Volume 16 Tower of Babel Chapter 975: The Battle in Hangar No. 2.
"Skadi" Orca-class heavy cruiser, hangar No. 2.
In order to prevent fire or equipment explosion, the hangar and ammunition depot of the Skadi are both externally mounted, and are independent modules fixed to the ship. Although the hangar also has a thick armor structure, it is located outside the ship, unlike the bridge and power compartment, which are "buried deep" inside the ship, so it has become the primary invasion area for the monsters hatched from the egg-shaped tumor.
The corrosive liquid dissolved a hole with a diameter of more than ten meters on the top of the west side of the hangar. The first batch of monsters that invaded the hangar from this hole were about thirty in number, most of which were small and medium-sized monsters with a size of between three and five meters. These monsters had different shapes, but basically had one of two characteristics - either extremely strong defense and resistance to attacks, or high mobility for rapid assaults.
As soon as those meat-shield monsters entered the hangar, they began to set up defensive positions, just like a bridgehead during a landing operation. As for those highly mobile monsters, they directly penetrated into the unsuspecting crowd and used close combat methods to massacre the personnel in Hangar No. 2.
After paying the price of fifty lives, the officers and soldiers in Hangar No. 2 relied on automatic defense facilities and tactical mechas to eliminate the highly mobile monsters that rushed up with great difficulty, but the meat shield monsters in the rear successfully gained a foothold, and new changes occurred - their body structures began to dissolve, but this was not a sign of death, on the contrary, these dissolved monsters merged with each other to form a huge whole.
They turned into a huge flesh and blood fortress that was as tall as the top of the hangar. The stratum corneum on the surface of the body began to crack and fall off, revealing the bloody skin. But when the soldiers concentrated their firepower to break the skin, they discovered in despair that a thick layer of chitinous shell had condensed underneath the skin at some point.
The defensive power of this chitinous shell is comparable to that of composite armor. The 35mm machine gun of the tactical mecha can only make a shallow pit the size of a bowl. As for those individual light weapons, they cannot even leave any obvious marks on it.
"Use lasers! Push the engineering laser cutter over here! Turn it up to maximum power!" A ground crew member suddenly had an idea - the engineering laser cutter, as the name suggests, is not a weapon, but an engineering equipment used by the logistics department and the rescue department. The main purpose is to cut the damaged and deformed cabins of fighter jets or mechas to rescue the pilots trapped inside. Or when the battle is fierce and supplies are tight, it can be used to disassemble those severely damaged aircraft and provide the usable parts as replacement parts to those less damaged aircraft.
However, although it is engineering equipment, the output power of the laser cutting machine is no less than those beam laser weapons, otherwise it would not be able to cut through the solid armor of those aircraft.
Three laser cutting machines mounted on carts were pushed to the front of the battle line. Several soldiers wearing powered exoskeletons followed behind, holding cables thicker than their thighs. These cables were filled with integrated optical fibers that could not be broken by falling. In the current emergency situation, these soldiers could only act as human scaffolds.
The Flesh Fortress was very large, which saved the trouble of aiming. Several ground crew members skillfully opened the safety of the equipment and set various parameters. The guy who made this suggestion used a fire axe to smash the limiting valve of each laser cutting machine and used "physical means" to adjust the power of the laser cutting machine to the maximum.
The risk of doing this is that the excessive power will cause the equipment to melt or even explode...but now that lives are at stake, obviously no one is going to care about safe operating rules.
The ground crew simply ignored the shrill alarm and the red words "Safety Limit Valve Damaged" flashing on the screen and pressed the trigger on the side of the operator. Three extremely dazzling lasers suddenly shot out from the lens and directly hit the flesh and blood fortress formed by the fusion of more than a dozen monsters.
However, just when everyone thought that this flesh and blood fortress would be cut open like those abandoned machines, a thick layer of bloody foam suddenly secreted from the surface of the flesh and blood fortress. These blood-red foams expanded rapidly and produced a large amount of steam when they came into contact with the laser, obscuring the vision of everyone in the hangar in just a few seconds.
In less than fifteen seconds, the three laser cutting machines that had released their safety limit valves were damaged one after another. After the laser attack stopped, the steam with a strong smell of blood began to dissipate... The Flesh and Blood Fortress, successfully emphasized to everyone the iron rule of "smoke but no harm" that is unshakable in film and television works and animations - the laser that was enough to cut the entire hangar in half failed to cause any damage to the Flesh and Blood Fortress.
During this time, the gap on the top of the hangar was expanded to a diameter of 20 meters. In addition to a group of small and medium-sized monsters that poured in later, two "big guys" also successfully invaded the interior of the hangar under the cover of the Flesh and Blood Fortress.
"These monsters... they are very intelligent, and they know how to cooperate!" A non-commissioned officer of the aviation brigade gritted his teeth and said, "The first batch of monsters that came in was just to delay time... Although we eliminated them all, their mission has been completed. Next, more and more powerful monsters will pour in... We can't stop them."
"Damn it, we should have attacked those monsters first before they merged... Now they have gained a foothold, it's too late to say anything!" said another soldier who was changing magazines without even looking up.
"No, we had no choice at that time... If we concentrated our firepower on the monsters that formed the Flesh Fortress, the other melee monsters would kill us all." The ground crew member who had previously proposed using the laser cutter to attack the Flesh Fortress sighed and shook his head, "They must have calculated this... If this strategy was thought up by the monsters themselves, rather than someone controlling and directing them, it would be terrible."
"It's no use talking about this now. What should we do next?" The soldier changed the magazine and shouted at the monsters that rushed up at the same time as he fired at the top of his voice, "Those two big guys are obviously not something we can handle! Fight or retreat, there must be a choice, right?"
"I'm contacting the bridge! Hold on! Wait for the general's order!" an officer shouted, but before he could get through the communication, a bone spur pierced through his body and nailed him to the ground.
The one that killed him was one of the two "big guys" - a monster shaped like an upright cylinder, about five to six meters in diameter and about twenty-five meters in height, moving with dozens of ventral feet at the bottom. There were no eyes or mouths on the body of this monster, and it didn't even have limbs to attack. There were only thousands of densely packed holes irregularly distributed on its body, and it looked like a meat roll rolled on a nail board.
But these holes were not caused by something being stabbed, but were the monster's attacking organs - every time it turned a circle, hundreds of bone spurs would shoot out from these holes. In addition to the officer, more than a dozen soldiers had already died from this long-range attack... The only good news was probably that the penetrating power of the bone spurs was not very strong, and the armor of tactical mechas and the handheld shields of heavy infantry could block the bone spurs... Otherwise, this monster alone would be enough to wipe out all the defenders in Hangar No. 2.
As for the other giant monster, its shape is more familiar...
This is a Thunder Beast that is only one-fifth of its normal size, but it is definitely not a Thunder Beast cub. People who are familiar with the native creatures of Alpha Star know that the most important criterion for judging the age of a Thunder Beast is the thickness of its chitinous carapace. The chitinous carapace of a Thunder Beast will gradually become thicker as it ages, and its defense will become stronger and stronger... However, the chitinous carapace of a newborn Thunder Beast cub is so thin that it can be penetrated by a rifle, and you can even see the flesh and bones underneath through this layer of carapace.
But the "miniature thunder beast" in front of us has a layer of black armor on its body surface - in addition to thickness, color is also a very important criterion. The older it is, the darker the color of the chitinous shell. Generally, the chitinous shell of an adult thunder beast is brown, and dark brown is considered a very rare old thunder beast... As for the thunder beast with a completely black chitinous shell, only one has been found so far.
According to bone age calculations, the black-shelled thunder beast must have lived for at least two thousand years, and the average thickness of the chitinous shell on its body surface reached an astonishing thirteen meters!
The "miniature thunder beast" only stayed in place for a few seconds before launching a charge towards the human defense line - this is also the thunder beast's usual method of attack. Most of the indigenous creatures on Alpha Star cannot withstand the impact and trampling of the thunder beast, and a group of charging thunder beasts is enough to cause a small-scale earthquake.
The floor of the hangar was shaking, and some of the wreckage and parts scattered on the ground even jumped up. One unlucky guy was even knocked to the ground, and hit his head on the instep of a tactical mecha next to him, and fainted.
"Disperse! Disperse quickly!"
Faced with the charging miniature thunder beasts, no one dared to take them head-on, not even the tactical mechas - the tactical mechas in hangar No. 2 were all transformed from flying mechas. In order to consider the flying ability and transformation performance, the structural strength and armor thickness of these mechas were not as good as those of tactical mechas specially used for land combat. Even the latter could not stop the charge of the thunder beasts, let alone these fragile mechas.
A gap quickly appeared in the middle of the defense line, and even the unconscious soldier was dragged aside by his companions - the thickest and simplest parts of the thunder beast's shell are the head and spine in the front. If you can avoid its charge and attack it from behind, the success rate of hunting will become a little higher... but only a little.
Everyone held their breath and clenched their weapons, waiting for the thunder beast to rush over so that they could launch a fierce attack on its "chrysanthemum"... But no one expected that after the thunder beast rushed into the gap specially left for it, it would suddenly brake, twist its body, and use its pair of giant jaw-shaped sickles to cut a tactical mecha beside it in half!
"The charge of the Thunder Beast... can it actually stop suddenly?" Everyone was stunned - with this level of weight and impact inertia, it is simply impossible to stop, but this Thunder Beast not only did it, but also successfully changed direction and killed a tactical mecha!
This kind of thing is as outrageous as an angry bull suddenly dancing an elegant ballet, and the steps are very precise... No one would believe it, but it happened in front of everyone.
The Thunder Beast crashed into the crowd as if it were in an empty space, overturning several tactical mechas one after another, and at the same time trampled the shield wall formed by the heavy infantry into a mess... After losing the protection of the shield wall and mechas, the soldiers exposed to the bone spur attack suffered heavy casualties - in this wave of attack, the Thunder Beast only killed a dozen people at most, but because the defense line collapsed, the number of soldiers who died from the bone spur shooting was three times that number!
"Retreat! Retreat quickly! If you don't retreat, we will all die!"
Including soldiers, pilots and ground crew, there are about 300 people in Hangar No. 2. It has only been seven or eight minutes since the roof of the hangar was broken and monsters invaded, and only half of the 300 people are dead.
Every second, soldiers in gray combat uniforms and ground crew members in orange-yellow reflective vests fell in a pool of blood. The cylindrical monster seemed to be filled with bone spurs. The firing had never stopped since the beginning. The ground of Hangar No. 2 was densely packed with tens of thousands of bone spurs, and it was difficult to find even a place to stand.
"Retreat, everyone retreat!" an officer in a pilot's uniform shouted, "This is an order from the bridge, everyone retreat to the inner cabin! Use the narrow passages for defense! Abandon Hangar No. 2! Quick, retreat!"
"We can't retreat!" said another soldier. He threw away the rifle whose barrel was already red from being shot, and pulled out his pistol to shoot repeatedly. "If we retreat now, no one will survive if we are caught up by these monsters!"
"Just retreat, I'll cover your retreat!" the officer shouted, "All mechas, stay and cover your retreat! After you hear the explosion, you will disconnect the No. 2 hangar from the ship! Do you understand?"
After the officer finished yelling, he jumped into the cockpit of a bomber and started the bomber's engine.
The ground fixtures were unlocked, the fuselage anchor hooks were unlocked, and the platform slowly rotated, aiming the nose of the bomber at the raging thunder beast.
The officer took a deep breath and resolutely pushed the accelerator to the bottom!
