Alien Relic Hunter

"Are you sure?" Ke Lan stared at the pile of rocks and asked in a low voice.

"...He was right..." Caroline swallowed with some difficulty, "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 his memory... However, he 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 case, the corpse could move on its own but had to rely on the continuous contraction and relaxation of muscles that had not yet decayed. That's right, it's impossible to move with just a single frame without muscles, fascia, tendon sheaths and other tissues.

Skeleton monsters that can jump and run around only exist in fantasy worlds and supernatural works. If they want to appear in the real world, there is only one possibility: supporting the movement of the skeleton is a mechanical system that relies on external energy supply. , just like the powered exoskeleton invented by humans.

But this possibility was directly rejected by Ke Lan. Even if the Security Bureau was not confident about these rock specimens, they could have left a few agents to guard them, and there was no need to secretly hide such a thing in the rock pile.

"That shouldn't be a human skeleton... what you see may be its exoskeleton." Ke Lan concluded.

"I've never seen such an indigenous creature!" 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 eel in the deep sea would inevitably panic when facing unknown things. Generate some feelings of fear.

"It's not just you, we haven't seen that thing before." Ke Lan turned to look at Caroline and saw that she had taken off the Gauss rifle hanging from the back of the power armor——

"First Mate, are you sure...the weapon in your hand will not penetrate the sealed partition of the drainage compartment?"

"Ah... I'm sorry, I'm just, I'm just a little nervous..." Caroline was stunned for a moment, hung up the Gauss rifle with some hesitation, waved her hands, and two half-meter-long mantis knives suddenly fell from her arms. The armor popped out.

"Here we go again!" It was Asano Akira who issued the warning in advance, but this time he did not move forward to meet the enemy, but took a sharp step back diagonally, blocking Ke Lan's body.

"Ke Lan! His target is you!" Liao Zilang shouted at the same time, but he did not throw out the impact grenade in his hand. Instead, he unfolded a folding shield to protect Ke Lan's other side.

The sword in Akira Asano's hand was crossed, and the crisp collision sound sounded again. The black shadow retreated with one blow, but this time it did not choose to hide, but perched on the highest point of the pile of rocks, looking down at the four of them.

This time, Ke Lan finally saw the appearance of that thing clearly.

This thing... is really a mutilated human skeleton!

Its main body is a human spine that has been cut off at the waist, with incomplete ribs connected to both sides. The clavicle, scapula and humerus are relatively intact, but the radius and pubic bone are weirdly twisted and intertwined, with a pair of sharp bone claws It is three to four times as long as a normal human finger.

Looking up from the cervical spine, you can see a half-broken skull, with all the parts above the cheekbones missing. The upper and lower jaws are tightly meshed together, but the teeth are exactly the same as those of normal people, including incisors, canines, and front and rear molars. Neatly arranged on the gums.

"This is obviously a human skeleton!" Caroline exclaimed in a low voice.

"It's not that simple..." Ke Lan observed this "skeleton" carefully. Except for the changes below the elbow, the overall material of the skeleton looked very different from human bones... The entire skeleton was gray. Black, the surface is relatively rough, and the surface is densely covered with fine pores - at a glance, it is very close 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 can turn into hounds and Asano Akira before. Although this part of the memory is only owned by Ke Lan, judging from various signs, it all really happened. Rather than the so-called hallucination.

Those chunks of meat that turned into humanoid forms acquired human genetic genes by absorbing human blood, and assimilated their own cells to continuously decompose and proliferate. However, no matter how weird the chunks of meat are, they are still a kind of " "Living thing"... And as a "dead thing", how did the rock change into a mutilated human skeleton?

Moreover... this skeleton with only half the skull remaining seems to have complete self-awareness, and it even adopts tactics such as ambush.

Not only that, after it fought against Asano Akira for the first time and failed to gain an advantage, it immediately changed its attack target - this thing not only has the ability to think, but also has a high IQ!

This just confirms Ke Lan's initial judgment: This thing is an unknown creature from Alpha Planet, which has a peculiar mimicry ability and "disguises" itself into the appearance of a human skeleton.

If only I could know the name of this thing... In this case, maybe the relevant information will pop up directly from the depths of my mind like last time.

Ke Lan can roughly determine that the triggering condition for that situation is to silently pronounce the name of the thing he sees in Alpha language - this is like entering keywords in the search bar of a search engine, but the problem now is that he Don't know what this keyword is.

Black human skeleton?

Regardless of whether this keyword is correct or not, Ke Lan suddenly discovered that in the language of Alpha civilization, there was no word human at all, and he did not know how to describe this unknown intelligent species from an unknown planet.

Black alien skeleton?

That would be even more irrelevant...

As if by chance, a thought suddenly came to Ke Lan's mind: What would happen if he tried to communicate with the "creature" in front of him in Alpha language?

Will it understand?