Volume 13 Ancient Bronze City Ruins Chapter 616: Super Giant Corrosion Seed
Mining base, main tunnel of shaft No. 4.
Asano Akira, who was following the end of the team, suddenly stopped and said, "There is a loud noise in the distance."
"A loud noise? Why didn't I hear it?" Layton picked his ears in frustration. "My ears are original. If something goes wrong, it will be a big trouble."
"We didn't hear anything either." Ke Lan said, "Did the fighting start on the front battlefield?"
"It's coming again...it's louder this time." As soon as Asano Akira finished his words, the entire tunnel shook violently. Collapsed cement debris fell from the top of the tunnel, hitting everyone's heads and shoulders, making a rustling sound.
"Shit... With such a loud noise, did they use a bunker-buster? Or one with a nuclear warhead?" Layton exclaimed, "Will this tunnel collapse? Although it has been reinforced with concrete and steel, this is an old project from decades ago. No one has maintained it for so many years... Maybe the steel frames buried in the cement have already rusted!"
"If the tunnel collapses, won't you still be there to hold it up?" Ivan glanced at him and said, "With the abilities of Lucifer and Augustus, you can dig them out even if they are buried, right?"
"That's what I said, but..."
"Okay, the frontal battlefield has already started, which means we only have four hours left." Ke Lan interrupted the conversation between the two people, "Two hundred meters ahead is the starting station of the mine cart track. The members of the Gopher Squad have repaired and laid more tracks. We will take the mine cart later - as for the thrust of the mine cart, it's up to you."
"I understand!" Leighton nodded solemnly and immediately shut his mouth.
Ancient Bronze City Ruins, the front battlefield.
Three rounds of carpet-style saturation bombing have been completed. The ground in the entire bombing area has been forcibly cut off by several meters of rock layer. The smoke and dust in the sky have been rising to hundreds of meters in the air, covering the sky and the sun.
"Report, there is no reaction in the bombing area!" 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 below which was shrouded in thick smoke. He did not project the thermal infrared image onto the screen. His eyes could not penetrate the smoke at all. Looking down from the battleship, he could not see anything at all. However, a strong omen kept lingering 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 credit points with his opponent and then send a reconnaissance team 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 lives.
Although he said that he never suffered psychological pressure because of the death of soldiers, it did not mean that he was a commander who regarded human life as worthless - Terenz had an almost abnormal mental cleanliness: under his command, every soldier who died must have "death for a good cause", only valuable sacrifices were recognized, and meaningless deaths in battle were the most direct manifestation of the commander's incompetence.
"Let the ground troops stay where they are and send unmanned mecha troops to the bombing area!" After thinking for only two seconds, Terenz issued a new order.
Hundreds of special containers were unloaded from the backs of the engineering mechas. The doors of the containers opened, and nearly three thousand "Black Widow Spider" unmanned tactical mechas, with their slender metal limbs, poured into the bombing area from three directions.
The "Black Widow Spider" unmanned mecha 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" has cancelled its manned function and greatly simplified its power mechanism. It has abandoned all armor except the gun shield, and the material of non-stress-bearing parts has been changed from high-performance alloys to polymers that are cheaper and easier to mass produce. As for the size of the fuselage, it has been reduced from more than ten meters long to less than two meters.
The only thing left of the original weapons of the Wolf Spider all-terrain tactical mecha was an electromagnetic railgun mounted on its back - of course, the railgun was a cheap, castrated version with a shooting life of only a pitiful 150 rounds.
Even a layman who is not very familiar with the research and development of weapons and equipment can see that this type of mass-produced drone is developed as a "disposable consumable". However, when the number of these things reaches a certain level, they can still play a decisive role on the battlefield.
The simultaneous firing of thousands of railguns can even sink some light warships equipped with energy shields.
These drone mechas can be programmed to conduct cluster formation command, or they can be remotely controlled like ordinary drones... and at this moment, the person controlling more than 2,000 "Black Widow Spiders" is none other than Terenz himself.
With his arms outstretched, his ten fingers slid slowly and evenly across the touch screen, inducing the pre-arranged drone mechas to take turns going deeper into the bombing area under mutual cover. But just when the leading hundred or so drone mechas entered the center of the bombing area, the signals of nearly four hundred drone mechas in the middle of the entire queue suddenly disappeared!
"Report, report to the commander! A huge heat source has appeared in the center of the bombing area!" The nervous voice of the staff officer sounded in Terenz's ears. At the same time, the number of drone mecha signals entering the bombing area was rapidly decreasing, and the large area of light spots that were originally densely packed on the screen was being extinguished 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 didn't bother to respond to the old general's sigh. His eyes scanned the dozen or so screens in front of him one by one. His ten slender fingers moved on the touch screen like playing a piano, writing a series of new command codes into the original operating procedures.
The unmanned mecha troops did not choose to withdraw from the battlefield immediately. Instead, they gathered into more than a dozen firepower clusters while maintaining high-speed movement, surrounded the areas where the light spots were extinguished, and began to blindly fire into the smoke.
"I need the clearest thermal infrared imagery!" said Terenz.
The next second, an image composed of colorful blocks was projected onto the big screen.
Although there was interference from smoke and flames, one could still see large sections of orange-red blocks representing high temperatures in the center of the image. After proportional conversion, the largest block was even more than a kilometer long!
“What is this…?!” the old lieutenant general stared at the screen and muttered.
"Compare the data of all known samples in the database immediately!" Terenz shouted, and his operation gradually slowed down - not because his physical strength had reached its limit, but because there were less than a hundred drone mechas left in the bombing area that he could control...
"Comparison completed! No samples match any of the characteristics!" said the staff officer, "The enemy is a new species that has never been recorded!".
"I knew it..." Terenz bit his tongue lightly to dispel the fatigue brought by the high-intensity operation. "If the heretics didn't come up with these weird things, they wouldn't be called heretics!"
When the signal from the last "Black Widow Spider" disappeared, the smoke that had been covering the bombing area finally dissipated, and the true appearance of the "huge heat source" was finally revealed to everyone -
The ground in the entire bombing area had cracked and collapsed, and thousands of tentacles emerged from the cracks in the ground. The smallest of these tentacles was several meters thick and hundreds of meters long; the largest one ran across the entire bombing area, with a diameter of more than 50 meters... The top and end of this super tentacle were hidden under the ground, but the length of the part exposed above the ground was nearly 1,500 meters!
The surface of these tentacles was covered with bloody holes, which were obviously the results of the bunker-buster bombs just now. The bunker-buster bombs that were powerful enough to blow ordinary creatures to pieces could not even tear the mucous membrane on the surface of these tentacles.
"It's a big one..." Terenzi stood up and swung his right arm vigorously. "Ground forces retreat fifteen kilometers! The air fleet uses plasma cannons to fire freely, targeting these tentacles exposed on the ground!"
"Do you think all these tentacles come from the same monster?" the old general couldn't help but ask.
"It's just a hunch." Taking advantage of this free time, Terenz took out an energy drink, uncorked it, and drank it all in one gulp. "Anyway, no matter if it's just one or a group, as long as it blocks our army's path of attack, we must destroy it."
"If it is a single organism, a creature of this size is very likely a prehistoric species." The old general said with some concern.
"The primitive species is not invincible... You should have read the report on the Leviathan incident, right?" said Terenz.
"I've read it, but according to the report, the Leviathan destroyed by the First Fleet cannot be considered a complete Leviathan. Strictly speaking, it was not a resurrected primitive species, but a strange insect creature that attached itself to the Leviathan skeleton and mimicked it." said the old general.
"The thing before our eyes is nothing but a crude imitation made by a heretical sect imitating the primitive species." As Terenz spoke, he zoomed in the surveillance screen - he saw balls of dazzling plasma exploding on the surface of these tentacles, and the high temperature generated directly created large areas of vitrified areas, but these tentacles were merely burned black and brittle.
When the carbonized tissue on the surface of the tentacle fell off, you could see the new flesh and blood inside growing at a speed that would make your scalp numb. The wriggling granulation tissue quickly filled the vacant positions of the damaged body. Even some carbonized layers that did not fall off on their own had been squeezed and cracked by the granulation tissue growing underneath.
Its self-repair speed is so fast that it can even restore all the damage caused by the first round of attacks before the fleet's plasma cannons have cooled down and the second round of attacks arrives.
The powerful plasma cannon that the Ark Fleet was so proud of, except , failed to cause any substantial damage to it.
"Look, the way these tentacles repair themselves is very similar to some biological weapons we are very familiar with?" Terenz said with a stern face full of disgust.
"Erosion Seed... This thing is actually an Erosion Seed... But, can an Erosion Seed be this big?"
"It has already appeared in front of us. Even if reason tells us that this is impossible, we have no choice but to believe it." Terenzi sighed lightly, "But no matter what, there is at least one good news: we are very familiar with this kind of monster, and we have the corresponding means to deal with it."
"With such a huge size, it is difficult to locate the 'core' of this Seed of Erosion. But if we want to kill it with a saturated dose of active ammunition, I'm afraid it will be an astronomical figure." The old general shook his head and said.
"I've just calculated it. Assuming that the part exposed above the ground is one-third of its total volume, it would take at least two billion standard doses of active ammunition to kill it... Of course, this is just a conservative estimate. I have no doubt that the part above the ground is just the tip of the iceberg."
"Two billion units... put together all the active munitions we have, how many?"
"One hundred and fourteen million, six hundred and one hundred thousand." Terenzi immediately reported a number, "It's a far cry."
"Then we can only use precision strikes..." The old lieutenant general frowned. "Let's not talk about how to locate the 'core'. Even plasma cannons can't cause effective damage to it. How can we tear open its body and expose the 'core' inside?"
