Ultraman: It turns out this is the easy mode.

Chapter 655: Bugs, Bugs Again

The fluorescent screen in the command room reflected Cui Ming's slightly frowned brows. He turned the environmental data report in his hand, and the edge of the paper was wrinkled by his fingertips. "The environmental problem has improved recently, which is a good thing." His voice was mixed with the hum of the air conditioner, but the tail tone was cut into pieces by the sudden sound of cicadas. Higashi Kotaro squatted beside the tactical board, carefully holding a green cicada with his fingertips. The insect was flapping its wings with its abdomen raised, and the sound of its chirping was like a rusty saw scraping a metal plate.

"But Kotaro, could you please not put this cicada here? It's very noisy!" Cui Ming's pen slammed on the table and stuck directly into the table. Kotaro hurriedly stood up, the cicada flapped its wings in his palm, and the golden lines on the transparent wing membrane glowed faintly. "Uh" he looked at Cui Ming's very unhappy face, his ears flushed with embarrassment, and a vague excuse rolled out of his throat, "This thing is pretty good. When I was a kid, I always went to catch it with my friends during the summer vacation. We would lie in the shadow of the tree for half a day."

Indeed, since the ecological restoration plan promoted by EDF took effect, all kinds of plants have begun to cover the earth, foxtail grass has grown in the cracks of the steel bars of abandoned factories, and even the large purple admiral butterflies that had disappeared for 30 years have begun to flutter their wings again on the cherry blossom branches.

When the rainy season ends, the sound of cicadas spreads across the city like a wave, weaving a summer sound field of the old times between the air conditioner and the neon lights. Kotaro looked at the tall buildings outside the window and suddenly thought of the crooked locust tree in the backyard of his hometown. The cicada shells were still attached to the bark, like translucent amber in the sunset.

"Captain, this is a cicada, very good!" There was an inappropriate joy in his voice, as if he was not in the headquarters of the Set team monitoring monsters, but in the afternoon with the fragrance of locust flowers.

Cui Ming rubbed his brows and glanced at Kotaro's combat uniform with torn cuffs - this kid always talks about his childhood, and during the last patrol he was staring at the dandelions in the ruins.

"Come on," he suddenly stood up, his tactical boots tapping out a crisp rhythm on the ground, "If you want to find a cicada, I know a bigger one here."

The holographic projection suddenly lit up between the two of them. The 3D model of the Musashino residential area slowly rotated, and the ground suddenly cracked into spider-web-like cracks. The projection of King Zemira rose from it, and when its four wings spread out, they blocked the light from the ceiling. The sound waves generated by the vibration of its abdomen were visualized as ripples, causing fine ripples in the coffee cup on the table.

This giant cicada larva is 45 meters long. The monster born from the fusion of the autumn cicada and the cosmic creature is called King Zemira. King Zemira inherited the characteristics and habits of the cicada. After living underground for a long time as a larva, it undergoes incomplete metamorphosis and molts to become an adult.

"The larval stage is okay, but the earthquake caused by the emergence is equivalent to magnitude 6.5 on the Richter scale." Cui Ming's fingertips slid across the projection and touched the slender mouthparts of King Zemira. "Last year, its breathing frequency was monitored underground in Chiba Prefecture. Now it is almost time for it to break out of the ground." Kotaro stared at the pair of compound eyes in the projection that could penetrate the darkness, and suddenly noticed the vocal organ in King Zemira's abdomen. The structure was exactly the same as the cicada in his palm, but it was magnified tens of thousands of times.

"The principle of the flame-emitting organ is still being analyzed," Cui Ming called up the thermal imaging image. The chest area of ​​King Zemira was flashing a lava-like red light. "It is preliminarily speculated that it is the combustible gas produced by the symbiotic bacteria in the body. As for why this thing can fly--" He paused, looking at the King Zemira's spread hind wings in the projection. The film-like structure glowed like a galaxy under the light. "I don't know how its wings support its huge body." Kotaro suddenly felt an itch in the palm of his hand. The cicada had climbed up the back of his hand at some point and was poking his skin with its mouthparts. An alarm suddenly beeped in the distance, indicating that the Pacific Plate was vibrating abnormally. Cui Ming turned off the projection and threw a metal box out of the drawer: "Take it, a soundproof box. If you let this thing disturb me again, I will lock you up with the larva of King Zemira to listen to the cicadas."

When Kotaro caught the box, the metal surface still had the residual warmth of Cui Ming's palm. At this moment, Cui Ming's phone vibrated on the table. The moment the screen lit up, a dazzling white light made Kotaro squint subconsciously. When he saw the lock screen wallpaper clearly, he couldn't help but let out a soft cry in his throat - Cui Ming in the photo looked only sixteen or seventeen years old, with blood-stained overalls with big holes at the knees. He was squatting in the ruins with green smoke, holding a beetle half a person's height in his hands and feasting on it. The insect shell burst out dark green juice between his teeth.

The sky in the background was orange-red after a nuclear explosion. Under the rolling clouds, the tip of a giant monster's tail was disappearing on the horizon, and the air wave it brought overturned the crooked billboard in the distance. Kotaro stared at Cui Ming's wolfing down in the photo, and suddenly remembered that the captain always said, "When surviving in the wild, even tree bark can be boiled into porridge." At this moment, looking at the old photo with the smell of gunpowder, an inexplicable sourness surged in his heart. "It turns out that the captain also had a childhood of catching cicadas," he murmured to himself, carefully putting the cicada into the soundproof box, and the light sound of the metal buckle was particularly clear in the silent command room.

Outside the command room, the sound of cicadas was still overwhelming, and the sound waves passed through the double-layer soundproof glass, like an airtight net, pulling the jungle of steel and concrete back to the natural time sequence. The shadows of the trees swayed on the blinds, and occasionally one or two lost cicadas hit the glass, making a muffled sound.

Of course, Kotaro was wrong. Cui Ming didn't have a childhood of catching cicadas! That was the end of the EDF world. The surface of the earth was polluted by Kururu's radiation and no grass grew. Humans could only hide in underground bunkers to survive.

The giant mutant insects that breed in the ruins are a rare source of protein for the survivors. Cui Ming still remembers the scene of his first hunt - he held a rusty crowbar and confronted a three-meter-long centipede in the basement of a collapsed shopping mall. The moment the other party's fangs brushed his cheek, he smelled the sweet smell of death.

At this moment, Cui Ming looked at Kotaro's thoughtful profile and turned his phone over calmly. The boy biting a bug in the lock screen wallpaper had a cruel look in his eyes that was inconsistent with his age. That was the light that only people who survived in the cracks of doomsday could have. The cicadas were still noisy, but for Cui Ming, this summer music full of vitality was just a prelude to another battle.

Why.
Still the same as before.
Not a big fan of bugs.

For Cui Ming, dead bugs are good bugs.
Of course, bugs that can also be turned into food are good bugs.
(End of this chapter)