Volume 9: Molten Mine Chapter 465: Park Sang-woo's Sacrifice
"Valentina! Loosen the fixing bracket! Release the lifeboat!" Ke Lan shouted again.
"It's a sacrifice ceremony!" Aya, the leader of the Security Bureau's special agent team, also noticed the change in Park Sangyou. "This man is a core member of the heretical sect! Only core members can initiate this kind of ceremony!"
The signal light on top of the lifeboat has turned red - this means that Park Sang-woo's body is dead, and something difficult to describe in words is coming to this world through his flesh and blood.
"It's too late. Even if we blow his body into pieces, there's no way to interrupt the ceremony." Ke Lan said... He had not expected the current situation - he had not even used the "evidence" forged with the help of Layton, but Park Sang-woo had already confessed and directly revealed his trump card!
He is a real madman, a madman who doesn't care about his own life at all in order to achieve his goals... much crazier than those guys in the institute.
His acting skills are even better than Arasaka Yui's. Everyone can even feel the fear, despair and inner struggle he showed before... However, all this is just his disguise.
"Didn't we check this guy's body to make sure he wasn't infected by the cells of the Seed of Erosion?" Hound pointed his gun at the hatch of the lifeboat. "What's going on here?"
"It's not the Seed of Corrosion." Ke Lan said, "This is a sacrificial ritual that is even more incomprehensible than the Seed of Corrosion. With our current level of technology, we simply cannot understand the principles of this ritual... I only know that the things summoned by this ritual are much stronger than the Seed of Corrosion."
"It's that black skeleton! It was mentioned in the report of the East 9th District operation!" Aya Breya said, "It's the thing you encountered in the Pioneer's No. 9 cargo hold."
"This kind of ritual doesn't seem to summon fixed things..." Ke Lan remembered what happened when he recited the "Holy Words". "This kind of sacrificial ritual...will produce completely different results depending on the content of the prayer."
This is just like an ordinary person praying to the God of Wealth for wealth. Assuming that the God of Wealth really exists and hears the person's prayers, there are many ways to fulfill the wishes of the person praying - the stocks and funds purchased by the person praying can suddenly soar for some reason, or he can pick up a bag of diamonds left behind by others when he goes out the next day.
As long as the ultimate goal can be achieved, not many people will care about the process of achieving the goal.
The black-robed believer encountered in the East Ninth District prayed for powerful strength through the "Holy Word", so he turned into a monster like a black skeleton - not only did he achieve the purpose of gaining power, but the sentence in the prayer "I am willing to sacrifice myself" also became a fact.
When facing Arasaka Yui, Ke Lan did not directly pray to the "great god" for strength, but said that he wanted to kill her - his goal was achieved, and in the process, his body did not show any abnormal changes.
But in order to "modify the Holy Word", a prerequisite is that one must master the language of the Alpha civilization... According to the information currently known, the only two people who possess this ability are him and the "Prophet".
There is definitely a price to pay for using the "Holy Word", but the "Prophet" obviously knows this. Otherwise, with the help of the power of the "Great God", the heretical sects could easily destroy the Ark and become the rulers of mankind.
As for the others, it was even more impossible for them to use the "Holy Word" or the power beyond imagination... In those memory fragments, it was clearly stated that using the "Holy Word" required paying the vitality equivalent to the gift, and the vitality of an ordinary human was very small in the eyes of the "Great God"...
To put it in a more understandable metaphor, it is like a desperate person who has to sell his body to exchange weapons from arms dealers. A person with average looks (ordinary people with not much vitality to pay) may be able to get a pistol or a grenade in exchange; and a stunningly beautiful woman (a human with extremely strong vitality) may be able to get a few kilograms of C4 explosives in exchange; but no matter how beautiful a person is (the limit of human vitality), it is impossible for him to get a powerful weapon like an intercontinental missile from an arms dealer.
It's not because the arms dealers don't have missiles, it's just that no one can afford the price.
Of course, quantitative changes can also lead to qualitative changes. The birth of Ze Luo is an example.
To be honest, Ke Lan was not particularly worried about what Park Sangyou's sacrificial ritual would summon - with his own vitality, the most he could exchange for was a monster like the black skeleton, but with the reconnaissance team's existing firepower, it would only take a few seconds to blast the black skeleton into pieces.
Restricted by the principle of "equivalent exchange", no matter how terrifying the power of that "great god" is, only a small part of it can be "lent" to Park Sang-woo.
But I don’t know if it’s because Park Sang-woo is a strengthened human, the power he “exchanged”... seems a little too much.
He did not turn into a black skeleton. His originally shriveled body quickly swelled up again. His entire body was like a blown-up balloon, instantly filling the remaining space in the lifeboat. His completely distorted facial features were pressed against the porthole, looking particularly weird.
“Bang!”
Everyone heard a muffled sound like a balloon exploding in the lifeboat. Dirty blood and broken flesh coated the inside of the porthole with a thick layer, making it impossible to see what was inside.
"This guy...could it be...exploded?" the Hound muttered softly.
"I don't know." Layton shook his head, "But the lifeboat seems to be moving..."
"I heard the sound of something squirming inside, it was sticky." Asano Akira said, he held the scabbard horizontally in his left hand and tightly grasped the handle with his right hand, and had already made the starting movement of "Iai Slash".
"It's about to come out..." Zhuo Ligetu stared at the hatch nervously and moved his finger to the trigger.
"Bang!" The next second, the door of the life capsule was knocked open by a huge force, and dozens of thick tentacles as thick as a man's arms and covered with mucus poured out from the life capsule. It did not throw away the life capsule, but lifted it up and carried it on its back.
Ke Lan felt that this thing looked like some kind of mollusk with a hard shell - the heavy and hard life capsule was its protective shell.
"Team leader...what kind of ammunition should be used for this thing?" an agent asked anxiously.
This is not his fault, because the monster Park Sangyou turned into is too much like the Corrosion Seed - every trained security agent knows that the Corrosion Seed can only be killed with active ammunition. However, the physical lethality of active ammunition itself is very low, and in many cases, conventional ammunition is needed to tear open the Corrosion Seed's body and expose the "core" to the outside before it can work.
They had no way of being sure whether the monster before them was a Seed of Erosion or not... It looked too similar, it looked too similar. Even for those who had the most experience in dealing with Seeds of Erosion, it was hard not to connect the two together.
Before Aya Breya could speak, Ke Lan said, "Use conventional ammunition to suppress it first. Even if we can't kill it, at least we can hinder it!"
"Use conventional ammunition! No signs of infection were found in Park Sangyou's body before. This thing just looks similar to the Seed of Erosion, but they are definitely not the same creature!" Aya glanced quickly at Ke Lan and shouted to her men.
"Don't be too absolute... No one knows what the sacrificial ritual summons... Maybe the first erosion species on Alpha was summoned by this sacrificial ritual." Ke Lan said to Aya while pouring firepower on "Park Sangyou".
"Then do you know what this monster is?"
"I said I don't know... If you want to study this thing, I suggest you kill it first. Although the corpse is not as valuable as a living sample, it is at least safe." Ke Lan shouted loudly to prevent her voice from being drowned out by the noisy gunfire.
"Are you still in the mood to joke at this time?"
"I'm not kidding, I'm just stating the facts."
Except for Valentina's body, everyone was retreating and firing at the monster that Park Sang-woo had turned into. Countless bullets hit the tentacles, as if they were hitting an extremely soft piece of plasticine. The bullets penetrated the tentacles almost unhindered, but except for a bullet hole that went through the front and back, it did not cause any greater trauma.
Generally speaking, if a living organism is hit by a gun, especially a large-caliber, full-power bullet like this, the kinetic energy attached to the bullet will directly tear off a large piece of flesh and blood from the hit part, or directly crush the internal organs... But when it hit this monster, the kinetic energy of the bullet seemed to disappear for a moment, and it went straight through its body.
It was not repelled by the barrage of bullets. Instead, it continued to crawl towards the crowd... The tentacles slowly crawled, leaving several crooked slime traces on the ground.
"Conventional ammunition doesn't seem to work on this thing!" the Hound shouted. "It can't even stop its movement."
"Switch to active ammunition and test fire a round first." Ke Lan emptied a magazine in one breath, then replaced it with a new magazine with a yellow and black "biohazard" logo on it, then raised the gun and fired a series of short bursts.
The distance between them and the monster was less than twenty meters. With the help of the power armor's assisted aiming system, even hip-shooting could achieve a 100% hit rate - these bullets exploded after drilling into the tentacles, releasing the active cells of the flesh-eating worms contained in the sealed tubes.
Nothing happens.
According to past examples, when shooting at the Seed of Erosion with active ammunition, even if the "core" is not hit, and even if the toxicity of the active cells in the ammunition is far from reaching the threshold to kill the target, at least the tissue at the site of the bullet will still quickly necrotize... But the monster in front of him seemed to be completely unaffected by the active cells of the flesh-eating worms.
"Don't waste active ammunition! This thing is not a seed of erosion!" Ke Lan shouted immediately.
"Then how can we kill it?" The Hound put the magazine he had just taken out back in annoyance. "Conventional ammunition is useless, and active ammunition is also ineffective. Do we have to use artillery shells to attack it?"
The Valkyrie is equipped with some heavy firepower weapons, but when bombarding the target at this distance, in a closed environment like a tunnel, the aftermath will definitely affect them. Even with the protection of power armor, it is difficult to guarantee that there will be no damage.
Unless they could create some distance... But Ke Lan noticed that the monster's movement speed was gradually increasing, and it seemed to be gradually adapting to this body. This might be the reason why it did not attack everyone at the first time.
Half a minute has passed now. The members of the reconnaissance team have changed from slowly retreating to running back while turning their heads to shoot, and the monster's movement speed is four or five times faster than at the beginning.
Every time those tentacles squirmed, it could move several meters on the smooth metal ground. At this time, it was very difficult to distance itself from it.
Unless someone voluntarily sacrifices himself to hold back the monster and allow others to retreat out of the range of heavy firepower.
Ke Lan would not give such an order unless it was absolutely necessary.
"Ke Lan, don't you have any clue? This thing is crawling faster and faster, we are about to be caught up by it." After discovering that both types of ammunition were ineffective, the Hound simply stopped shooting and rummaged through his equipment bag, trying to find something that could stop the monster.
Ke Lan naturally knew what the Hound meant when he asked him "Do you have any clues?" "Clues" referred to those memory fragments that automatically emerged in his mind when he came into contact with things related to the Alpha civilization. When they first encountered the Seed of Corrosion in the exile camp, Ke Lan relied on the information provided by these memory fragments and used the corpses of the flesh-eating worms to lure and kill the monster.
But this time, nothing popped out of Ke Lan's head.
After entering this tunnel, those memory fragments hidden deep in the mind seemed to have fallen into a dormant state and never appeared once.
I don't know why, but Ke Lan suddenly had a very strange idea...
Those memories seemed to be afraid of this place.
