Chapter 313 - 306: Exploring the Silent Abyss
Chapter 313: Chapter 306: Exploring the Silent Abyss
The Silent Abyss was the last unlit area on the entire warzone map.
From high above, the land looked as if it had been forcibly torn apart by some great power, leaving behind a massive scar over one hundred kilometers long and nearly five kilometers wide.
Within the scar, a thick, grayish-white fog lingered year-round.
A year ago, Allen had dispatched a reconnaissance squad composed of twelve Spider Killer Type II Golems into the abyss.
But mere seconds after the squad crossed the border of the mist, their data links collectively severed.
No combat alerts, no distress signals, not even feedback from a unit self-destructing was transmitted back.
They vanished without a sound, without a trace.
At the time, Allen had chosen to set the matter aside.
Feeding troops into a meat grinder was a cardinal sin of warfare.
But things were different now. He was not currently at war and no longer needed to test the abyss’s appetite with just a few Golems.
’Let’s see what the new Golems are made of.’
"Hive, launch."
"Target: the Silent Abyss."
[Command confirmed.]
The dome of the special assembly chamber slowly opened. At the bottom of the colossal, inverted pyramid-shaped structure, six large Anti-Gravity Rune Arrays lit up one by one with an ethereal blue glow.
The heavy vessel silently lifted off the ground, ascending slowly into the sky.
A massive shadow enveloped the land below, eventually shrinking to a black dot as it flew northwest at high speed.
「Twenty minutes later.」
The Hive mothership arrived above the Silent Abyss.
It was like an ancient wonder floating in the sky. Its immense hull blotted out the daylight, making the abyss below, perpetually shrouded in a thin, grayish-white mist, seem all the more insignificant.
"Open the deployment bay."
On the mothership’s slanted armored plating, some of the hexagonal apertures lit up with ethereal blue indicator lights.
"First wave, one hundred Mad Bees. Penetrate in a canopy formation. Mission: establish basic communication nodes and map the surface in 3D."
[Swarm has left the Hive.]
WHOOSH—
A dense barrage of whooshing sounds erupted as one hundred streamlined, black afterimages shot out from the mothership’s underbelly.
They quickly formed up in mid-air and plunged headfirst into the churning, grayish-white mist below.
Allen closed his eyes, seamlessly connecting to the Mad Bees’ data network.
His vision split into one hundred independent feeds.
For the first three seconds, everything was normal.
The Mad Bees dove downward at a high speed of one hundred fifty meters per second, piercing through the heavy smog.
On the fourth second, something went wrong.
A piercing alarm blared within the mothership’s Control Core.
[Warning! Encountering an extremely high-frequency Magic Power interference field!]
[Frequency unknown! Waveform unknown!]
[Data link integrity plummeting: 80%... 60%... 35%...]
The one hundred feeds in Allen’s vision began to flicker violently. Patches of static and garbled code flooded the display, as if countless invisible hands were frantically tearing the Mad Bees apart.
Allen’s gaze hardened, but his expression showed no surprise.
"As expected."
He calmly issued a command, "Activate the Hive’s main Control Core anti-interference mode. Increase intensity by three hundred percent. Force stabilization of the data link."
From the very beginning of its design, he had considered the most extreme scenarios.
To command thousands of units in coordinated combat simultaneously, a stable, powerful, and exceptionally jam-proof command hub was of the utmost importance.
To that end, he had spared no expense, designing and equipping it with a Control Core of immense computational power and an anti-interference Rune Array to maintain absolute stability of the data link.
[Anti-interference mode activated. Magic Furnace output increased. Computational power augmented. Reconstructing data link...]
An invisible and incredibly powerful torrent of data, centered on the mothership, slammed into the mists of the abyss like a sledgehammer.
On the light screen, the signal lines that had been on the verge of breaking were instantly replaced by thicker streams of blue data, becoming stable once more.
This was a brute-force beatdown, a pure combination of computational power and Magic Power.
The flickering green dots also returned to normal.
[Data link integrity: 93.7%.]
The corners of Allen’s mouth turned up slightly.
With the signal stabilized, the miniature Demon Eye lenses on the Mad Bee drones finally transmitted a clear, real-time feed from inside the abyss.
On the main control room’s light screen, one hundred split-screen feeds lit up simultaneously.
The inside of the abyss was not the dead silence and darkness he had expected. On the contrary, it was so dazzlingly brilliant that it was almost blinding.
This... was a bizarre and fantastical world.
Vast patches of strange, fungus-like plants grew on the steep rock walls, emitting a faint, ethereal blue light. They pulsed between light and dark as if breathing, casting a dreamlike glow throughout the entire abyss.
Enormous, fern-like leaves extended from crevices in the rock, their veins flowing with a fluorescent green liquid.
Countless fist-sized orbs of light floated in the air, dancing leisurely like a swarm of incorporeal fireflies.
It was breathtakingly beautiful and unsettlingly quiet.
’Could this be the effect of some special mineral vein?’
"Spread out. Activate geological scanning modules and search for mineral veins," Allen ordered.
The one hundred Mad Bees dispersed, flying low over the glowing, moss-covered ground. They scanned the surface, gradually filling in the topographical data.
Suddenly, the feed from Mad Bee 047 turned to static.
’Again?’ Allen frowned.
"Pull up the last three seconds of data from 047."
[Failed to retrieve records. Contact with the unit has been lost.]
Immediately after, piercing alarms once again rang through the control room.
[Warning. Contact lost with unit 012.]
[Warning. Contact lost with unit 088.]
[Warning. Contact lost with unit 034.]
On the holographic map, the green dots representing the Mad Bees went out one after another.
There was no pattern. Mad Bees positioned in various locations were going down one after another.
"What’s happening? Are they under attack? Pull up the feeds from the remaining Mad Bees."
Allen’s seven sub-processes ran at full speed, taking direct control of the remaining Mad Bees’ visual modules.
The main screen split into dozens of smaller feeds.
In one feed, a Mad Bee was flying steadily.
There were no flying Magical Beasts nearby, no energy beams being fired, and even the glowing vines showed no signs of movement.
Suddenly, the Mad Bee’s body shuddered violently. The Rune Circuits inside its chassis flashed red for an instant, then went completely dark.
The Mad Bee lost power and plummeted straight into the moss below.
No physical contact, no visible energy strikes.
’What kind of attack is this?’ Allen’s mind raced.
The feeds were going dark faster and faster. The remaining Mad Bees were being wiped out rapidly.
’Can’t let them all be wiped out. I have to get some solid data back.’ Allen’s expression turned grim.
"All remaining Mad Bees, abandon flight stabilization! Direct dive!"
[Command confirmed.]
The twenty-odd remaining Mad Bees stopped short in mid-air. Then, an intense red light glowed on their surfaces—the prelude to self-destruction.
Like burning meteors, they frantically charged toward the very bottom of the abyss.
"Show me! Show me what the hell is down there!"
Ten... five... two...
’What is that creature?’