The plunder of the heavens begins with the Spirit Cage.

The strange beasts that live hidden in the mist have poor eyesight, but their ears are definitely very sharp.

The manhole cover in the southeast corner of the sewer was blown off by a strange force surging from below, and a dark mass of slug-like monsters crawled out along the drainage ditch.

Wherever their soft bodies crawled, even cement tiles were gnawed into fragments by their corrosive saliva.

On the west wall, humanoid monsters with membranous wings flapped their blood-stained wings and jumped down from the rooftops of three residential buildings, crashing down on the defensive positions like clumps of black rain. As soon as they landed, they were riddled with bullets by the heavy machine guns behind the cover, and the dark blood splattered all over the wall. Those that escaped before they could finish off the sentries were blown to pieces by the basketball-sized steel fists.

Under the overpass on the north side, an amorphous slime monster wrapped in the wreckage of a scrapped bus roared as it smashed through the barbed wire and charged toward the defensive line, only to be burned to a crisp by more than a dozen armor-piercing incendiary bombs.

No matter how many they cleared, new monsters kept emerging from the fog.

They came from all directions, killing one batch after another, as if all the monsters in the city had been drawn to them.

"This fight has been going on for almost an hour. There must be a 'leader' behind it all!"

The commander squinted at the battlefield all around the screen, and finally had to accept that these creatures of various shapes and sizes had their own 'Lion King'!

"The mastermind behind this must be found!"

The moment these words reached Lu Qianwei's ears, he had already descended the rope ladder from the stadium dome to the command vehicle.

"Send a team out to find him and take him down!"

The fog itself carries strong magnetic interference, so someone has to go out to find the real culprit.

There were too many creatures on the ground, so the four airships painted with matte camouflage quickly took off and flew towards the perimeter of the stadium.

These airships are designed with full shielding and antimagnetic protection, making them ideal for use as signal relay stations.

Of course, the human eye cannot find the hidden alpha wolf even with the help of the herd and the fog.

What the airship had to do was open the hatch and release countless swarms of drones, each the size of a fingernail, spreading out like black sand and extending in all directions along the fog-shrouded streets.

Strong magnetic interference can indeed render large detection equipment useless, but it cannot stop the distributed detection of a swarm of bees.

Even though drones occasionally crash on the road due to their chips being burned out by strong magnetic fields, the remaining drones still rely on swarm algorithms to gradually and clearly understand the signal fluctuations of the entire city.

The commander could not be too far from the herd, and the swarm, filtered by big data, took less than twenty minutes.

We finally found three potential targets.

One is located underground in an old civil defense fortification complex in the northern suburbs, four kilometers away; another is in a hundred-meter-deep pit in an abandoned steel plant in the west of the city; and the last one is in an abandoned oil storage depot on the riverside in the south of the city.

The three underground spaces were all enclosed, just enough to hide the sizable leader of the strange beasts.

"Better to kill the innocent than let the guilty go free. Kill all three!" The commander stared at the three red dots on the screen and gave the order directly.

The three airships immediately flew into the air, adjusted their cannons, and the first to fire was the airship aimed at the steel plant in the west of the city.

A blue-white beam of light slashed down diagonally, piercing directly through the hundred-meter-thick layer of soil and reinforced concrete bunker above the pit.

The multi-headed lizard-like monster hidden inside didn't even utter a sound, and the entire pit was blasted into a fiery, shattered mess.

Immediately afterward, an explosion was heard at the South City Oil Depot. The spider-like mother monster that was laying eggs under the oil tanks was blown through its core by a single blast, and the entire oil depot area was turned into a sea of ​​fire.

The last shot that landed on the air-raid shelter in the northern suburbs seemed to have been met with a swift escape by the enemy, who appeared to sense the danger as the airship's cannons were aimed at them.

The electromagnetic railgun only managed to blast open the entrance to the fortifications; it failed to kill the enemy outright.

Fortunately, the drones had already marked the location, and with their continuous tracking and reporting, the drones were able to reach the target.

Lu Qianwei quickly led two squads underground, killed a large group of soldiers who were blocking their way, and then killed the alien creature with a particularly protruding head with a few slashes.

At that very moment, the monstrous beasts that had been charging wildly outside the stadium suddenly stopped their fearless charge.

In the chaos, they would either be mowed down by soldiers' guns and cannons, kill each other, or turn around and flee.

For the next few days, the stadium and its surrounding area became the only safe zone in the city.

The strong military support also reassured the rescued people, allowing them to cooperate with the mayor's arrangements.

Thanks to the widespread deployment of unmanned bee swarms, the efficiency of search and rescue operations has been greatly improved.

Over the next few days, nearly 10,000 survivors who had been hiding for almost a week were rescued from various basements, subway tunnels, and gaps in the load-bearing walls of residential buildings.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, a 20-person search and rescue team searched for an industrial park 30 kilometers outside the city.

The area had been shrouded in thick fog, and the drones had only detected faint signs of life.

As soon as the squad reached the outside of the park's perimeter wall, they heard a dense barrage of light weapons gunfire and the booming of exploding grenades coming from deep within. The sounds carried a distinct sense of tension, indicating that the fighting was proving extremely difficult.

"It wasn't the sound of our weapons; it must be the arrival of this country's army."

"Let's go, provide support if we can!"

As the squad leader spoke, he led his team into the battlefield without the slightest hesitation.

On the other side, the 173rd Regiment, surrounded by the main office building of the park, had long been at its wits' end.

They were originally the main force ordered to go north to reinforce the main urban area.

As a result, they accidentally entered a dense fog area and were entangled by a large group of strange beasts. More than 800 people fought all the way, but when they retreated here, less than 150 people remained, along with more than 20 seriously wounded.

The two remaining tanks were blocking the main entrance of the office building. One of them had its chassis ripped out by the alien beasts and blown to smithereens. The other one could still fire, but its cannon barrel was already red-hot. It only had three armor-piercing rounds left, and the infantrymen had less than half a magazine of bullets each. They also only had four rocket launchers left.

The outer wall had long been breached by the monsters, and countless small monsters were crawling into the building through the cracks in the wall and the ventilation pipes. Half a squad of soldiers had to be left on each floor to block them. Every ten minutes or so, a wave of large monsters would charge at the main gate under fire.

Leading the charge this time was a nearly five-meter-tall unicorn beast.

It was covered in a half-meter-thick dark brown armor shell, which was even more robust than tank armor, and bullets had little effect on it.

This guy charged headlong into the road, smashing through three walls in his path and even turning a parked heavy truck into scrap metal.

With its head down, it charged headlong into the tank blocking the entrance. With a muffled "boom," the tank, weighing tens of tons, was forced back half a meter, and a large patch of paint was scraped off the edge of its tracks.

Regimental Commander Zhao Chengye gritted his teeth and roared, "Rocket launchers, prepare!"

Two rocket launcher operators immediately set up their guns and aimed, firing two rockets in quick succession at the giant armored rhinoceros's head. After the smoke cleared, only two shallow white marks remained on its carapace, without even a crack appearing.

The third rocket grazed the armored rhinoceros's eye and exploded, enraging it. It then rammed into the tank again, denting the frontal armor and shattering the sights into glass shards.

Its claws slammed into the side of the tank turret, instantly stunning the gunner in the driver's compartment.

At the same time, hundreds of strange beasts poured out of the breach in the wall.

They rushed into the building, drooling. The nearest soldiers didn't have time to fire and had to fight them to the death with their bayonets!

The soldiers behind them quickly became hesitant to fire in the chaos, fearing they might accidentally injure their comrades. In the end, they too had to shout and engage in hand-to-hand combat with the canine creatures.

Zhao Chengye pulled out the pistol from his waist, already prepared for his entire team to die in battle.

But just then, a completely different sound suddenly came from outside the park's perimeter wall.

The crackling light swept across, and a whole bunch of the monsters that hadn't even rushed in yet immediately fell down.

The larger mini-boss wasn't much better off, as it was just recovering from its pain.

Four powered armored vehicles charged towards it, stepping over rubble.

The shoulder-mounted laser cannon emitted a blinding blue-white light and, almost without pause, pierced through its ridiculously thick armor.

His head and chest exploded, and then that was it.

Without a leader, the remaining large and small beasts were quickly wiped out by the group.

Zhao Chengye stared at the reinforcements before him, whose equipment was beyond the comprehension of this era, and remained speechless for a long time.

It wasn't until the headcount was completed and the remaining officers and soldiers of the 173rd Regiment returned to the stadium with the search and rescue team that they learned of the heroic deeds of this powerful force from the mayor.

"In any case, thank you for your contributions these past few days!"

Zhao Chengye saluted and thanked him repeatedly, making Lu Qianwei a little embarrassed. In the end, he awkwardly said, "It is the responsibility of the strong to protect the weak..."

Chapter 246 The Mist 6

"From now on, I'll leave things here to you!"

After reinforcements arrived at the Central Gymnasium, Lu Qianwei decisively chose to leave.

After all, no country can ignore the presence of a high-end military force that is several generations ahead of their own.

Leaving behind a batch of resources and equipment, and following the old custom, giving them a set of scientific and technological materials, Lu Qianwei walked onto the flagship and waved goodbye.

Having returned to the alien world through the portal, Lu Qianwei received some good news.

"After multiple rounds of screening and calculation, we have preliminarily confirmed the coordinates," Cole said, pointing to a location on the planet's projection.

That was a red desert region in the heart of the planet's southern hemisphere.

To save trouble, Cole simply gave this area a code name: S-01 No Man's Land!

It is called the no man's land because, when viewed from space, the entire area, stretching for millions of square kilometers, is a slowly flowing red sandstone desert.

Of course, the absence of long-term signs of life activity does not mean that life does not exist in quicksand; further exploration is needed.

According to geographical models, 40,000 years ago, this area was an alluvial plain near the sea.

The uplift of tectonic plates, coupled with drastic climate change, has transformed this fertile land into a death zone where even the wind leaves only yellow sand.

"We compared the ancient landform data in the memory core of the pre-civilization and calibrated it back and forth seven times."

The coordinate error is unlikely to exceed 200 meters, so there is a high probability that the object is hidden in this area.

Even if the hostile forces of the previous civilization were not found, in another 100,000 years, the wind and sand will only bury it deeper..." Cole pointed to the red dot with his fingertip to confirm again.

"Whether it is or not, let's go and see first."

Once the suspected location was identified, the temporary camp was completed in less than half an hour, and everyone was loaded onto the spaceship and sent to the skies above the S-01 Crimson Sand Sea.

The two-kilometer-long exploration flagship hovered five kilometers in the air.

Hundreds of modified desert hovercraft landed smoothly on the soft sand.

Thousands of drilling mechanical insects, each half a meter in diameter, slid into the crimson sand layer through the door of the exploration vehicle.

They didn't need to clear the soil and explore the caves bit by bit like in archaeological excavations.

These custom-designed deep-exploration robotic insects were created specifically for this scenario.

The diamond composite drill bit at the head can break through granite layers at a speed of 5,000 revolutions per second, and the machine body is equipped with a gravitational wave radar that can penetrate 3,000-meter-thick rock layers. Any artificial structure with a density different from that of the ordinary earth's crust will be instantly marked.

With thousands of mechanical insects deployed, a detection network covering 120 square kilometers was directly woven underground.

The flagship simultaneously initiates neutron scanning at high altitude, with dual detection superposition, making it virtually impossible to miss any man-made structures hidden underground.

This sea of ​​sand is located within the alien fog zone. The pale gray fog flows slowly along the sand dunes, reducing visibility to less than 100 meters. As soon as the exploration team set up their equipment, strange movements began to occur beneath the sand layer.