Alien Relic Hunter

Mine base, main tunnel of Shaft No. 4.

Asano Akira, who was following the team at the end, suddenly stopped and said, "There was a loud noise coming from the distance."

"A loud noise? Why didn't I hear it?" Layton took out his ears in frustration, "My ears are original. If something goes wrong, I'll be in big trouble."

"We didn't hear it either." Ke Lan said, "Did the fighting start on the front battlefield?"

"Here it comes again... this time louder." As soon as Asano Akira finished speaking, the entire tunnel shook violently. The collapsed cement debris fell from the top of the tunnel and hit everyone's heads and shoulders, making a rustling sound. The sound of rustling.

"Damn it... there was such a big movement, did they use ground-penetrating bombs? Or the kind with nuclear warheads?" Layton whispered, "Isn't this tunnel collapsed by the earthquake? Although it was made of concrete and steel. It has been reinforced, but this is an old project decades ago, and no one has maintained it for so many years... maybe the steel frames buried in the cement have rusted!"

"If the tunnel collapsed, wouldn't you still be holding it up?" Ivan glanced at him and said, "With the abilities of Lucifer and Augustus, they can dig it out even if they are buried, right?"

"That's what I say, but..."

"Okay, the frontal battlefield has begun. In other words, we only have four hours left." Ke Lan interrupted the conversation between the two people, "Two hundred meters further is the start of the mine car track. The station has started. The members of the Gopher Team have repaired and re-paved the railway track. We will take the minecart later - as for the thrust of the minecart, I will leave it to you."

"Understood!" Leiton nodded solemnly and immediately closed his mouth.

Ruins of the ancient copper city, frontal battlefield.

Three rounds of carpet saturation bombing have been completed. Several meters of rock formations were cut off the ground in the entire bombing area. Smoke and dust rose hundreds of meters into the sky, blocking the sky and the sun.

"Report, there is no reaction in the bombing zone!" the staff officer's voice sounded again.

"Let the ground troops... no, wait a minute." Terenz suddenly leaned down and stared closely at the battlefield wrapped in thick smoke below - he did not put the thermal infrared image on the screen, his eyes did not even He couldn't penetrate the smoke, and when he looked down from the battleship, he couldn't see anything at all. However, a strong omen could not be dissipated in his mind.

There must be something hidden in this area!

If this was a sandbox simulation rather than a real battlefield, he would even be willing to bet a thousand credits with his opponent and then send a reconnaissance force to verify his guess.

But he can't do that now - on the sand table, soldiers are just a number that can be increased or decreased at any time, but on the battlefield, behind every number are countless living lives.

Although he said that he has never suffered psychological pressure due to the death of soldiers, this does not mean that he is a commander who regards human life as trivial - Terenz has an almost perverted mental mysophobia: under his command, Every soldier killed in battle must "die a worthy death", and only valuable sacrifices are recognized. As for meaningless death in battle, it is the most intuitive manifestation of the commander's incompetence.

"Let the ground troops stay where they are and send drone armor troops to the bombing area!" Terenz only thought for two seconds before issuing a brand new order.

Hundreds of special containers were unloaded from the backs of the engineering mechas. The cabinet doors were opened, and nearly three thousand "Black Widow Spider" unmanned tactical mechas pulled on their slender metal limbs and poured in from three directions. bombing area.

The "Black Widow Spider" unmanned aerial vehicle is a new generation of military combat drone developed based on the "Wolf Spider" all-terrain tactical mecha. Compared with the "Wolf Spider", the "Black Widow Spider" cancels the carrying capacity of the "Wolf Spider". It has human functions, and has greatly simplified the power mechanism, discarding all armor except the gun mantlet, and the materials of non-force-bearing parts have also been replaced from high-performance alloys to polymers that are cheaper and easier to mass produce. As for The size of the machine body has been reduced from the original length of more than ten meters to less than two meters.

The original weapons of the "Tarantula" all-terrain tactical mecha only have an electromagnetic railgun installed on the back - of course, the railgun also uses a cheap castrated version, with a pitiful shooting life of only one hundred years. Fifty rounds.

Even a layman who is not very familiar with the research and development of weapons and equipment can easily tell that this mass-produced drone is developed as a "disposable consumable". However, when the number of these things reaches a certain level, time, it can still play a decisive role on the battlefield.

A salvo of thousands of railguns can even sink some light battleships equipped with energy shields.

These UAVs can be programmed for group formation command, or they can be controlled individually by ordinary UAVs... At this moment, the person who controls more than two thousand "Black Widow Spiders" is none other than Trenz himself.

He opened his arms and slid his fingers slowly and evenly on the touch screen, inducing the groups of UAVs that had been formed in advance to cover each other and alternately go deep into the bombing area - but the hundred who were in the lead were When multiple UAVs entered the center of the bombing zone, the signals of nearly 400 UAVs in the middle of the entire queue suddenly disappeared!

"Report, commander! A huge heat source has appeared in the center of the bombing area!" The nervous voice of the staff officer rang in Terenz's ears. At the same time, the number of UAV signals entering the bombing area was rapidly declining. Originally, the signal on the screen A large number of densely packed light spots are extinguishing in large areas.

"Fortunately, you didn't let the ground troops enter the bombing area." The old lieutenant general took a deep breath and said, "Otherwise, the losses of the drone troops would have to be borne by the soldiers."

Terenz had no intention of responding to the old general's sigh. His eyes scanned the dozen or so screens in front of him one by one, and his ten slender fingers danced on the touch screen like playing a piano, translating strings of brand-new command codes. Written into the original operating program.

The drone armor units did not choose to withdraw from the battlefield at the first time. Instead, they gathered a dozen firepower clusters while maintaining high-speed movement. In turn, they surrounded the areas where the light spots were extinguished, and began to move towards the smoke. Blind firing.

"I need the clearest thermal infrared images possible!" Terenz said.

The next second, an image composed of colorful blocks was projected on the big screen.

Although there is interference from smoke and flames, you can still see that in the center of the image, there are large orange-red blocks representing high heat. The largest one is even more than a kilometer long after scaling. !

"What is this...?!" The old lieutenant general stared at the screen and muttered.

"Compare it with the data of all known samples in the database immediately!" Terrence shouted, and the operations under his hands gradually slowed down - not because his physical strength had reached the limit, but because the bombing area was within There are less than a hundred drones left that he can control...

"Comparison completed! There are no samples with matching characteristics!" the staff officer said, "The enemy is a new species that has never been recorded!".

"I knew..." Terenz bit the tip of his tongue gently to dispel the fatigue caused by high-intensity operations, "If the heretical sect doesn't bring out these ghosts, they will It won’t be called a heretical sect!”

When the signal from the last "Black Widow Spider" disappeared, the smoke that had been covering the bombing area finally dissipated, and the true face of the "huge heat source" was finally revealed to everyone. ——

The ground in the entire bombing area had burst and collapsed, and thousands of tentacles emerged from the gaps in the ground. The smallest of these tentacles are several meters thick and hundreds of meters long; the largest one spans the entire bombing area, with a diameter of more than fifty meters... The top and end of this super tentacle are hidden under the ground, but only The length of this section exposed on the ground is already close to 1,500 meters!

The surface of these tentacles is covered with bloody pits, which are obviously the results of those ground-penetrating bombs just now - ground-penetrating bombs that are enough to blow ordinary creatures to pieces, and can't even tear open the mucous membrane on the surface of these tentacles. .

"It's a big guy..." Terenz straightened up and waved his right arm vigorously, "The ground troops retreated fifteen kilometers! The air force fleet used plasma cannons to fire freely, and the target was these tentacles exposed on the ground!"

"Do you think so many tentacles come from the same monster?" The old general couldn't help but ask.

"It's just intuition." Taking advantage of this free time, Terenz took out an energy drink, pulled out the cork, and drank it in one gulp. "Anyway, no matter if it is one person or a group, as long as it stops our army's attack, On the road, it must be eliminated.”

"If it is a single creature, a creature of this size is likely to be a prehistoric species." The old general said with some worry.

"The prehistoric species are not invincible... You should have read the report on the Leviathan incident, right?" Terenz said.

"I have read it, but according to the content of the report, the Leviathan destroyed by the First Fleet cannot be regarded as a complete Leviathan. Strictly speaking, it is not a resurrected prehistoric species, but a strange insect. It's just a simulated creature attached to the Leviathan skeleton," the old general said.

"Then the thing in front of you is just a poor imitation made by the heretic sect to imitate the prehistoric species." Terenz said as he zoomed in on the surveillance screen - he saw balls of dazzling plasma in these The surface of the tentacles exploded, and the high temperature that erupted directly created large areas of vitrified areas, but these tentacles were only burnt black and brittle.

When the carbonized tissues on the surface of the tentacles fall off, you can see that the new flesh and blood inside are growing at a numbing speed. The squirming granulations quickly fill the vacancies in the damaged body, even some that have not fallen off on their own. The carbonized layer has also been squeezed open by the granulation growing underneath.

Its self-healing speed is so fast that it can even restore all the damage caused by the first round of strikes before the fleet plasma cannon has cooled down and the second round of strikes arrives.

The powerful plasma cannon that the Ark Fleet was proud of, except for creating a large number of vitrified zones, actually failed to cause any substantial damage to it.

"Do you think the way these tentacles repair themselves is very similar to some kind of biological weapon that we are very familiar with?" Terenz said with a straight face and a look of disgust on his face.

"Seed of Corrosion... This thing is actually a Seed of Corrosion... But, can the Seed of Corrosion be so big?"

"It has already appeared in front of us. Even if our reason tells us that it is impossible, we have to believe it." Trenz sighed lightly, "But no matter what, there is at least one good news: for this kind of monster, We are very familiar with it and have corresponding means of handling it."

"With such a huge volume, it is difficult to locate the 'core' of this erosion seed. But if you want to kill it with a saturation dose of active ammunition, it will probably be an astronomical number." The old general shook his head and said.

"I have just calculated it. Assuming that the part above the ground is one-third of the entire volume, it would require at least two billion standard dose units of active ammunition to kill it... Of course, this is just a conservative estimate. I have no doubt that the part above ground is just the tip of the iceberg."

"Two billion units... combined with all the active munitions we hold, how many are there?"

"Fourteen.61 million." Terenz immediately reported a number, "It's a far cry from that."

"Then we can only use precision strikes..." The old lieutenant general frowned, "Let's not talk about how to locate the 'nuclear'. Even the plasma cannon can't cause effective damage to it, so how are we going to tear it apart? How about opening its body and exposing the inner core?"

[P.S. It has been one and a half years since I finished treatment. Next week, Monday and Tuesday, I will go back to the hospital for my semi-annual bone puncture review. Bone puncture requires hospitalization. Now because of the epidemic, I am not sure whether I will be able to do it after I move in. You cannot be discharged and go home on the same day (the bone puncture itself can be done in ten minutes, but because you need to be hospitalized to do this, bed arrangements are more troublesome. You need to make an appointment in advance, and you have to do nucleic acid tests and so on, and then there are a lot of things to do when you leave the hospital. Procedures), so I may take one or two days off depending on the situation. I hope everyone understands.

It has been almost three years since I was diagnosed on July 15, 2019. I hope this test will still remain negative. As long as there is no recurrence within five years, it can be regarded as clinically cured, and I can use this to brag in the future. .

Of course, I am also very grateful to you who have been with me until today. I wish you and myself always good health! 】