Chapter 165: Bonus Chapter for Alliance Master Little Stone (7/10)

“Find one in the army?”

“A special unit like ours doesn’t have any female soldiers, does it?”

The officer in charge was completely bewildered by Bai Yuxi. “Who told you the organization still provides wives?”

“Precisely because there are no female soldiers, it would be true love…”

Willy drifted past mournfully from the side. Several special-service soldiers who had been eavesdropping on the subject of “wives” were left utterly flustered, and they began looking at their comrades with strange expressions.

The Seventh Squad sat off to one side like a group of pampered aristocrats. They gulped down the super-vitality potions provided free of charge as combat rations, recovering their depleted energy and stamina as quickly as possible, while watching the special-service soldiers fret over the particle interferer, which had been blocked at the edge of the barrier space by the bodies of the snakes.

By now, the lake beneath the combat platform was crammed with the corpses of mutated snakes. They bobbed and sank amid the water, presenting a terrifying sight.

Even the water within this section of the barrier space, isolated from Gulu Lake by the energy wall, had been dyed a deep red by the snakes’ blood. It had even thickened until it resembled blood itself.

As seasoned special forces soldiers, they had experienced countless battles. During missions in the wilderness, swallowing spiders, toads, lizards, earthworms, or caterpillars was nothing more than child’s play. They were even more hardcore than Bear Grylls, unquestionably among the people at the very top of the food chain.

Rolling through mud pits and puddles was even less of an issue. To complete a mission, they had spent three days and three nights lying in wait inside cesspits. Naturally, they were not frightened by a pool full of snake corpses and blood.

The problem was that the creatures floating in that bloody water were no ordinary snakes. They were mutated snakes infected by X-particles!

Never mind the snake heads, which floated and sank with their jaws stretched wide in deathly fury. Even the dark-red water itself was likely saturated with a potent toxin!

It was not that they feared death. But with ordinary human physiques, jumping into the water and being pierced by a snake’s fangs would simply be suicide.

Yet if they did not go down, there was no way to retrieve the particle interferer and replace its energy crystal. They were caught in an awkward predicament.

Fortunately, just as the officer in charge was preparing to swallow his pride and ask Bai Yuxi’s group of transcendent warriors for help—perhaps they had some way of retrieving the particle interferer—the command center in the rear also detected something unusual about Barrier Space F14.

The combat platforms surrounding Shewae Island were all equipped with detection radar.

Although interference from the high-density superpowered particles spilling out of the anomaly prevented them from obtaining images or sound from the scene, the installation of signal-amplifying equipment still allowed them to grasp certain basic information.

For instance, the spatial-field fluctuations generated when the particle interferer opened the gates of the barrier could be captured by the detection radar.

Barrier Space F14 had opened ten gates at once.

The command center in the rear was immediately alarmed, assuming that another high-risk paranormal creature had broken through the defensive line.

Yet before they could dispatch a mobile combat team to the site, they discovered that the danger-pressure readings in the two E-level barrier spaces inside the Fourth Defensive Line, adjacent to F14, were rapidly declining.

According to the danger assessment, that degree of pressure release meant that enough paranormal creatures had surged from the two inner barrier spaces into F14 to fill the entire space.

And yet the danger-pressure reading relayed from Combat Platform F14 remained steadily in the white zone.

The operations strategists in the rear command center were utterly baffled.

Mutated snakes could not operate particle interferers. In other words, all ten gates had been opened by the combat personnel stationed on Combat Platform F14.

Moreover, despite the influx of so many paranormal creatures, the concentration of “energy-matter pheromones” within Barrier Space F14 had not increased in the slightest.

That meant the paranormal creatures entering F14 had indeed been killed and had died!

It was beyond belief.

The strange situation gave the operations strategists in the rear command center an enormous headache. They nearly wished they could rush inside and see what had happened with their own eyes.

Could they have dispatched the wrong unit, sending a team of E-level transcendent warriors—or even a team of D-level transcendent warriors—to an F-level combat platform?

If advanced transcendent warriors were stationed in Barrier Space F14, the strange phenomenon could be explained.

In large-scale, organized transcendent campaigns such as this, the methods of operation were actually highly standardized.

First, energy walls were erected layer by layer around the anomaly, preventing dimensional creatures emerging from it from spreading outward.

At the same time, the native creatures drawn toward the area were kept away from the region where the dimensions overlapped, preventing them from undergoing widespread mutation after being infected by high concentrations of X-particles and the pheromones of dimensional creatures.

Then transcendent warriors were sent into the overlapping dimensional zone to eliminate, layer by layer, the paranormal creatures that had gathered there. Finally, the anomaly itself was sealed.

However, advanced transcendent warriors capable of dealing with high-risk paranormal creatures were extremely scarce.

To conserve their strength and stamina, and to deploy these elite forces where they were most needed, the usual strategy was to use the finest steel on the sharpest edge.

In other words, advanced combatants were used only against high-risk targets, avoiding any waste of their strength.

The low-risk paranormal creatures, intimidated by the powerful pheromones emitted by advanced transcendent warriors, generally did not dare attack them of their own accord.

Thus, with a little guidance and diversion, they could be led away from the core zone and left to be eliminated gradually by lower-level transcendent warriors in the rear.

The number of paranormal creatures within the two E-level barrier spaces inside the Fourth Defensive Line was so great that even E-level transcendent units would have struggled to deal with them.

For a flood of paranormal creatures on that scale to be released at full pressure into a single F-level barrier space and then destroyed by an F-level trainee squad would be nothing short of murder!

This proved that the transcendent unit stationed inside Barrier Space F14 had to possess at least D-level combat strength to withstand an impact of such magnitude.

But therein lay the problem.

The transcendent units stationed in barrier spaces of every level were dispatched according to their respective combat ratings. As strategists in the highest-classified special operations force, how could they possibly have made such a basic mistake?

The several operations strategists responsible for allocating forces to the F-level barrier spaces were so terrified that cold sweat broke out across their bodies.

If such an idiotic error had truly occurred, they would be court-martialed. A mere five minutes on the firing range would not settle the matter.

Yet the problem remained.

After repeated verification, they confirmed that the unit dispatched to Combat Platform F14 was indeed an F-level trainee squad.

Moreover, it was a trainee squad under an F-level transcendent unit belonging to the Jialuo Mountain Base in Jiangcheng, with an average combat rating of no more than F5…

(To be continued.)