2046 Earthly Dragon!
It did not feel like an explosion or a natural earthquake but more like an artificial earthquake with a fixed pace and rhythm. The source of the quakes moved very quickly upward and was arriving at their feet in no time.
Thinking quickly, Li Yao calmed down his anxious soul again and sent a message to Han Te and Liu Li’s heads, asking them to stay alert and hold on a while longer. He also remotely controlled ‘Fiend Star’, the tracked spiritual puppet, from the Tarantula and lay next to the two little fellows dutifully.
In the setting that they had made up, the profession of the two little fellows had been changed into ‘puppeteers’.
It was a profession to control spiritual puppets and beast puppets and to coordinate human beings and machines. The puppeteers were to their spiritual puppets what the sword Cultivators were to their flying swords. They were indispensable for each other.
Therefore, it was perfectly reasonable for Han Te and Liu Li to stay close to the two war machines.
After Li Yao reminded them of everything, a lot of bandits and thugs whose senses were keen had felt the quakes from beneath the ground.
Including the Fist King and Xiahou Wuxin, all the sinners were greatly nervous, fearing that some other terrifying monsters would pop up from the underground world.
But out of their expectations, the skeleton lizards around them were circling in agitation or craning their necks to shriek, with their heads slightly shivering.
Right then…
Boom! Boom!
The earth turned into mud, and soil and stones soared into the sky like a spring before they splashed to the ground. From the crater, an extremely unusual machine crawled out!
It was both like a long metal earthworm and an armed crystal train that travelled underground. At the frontmost part was an enormous excavation drill that was similar to a shield tunneling machine. Every whorl on the main drill was like the sharpest chainsword, and dense, complicated runes and circuits of spiritual energy had been carved on the internal side. The glittering rays vaguely shining on the surface suggested that it was a composite drill made of both metals and mystic rays, which was multiple times harder and more efficient than the drill of mystic rays adopted by Sparkle, Li Yao’s multipurpose exploration starship!
Next to the main drill that was more than three meters in diameter, more than twenty ancillary drills and enormous dust-sucking holes were distributed. All the scraps of rocks minced by the drill were transmitted to the rear of the underground vehicle through the dust-sucking holes.
The whole body of the machine was covered in rough and huge tracks, and every track was installed with sharp and tensile hooks. Li Yao estimated that it must boast an amazing ability in gripping and climbing. Such a structure would even allow it to move vertically in the middle of the underground rocks at a speed no lower than on the ground.
What a great penetrator! Li Yao secretly complimented.
Since the technology to build underground cities and to detect and exploit the underground mother lodes had become popular, ‘penetrators’ that could work for a long time below the ground no longer seemed marvelous. For example, Li Yao’s ‘Neltharion’ and its prototype, Sparkle, both possessed the ability to dig holes and move below ground.
However, the super penetrator in the form of an enormous boa or earthworm was definitely the most advanced magical equipment that Li Yao had ever seen in the relevant fields. It was not hard to evaluate its high comprehensive combat efficiency based on the high speed of the quake source and the feebleness of the quakes before the vehicle burst out of the ground!
Who was it that had crafted and was maneuvering such a war machine? The Immortal Cultivators from Manjusaka? Not very likely!
Li Yao saw that the front end of the super penetrator had emerged from the ground, but the rear end was still hidden below the earth. The front part of the vehicle was like a porcupine that had been infuriated. Countless barrels were raised and released almost a hundred enormous iron tanks into the sky.
Pa! Pa! Pa!
The iron tanks exploded one after another. They turned out to be smoke grenades with an extremely vast coverage. Very soon, more than half of Liberty City was consumed. The battlefield was covered so tightly that it would not be able to see anything from the sky.
Then, next to the barrels, a lot of folded, disc-shaped antennas were ejected, triggering invisible but powerful waves.
Li Yao could clearly sense that the communication among the Immortal Cultivators, especially the City in the Sky’s remote control on the skeleton lizards, was seriously disrupted by the indiscriminate interferential waves.
The skeleton lizards were just ignorant animals. After the crystal chips inside their heads were affected and they lost the command of the external signals, they were immediately at a loss.
Some wanted to escape to the underground world because of the explosions and smoke on the battlefield. Some raged and jumped at the bandits, only to be blown up quickly because they did not have the neat teamwork they had before. Some were even brutalizing each other, and their ‘man-eating flowers’ were biting each other hard, until they were all bleeding and deformed.
The only exceptions were the few skeleton lizard kings that were almost ten meters tall. After the initial shock of the super penetrator, they soon returned to themselves, shaking their heads and hesitating over if they should attack again.
It was at this moment that Li Yao noticed the woman who was standing on the enormous drill majestically, with a huge vibration saber three meters long on her shoulder and a green crystal suit on her body.
As she confronted the three skeleton lizard kings coldly, the air around her was no weaker than the Fist King or Xiahou Wuxin when they were at their peak state. Thousands of runes were floating on her crystal suit, condensing and spinning within three meters from her body, like thousands of small drills.
“You have one minute. Get on board quickly!”
Her voice was so low and hoarse that it seemed to come from the underground world.
The plates on the two sides of the super penetrator were all opened, revealing the spacious room inside. Several mysterious people in dim crystal suits waved at everyone and shouted, “We can only resist them for one minute. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”
All the bandits and thugs were slightly dazed. Behind them were the ferocious skeleton lizards, and in front of them were their own kind whom they could communicate with. They did not have any choice but to hurry aboard!
When he boarded the super penetrator in the crowd, Li Yao still focused his attention on the female warrior who seemed to have grown drills all over her body.
The scanning of his soul happened to capture the picture where she slashed at one of the skeleton lizard kings, blowing up its entire head with the force of high-frequency vibrations, before she crashed into the chest of another skeleton lizard king with the rapidly-hovering runes around her, mincing the creature into a pulp.
Then, the doors on the two sides of the super penetrator were closed heavily, and the tracks rolled in reverse, dragging the vehicle back into the underground world.
There were chains everywhere inside the cars. All the newcomers, copying what the mysterious warriors did, tied themselves to the chains to resist the crazy quakes of the super penetrator.
They retreated backward in the underground cave, and the entrance of the hole became smaller and smaller.
Countless skeleton lizards jumped into the cave, trying to track them, but the enormous drill was still revolving quickly, shredding any creature or machine that jumped down.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Those mysterious people must have deployed crystal bombs on the walls of the cave. The bombs were detonated at the same time after they had retreated a certain distance, collapsing and blocking the cave.
Also, at the front part, or the rear part, of the vehicle, a certain type of silver gel was spurted out, which was somewhat similar to the special foam on starships for emergency damage repairs. After it leaked into the gaps of the debris, it made the structure of the blockage even tougher than before. There was no hole to pass through at all.
Everybody was obviously below the ground, but when the super penetrator moved quickly, they felt that they were on a lone boat at the peak of surging tides. The vehicle was moving up and down and trembling so hard that they could barely keep themselves steady.
The mysterious people who had guided them were working hard, operating busily and nervously. They had no time to bother with the newcomers at all.
Even the Fist King and Xiahou Wuxin looked at each other in bewilderment, not having the faintest idea what was going on.
When Li Yao explored with his soul, he could only tell that the super penetrator was almost a hundred meters long in total. It was truly like some sort of amazing metal life living below the ground.
There was no telling how long passed, but the degree of the bumps and quakes slowly dropped.
By Li Yao’s estimation, they had slowed down at approximately four thousand meters below the surface. The vehicle was still moving forward slowly, but the quakes and noises that it released were mostly gone. It was now like a silkworm gnawing the mulberry leaves.
Shua!
The door to the operation cabin of the excavation system in the front was opened. The female warrior who had stood on the enormous drill, with the intense stench of blood, strode into the room.
The three-meter-long vibration saber was gone. The upper half of the thick, heavy crystal suit had been taken off, too, revealing the dark green vest and the athletic body beneath.
To his surprise, Li Yao discovered that the woman who was not ugly in any way had a bald head. There was only an enormous star-shaped tattoo on her forehead, and the five angles of the star turned out to be five drills.
Also, the left arm with which she had held the saber was a false one. It was actually an artificial limb.
The bald female warrior who did not have a left arm glanced coldly at the mobsters who had not entirely gathered themselves and furrowed her brows, not covering her disgust for the bandits and thugs at all.
It only made Li Yao even more curious. Since she obviously detested those bandits from the Land of Sins, why did she bother to rescue them?”
“My name is Zuo Jingyun,” the bald female warrior said coldly and finally focused her eyes on the Fist King and Xiahou Wuxin. The alertness and hostility in her gaze pierced the throats of the two leaders of the tough bandits like drills. “I’m sure that you must have a lot of questions, and you do not understand what is going on at all. But just rest assured, you will know what you should know very soon. However, let me make one thing clear first. This is Cloud Penetrator, my ‘earthly dragon’. In this place, my word is law. Whoever does not obey my rules will be thrown out to live on their own in the debris and rocks thousands of meters below the ground!”