Volume 2: The Undersea City Chapter 61 Black Skeleton
"Are you sure?" Ke Lan stared at the pile of rocks and asked in a low voice.
" ...He was not mistaken..." Caroline swallowed hard, "The camera of the power armor captured the image of that thing...It was a human skeleton, but only the upper body."
"Skeleton?!" Ke Lan quickly searched for relevant clues in her memory... However, she couldn't find any close results...
A skeleton, how does it move?
He couldn't help but think of the corpse controlled by the parasite in the A-087 ruins, but the problem was that even in that situation, the corpse could only move on its own by relying on the continuous contraction and relaxation of muscles that had not yet rotted. A skeleton alone, without muscles, fascia, tendon sheaths and other tissues, would not be able to move.
The kind of skeleton monsters that can jump around and run around only exist in the magical world and supernatural works. If they want to appear in the real world , there is only one possibility: the mechanical system that supports the movement of the skeleton relies on external energy supply, just like the powered exoskeleton invented by humans.
But this possibility was directly denied by Ke Lan. Even if the Security Bureau was worried about these rock specimens, they could just leave a few agents to guard them. There was no need to secretly hide such a thing in the pile of rocks.
"That shouldn't be a human skeleton...what you see might be its exoskeleton." Ke Lan concluded.
"I've never seen such indigenous creatures!" There was a hint of fear in Caroline's tone. Even the female first mate who dared to fight to the death with the giant eels of the deep sea would inevitably feel some fear when facing unknown things.
"It's not just you. None of us have seen that thing." Ke Lan turned her head and glanced at Caroline, only to see that she had taken off the Gauss rifle hanging on the back of the power armor -
"First mate, are you sure...the weapon in your hand won't penetrate the sealing bulkhead of the drainage tank?"
"Ah... sorry, I'm just, just a little nervous..." Caroline was stunned for a moment, then hung up the Gauss rifle hesitantly, and waved her hands. Two pieces of mantis knives more than half a meter long suddenly popped out from her arm armor.
"Here they come again!" It was still Asano Akira who issued the warning in advance, but this time he did not rush forward to meet the enemy. Instead, he took a step back diagonally and stood in front of Ke Lan.
"Ke Lan! His target is you!" Liao Zilang shouted at the same time, but he did not throw the impact grenade in his hand. Instead, he unfolded a folding shield to protect Ke Lan's other side.
Asano Akira held the sword in his hand horizontally, and the crisp collision sound rang out again. The black shadow retreated after one strike, but this time it did not choose to hide. Instead, it perched on the highest point of the stone pile, looking down at the four of them.
This time, Ke Lan finally saw the appearance of the thing clearly.
This thing...is actually a mutilated human skeleton!
Its main body is a human spine severed at the waist, with incomplete ribs connected on both sides. The clavicle, scapula and humerus are relatively intact, but the radius and pubic bone are strangely twisted and entangled together, and a pair of sharp bone claws are three or four times longer than normal human fingers.
Looking up from the cervical spine, it is a half-broken skull. The part above the zygomatic bone is completely missing, and the upper and lower jaws are tightly clenched together. However, the teeth are exactly the same as those of a normal person, with incisors, canines, and anterior and posterior molars, neatly arranged on the gums.
"This is clearly a human skeleton!" Caroline exclaimed in a low voice.
"It's not that simple..." Ke Lan carefully observed the "skeleton". Apart from the changes below the elbows, the overall material of the skeleton seemed to be very different from human bones... The skeleton was gray-black in color, with a relatively rough surface and densely covered with small holes - at first glance, it was very similar to those rock samples.
Could it be that this thing is made of rock?
This is not without precedent. They have encountered strange pieces of meat that could transform into the appearance of a hound and Asano Akira before. Although only Ke Lan has the memory of this part, from all indications, it all happened in reality and is not a so-called hallucination.
Those pieces of flesh that turned into human shapes absorbed human blood, obtained human genetic genes, assimilated their own cells, and continued to decompose and proliferate - but no matter how strange the pieces of flesh were, they were still a kind of "living thing"... and as a "dead object", how did the rock change into an incomplete human skeleton?
Moreover... this skeleton with only half of its skull left seems to still have complete self-awareness, and it can even adopt tactics such as ambush.
Not only that, after it failed to gain the upper hand in its first fight with Asano Akira, it immediately changed its attack target - this thing not only has the ability to think, but also has a pretty high IQ!
This just confirmed Ke Lan's initial judgment: this thing is an unknown Alpha creature with a peculiar mimicry ability, "disguising" itself into the appearance of a human skeleton.
If only I knew what this thing was called... then maybe the relevant information would automatically pop up from the depths of my mind like last time.
Ke Lan was roughly certain that the trigger condition for that situation was to silently recite the name of the thing seen in the Alpha language - this was like entering a keyword in the search bar of a search engine, but the problem now was that he didn't know what the keyword was.
Black human skeleton?
Regardless of whether this keyword is correct or not , Ke Lan suddenly discovered that there is no word "human" in the language of Alpha civilization, and he doesn't know how to describe this unknown intelligent species from an unknown planet.
Black alien skeletons?
That's even more irrelevant...
As if possessed by a ghost, an idea suddenly popped up in Ke Lan's mind: What would happen if he tried to communicate with this "creature" in front of him using the Alpha language?
Will it understand?
