The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 24 Another fight with the Straight Spiral Stone
  During Lin Yi's breakup, Zhiluojiashi hunted and killed a Poseidon Helmet Shrimp, and then returned to the waters, wandering around the coral reefs waiting for opportunities.

Lin Yi clearly saw that the small horned stones he had seen before were surrounding his side, eating the flesh and blood of the helmeted shrimp from the gap torn open by the straight spiral horned stones.

However, the Straight Snails turned a blind eye and even made more scars on the body of the Poseidon Helmet Shrimp to make it easier for those small horned stones to feed.

This confirmed Lin Yi's guess. Those small horned stones that have also never been seen are most likely the larvae of Ortholith. It also shows that the habits of Orthospermum are different from those of almost all creatures of the same period, and that they will take care of their young for a long time.

Under the control of Lin Yi, the second-generation soldiers swung two pairs of flat paddle-like paddling feet, opened their blade-covered sickle limbs, and shot out from the coral reefs, heading straight for the straight-horned rocks swimming in the sea. .

A pair of huge pupils of the straight spiral stone rotated, and the eyes looked like an indescribable old god looking down at the world. The huge body drew an arc in the water under the reverse thrust of the water jet propulsion system. A cold light flashed between the waves, and the cone The shaped shell pierces the soldiers at the front like a spear.

But the doubled mobility brought by the two pairs of paddling feet and the strengthened nervous system with myelin allowed the second-generation soldier to easily avoid the fatal charge. He swung his broad and flat tail, turned around, and opened his sickle. The limbs directly hit the exposed soft tissue part of the front half of the straight horn stone.

The straight spiral horn stone tentacle waved its wrist, and water sprayed out from the funnel. It tried to speed up and leave the battlefield, turned the spiral shell around and launched another round of charge.

But how could Lin Yi easily fulfill its wish? Soldiers surrounded it from all directions, restricting the scope of action of Zhiluojiao Shi. No matter how it fights left and right, it will be difficult to break out.

Seeing this, Zhihejiushi turned around and opened its ten tentacles covered with fine tooth-like protrusions on the inside, covering the nearest soldier. At the same time, the conch shell stabbed a few times and narrowly passed the side of another soldier.

But Bing Hao, who was locked by the tentacles, was not so lucky. It was enveloped in a death net composed of ten tentacles. The pair of sharp horny beaks in the center of the tentacles were opening and closing, and the remains of tissue contaminated during the last hunt were still vaguely visible above.

Amidst the sound of the exoskeleton cracking, blue horseshoe crab blood spread in the water.

In the battle between chitin and horny, horny wins. Bing Hao's body was violently torn in half by the horned stone through the gap made by its horny beak. Immediately, the horned stone released its tentacles and allowed the two stumps to fall to the seabed.

This is also the most fatal problem when facing large corner stones when the shell of the corner stones cannot be broken.

If you want to cause fatal damage, you must attack the exposed soft tissue, but the soft tissue is where most of the attack structures on their body are concentrated. If there is no way to break through their hard shell, they can only face the domination of the past. The person's wrist.

Even if the jawed fish that dominated the world in later generations wanted to suck a squid, facing those ammonites with armor stacked up to form turtle shells, they still had to find ways to safely start with the soft parts. There was even a weird creature like the Helicopteron shark that drove himself crazy and later generations of paleontologists.

What's more, Binghao was born out of a feather-winged horseshoe crab, with a body of more than one meter long, facing a huge straight spiral stone with a total length of nearly nine meters.

Even if more than half of the nine meters is a slender shell, even the two or three meters long soft structure from the headband to the wrist is enough to easily entangle and kill the approaching soldiers. Fortunately, Lin Yi is not fighting alone. And even for the straight helical stone, which was considered the most advanced structure at the same time, the tentacles are not flexible enough to attack multiple enemies with multiple tentacles at the same time.

This also means that when it entangles a certain soldier, it temporarily loses its ability to attack and becomes the best target for other soldiers.

The soldiers swarmed forward, their sharp sickle limbs closed, and the blade thorns clustered on the inner edge pierced the exposed soft tissue of the straight spiral horn stone with the movements of the sickle limbs, tearing and tearing several extremely ferocious deep cuts on the surface of the tentacles. Deep scars.

The blood spurted out again, making the water where the blue horseshoe crab blood had not dispersed become even more turbid.

At the same time, a pair of smaller sickle-shaped appendages that were inherited from the Limulus template and whose spike structures were also modified also began to pierce and pull the soft body tissue of the Orthohelix. There were traces of blood. The long scorpion tail is raised above the head, and the digestive juice is injected into the body of the scorpion from the tail stinger.

The straight helical stone struggled violently, but once these curved blades penetrated, it was difficult to break free. There is even a structure similar to a blood groove on the blade thorns, but the fierce struggle only makes the wounds caused by the blade thorns on the limbs of the soldier's sickle become deeper, larger, and more deadly.

The blood of the straight horned stone gushes out and spreads among the blue waves. The shaking amplitude of the ten tentacles gradually decreases, and the sharp horny beak also changes from the crazy opening and closing of the initial bite to a weak and slightly opened one. The injection of digestive juices and the loss of blood caused the life of this terrifying head-footed beast like the ruler of the old days to slowly pass away.

……

After a few minutes of fighting, Bing Hao slowly released his sickle limbs, but the huge body of Zhihejiushi was already lifeless and floated to the sea surface under the influence of the gas in the air chamber.

The soldiers dragged its body and swam toward its mother nest among the coral reefs on the seabed. Lin Yi wanted to see what was so special about the genetic sequence of the Orthogonal Stone.

Seemingly seeing that the battle was over, the nearby larvae of the snails that had disappeared since the start of the war came back and swam around the body of the big snails, unwilling to disperse for a long time. It even opened its horny beak and swallowed the tissue fragments floating in the sea water, without any concern that many of them came from the same kind.

But for some reason, Lin Yi always felt that there was still something wrong with these Orthogonite larvae.

With the thought of cutting the weeds to their roots and shaking the yellow eggs away, he controlled a few soldiers to use a pair of smaller sickle-shaped appendages to clamp hard on the bodies of these small straight-horned stones, and immediately tore them apart. into pieces.

After reacting, the little Zhiluojiaoshi fled in all directions, but they were quickly caught up by the soldiers and killed them one by one.

The family soon arranged themselves neatly. But Lin Yi still felt that something was wrong, but he couldn't figure it out for a while - or in other words, he didn't want to think about the worst possibility.

But in the next second, in Bing Gao's compound eyes, water waves swayed in the distance, and two slender white water lines approached again, revealing Lin Yi's familiar gray-white conical shell covered with blood-like dark red stripes. The thick and long tentacles they waved, and the narrow pupils that were as contemptuous as the old gods came to the world, all indicate their identities - straight horned stones, and they are two adults!
  (End of this chapter)