Alien Relic Hunter.

Chapter 623 The Seed of Super Giant Erosion
Mine base, the main tunnel of Shaft No. [-].

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

"Loud noise? Why didn't I hear it?" Layton plucked his ears a little depressed, "My ears are original, if something goes wrong, it will be a big trouble."

"We also didn't hear it." Ke Lan said, "Is there a fight on the frontal battlefield?"

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

"Damn it... With such a big commotion, did they use ground-penetrating bombs? Or the ones with nuclear warheads?" Layton whispered, "This tunnel won't collapse, right? 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 are already rusted!"

"The tunnel collapsed, isn't it you who are holding it?" Ivan glanced at him and said, "With the performance of Lucifer and Augustus, even if they are buried, they can be dug out, right?"

"That said, but..."

"Okay, the frontal battlefield has already started, that is to say, we only have four hours left." Ke Lan interrupted the conversation between the two, "Going 200 meters further is the beginning of the mine car track Stop, the previous members of the Gopher Squad have repaired and continued to lay the rails, we will take the mine cart later - as for the thrust of the mine cart, I will leave it to you."

"Understood!" Layton nodded solemnly, and immediately closed his mouth.

The ruins of the Bronze City, the frontal battlefield.

Three rounds of carpet-style saturation bombing had been completed, and the ground in the entire bombing area was cut off several meters thick of rock formations. The smoke and dust in the sky rose hundreds of meters into the air, covering the sky and the sun.

"Report, there is no response in the bombing area!" The voice of the staff officer sounded again.

"Let the ground troops... No, wait a minute." Trenz suddenly bent down, staring closely at the battlefield surrounded by thick smoke below - he did not project the thermal infrared image on the screen, his eyes did not Unable to penetrate the smog, looking down from the battleship, he couldn't see anything at all, but a strong omen still lingered in his mind.

There must be something hidden in this area!
If this is a sand table simulation rather than a real battlefield, he is even willing to bet a thousand credits with his opponent, and then send a reconnaissance troop to verify his guess.

But he can't do that now - on the sand table, a soldier is just a number that can increase or decrease at any time, but on the battlefield, behind every number are countless lives.

Although he said that he would never suffer psychological pressure because of the death of soldiers, this does not mean that he is a commander who regards human life as nothing—Trentz has an almost abnormal mental cleanliness: under his command, Every soldier who died in battle must die "deservingly". Only valuable sacrifices are recognized. As for the 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!" Trenz only thought for two seconds before issuing a brand new order.

Hundreds of special containers were unloaded from the back of the engineering mech, and the door opened, and nearly [-] "Black Widow Spider" unmanned tactical mechas rushed in from three directions with their slender metal joints. bombed area.

The "Black Widow Spider" UAV is a new generation of military combat drone developed on the basis of the "Tarantula" all-terrain tactical mecha. Compared with the "Tarantula", the "Black Widow Spider" has canceled Human function, and greatly simplified the power mechanism, abandoned all the armor except the gun mantlet, and the material of the non-stressed parts was changed from high-performance alloy to polymer with lower cost and easier mass production. The size of the body has been reduced from more than ten meters long to less than two meters long.

The original weapon of the "Tarantula" all-terrain tactical mecha is only an electromagnetic railgun mounted on the back-of course, the railgun is also a cheap castrated version, and the shooting life is 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 mass-produced drone is developed as a "disposable consumable", but when the quantity of this thing piles up to a certain level Sometimes, it can still play a decisive role on the battlefield.

The salvo of thousands of railguns can even sink some light warships equipped with energy shields.

These UAVs can not only be programmed to conduct cluster formation command, but also can be remotely controlled by ordinary UAVs... At this moment, the person who controls the more than 2000 "Black Widow Spiders" is precisely Trenz himself.

With his arms open, his fingers slid slowly and evenly on the touch screen, inducing the pre-arranged formation of drones to alternately penetrate into the bombing area under the mutual cover—but the more than When 100 UAVs entered the center of the bombing area, the signals of nearly [-] UAVs in the middle of the queue suddenly disappeared!
"Report, report to the commander! There is a huge heat source in the center of the bombing area!" The tense voice of the staff officer rang in Trenz's ears. At the same time, the number of UAV A signals entering the bombing area was rapidly decreasing. A dense patch of light spots is being extinguished in large swaths.

"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."

Trenz didn't have the heart to respond to the old general's exclamation. His eyes scanned the dozens of screens in front of him one by one. Ten slender fingers danced on the touch screen like playing a piano, and a series of brand new command codes Write it into the original operating procedure.

The Drone Armor troops did not choose to withdraw from the battlefield immediately, but gathered more than a dozen fire clusters while maintaining high-speed movement, which in turn surrounded the areas where the light spots were extinguished, and began to move towards the smoke. Blind shot in it.

"I needed the sharpest thermal infrared images possible!" Trenz said.

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

Although there is interference from smoke and flames, it can still be seen that in the center of the image, there are large sections of orange-red blocks that represent high heat, and the largest piece is even more than a kilometer long after the scale conversion !

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

"Immediately compare it with the data of all known samples in the database!" Trenz shouted, and the operation under his hand gradually slowed down—not because his physical strength had reached its limit, but because at this time the bombing area There are less than a hundred drones that he can control...

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

"I knew it..." Trenz bit the tip of his tongue gently to dispel the fatigue caused by the high-intensity operation, "If the heretics don't come out with these ghost things, they will It won't be called a heretical sect!"

When the signal of 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 has burst and collapsed, and thousands of tentacles have drilled out of the cracks in the ground.The smallest of these tentacles is several meters thick and hundreds of meters long; the largest one traverses the entire bombing area, with a diameter of more than 50 meters... The top and end of this super tentacle are hidden under the ground, but only exposed At this section on the ground, the length is close to 500 meters!
The surface of these tentacles is covered with bloody potholes, which are obviously the result of those ground-penetrating bombs just now-the ground-penetrating bombs that are enough to blow up ordinary creatures to pieces, even failed to tear the mucous membrane on the surface of these tentacles. .

"It's a big guy..." Trenz straightened up and swung 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 asking.

"It's just a hunch." Taking advantage of this spare time, Terence took out an energy drink, uncorked the bottle, and drank it down. on the road, it must be eliminated.”

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

"The primordial species is not invincible... You should have read the report on the Leviathan incident, right?" Trenz said.

"I have read it, but according to the content of the report, the Leviathan that was wiped out 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 something mimicked by a living creature attached to the Leviathan’s skeleton.” The old general said.

"The thing in front of me is just a poor imitation made by heretical sects imitating the prehistoric species." Terenz said as he zoomed in on the surveillance screen - he saw balls of dazzling plasma on these The body surface of the tentacles exploded, and the burst of high temperature directly created a large area of ​​vitrification, but these tentacles were only scorched black and brittle.

When the carbonized tissue on the surface of the tentacles falls off, you can see the new flesh and blood growing rapidly at a scalp-numbing speed. The wriggling granulation quickly fills the vacant position of the damaged body, and even some that have not fallen off by themselves The carbonized layer has also been cracked by the granulation growing from 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's plasma cannons have cooled down and the second round of strikes arrives.

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

"Do you see that the self-repairing method of these tentacles is very similar to some kind of biological weapon that we are very familiar with?" Trenz said with a straight face, full of disgust.

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

"It has already appeared in front of us, even if reason tells us that it is impossible, we have to believe it." Trenz sighed lightly, "But anyway, there is at least one piece of good news: For this kind of monster, We are familiar with it and have the means to deal with it.”

"With such a huge size, it is difficult to locate the 'nucleus' of this Seed of Erosion. But if you want to kill it with a saturated dose of active ammunition, it may be an astronomical figure." The old general shook his head and said.

"I have just calculated, assuming that the part above the ground is one-third of the overall volume, at least 2 billion standard dosage units of active ammunition are needed to kill it...Of course, this is just a conservative estimate, I There is no doubt at all, the part above the ground is just the tip of the iceberg."

"2 billion units... put together all the active ammunition we have, how much?"

"460." Trenz 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 'nuclear', even plasma artillery can't cause effective damage to it, how can we tear it apart?" How about opening its body and exposing the internal 'core'?"

【PS It will be a year and a half since the end of treatment. Next Monday and Tuesday, I will go back to the hospital for a semi-annual re-examination for bone wear. I can’t finish it on the same day and leave the hospital and go home on the same day (the bone piercing itself can be done in 10 minutes, but because you have to be hospitalized to do this, the bed arrangement is more troublesome, you need to make an appointment in advance, and you have to do nucleic acid and so on, and then there are a lot of discharges. Procedures), so I may ask for a day or two of leave depending on the situation, I hope everyone understands.

It has been almost three years since the diagnosis was made on July 2019, 7. I hope this test will still be negative. As long as there is no recurrence within five years, it can be regarded as a clinical cure, and I can use this to brag about it in the future. .

Of course, I am also very grateful to you who have been with me to this day. I wish you, and myself, always be healthy! 】

(End of this chapter)