Chapter 350: Flame Rats
The power plant had its own factory protection team.
After a few of the strange fire accidents and explosions, the Red Dragon Army stationed squads from the special forces in the power plants.
They were at North Mountain Region, located in the north of the city, so the abnormal beast research department also stationed a regional-level operations team.
The three squads immediately did more than ten searches, but they did not find anything.
Meng Chao remained uneasy. He felt that something bad was about to happen.
When it was around ten at night, the strange fog came tumbling from the air. It released a faint blue and red light, which gradually descended on them along with the night. It was as if vortex-shaped, dark clouds had become connected together.
Piercing whistles cut through the night, and the sky seemed to be torn apart by a pair of hands that could not be seen. Huge shiny eyeb.a.l.l.s came from the four cardinal directions. They had tentacles trailing behind them and looked like the amalgamations of an octopus and a jellyfish as they staggered out of the rifts.
Demonic Air Ripping Eyes were the vanguards of the monster invasion this time.
They did not have great fighting strength, but they could use piercing mind attacks and strike at humans’ cerebral cortexes, which made theri mental strength indices fall because of fear and confusion.
During the recent fog descents, the number of Demonic Air Ripping Eyes had increased. It was to the point that people began to think that there was some sort of mysterious power controlling them.
And the Demonic Air Ripping Eyes were also evolving.
Not only had their tentacles become incredibly st.u.r.dy, they could also send them down from one hundred meters up in the air. Those mutated tentacles were death hooks that snagged people away.
A large number of new-type Demonic Air Ripping Eyes had also appeared, and they could interfere with the internet as well as cut communication optical fiber cables and wireless communication.
The monster experts called these mutated types Demonic Confusion Eyes.
It signified that once they appeared on the battlefield, they blocked off all communications by executing full-band barrage jamming.
To humans who had strict organizations and were used to coordinating attacks with each other, this was naturally an incredibly problematic thing.
Meng Chao stood at the highest point of the power plant. It was a cooling tower that released steam, which made it look like an erupting volcano. He looked into the distance at the faint light shining from the Demonic Air Ripping Eyes and the night sky, which was now dyed all sorts of colors.
It was like a nightmare around him. The short-distance dimensional portals had opened, and monsters appeared in the alleys and streets in ma.s.sive waves. Even Demonic Halberd Pigs and Iron-armored Rhinoceroses, which were the most common monsters, were much bigger and deformed. They didn’t seem the same creatures that Meng Chao had seen in the fog descent that happened when he had just returned to the past.
Their eyes were bloodshot and they were foaming at their mouths. Their muscles were twisted from being too tense, and, driven by their killing instincts, the monsters started attacking humanity’s fortified residential areas and skysc.r.a.pers.
Bang, bang, bang, bang!
The anti-aircraft guns located all over the city started voicing their protest. With the guidance of tracers, fire snakes shot into the air before they gathered together to form destructive waves that swept over the hundreds of Demonic Air Ripping Eyes.
Some of them were instantly shot full of holes. Whistles resembling those of popped balloons cut through the air while they swung their tentacles madly in the dark. This strange sight was even more terrifying than the mind attacks they released, and people’s skins crawled when they saw it.
More Demonic Air Ripping Eyes released strange forcefields to change the trajectory of the bullets, so they would barely graze them.
Both humans and monsters were learning how to fight.
While humans developed the Ultimate Style and other advanced fighting models to specifically target monsters, the monsters were also evolving and growing less apprehensive of human bullets. But only normal bullets used for long-distance attacks.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Fortunately, humans still had rocket launchers.
Some of the soldiers with heat tracing shoulder-fired rocket launchers had been lurking on the buildings. They had long since locked down on their targets, and when the Demonic Air Ripping Eyes descended to less than one hundred meters away from the ground, the soldiers calmly pulled the trigger.
To avoid the mind attacks from the Demonic Air Ripping Eyes, at the moment they pulled the trigger, the soldiers shut their eyes.
The rocket launchers had heat tracing technology, so they could still accurately find their target.
This time, the interference forcefields were not very effective and the Demonic Air Ripping Eyes were reduced to brilliant fireworks.
Under the illumination, more s.p.a.ces were torn, and more Demonic Air Ripping Eyes crawled out.
For a period of time, more than one hundred residential areas and hundreds of tall buildings in the city were attacked simultaneously.
The metal nets were connected to high-voltage electricity. They released loud crackles and incredibly dazzling sparks.
The searchlights illuminated the battlefields in the residential areas, which turned night into day over there. The monsters with mimicry and invisibility talents could not hide anywhere.
The electromagnetic towers released bright electrical arcs. They were like sharp and unblockable blades that cut open the aggressive monsters and burnt them to a crisp.
The st.u.r.dy fortresses were supported by a lot of electricity.
The five main power plants in Dragon City were operating over their maximum capacity.
After an hour of intense fighting, the garbage power plant to the north of the city still showed no signs of abnormal activity. Aside from two units temporarily going out of service because they had been operating over their maximum capacity for too long, there were no hints of man-made fires or explosions.
“Could it be that no monsters are lurking here?” Lu Siya asked Meng Chao through the communication channel.
“I don’t know.” Meng Chao shook his head. His eyes were still fixed on the night sky. He did not even blink as he mumbled, “The weather forecast station said that the fog is going to last for a really long time. The fight might go from midnight until dawn. If I were a monster that has outstanding intelligence, I wouldn’t choose to attack now.
“Before dawn, the power plant will have been operating at more than maximum capacity for an entire night. The humans would be mentally exhausted as well, so their defenses would be at their weakest. Wouldn’t that be the best time for me to attack?”
Meng Chao sat down cross-legged on the chimney and entered a deep meditative state.
Now that he had become a three-star superhuman and awakened to many of his previous memories, he could face Dragon City with absolute calmness even if it was burning with the flames of war.
It didn’t matter that the Demonic Air Ripping Eyes let out piercing shrieks and shocking waves of mind attacks. They did not bother him in the slightest.
In fact, he consciously expanded his vitality magnetic field to sense the vitality magnetic fields of the monsters in an attempt to find the secret behind how they could coordinate their attacks with more than one hundred species being present.
Time trickled by, but the monsters’ offense did not weaken in the slightest.
Even the steel corporations near the garbage power plant began to feel the pressure.
The Red Dragon Army special forces stationed here and some of the factory protection squad suddenly gathered together and rushed out of the garbage power plant.
Meng Chao opened his eyes and asked Lu Siya through the communication channel, “What’s going on? Where are they going?”
“The steel corporations were ambushed by a large number of monsters. There are dozens of Nightmarish Beasts and a few h.e.l.l Beasts mixed among them. The protection squads of those steel factories are not going to be able to fend them off any longer, so they’re rushing over to provide reinforcements,” Lu Siya cried out.
“I know what you’re worried about, but if we lose the defense line of the steel corporations, the monsters will seize the momentum to push to this place and the power plant will end up in flames!”
“Where’s Captain Ye?” Meng Chao was taken aback for a moment. “There should be even more elites from the abnormal beast research department here, right?”
“There was news half a minute ago saying that mysterious explosions happened simultaneously at the power plants at the center and south of the city. It seems like there are abnormal beasts over there,” Lu Siya said. “Captain Ye led Group 9 over there to put out the fire.”
Meng Chao spat at the ground before he suddenly calmed down.
His nostrils flared, and he sucked in a deep breath. “Did you smell something? It’s like... some sort of greasy inflammable substance.”
“Yes,” Lu Siya said. “And there’s a lot of it... They’re crawling up the pipes from deep underground.”
It was rats.
Just when part of the defensive force tasked to protect the power plant was mobilized to stabilize the defense line of the steel corporations, thousands of rats suddenly crawled out from under the power plant.
The rats were unlike any of rat-type monster Meng Chao had seen before.
They were greasy, plump, had thin and short limbs, and moved really clumsily. Forget about Meng Caho, as long as a Red Dragon Army sharpshooter who was well-trained was around, they would be able to hit them easily.
But when shot by bullets, they did not die instantly. Instead, the inflammable substance that filled their bellies would rise up in flames because of coming into contact with air.
The fire would burn the rats alive, which put them in extreme pain. The originally slow rats would then become much faster. They would run around like crazy and set everything around them on fire.
For a period of time, gunshots rang and hundreds of fireb.a.l.l.s screeched and ran about in the power plant. The situation became incredibly chaotic.
Fortunately, the abnormal beast research department had already predicted the risk of a fire and explosion, so they contacted the fire department and appointed an elite firefighting squad to come in advance.
Among them were a few experts who were skilled in controlling the transfer of heat.
A number of the superhuman engineers of the power plant were also skilled in creating spirit energy magnetic fields that could turn chemicals into electricity, then turn electricity into heat.
Thud!
More than ten fire trucks spread out in a row and fired a water pillar that looked like an aquatic dragon at the spot with the most Flame Rats. It blasted more than one hundred burning creatures away.
The engineers of the power plant started mumbling. Spirit tattoos spread from their foreheads to their fingertips, and they started moving their fingers rapidly. They created spirit energy magnetic fields that were both ingenious and exquisite. They turned the water droplets that came from the fire trucks into crystalline ice.
The ground was instantly frozen. A number of the Flame Rats’ limbs froze to the ground, and even if the fat on their bodies was still burning madly, they could not take even a step forward.
Gradually, the ice turned into ice spikes, and they gathered together to form ice walls. They surrounded the area in a small ice cage and trapped most of the Flame Rats inside.
The Flame Rats struggled madly to climb out of the ice cage, but even if they were lucky, most of the flames on their bodies were already extinguished. They were also badly battered and were on their last breath, so they no longer had the strength to continue attacking the vital spots of the power plant.
Besides, Lu Siya was still levitating in midair while holding the fort.
After half a year of sparring with Meng Chao, she had turned from a support-cla.s.s superhuman to a fighting-cla.s.s superhuman. She had already mastered her Spike Art.
When she saw any rats that they missed, she snapped her fingers lightly, and a small row of spikes shot out silently to pin that Flame Rat to the ground.