Alien Relic Hunter

Ke Lan checked his equipment one last time, and it happened that the fifteen-second countdown on the head-up display also returned to zero at this time, and was reset to a new countdown of three hundred seconds.

This was the window time reserved for them by the fire control system. He and Asano Akira had to cross the empty area before the three-hundred-second countdown ended, otherwise they would be sieved by the dense heavy machine guns behind them, and then covered by several rounds of Artillery fire shattered bones and scattered ashes.

Walk!

Ke Lan said to Asano Akira, striding forward.

A distance of three hundred meters, five minutes... To use a common joke on the Internet, it is my grandma can push a wheelchair across it - but in fact, this road is not easy to walk.

The roads left behind after the buildings in the neighborhood were violently demolished are uneven, with various potholes and exposed pipeline tunnels... If you are not careful, you will step on the air and fall into the compartment.

Moreover, the support structures on the ground have been severely damaged in many places - these places seem to be intact on the surface, but in fact only the top two-millimeter-thick steel plate is still there, and the support frame and load-bearing platform below have been damaged. Due to the fracture and settlement, Ke Lan's own weight plus this set of power armor, as well as the weapons and ammunition he carried with him, weighed more than one ton. What's more, the contact area of ​​​​his feet is not large, and the pressure on the ground is even higher. There was no way such a thin steel plate could hold him up.

Directly below the West Area 1 is not a residential area, but one of the several core reactors that provide energy for the Ark. The various passages and pipelines inside are as complicated as a maze. If there is no guide robot, even if you take You may not be able to get out of it just by looking at the drawings.

If you are unlucky enough and hit some important flammable and explosive facility, you can even save yourself the trouble of sending the body to the incinerator.

When encountering a place like this, he and Asano Akira had no choice but to take a detour.

It wasn't until the last forty-five seconds left in the countdown that the two of them were able to touch the door of the institute's headquarters.

Ke Lan took out an iron-gray hard card with no patterns, words or patterns on the surface and inserted it into the access control gate. Suddenly, a perfect circular hole about five meters in diameter appeared on the light screen in front of him. .

According to the researcher's level, their ID cards have different permissions. The lowest level is white, which can only pass through the gate of the institute and the access control of the department building to which it belongs under normal conditions, while the green card and blue card can go anywhere There are more cards than white ones. As for the purple cards held by professors, they can travel unimpeded throughout the entire institute headquarters except for a few confidential restricted areas.

Of course, this means that under normal circumstances, if an emergency occurs - such as now, then whether it is a white card or a purple card, it will directly become a waste card, and only the red card and the red card of the institute's management will be replaced. Only the black cards held by the dean and vice deans of the institute can retain their original permissions.

The iron card in Ke Lan's hand is held by the chief of the crisis management department. Its authority is equivalent to the black card of the director of the institute. But in addition, this card also has the ability to delete the black card. ” and the special permissions of “Red Card”.

Let's go. Ke Lan patted Asano Akira's shoulder and stepped across the light curtain first.

He found a communication interface stake at the entrance and plugged the communication cable he had just unplugged into the street stake - because of the existence of the energy shield, neither wired communication nor laser communication could penetrate the shield and reach the outside. , they must rely on communication interface piles and lines buried under the ground to maintain communication with the command headquarters in the rear, so preserving this interface pile has become the first task after entering the contaminated area.

Ke Lan pulled out three folding stands from the huge backpack, and mounted three automatic machine guns with the communication interface pile as the center. Except for Ke Lan and Akira Asano with identifiers, anything that moved appeared here. All three machine guns would fire without hesitation within range.

The bullet chain uses a fifteen-unit active ammunition inserted into every three conventional incendiary rounds. Therefore, even if the target of the attack is a corrosive seed, one round of long bursts is enough to deliver a fatal dose of active ammunition. into the target's body.

There are at least 400 individuals of erosion seeds in various stages sealed in the underground icehouse at the institute's headquarters, and there are at least 100 more containers frozen in ice coffins. They are all alive...despite these erosions It is unlikely that all the seeds and containers will escape, but no one can say what accidents will happen if the entire institute headquarters loses control.

Next time there is such an experiment, it should be done in the wilderness. Ke Lan complained as he tightened the screws. This way, even if there is an accident, at least the situation will be easy to deal with.

There won't be a next time. Schroeder's voice came from the earphones.

Do you believe it? I don't believe it anyway... I dare say that many of those bastards in the countermeasures team are trying to figure me out now, right?

I can guarantee that from now on, the institute will strictly prohibit any projects related to you...

Don't fart. The crew would have enforced this ban long ago. If they could abide by it, they wouldn't need me to come here to wipe their butts. You're right. Ke Lan directly retorted Schroeder's words.

After tightening the last screw, Ke Lan tapped the bracket with a wrench, and there was a crisp sound.

What's the sound? Is it a gunshot? Have you encountered the enemy? Schroeder immediately asked nervously - in order to prevent the meme from being transmitted to the command post behind the scenes, Ke Lan and Akira Asano transmitted the communication back in real time through the cable There are only two types of information: sound and coordinates. As for things like images, Ke Lan needs to manually screen them and use processing software to mosaic out those parts with memes before they are sent back to the rear.

I haven't encountered an enemy. I'm just checking whether the machine gun mount is secure. Ke Lan said, turning on the sensor of the automatic machine gun. Several faint red lasers shot out from the muzzle of the gun, regularly in a fan-shaped pattern. Sweep back and forth within the range.

To be honest, I don't think these three automatic machine guns can stop those monsters running out of the underground icehouse.

The original plan was to arrange a team of autonomous robots to follow you into the contaminated area, but the goals of the autonomous robots are too obvious, and they are more likely to be attacked by monsters...

What you said... seems like three machine guns that are more than one meter long and rotating back and forth are not conspicuous... Ke Lan complained casually and started to walk forward.

Akira Asano held the scabbard with one hand and grasped the handle tightly with the other, following closely behind him.

Uh... that's because...

Schroeder obviously wanted to say something more, but Ke Lan immediately and ruthlessly interrupted him: We are about to start moving forward, please remain silent to avoid causing interference.

Although the power armors of both of them are equipped with a large number of detection equipment, what Ke Lan trusts most is Asano Akira's ears.

Akira Asano's hearing is not a pure hearing to be precise - his main organ for receiving sound is not his ears, but the idea tentacles centered on him and spreading in all directions.

As we all know, sound is a wave. For a normal human being, only when sound waves are collected by the auricle along a medium such as air, and then transmitted along the external auditory canal to the tympanic membrane, the tympanic membrane and ossicles amplify the vibration of the sound wave, and then through a series of complex transformation processes, This vibration is converted into nerve electrical signals and transmitted to the auditory center - only then can humans hear sounds.

For Asano Akira, the sound waves have already been captured by those thought tentacles before they come into contact with his body. Therefore, he can naturally hear more things and understand them more clearly than ordinary people. .

…

After walking less than a hundred meters, a hell-like scene appeared in front of Ke Lan:

Hundreds of staff from the institute lay scattered on the street, their iconic white coats stained with dark red blood, and the buildings nearby were covered with dense bullet holes...

Before Ke Lan got close, he smelled a strong smell of blood. Even a breathing mask with its own filtering function couldn't completely eradicate the smell of blood in the air... The further he walked, the more corpses he saw in his field of vision. Many, he could even clearly feel the sticky feeling coming from the soles of his feet with every step he took - only a few hours had passed since these people were killed, and the blood flowing had not yet completely coagulated. A slurry layer was formed on the ground that was two centimeters thick and sticky to the touch.

I have arrived at the first interface. There are at least 600 human corpses here, most of them concentrated at the intersection. Ke Lan squatted down and reported to the rear headquarters while looking through the nearby corpses. These corpses were all killed by firearms. I saw no signs of being infected by 'memes' on their bodies.

These people should be the victims who appeared after the first batch of autonomous robots entered the contaminated area an hour and a half after the incident... Schroeder said in a heavy tone, Because autonomous robots cannot recognize 'memes', The AI ​​automatically mistook the 'eyeballs' that were highly similar to the 'meme' as the target of attack... These people should have been accidentally killed by autonomous robots.

Each of these people can be regarded as a valuable asset of the institute, right? Ke Lan said, For the scholars on the Ark, being able to enter the institute is almost the ultimate goal in this life... This thing is just like the old Era is like the Ivy League. If you take any person outside, they are all great people. But at this intersection, a group of human robots killed hundreds of them like chickens. The crew members should be very distressed. Bar?

Actually... Schroeder hesitated for a moment, then continued, Even if they were not killed by autonomous robots, it would be difficult for them to survive. At that time, the entire contaminated area had been closed, and according to regulations, it was impossible to release them. For this group of people who come out, if they stay inside, there is only one ending...

Infected. Lin Qiming's voice interrupted.

Yes, according to the meaning of the Undead Crew Association, the situation of zero survivors in the contaminated area should have been acquiesced. Schroeder continued, Even if you encounter survivors asking for help, you can ignore them. Please be sure to Make the main task your first priority.”

You won't save him even if you die? Ke Lan asked supplementaryly.

……right.

It's absolutely amazing... Even if this incident can be ended successfully, the institute will probably be severely damaged...

Actually, my strength has been greatly weakened now. Schroeder sighed, Originally, the institute's staff, excluding security, service staff and engineering departments, totaled 2,449 people...

what about now?

The only people left now are the people from the 'temporary countermeasures group'...

Ke Lan was stunned for a moment. He had gone to see the countermeasures team before. Counting those students who were not qualified to discuss and could only watch from the sidelines, the entire countermeasures team totaled less than a hundred people... ...Although Ke Lan has never had a good impression of this group of lunatics, he has to admit that Ark's current level of technology depends entirely on these lunatics.

In the fifty years since landing on Planet Alpha, the level of human science and technology has advanced enough to be equivalent to the five hundred years on Earth, or even more. Although a large part of these developments come from the technology left behind by the Alpha civilization, Without this group of people to analyze, transform, and apply the technology of Alpha Civilization, it would be very difficult for humans to even gain a foothold on this planet.

The loss of high-end talents is far more regrettable than the loss of property... These talents cannot be measured by numbers, and they can even be measured in numbers. Each of them is a combination of genius and hard work. They are rare and rare. No matter how much resources you have, you may not be able to cultivate such an expert... But now, less than 10% of this group of people died in the blink of an eye.

Ke Lan felt that if he were sitting in the undead crew meeting's seat, he would be so angry that he would faint.

After the inspection, there are a total of 709 corpses at the street intersection, and none of them are infected. Ke Lan put away the teasing tone before and said seriously.

receive.

I'm going to move on, wait a minute-- Ke Lan had just stepped over a body lying face down on the ground, and suddenly stepped back.

What's wrong?

A unique body was found... He was not shot to death.

Has he been infected by a meme? Schroeder asked.

No.

Sync images.

Yes. Ke Lan nodded and entered a series of instructions on the control terminal. A red warning border immediately lit up on the edge of his helmet display - this indicated that everything he was seeing now was It was transmitted back to the rear headquarters in real time.

If he sees the meme carrier now, the entire crisis management department will probably be dismissed... Ke Lan thought to himself, and locked his perspective on the corpse on the ground.

To be precise, it was on these two parts of the corpse.

This corpse was cut off at the waist by something sharp, and the fracture was very smooth... And those autonomous robots that entered the contaminated area were not equipped with such weapons.

[P.S. The last monthly ticket double event of this year will start after midnight on the 29th. The monthly tickets you have saved can be voted out later... Although I am afraid that I will not reach a thousand chapters this month, I still have to shout: please Monthly ticket, please support~~~~]