"What's there to be afraid of those things?"
"They're slow and pose no threat."
"A single sweep of a gun can take out a whole bunch."
Qin Zhenghao was dismissive.
He wasn't the only one who thought so.
In fact, despite Su Wu's efforts to highlight the threat of the Amethyst Crystal Entities, their activity had never extended beyond the Magma Canyon area of the Qinling Mountains. The videos circulating online didn't show anything particularly dangerous about them. They were either blown apart by the seemingly low-destructive Electromagnetic Rifles as soon as they emerged or easily wiped out by the high-altitude fire platforms when they jumped or moved in groups. The scenes were almost like stress-relief games.
Even the Amethyst Crystal Entities that burrowed underground, due to their slow movement, couldn't escape the Hunt Crystal Type I Shield Machines. Overall, they gave the impression of being nothing more than rocks that could jump around on their own.
Intentionally or not, people overlooked the fact that when these entities approached humans or any other living beings, they could indeed devour and digest them.
"But there are just too many of them."
"Can't guarantee there won't be some that slip through—"
"Alright."
"I'm overthinking it."
The young man forced himself to justify his thoughts, then remembered the exaggerated mechanical army he had seen in videos, which could surround an entire mountain. He felt his reasoning was too far-fetched and, with a helpless shrug, admitted he was being overly paranoid.
"By the way."
"I just read online that Jianghe City will implement an 8-hour workday in six or seven days."
"The news has been confirmed, not a rumor."
"Looks like we're lucky, catching a good time."
"Yeah."
"Before the apocalypse, I couldn't imagine only working 8 hours a day."
"If this is true, it's going to be amazing."
"I heard there's even a dedicated activity center."
"We can find people to form a basketball team there."
Qin Zhenghao couldn't help but feel a surge of interest and a desire to talk about this. It concerned his future life, making it far more important than the Amethyst Crystal Entities only circulating online.
As the two in the off-road vehicle looked forward to Jianghe City, not far from them in the Magma Canyon of the Qinling Mountains, what was once a one-sided hunt was gradually evolving into a real battlefield.
Boom!
A massive fireball exploded in the canyon.
The terrifying shockwave instantly dispersed the erupting magma flow, hundreds of meters in diameter, causing it to abort before it could leave the canyon. It turned into a torrential rain of fire, falling back into the canyon.
The two to three hundred fire platforms built on the canyon walls couldn't escape the disaster of the indiscriminate magma rain. Many platforms saw their turrets, machine guns, ammunition depots, supply warehouses, drone landing fields, and communication stations all suffer severe damage.
Alarms were sent from all over to the control center in the Farmhouse Shelter. Meanwhile, the magma interference rendered most fire platforms temporarily unable to attack. For the first time since their construction, the fire net above the Magma Canyon showed a significant gap.
[Warning: Comprehensive damage rate of the Magma Canyon fire blockade platforms has reached 37%.]
[Preliminary repairs estimated to complete in 17 seconds.]
Countless micro-robots were awakened from the core warehouses within the fire platforms and crawled in batches to the damaged areas for emergency repairs. They prioritized repairing the machine guns, then the turrets and ammunition depots, to fill the firepower gap as quickly as possible.
However, the repair process still seemed too slow.
On the canyon floor, taking advantage of this precious opportunity, the once calm magma lake boiled over. Magma streams shot into the air everywhere, sending tens of thousands of Amethyst Crystal Entities to the ground outside the canyon and onto the fire platforms on the canyon walls.
These entities not only wanted to escape the canyon but also to destroy the fire platforms that had suppressed them for so long. To this end, they had even evolved the ability to self-destruct. Every Amethyst Crystal Entity that touched a fire platform, whether as small as an insect or as large as a basketball, could explode like a bomb, with destructive power proportional to its size. The largest one could even reduce a two-meter-high turret to irreparable debris.
In just 17 seconds, over 30 fire platforms were completely destroyed. It wasn't until a large number of Electromagnetic Machine Guns were repaired and joined the battle that the invasion of the Amethyst Crystal Entities was suppressed, slowly pushing them back into the magma lake.
Outside the canyon, many Amethyst Crystal Entities rode the magma and high-altitude winds, spreading further afield. Some moved extremely fast, shooting out at near-subsonic speeds, while others unfolded transparent insect-like wings, gliding through the air and altering their bodies to resemble cooled magma rocks. This posed a significant challenge to Su Wu's Crystal Detectors, as they often appeared and disappeared, making it difficult to pinpoint their coordinates.
One second after the Amethyst Crystal Entities appeared outside the canyon, the first line of defense on the Qinling Mountains activated its aerial interception firepower, spraying hundreds of thousands of metal pellets per second at the visible entities.
By the seventh second, Artificial Intelligence analysis found that relying solely on Electromagnetic Machine Guns was no longer sufficient to control the situation. Despite killing over half of the emerged Amethyst Crystal Entities, a significant number had still managed to escape to other areas. The alert level was automatically raised, and high-powered rockets were deployed for indiscriminate area attacks, aiming to force the entities out of hiding.
However, this attempt wasn't very effective, and within a short span of ten seconds, more and more areas were drawn into the battle. Su Wu's second and third lines of defense on the Qinling Mountains were forced to join the fight.
The involvement of three consecutive lines of defense increased the Artificial Intelligence's attention, prompting a change in tactics. All Amethyst Crystal Entities and rocks reaching the second and third lines of defense were marked for destruction. Unable to quickly distinguish the enemy, the AI decided to destroy all suspicious entities, regardless of the additional ammunition waste.
With the change in tactics, more rockets exploded in the sky, forming a series of orange-red, elongated clouds of fire that consumed all solid matter shot their way. After about ten seconds, the density of the ejected Amethyst Crystal Entities and magma debris dropped significantly, and the fire that had burned across half the sky gradually faded.
The Electromagnetic Machine Guns then took over the interception task, and with the number of Amethyst Crystal Entities in the air drastically reduced, they had no chance to advance further, only awaiting their eventual destruction.
[Detected that airborne Amethyst Crystal Entities have been mostly eliminated.]
[Alarm deactivated.]
[Commencing repairs of fire platforms and replenishing ammunition.]
In the Farmhouse Shelter, hundreds of thousands of Spider Robots silently stood down from their combat readiness, returned their allocated weapons and ammunition, and went back to work in the engineering teams. Aside from the workers in the remote control center, no one else knew that this massive underground city had just undergone an emergency mobilization, coming perilously close to all-out war.
In the Qinling Mountains, once everything had settled, the ammunition reserves of Su Wu's second and third lines of defense had dropped to 26% and 34%, respectively, nearing or even falling below the minimum reserve line of one-third. The first line of defense was nearly depleted. If the Amethyst Crystal Entities organized another large-scale riot, these lines of defense might not be able to intercept them.
But the Amethyst Crystal Entities, having suffered heavy losses, seemed to have retreated deep into the magma lake, even ceasing their usual probing actions. Thus, both sides began repairing their damages in unison, silently preparing for the next battle.
800 kilometers away, in a coastal shelter near Yu'an City, a middle-aged man with a stubble lay in bed, browsing the internet under the dim light of his dorm. The shelter was now maintained by just him and a few others, and to save energy, even the central air conditioning wasn't turned on, relying on coal-heated water to keep the living and main work areas relatively warm—though "warm" was relative to the -60 to -70 degrees Celsius outside, as the average temperature inside was still below 5 degrees Celsius.
This made the dorm feel damp and chilly, forcing the man to huddle under his blanket for comfort.
"Jianghe City had another Amethyst Crystal Entity attack."
"Looks really lively."
The man sighed, a hint of envy on his face. After all, it was a human society about to gather half a billion people, never lacking in vibrancy, unlike his current situation. After several waves of mass migration, there were no humans left within a hundred kilometers of his shelter—not even rats or cockroaches. The harsh environment had eradicated even the most resilient pests, leaving only darkness, cold, and solitude as the themes of this frozen land.
"When the next merchant train comes, we can move all the remaining supplies at once."
"Then we can also move to Jianghe City."
"Calculating the time, it should be within a month at the latest."
After his moment of envy, the man couldn't help but calculate his moving date again. Compared to other shelters still housing many survivors, the only valuable things here were some fuel and cheap metals, along with various second-hand equipment in the shelter. Their value barely exceeded the cost of a merchant train trip, hence his low priority in the relocation tasks.
"At least there's still the internet."
"Keeps me from completely losing touch with human society."
"And there are people worse off than me."
Sighing about having to stay in this hellhole for another month, the man swiped his phone screen, his gaze falling on a friend in the chat app, feeling a bit comforted.
Physically, this friend was the closest to his shelter, but not on land—instead, he was further east in the ocean, where coastal lands had become the seabed after the initial tsunamis of the apocalypse. Now, with the extreme cold, the sea surface had frozen over with a twenty-meter-thick ice layer. Without external help, he'd likely never leave his shelter.
"His shelter only has him."
"Within twenty to thirty kilometers, other shelter dwellers have either fled or perished."
"Just thinking about it is suffocating."
The man murmured, somewhat admiring his friend's resilience. However, he believed the key to his friend's endurance was the internet, which allowed him to stay closely connected with billions of people in East Asia. With a positive mindset, it didn't feel much different from living in normal human society.
"Jianghe City's satellite network is truly remarkable."
"Don't know how many people it has given hope to survive."
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