Volume 15 Gray Fog Forest Chapter 759: Shaojiang Reform
Meanwhile , on the forest floor.
"The bombing... the bombing seems to have stopped." Mo Jue looked up at the dome and said in disbelief.
"Did they succeed?" Ivan subconsciously clenched his fists. The back of his neck was sore from having his head tilted back, but he didn't want to lower his head at all.
According to the time, if Ke Lan and his team had not succeeded, the plasma cannon of the "Shaojiang Modified" should have been fully charged by now.
Even if he died, he would watch the scene of his death clearly, instead of burying his head in the sand like the ostriches on Earth when danger came.
The next moment, an extremely strong white light penetrated the dense treetops and the thick fog that blocked out the sun. The originally dark open space in the forest was illuminated as if it were in broad daylight. The light was so strong that it was difficult to look directly at it even with goggles.
“Is… is it a plasma cannon? Fired… fired?” Mo Jue’s lips trembled slightly.
"No, if the plasma cannon had fired successfully, we would have been reduced to ashes by now." Thirty-three shook his head. "I don't have time to comment on your thoughts... After all, you came from the 'Ostron', don't you even have this little common sense?"
"I... I just..." Mo Jue was choked by Thirty-three, his face flushed and white, "I'm just a little nervous."
"Chapter 1, Article 3 of the 'Hell's ODST Combat Code, 'You must remain sensible and rational in any situation, even if death is ahead.'" Thirty-three read, "Soldiers who only know how to follow orders are ultimately consumables on the battlefield. You have to know how to make your own judgments on the battle situation."
"..." Mo Jue pursed his lips and didn't respond.
She wanted to say that she was no longer a soldier, but she didn't say it in the end.
A humanoid machine with a red-burned shell fell from above with a loud bang. It was the Blasphemer mecha that Ke Lan and Valentina were riding.
Under the effect of the cooling device, the outer shell of the aircraft gradually restored its original color. The door of the cockpit opened again, and Ke Lan, with her upper body naked, jumped out of the cockpit and landed on the ground.
"Did it work?" Ivan asked.
Ke Lan nodded, took the spare clothes handed to her by Ze Luo, and put them on: "After cutting off those vines, the native creatures in the Gray Mist Forest regarded the Shaojiang Kai as an invader. After those monsters consumed the energy shield, we fired a single shot to destroy the battleship's main gun... It shouldn't be long before the entire battleship falls from the sky."
"Is it so hot? Take off all your clothes?" After hearing that the "Shaojiang Modified" was about to crash, Ivan's mood suddenly improved a lot, and he even had time to tease Ke Lan.
"The Blasphemer mecha can be driven by two people. The clothes I wore before were torn to pieces by the tentacles used for nerve connection." Ke Lan said truthfully, "But as for the heat, the temperature in the cockpit should have reached over 60 degrees Celsius for just two or three seconds. I have no problem, but I don't know if Valentina has been affected. You can go and check on her."
"I'm fine." Valentina's voice came from the cockpit. "The heat was quickly taken away by the injection fluid in the cockpit. I was not affected at all."
"Two-driver?" Ivan was obviously more interested in another thing Ke Lan mentioned. "Isn't this mecha operated by the driver's nervous system? If two drivers are connected at the same time, won't there be a conflict of commands? Or did you two share consciousness at a high synchronization rate?"
"Let's study this after we get back." Ke Lan looked up into the sky, "The Shaojiang Modified will probably come crashing down soon. Everyone, be prepared to withstand the impact."
Although Ke Lan asked everyone to be prepared, in fact, it was enough for Ze Luo to be there alone - several small bubble-like space barriers wrapped everyone up and suspended them in the air. Outside these "space bubbles", three flexible buffer layers were set up in a row to resist the impact caused by the battleship landing.
Although Ze Luo's space barrier cannot withstand the plasma main gun of the "Shaojiang Modified", it is more than enough to block the vibration caused by the collision between the warship and the ground.
The crash of a battleship to the ground and the self-accelerating collision are two completely different concepts. The former is a free fall motion, with no thruster acceleration and no ship attitude control. When the angle cannot be adjusted, the battleship cannot pass through the canopy of the gray fog forest at the angle with the smallest obstruction area. Then this canopy can serve as an excellent speed bump, absorbing most of the kinetic energy of the battleship when it falls.
"I can feel that a large mass object has entered the tree canopy." Ze Luo said, "But that's all... This fog has a strong shielding effect on my perception ability."
Although everyone's vision could not penetrate the thick fog, the flow trajectory of the fog kept telling everyone a message: a huge monster was passing through the thick fog from top to bottom.
Or rather... falling.
Since the spatial barrier also blocks out external sounds, and the gray fog itself has extremely strong soundproofing capabilities, everyone is now in a completely silent world... But in this almost suffocating silence, the ground suddenly began to shake violently, the ground cracked, soil and rocks collapsed, countless supporting roots and trunks of fog trees were uprooted... A shock wave like a tidal wave swept in from the twelve o'clock direction, and the ground was all turned upside down wherever it passed, as if it was swept by an invisible giant plow.
"My goodness! This is the first time a warship crashed so close to me." Thirty-three couldn't help but sigh as he looked at the earth and rocks surging like a tide below.
"What are you going to do next?" Ivan looked at Ke Lan, "Continue to move deeper into the Gray Mist Forest, or..."
"Let's explore the wreckage of the 'Shaojiang Modified' first... I want to figure out some things." Ke Lan said.
"That's what I thought. Instead of continuing to explore deeper into the dangerous forest without a 'navigation', we might as well take advantage of this rare opportunity to collect some clues." Ivan nodded. "Since Mo Jue's father and his men were able to get these clues, then as one of the warships that participated in that mission, the 'Shaojiang Kai' must have preserved more valuable things."
Ke Lan and the others waited until the shaking completely stopped before returning to the ground. At this time, a large area of fog-dwelling trees had been pulled up or broken, which expanded the area of the clearing in the forest by dozens of times. Even the originally thick gray fog had become much .
"The recovery speed of the Mist Roost is very fast. It will be back to its original state in less than a week."
Just as Mo Jue said, many new saplings had sprouted from under the bark of the fallen mist trees. They grew rapidly like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, and the original tree bodies were used as nutrients and gradually withered.
"A week is more than enough time for us." Ke Lan walked at the front of the team - after the impact of the battleship crash, the concentration of gray fog in this area has dropped to about one kilometer behind the red line, and the fluidity has also become much stronger. The surrounding gray fog seems to be gathering in this direction... Compared with the fog trees that have grown again from saplings, the fog concentration is estimated to return to its original level in less than a few hours.
Along the way, Ke Lan also saw a number of "hatching nests" that were originally hidden in the canopy of the Mist Tree... But after the Mist Tree fell, these "hatching nests" all stopped the cultivation of biological weapons, and those egg-shaped embryos turned into liquid substances and were absorbed by the tree body, and then used as nutrients to supply the thriving seedlings.
For the Gray Mist Forest, filling the gap in this piece of forest seems to be the highest priority task at the moment.
This is good news - at least, Ke Lan and his team don't have to worry about being attacked by biological weapons on the ground. Although the individual combat power of the ghost-faced giant owl is not very strong, their number is too terrifying... Even the energy shield of the "Shaojiang Modified" can be blown up. Ke Lan's team may not be able to hold out for even a minute in the face of such a battle.
The crash site of the "Shaojiang Modified" was not far away. Ke Lan and his team only had to trek less than two hundred meters before the wreckage of the huge monster appeared in their sight.
Although the frigate's size can only be ranked at the bottom of the Ark Fleet, this is only a conclusion drawn when compared with those aircraft carriers and battleships that are several thousand meters long... In fact, the length of this "Shaojiang modified" frigate has exceeded 500 meters, which is larger than most of the sea-based aircraft carriers in the old era.
The hull of the "Shaojiang Modified", which had crashed twice, had become extremely dilapidated. Even the thick vines could not hold the shattered hull together. The entire battleship was broken into four pieces. The location of the belly plasma main gun was evaporated out of thin air, and even the hardest keel part of the ship was not left.
"That's good. It saves us the trouble of finding the entrance." Thirty-three walked to a crack that was more than ten meters wide and leaned over to look inside.
There seemed to be a serious fire inside the battleship. The bulkheads were burned black and the space inside the ship was filled with intricate vines.
"Where should we start the search?" Ivan looked at Ke Lan. "My personal suggestion is to search the bridge first, then the CIC and the escape pods that failed to be sent out. These are the places where intelligence is most likely to be stored."
"Well, let's follow this order and go to the bridge first." Ke Lan said.
The Shaojiang modified frigate uses a traditional lifting central bridge, which can be raised above the deck when not in combat, providing the command team with a good direct view. When in combat, it will sink into the ship's hull and collect information through thousands of surveillance cameras installed on the outside of the ship's hull.
Of course, there is another use for the lifting bridge, which is to allow the warship to be controlled through visual observation when all external monitors are destroyed or interfered with and cannot work normally. This situation rarely occurs, and raising the bridge during battle is also very dangerous. It can only be said to be an extreme response measure under extreme circumstances.
At least the crew of the warship will not be left with only the option of abandoning ship and escaping when all external vision is lost.
When the "Shaojiang Modified" crashed, the bridge sank into the interior of the hull, and the position that accommodated the bridge happened to be located in the second section of the wreckage. Between the second and third sections of the wreckage was where the plasma main gun was located. If the bridge was located a little further back, it would probably no longer exist now.
The broken end of the second section of the wreckage was also tightly blocked by vines and wood fibers. Sanjusan and Asano Akira moved to the front of the team at this time. One of them waved a sword and the other controlled a black flying blade. They quickly created a wide passage for the Blasphemer mecha to pass through.
What surprised Ke Lan was that these vines did not actually completely fill the space inside the battleship. At least the corridor leading to the bridge was unobstructed. There were only some vines as thick as fingers clinging to the walls, ceiling and ground, looking like the messy wiring in those dilapidated facilities.
"Actually, I'm quite curious... How do these vines control the warship..." Thirty-three lowered his voice and said, "Could it be that these pieces of wood can be connected to the circuit boards of the warship's control system?"
"Let's go in and take a look first." Ke Lan said.
The corridor leading to the bridge was only three meters high and four meters wide, so the Blasphemer mecha could not pass through. Ke Lan had no choice but to let Valentina, Mo Jue and Ivan stay at the entrance of the passage while he continued forward with Asano Akira, Sanjusan and Ze Luo.
But as they walked, they discovered something else.
Although the air in the corridor was very turbid, the thick gray fog outside did not invade the interior of the battleship... Logically speaking, the pervasive gray fog could seep in even if there was only a tiny gap, and the wreckage of the battleship was already riddled with holes and had no airtightness at all, so why didn't the gray fog flow into the interior of the battleship?
Moreover, these vines that invaded the warship did not seem to have the ability to generate fog.
Could it be that these vines and fog vines are two different species? But Ke Lan remembered that the vines wrapped around the controlled walker mechas were able to create fog, so that they could wrap the walker mechas with a layer of armor made of fog... But when the "Shaojiang Kai" was suspended in the sky before, apart from the vines wrapped around the hull, Ke Lan did not see a trace of fog attached to the warship.
It's just a little too...clean.
This made Ke Lan alert.
"There's movement in the bridge." Asano Akira stopped and said when they reached the middle of the corridor.
There is no gray fog here, so his "hearing" will naturally not be affected in any way.
