Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 433 Incubation
The robot suddenly stopped talking. The red light in its eyes that gave people a weird feeling gradually dimmed. A series of emotionless electronic synthesized voices came from its mouth: "The operating system has been initialized... Searching for task logs... No data... Restoring factory settings... Cutting off the power..."

After a few seconds, the robot squatted down and curled up into a ball. The indicator lights on its body went out one after another...it actually shut down automatically.

At the same time, Yang Qi's anxious voice came from the headset: "Sun Hang! Sun Hang, can you hear me? The communication is clearly not interfered with! Hello? Hello?! Sun Hang?!"

"I can hear you, I can hear you...what's wrong?"

"I saw you staring at the screen in a daze just now, and I thought something went wrong again." Yang Qi said.

"Aren't there enough problems now?" Sun Hang glanced at the powered-off robot from the corner of his eye, then pulled the keyboard in front of him, "How do I operate this thing?"

Sun Hang thought that if the restarting procedure was too troublesome, he could just use his own ability. Anyway, this thing had been invaded by Chimera No. 17, so he could just find any excuse to get away with it afterwards.

"Enter the code I sent you and open the backend control interface. Then log in to the administrator account again and select device initialization... Pay attention to the various parameters of the telescope. If the lens angle is deviated or out of focus, search the historical parameter configuration..."

"There is no historical parameter configuration." Sun Hang opened the backend control interface according to Yang Qi's instructions. "The historical operation records are also blank. They have all been deleted. In other words, they have been directly restored to factory settings."

"Wait a moment. I'll check the parameters used by the previous bunker observers... Those things should be recorded. If we fill in the parameters according to those records, we should be able to see the current status of Chimera 17..."

"Uh... are you talking about these things on the table?" Sun Hang found a thick stack of photos next to the keyboard. The contents of the photos were all images of Chimera No. 17. In the lower right corner of the photos, there were several lines of densely packed small characters. If you look closely, you can find that these small characters are the various parameters used by the equipment used to take these photos.

"Yes, just fill it in directly!"

Sun Hang selected a full-body photo of Chimera XVII and directly filled in the parameters on the photo into the control interface... Soon, the screen jumped to the real-time picture observed by the telescope, and the clarity of the picture was constantly improving with the fine-tuning of the device's built-in AI.

When Chimera No. 17 on the screen was still a large, blurry halo, Sun Hang and Yang Qi had already discovered something unusual - within this milky white ball of light, there seemed to be some bright red spots and lines mixed in. These spots and lines covered almost the entire cocoon, faintly emitting an unsettling atmosphere.

"What the hell, what is this?" Song Yarong's voice came from beside Yang Qi, and the latter immediately shouted in a low voice: "Don't make noise... Wait until the camera is in focus before looking."

Since the telescope and the observation equipment connected to it were all initialized, the refocusing process took a full five seconds. When the clear image after focusing was completed appeared on the screen, a sound of people sucking in their breath was heard in the communication channel.

The Chimera's cocoon was no longer complete - the scarlet spots and lines they had just seen were actually the cracks on the surface of the cocoon and the places where the cocoon shell had fallen off... Looking inside these cracks and breaks, the thing hatched from the inside of the cocoon was like a huge fireball, and the scarlet viscous fluid flowed slowly like magma, emitting a light far brighter than the cocoon shell.

"The giant cocoon of Chimera No. 17... cracked..." Yang Qi murmured.

"Has this thing hatched?" Sun Hang asked.

"I... I'm not sure..." Yang Qi suddenly reacted and said to Song Yarong beside him, "Quick, call all the experts to a meeting! Analyze the current status of Chimera 17 immediately! In addition, notify all participating units of the final combat operation, and advance the final combat operation to two hours later!"

"Two hours later, should I come back?" Sun Hang scratched his head.

"No, you don't have to come back, we will go find you!"

……

……

The experts' video conference lasted less than twenty minutes. All the experts participating in the meeting, including those senior bosses far away in the Tianshu Tower, agreed that the incubation process of Chimera No. 17 had entered the final stage, and its complete form could "break out of the cocoon" at any time. As for the power of the nuclear explosion caused by "breaking the cocoon", although it would be attenuated compared to the pre-estimated equivalent, it would still be easy to flatten the entire Tianfu City.

This feeling is like a bomb with a clear countdown turning into a sword of Damocles hanging over one's head, and the horse mane hanging the sword has been stretched to the extreme... No one knows when it will break, but everyone knows that it will break soon.

Just after closing the video conference interface, Yang Qi's mobile phone placed next to the computer vibrated. She picked up the phone and saw that the person calling was the highest-ranking person in charge of the final combat operation on the military side.

"Is the pesticide ready to use?" The boss didn't waste any words and went straight to the point, pointing out the most critical point of the problem.

"It can be used, but the 'effectiveness' will be weakened." Yang Qi said.

The "pesticide" produced using meme reverse engineering is like a targeted drug for treating cancer. The higher the affinity (or fit) to the target, the better the drug efficacy; conversely, the lower the affinity, the higher the probability of "off-target", and the probability of drug failure will also increase accordingly.

"I wonder what the success rate of this operation is?"

"I'm sorry, I can't give you a quantitative value..." Yang Qi said in embarrassment, "There are too many variables involved. It can't be determined simply by the degree of completion of the pesticide..."

"Then tell me, how sure are you?"

After thinking for a moment, Yang Qi gritted his teeth and said, "Fifty percent...success, or failure."

"Okay, I understand. In the next operation, I will let the troops cooperate with you as much as possible..." The boss' voice paused slightly, "Remember, at all costs."

The other party hung up the phone without giving Yang Qi time to respond. Yang Qi took a deep breath, picked up the notebook on the table, and then slung the bag hanging on the back of the chair over her shoulder.

"Let's go to Sun Hang." She glanced at Song Yarong and Wang Xiyi beside her and said in a deep voice.

……

……

Bunker No. 1, observation room.

In the half hour after the observation equipment was restarted, Sun Hang kept staring at the giant cocoon full of cracks. The physical strength of the cocoon shell of Chimera 17 was very high, and it was difficult to penetrate the cocoon shell whether it was a nuclear explosion or a high-energy laser irradiation. But there is a saying that goes, "The strongest fortress is often breached from the inside" - this sentence may be a bit strange in the current context, but it is very suitable to describe the current state of the giant cocoon.

The slowly flowing "magma" inside the giant cocoon seems to have extremely strong power. Driven by this power, the cracks on the surface of the cocoon are spreading rapidly - just like the operation of picking up pieces in Go, from time to time a "small" piece of cocoon shell surrounded by cracks will fall off the surface of the cocoon, revealing an internal area emitting a hot red light.

In fact, the flow rate of the "magma" is not slow, and the fallen cocoon shells are not small either - the slow and small here are only relative to the huge size of Chimera No. 17. In fact, the flow rate of these "magmas" is much faster than the blood pumped out of the human heart, and each of the fallen cocoon shell fragments is enough to smash a car like the one Sun Hang drove before.

This set of intelligent observation equipment has built-in statistical software that tells Sun Hang that in the past thirty minutes, the proportion of exposed "magma" inside the giant cocoon to the total area of ​​the giant cocoon has increased from 11% to 17%... In half an hour, 6% of the cocoon shell has fallen off. At this rate, in less than seven hours, the cocoon shell of Chimera No. will fall off completely, and it will change from a giant cocoon emitting milky white fluorescence to a burning giant lava egg.

Of course, Sun Hang also knew that the speed at which the cocoon shell fell off could not be calculated in this way... It was not a linear value at all. As more and more cocoon shells fell off, the speed would only increase. When those cracks spread to every corner of the giant cocoon, it was not impossible for the entire cocoon shell to explode at once.

After such an explosion, Tianfu City would probably be deleted from the city list of Xiazhou Federation - although it was dozens of kilometers away and although it was only an image seen on the screen, Sun Hang could still feel the enormous energy contained in the "magma" flowing under the cocoon shell.

This is all the energy gathered from the nuclear reaction that has been going on for such a long time since Chimera No. 17 "cocooned" - according to the experts in Tianfu City, the giant cocoon of Chimera No. 17 is a nested "double-layer reactor". The outer reactor carries out nuclear fission reaction, and the energy generated by the nuclear fission reaction is used to maintain the operation of the nuclear fusion reaction in the core area.

This is equivalent to a hydrogen bomb exploding inside Chimera 17 at every moment, and the power of the explosion not only does not leak out at all, but is instead all gathered together by Chimera 17... It is difficult to imagine the extent of damage that will be caused when Chimera 17 releases all of this energy.

In the words of those experts, the aftermath of the overflowing energy alone was enough to raze Tianfu City to the ground.

If Chimera No. 17 fails to hatch and self-destructs, releasing all of this energy at once in the form of an explosion, not to mention Shuzhou, even the cities outside the area covered by the Eternal Night will be seriously affected.

One expert even believed that once Chimera No. 17 exploded, the only city in the Xiazhou Federation that could survive intact would probably be Chunming City, which had a city-level energy shield.

It is precisely for this reason that a host of issues such as eternal night, blood moon, death aurora, etc. have been put aside. How to deal with this "super big explosion" is the most urgent problem that the entire Xiazhou Federation needs to solve.

If it is not handled properly, not only will Shuzhou be destroyed, but most of the federal territory will also suffer.

The number in the upper right corner of the screen flashed twice again, jumping from 17% to 19.3% - Sun Hang saw that in the lower right corner of the giant cocoon, the area with the densest cracks, more than a dozen cocoon shell fragments fell off at once, revealing a large area of ​​"magma" glowing red.

"If I stand close to Chimera 17 at this time, it should be spectacular, right?" Sun Hang thought to himself.

From the observation images, it can be seen that the falling of these cocoon shell fragments is like knocking off a hard-boiled egg, and some eggshell fragments that are much smaller than a fingernail. However, only when you get close to the real thing can you know that the average diameter of these fragments is more than ten meters, and the weight is measured in tons. They collapsed from a height of hundreds of meters...

This noise is probably even more exaggerated than a landslide.

Sure enough, not long after the fragments fell, a very obvious undulating curve appeared on the screen of the instrument used to monitor the explosion and ground shock waves, and the red warning light suddenly flashed continuously.

"The speed at which the cocoon shells fall off has increased." Sun Hang said in the communication channel, "How are your preparations going?"

"The semi-finished product of the insecticide has been loaded onto the transport plane. The PFDA will complete the final assembly and launch it on Garuda." Yang Qi said, "In six minutes, the helicopter will arrive at Bunker No. 1 and they will pick you up on Garuda."

"Why is it a semi-finished product?" Sun Hang was a little puzzled. "How complete is it?"

"It's not a question of completion." Yang Qi explained, "Insecticide is essentially an antimemetic agent. Antimemetic agents have a very short shelf life. Generally, the final production steps are completed only when they are about to be used... Just think of it as the pull tab of a grenade that can only be pulled off one second before it is thrown."

"All assault units will carry a semi-finished insecticide and an activator. When using the insecticide, you only need to inject the semi-finished product and the activator into Chimera 17's body at the same time. The operation is similar to collecting meme samples." Yang Qi continued, "But there is a special task that needs to be assigned to you."

"Miki Fukada?" Sun Hang guessed.

"That's right... Fukada Miki said that she couldn't see the flaw of Chimera 17 from a distance, and right now we don't have time to clear out the culprits on the surface of the giant cocoon... The only way is for you to take her to the vicinity of Chimera 17 and find its flaw."

Sun Hang suddenly realized that in order to ensure the success rate of the mission, the superiors had already considered Fukada Miki, a psychic with valuable abilities, as part of the price of "at all costs". For a psychic like her who had no combat ability, after being brought close to Chimera 17, the probability of survival was almost infinitely close to zero.

She is much more valuable than those hunters who are responsible for fighting.

(End of this chapter)