The Mechanic

The hard branch poked Zhang Xun's helmet, and the night wind was cold, but he was already covered in cold sweat. His heartbeat was so loud that he was almost worried that he would be heard by those mechanical soldiers.

Adam lay beside Zhang Xun, without telling Zhang Xun that he noticed that all the team members' guns were aimed at him at this moment.

At this moment, as long as Adam makes any move that may cause people to misunderstand that he wants to communicate with the mechanical soldiers, he will be beaten into a sieve.

The rustling sound became more and more rapid, and the branches and leaves shook more and more violently. Then, a long thing stretched out first. It seems to be the arthropods of some kind of mutated giant insect. Under the translucent membranous "skin", the eerie bright blue current is quickly transmitted along the mucus-like substance of a certain metallic color. That thing looked soft and boneless, but the tip was sharp and full of serrations, and it inserted into the ground effortlessly. The same "joint limbs" stretched out one after another, poking into the depths of the ground again and again like a steel bar, bringing out a disc-shaped body covered with a circle of round blue lights like eyes, constantly rotating. The round body covered with a layer of metal shell kept making strange sounds like sharpening a knife or mechanical operation.

Zhang Xun also saw mechanical policemen and mechanical soldiers ten years ago when he left Paradise Lost and sneaked into the cities of the ordinary world, but those were robot shapes that were very in line with human imagination and definition of robots. But the thing in front of him, those metal slime and translucent unknown material with mucous membrane texture, almost looks like... a real animal. More precisely, like a giant spider magnified hundreds of times.

Eden has significantly changed the design of mechanical soldiers, becoming closer to creatures, but completely different from creatures.

The lines between machines and life are blurring.

Why

The mechanical monster found the camp they hadn't put away in time, raised a giant leg, and then mercilessly cut towards Zhang Xun and Adam's tent just now. The extremely sharp legs cut the tent in half like cutting tofu, and tore all the other tents into pieces recklessly. If Zhang Xun hadn't released the worms, if they hadn't escaped in time, they would have been chopped into meat paste by now.

After it cut all the tents into infinitely small pieces at a fast speed, it still didn't leave. The oblate body kept spinning, and after looking at those blue lights for a long time, it seemed as if one could see a trace of bloodthirsty malice. It is still looking, and it thinks that these are not enough, and there may be something more important.

Everyone was drenched in cold sweat, not daring to breathe. Fear made Zhang Xun tremble slightly.

At this time, Adam suddenly stretched out his hand and gently returned his shoulder, just like he held Adam during the bombing, but this time Adam hugged him.

Adam was trying to reassure him, as he had done before.

The robot monsters gradually approached their direction, and the rotation speed of the disc seemed to be faster than before. It looked for pheromone molecules in the wind, and what it found didn't match the samples in its database. It was so close that Zhang Xun could even feel some kind of weird electric field emanating from it, making every hair on his hair stand on end, the static electricity beeping in the air, ironing every inch of skin .

There is a hollow smell unique to electronic products in the nose.

Nerves were tense, almost breaking. When the fear accumulated to the point of shaky, it finally took a few steps back.

Probably giving up on continuing to search for possible hostile targets, several beams of the same color suddenly shot out from its countless spinning blue eyes. The light fell on their tent wreckage and munitions, and immediately everything including metal products was broken into the smallest molecules in less than a second and scattered in the air.

If such a beam of light shines on a person, the person will disperse into countless carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms in less than a second, and disappear without even leaving a drop of blood.

Everyone shivered at the same time, even Adam included.

After cleaning up all human traces, the mechanical soldiers finally wandered in another direction with huge jointed limbs. They still didn't dare to move their bodies, fearing that the thing would come back suddenly. It wasn't until Zhang Xun's worm confirmed that it had left a distance of more than 400 meters that they finally dared to move their already stiff bodies. Jabari lifted his helmet visor, showing his face dripping with sweat, and spat on the ground, "Fuck, it's another big spider. Why are there so many of these things recently?"

For the hunters who are going outside for a long time, these strange-looking mechanical soldiers are no strangers. On the contrary, Zhang Xun, the mechanic, stared dumbfounded at the direction where the mechanical soldiers disappeared.

He Yuxin walked to their original camp, turned around and looked around, but couldn't find even a speck of ashes, "How much equipment and rations did we lose?"

After everyone checked, they found that almost all their food and several weapons had been burned. The worst thing was that the radio transmitter that Adam was going to use to black out those people in Feathered Serpent Land was also burned.

Now they are faced with a choice, whether to declare the mission failed and go back to the Lost Paradise to accept punishment, or to bite the bullet and continue to try to track down the whereabouts of those Feathered Snake City people.

Several soldiers were fighting with red faces, but Zhang Xun sat silently on a dead log, looking solemnly at the image sent back by the bug displayed on the tablet. Adam came out from behind some bushes, shook the needles on his head, leaned against a cedar trunk next to Zhang Xun, and looked at him curiously, "Why don't you participate in the discussion?"