifting platform and asked in the team channel.

"The reason why these bats and rats are attacking us desperately is because this is their lair... The underground passages of the sandstone ruined city are probably riddled with holes by these guys, and we accidentally entered them. If so, you may not be able to get out in a short time!"

"You mean, we have to go back the way we came?" Valentina asked loudly.

"right."

"I got it." After saying that, her body turned around and grabbed Ke Lan's body. "You also hold on to me, and I will fly up with you."

Ke Lan is still a whiteboard skeleton at this time. The thruster output of the skeleton is not enough to support the body to fly to the wellhead, but Valkyrie is equipped with an external thruster. Although this thing is a disposable consumable, the internal Once the filled fuel is used up, it cannot be replenished, but its output is more than ten times that of the built-in propeller, which is enough to fly the two bodies out of the shaft together.

There was a muffled "bang" sound, and hot tail flames shot out from the thrusters. However, just after the two machines were lifted a few meters, the thrust suddenly changed direction, causing the two machines to move headlong. Hit the well wall!

"What, what's going on...?" Ke Lan asked hurriedly. Just now, he seemed to catch a glimpse of one of the two thrusters falling off Valkyrie's back on the monitor screen, as if it was being launched. The missile flew towards the wellhead...

The other remaining thruster was completely out of control, and the tail flames it sprayed were fluttering around. In this case, even an ace pilot like Valentina could not maintain it. Keeping the balance of the machine, Ke Lan and Ke Lan were bumping around in the shaft.

"It seems... the connector of the thruster... is broken... I don't know why... this happens..." The series of bumps and impacts made Valentina's speech become choppy. ...As for Ke Lan, he simply let go of the joystick and closed his eyes - anyway, as long as he was not thrown out of the magnetic levitation seat by the inertia, he would definitely not fall to death.

Akira Asano was also clinging to the back of Ke Lan's chair... His condition should be considered the best among the three, but the problem was that in this situation, he couldn't do anything to help.

"I...I know...it's the blood of those bat rats...that corroded the connectors of the propeller...and then under the maximum output, the corroded connectors were overwhelmed..." Ke Lan said with his eyes closed, although I figured out the reason, but it doesn’t help anymore——

Valentina reversed the elbow joint of the mecha's right arm, and used a dagger to cut off the connecting piece of the remaining thruster. The unfettered thruster flew out instantly, and after several collisions with the well wall , exploded more than twenty meters above their heads.

The two machines finally landed back on the lifting platform...but before they could catch their breath, the lifting platform hit the bottom of the shaft heavily!