Chapter 626: Chapter 626: Holy Hall, Literature Hall, Leader Bee
A large chunk of armor plate hit the ground with a clang after being forcefully kicked by Qianqian and landed near our feet on what seed like the alloy floor of a landing platform, imdiately raising clouds of dust.
The words “Goddammit” rose slowly from the southeast, shining with rays of rosy light.
… seriously, were the ancient Xyrin people’s designers always this cute? A door that couldn’t be broken by ship-to-ship cannons was installed on a wall that could be kicked down, and the most goddamned part was that we had been bombarding that door like fools for several minutes!
If Qianqian hadn’t thought outside the box, we might still be bombing that thing right now!
“Er, probably… *cough cough*, probably not a design issue,” Taville, sweating from his head, squatted on the ground and studied the armor plate that Qianqian had kicked down. After a while, he finally explained the reason for our current goddamned situation, “This is empowered armor, which only becos stronger than regular armor after energy is applied. But the outer energy system of this relic seems to have been shut down by soone. That’s why it turned into a normal tal plate. Otherwise, not even Madam’s flying kick, let alone a Helium Flash, would likely penetrate this super armor that is usually only used in Royal Fortresses. Hmm, there is a situation that needs attention. The residual activity of the armor indicates that the cut-off from its energy source must have just happened, maybe even right when General Pandora ceased her attacks. It could be that Taville is already taking action inside.”
Thank you, Taville; you saved the last shred of dignity for the Xyrin people.
“Ahahaha, so that’s how it is,” Qianqian said with a face that scread “I don’t understand what that ans but it sounds impressive.” She didn’t care about what empowered armor was; the vibrant girl was busy enthusiastically making a hole in this now de-energized wall, “Hey! Hi! Yo-ha—ah da!”
“Clang,” another tal plate fell to the ground. Following several rounds of Qianqian’s brute force cracking and the Pandora Sisters also joining in to manually dismantle it, a two-to-three-ter-high hole soon appeared before us. Looking inside from the hole, it was dark ahead with only the faint glimr of navigation lights twinkling in the distance.
“No energy reaction.” Sandora said as she walked in first, and we hurriedly followed.
This was a repair corridor that was not used for personnel transport, so although it was dimly lit, it was exceptionally spacious. Perhaps to facilitate the stacking of equipnt during maintenance, the width near the exit was even a hundred ters wide. Thus, even when Qianqian made a hole far from the door, it allowed us to enter the normal passage successfully without diving head-first into so machinery. The open area extended forward for a few tens of ters before gradually narrowing down to a corridor around six ters wide. As Taville had said, most of the energy in this area had been shut off, naturally including the lighting system. After we walked a few hundred ters further, the darkness around us reached pitch black.
With a thought, the Dull Cat Angel, who had just woken up and was doing morning exercises in her own spirit sea, appeared wobbly in the air, regaining balance with frantic movents and looking at us with a puzzled expression.
With a stern expression, I explained, “It’s too dark here; we need you out for so light.”
Everybody: “…”
Alaya, ignoring the black lines surrounding her, just nodded dumbly with an “Oh,” and then expertly adjusted her own light source to a natural 400 luns. She also focused back and forth a few tis to ensure our path ahead was more evenly lit. Finally nodding with satisfaction, she gave a sweet smile.
Taville, who usually didn’t communicate much with Alaya, was flabbergasted when he saw an Arbitration Institution, a Leader Apostle, so proficient in lighting skills, he blurted out, “My Emperor! What on earth did you do to her?”
I know scientists tend to be blunt and naive about the ways of the world, but the ambiguity of your statent could make embarrassed.
Anyway, with Alaya’s lighting, it was much brighter along the way, otherwise, even with enhanced vision that’s not afraid of the dark, it would still be uncomfortable to look around, and I’m not very fond of the military’s point light source devices. It’s said that having an Angel Envoy sister at ho ans you won’t worry, she can warm the bed when it’s cold, provide lighting when it’s dark, entertain when you’re bored, and after looking through Old Xu’s stuff and getting depressed, she can still co out and act cute… Speaking of which, ever since I discovered a QB that ca through Shadow City last ti and let Sandora stew and eat it, I’ve sent people to look for their mother world in the Macro World System and capture this kind of species everywhere, I wonder if they’re extinct yet… When will I ever stop drifting off into my thoughts while walking?
The paths inside the ruins were complicated, and after walking along the maintenance corridor for over ten minutes, we encountered several forks in the road. According to Taville, this place was sothing like a database and computing core, but the complex pedestrian passages inside seed to suggest it had other important functions. Bringing Taville turned out to be the right choice. Her ultra-fast data analysis skills spared us the trouble of wandering around aimlessly. At any intersection, Taville would attach a scanning terminal (that God knows extended from where and connected to which part of her body) to the alloy walls. Then, based on the flow rate of the inner commands, she would determine the direction of the control core. Our progress wasn’t slowed despite the incessant forks in the road.
“Che, just blast this place with a cannon after we find Sister Silvia. I hate ruins the most,” Visca puffed her cheeks, clearly in a bad mood.
“Well, you’d probably need to assemble a fleet to bomb it. I can’t imagine how much the original construction cost must have been; it’s even sturdier than the core armor of the Imperial Admiral.”
“Holy Hall, Literature Hall.”
Taville, who was reading the data flow from a line ahead, retracted her probe and pushed up her glasses before turning to us and speaking, “By decrypting the data lines in this structure, I’ve found a few keywords that might be the answer to your question. This place is indeed part of a much larger facility. In the basic data, this massive facility is referred to as the Holy Hall, and this part of the ruins is known as the Literature Hall. Moreover, the Holy Hall seems to include many other sections like ‘Residence’, ‘Tomb’, ‘Initial Core’, and ‘End’, but the records about those parts are a bit vague and appear to lack key terms. However, ‘Holy Hall’ and ‘Literature Hall’ are definitely accurate — theoretically speaking.”
“Keep moving,” Sandora fell silent for a few seconds and then said indifferently with a slightly dark expression, “I don’t rember which Emperor had this kind of hobby, but these nas give a bad premonition.”
I wasn’t sure what Sandora was thinking, but the words “Literature Hall” imdiately made think of “archives”. Was this tallic structure, hundreds of kiloters long and simply larger than an average city, just a database? What then was the purpose of the computing module Taville had discovered earlier? It just kept getting more and more perplexing.
My mind was swirling with various speculations, but concern for Silvia still took precedence. I rapidly followed Sandora’s steps and called Taville, who still wanted to study those data flows, to move deeper into this building that was as complicated as a maze.
“Buzz… sizzle… drip, drip…”
It was at this mont that a strange noise reached my ears.
“Pandora? Bored again?”
I rubbed the head of a certain expressionless loli beside who, when bored, would make a dripping noise in her belly, and when thinking, would make a sizzling noise. The cute habits of my little sister were truly distinctive.
But when the latter looked up, the only thing that greeted was an impassive expression from which I barely managed to decipher the word “confusion.”
“Sizzling…drip—”
That strange noise rang out again, and this ti I finally understood that its source was not from within Pandora.
The mont I realized this, the whooshing sound of sothing tearing through the air suddenly ca from above . Driven by a sense of crisis, I reflexively activated my shield, and then heard a teeth-gritting slicing noise on it. Looking up, I saw the figure of the assailant.
It was a narrow, diamond-shaped weapon about two ters long and no more than thirty to forty centiters at its widest, made up of silver-white alloy and ice-blue crystals. It was now embedded in the energy shield, violently trembling as it tried to break through. The weapon had a peculiar structure, with sharp edges that clearly featured anti-phase blade technology; it seed to be a lee weapon, yet there was also a ten-centiter-wide fissure running parallel to its body at its center, similar to an electromagnetic cannon’s acceleration track. This structure was too slim for a lee weapon and too sharp-edged for a shooting weapon. I didn’t recall the Imperial Army ever possessing such a weapon.
As I was baffled by its odd shape, the narrow fissure in the center suddenly lit up with a blinding white light and fired instantly—it was indeed the acceleration track of an energy cannon!
Since it was trapped by the energy shield and unable to move, the shot naturally did not harm us. Pandora imdiately grabbed the weird object, and her small hand, buoyant with ghost energy-enhanced force field, completely ignored its sharp anti-phase edge. With a “crack,” the object was snapped in two by the little girl.
It seed more fragile than I expected. Could it just be so unseen type of floating cannon?
As I pondered, I noticed that Sandora’s expression had turned serious, and both Pandora and Visca had drawn out hand cannons suitable for use in tight spaces, looking ready for battle.
“Locking on, invader, identity recognition, malfunction, clear.” An inorganic voice suddenly popped up nearby. Subsequently, several objects like the “floating cannon” from before erged again—this ti I saw them flying straight out of the corridor walls—as if materializing from insubstantial shadows or as if they had no interaction with real matter. They effortlessly penetrated the solid alloy walls and imdiately locked onto the “invader’s” direction. A number of bright energy beams accompanied by the booming sounds of searing air attacked us, but all were blocked by our energy shields. Pandora and Visca’s hand cannons fired almost simultaneously. The advanced fire control systems of the Leader-level Apostles disregarded the peculiar weapons’ montary evasive maneuvers and destroyed them accurately. However, the crash of a few crystal floating cannons was just the beginning. Soon, more of these objects erged near us, so protruding from walls, so rising from the floor and ceiling, and so even appearing directly in the air. They clearly possessed highly advanced spatial combat modules, capable of tactical-level spatial movent—an encounter with such variable attack floating cannons was a first for us.
“Increasing invader combat evaluation, Radiant Glow Leader Bee concluded, command Leader Bee activation, protect the Literature Hall.”
The inorganic voice sounded again, and hundreds of “floating cannons” suddenly retreated en masse. The crystalline glow on their surfaces seed to undergo a subtle change, then from their fronts white rays were emitted, not to mount an attack, but to draw two-ter high square fras a short distance in the air in front of them. Pandora and Visca began shooting the mont the guardians moved, but due to the terrain and the perpetual vanishing of the guardians into the walls, only less than a third were destroyed. The remaining two-thirds outlined square fras in the air suggestive of teleportation gates, and orderly footsteps began to erge from the fras.
“Protect the Literature Hall!”
Accompanying the first battle cry, the first enemy to burst out from those fras was an Armored Scorpion?
Of course, the enemy wasn’t Vega and her Scorpion Soldiers, but a strange warrior clad in full black armor with even the carapace painted pitch black. It goes without saying they were the enemy; it was just the sudden appearance of an Armored Scorpion that caught off guard montarily. This highly agile warrior wielded dual blades and charged at us, and as he did, more soldiers poured out of the glowing white squares—Armored Scorpions, Ravens, Heavy Infantry, Xyrin Agents, and even Subordinate Commanders in uniform nearly filled the space around us in an instant.
The first Armored Scorpion to charge at us took a direct hit from Pandora’s Hand Cannon, yet it didn’t explode or leave a corpse as expected. Instead, it shattered like glass into fragnts with a crisp sound.
“These are Shadow Guards!” Sandora’s voice rang out in the spiritual connection, “Their attacks are as strong as their real bodies, but their defense is weaker. Use our overwhelming firepower to annihilate them!”
“Boom, boom, boom—” Pandora and Visca’s firearms roared into action first. Despite the slow rate of fire typical for hand cannons, in the hands of these two young girls specialized in gunnery, the weapons were as rapid as automatic rifles. Intense cannon fire and the heavy single-shot damage imdiately overwheld a corridor crowded with Xyrin Soldiers charging toward us. Although these soldiers were of Elite Level, facing two Generals, they could only obediently turn into cannon fodder; they didn’t even have ti to activate their weapons before being blown to bits. Qianqian had already transford into the tyrannical Ti Queen, declaring, “The wheel of ti shall crush your corpses,” and instantly, the second corridor beca a mosaic of destruction. Sandora was the most graceful of us all, simply watching quietly in one direction as various enemies charging from there began slaughtering each other. My Energy Explosions were probably the most effortless among us; despite the enemies being Imperial Advanced Soldiers and even Heroic Combat Soldiers, they were still rely Soldier Class. With such a small number, detonating their energy furnaces hardly required any spiritual power from . However, the most surprising was Taville. This usually demure, glasses-wearing woman—I didn’t know if she’d crossed wires today or if her mass projection wasn’t listening to her—but she proclaid with full bravado, “Let you muscle-bound idiots see the combat power of a scientist!” and then whipped out a bunch of indescribable things. Tossing them into the enemy crowd—well, I can only say those weirdly shaped objects made explosions even louder than Pandora and Visca’s hand cannons.
“These are the next-generation Energy Resonance Bombs used for performance validation on Heavy Assault Ships, high-powered experintal munitions for dismantling enemy aircraft carriers,” Taville reported to with a proud expression amidst the thundering cannon fire.
Taville, I have a feeling you’ve triggered your own critical switch—continuing to shatter your image like this, is that really okay? Or is it as expected that every Xyrin Apostle has veins filled with nitroglycerin, including you, a research scientist?
While dealing with the enemies in front of us wasn’t difficult, wasting ti here wasn’t my initial intention. Moreover, it was quite frustrating that a group of Leader-level Xyrin Apostles was being held up by so mysterious guards using so mysterious thods. Admittedly, the enemies’ fighting style was odd and strong, but after blowing up a dozen more swooping Ravens into Arcane Sparks, I found a mont to shout to Sandora, who was engrossed in her “Puppeteer” ga, “Sandora, what exactly are these things? Floating Cannons? Transporters? Or War Blades? And is there no way for us to attack the defense system’s main body?”
The explosions around us were deafening, drowning out any regular conversation.
Sandora’s voice imdiately entered my mind: “Don’t panic, Ah Jun. These temporary Shadow Guards are very energy-consuming to summon. If we can’t overco them, the main body of the Guardians will soon appear. They seem to be a combat unit called Leader Bee, and they are quite annoying, but the main body’s combat strength isn’t strong. I’ll explain more after we deal with it—also, with all this chaos, why aren’t you using spiritual connection?”
: “…You know your boyfriend occasionally has a brain fart, right?”
“Intruder combat power evaluation upgraded, Leader Bee activation in progress, protecting the Literature Hall.”
Just as she said this, a tallic voice indeed rang out once more, and with the second defense mode being ineffective against us invaders, the Guardian calling itself Leader Bee imdiately switched to a new tactic. This ti, I finally saw “its” true form.
Above the not-yet-annihilated ranks of the Guards, elegant figures appeared out of thin air, like rcury.
Judging by the silhouettes, they seed to be female combat units? Was this a group of fierce Imperial girls?
(Ah, by the way, I’d like to recomnd a book, “The World Line Wars of Xiyen,” with a teleportation gate link under its cover page. It’s theoretically a fan work of the Xyrin Empire and definitely worth a read—for at least its standard is better than… I’ll leave unsaid. Also—a curious phenonon where favorites increase and subscriptions decrease, what’s going on with that?!)(
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