Revisiting Azur Lane

"Well, does that mean you are not as smart and useful as the barbarians?"

Zuikaku looked at the robot twice, thought of the hardworking and dedicated people in the restaurant, made a comparison and said.

“…In theory, yes.”

Xuefeng was silent for a moment. She had been to so many experimental worlds, but this was the first time she had seen a strange creature like Manju that was highly intelligent and powerful. She often stared at Manju when eating in the restaurant. Many waiters were frightened by her stare and dared not approach her.

"Xuefeng, how is the battle going ahead?"

Unlike Zuikaku who was interested in everything new, Shokaku was more concerned about the battle in the distance. The ominous storm made the air currents in the sky extremely violent, and the clouds were dyed black, so they, the overlords of the new era, didn't even have a chance to watch the battle. It was a very strange experience.

"The energy stored in the entity of Bad Omen is almost used up. The number of creatures that descended is not as large as the number that were destroyed. In at most one hour, the battle with Bad Omen will be over."

Xuefeng's face was calm. She shuttled directly through the middle of the Ominous Fleet. She was better than everyone else. Everyone knew clearly whether the battle situation was good or bad. The Ominous also had its limits. As long as the energy loss reached a certain point, it would dissipate on its own.

Because of this, she felt a sense of disharmony: she often traveled between various experimental worlds, and was quite professional in the project of breaking through the mirror sea. She noticed something unusual during her first encounter with the bad omen, and today she was even more certain:

The bad omen is not the core of this mirror world. Even if all the bad omen entities are eliminated and the storm is dissipated, it is meaningless.

The real core is someone else.

"Hahaha, how abominable! I haven't even joined the battle yet and it's about to end."

When Zuikaku heard this, she couldn't help but laugh because she had to watch the entire process of destroying the omen without being able to intervene.

"No, it's only the battle with the Omen that's over."

Yukikaze emphasized the point. Zuikaku was puzzled and said, "Huh?" But Shokaku thought of something more and raised his delicate eyebrows slightly. "Yukikaze, are you saying that the core of this world is not an ominous entity?"

"Yes."

Because of the reduced speed, Xuefeng was able to take a deep breath: "The core of this mirror sea has never changed from the beginning to the end. It's just that we were attracted by the existence of the omen and thought they were the core."

"what."

Shokaku seemed to have thought of something, and his beautiful blue eyes flickered slightly: "You mean, the core of this mirror world is the testers, purifiers, and even builders who came with us?"

"Yes."

Xuefeng looked in the direction of the port area: "Although the builder died for unknown reasons, she had already completed the development of the 'Mirror Sea' before that. At that moment, she had already determined that the core was one of the sirens who came to this world with us."

"what?"

Zuikaku couldn't quite understand the conversation between the two, but she understood one thing: "In other words, as long as we deal with the testers and purifiers who are still active, we can eliminate this mirror sea?"

"Yes, even the Builder could be the core, and he may even be the most likely one."

Xuefeng nodded: "Siren's development of the Mirror Sea has reached an inhuman level. Even if the builder's body stops functioning, the energy in her body still exists and can be absorbed by the Mirror Sea and operate on its own."

"Tsk, what a troublesome bunch of guys."

Zuikaku curled his lips, but soon raised the corner of his mouth: "But if that's the case, things will be simple."

"Yes."

Xuefeng also smiled, with a gleam in her eyes.

The experimental institutions in this world are really interesting.

Chapter 140 Necessary Sacrifice

"Isn't the bad omen the core of this world?"

The sunlight from the sky penetrated the dark clouds and scattered on the port dock. Zhou He looked at Xuefeng who was returning to the dock with his boat in front of him. He glanced at the ominous team that was almost dying and whose black vortex was shrinking. Did he blame them wrongly?

It doesn't matter if it's a wrong accusation. He's going to be killed anyway. The reward for defeating the Omen entity is much richer than closing the Mirror Sea. Next time I meet him, I'll give priority to defeating the Omen.

However, he took two steps and looked at the peaceful sleeping face of the Builder again, then pointed and said, "Xuefeng, look at her. Is she the core?"

"Well…"

Xuefeng squatted beside Zhou He's legs and looked down at the Builder. After a while, he shook his head and said, "This is the first time I've seen a Builder's body, but according to my experience, whenever a living individual is used as the core of a mirror, there will be energy fluctuations around those people that echo the mirror world. She doesn't have that, so it's probably not her."

"So, there is only one candidate."

At some point, Zhou He's gaze had shifted from the builder to Xuefeng's head. Xuefeng's hair was very beautiful. In the game, she often used bow hairpins and ribbons to comb her hair into a pleasing hairstyle (skin portrait), but this Xuefeng meta of his had never used ribbons and hairpins to comb her hair since she joined, so that her long snow-white hair just fell on her shoulders, looking more mature and lovable than in the game.

"He is a tester who never showed up from beginning to end..."

Xuefeng pressed her hands on her legs and stood up, looking up. As she spoke, her eyes met Zhou He's in the air, and her eyes widened unnaturally - but Zhou He looked away at this moment, with his hands behind his back, looking towards the distant sea with a smile as if nothing had happened: "The tester did not show up, but I know where she is now."

"…Where is she? I'll kill her."

Xuefeng lowered his head and lowered the pitch of his voice, even adding an inaudible urgency.

"Not in a hurry."

Zhou He raised his hand and pointed at Mingshi who was running around at the back of the transport ship, and said with a smile: "Please help move these things down first. It will probably take a long time for Mingshi and I alone."

The bad omen hasn't died yet. If Xuefeng is sent to the decapitation operation now, his emergency mission reward will be gone.

"what."

Xuefeng finally reacted, left Zhou He and jumped into the stern of the transport ship. Together with Mingshi, they gathered together the materials that were thrown into a mess during the return voyage. They also picked out the lighter items and passed them to Zhou He who was standing on the dock beside the ship. The three of them fiddled with it back and forth for a while, and it took them half an hour to move all the things to Mingshi's production workshop.

“Can we really infer the production method from these things?”

Looking at Akashi who was fiddling with spare parts in the workshop, Xuefeng looked at Zhou He, who was leaning against the wall with one hand, with several buttons of his collar undone, seemingly trying to look cool but actually feeling a little overwhelmed. The corners of his mouth inexplicably curled up, but he immediately lowered them and asked.

"It's definitely not possible for me to do it, but Akashi can."

Zhou He coughed lightly and answered seriously.

"Really~"

Xuefeng looked at him, snorted in an incomprehensible way, and spread out her palms to him: "Now you can tell me the location of the tester. If the bad omen is eliminated later, the Purifiers will definitely control the Siren Fleet and fight with Yudachi and the others."

"If a real fight breaks out, the Purifiers will be the losing side."

Zhou He took a look at the battlefield. The huge storm that originally occupied more than ten nautical miles had been almost dissipated. The red Siren fleet surrounded the remaining black ominous entities. Yuli and the others had already withdrawn from the core battle circle, as if they were sitting on the mountain watching the fight between tigers.

During the two minutes he was observing, the twenty or so black entities disappeared instantly, and the storm also dissipated - after four hours, the ominous entity was completely defeated.

"The tester is just east of our port right now, heading south with a fleet of executors of about 300 people. It looks like they are preparing to surround our team."

His gaze tilted and he saw the testers who appeared in the area of ​​vision opened by Yorktown and the others. Unlike his younger brothers, these ones from the experimental agency had separate large display points, and the display icons were their respective little figures.

"Three hundred?"

This number made Xuefeng squint his eyes.

The most difficult problem with the Sirens is that their production speed is too fast. The productivity of all the camps in a world combined is not as good as theirs. This is also the reason why the experimental agency can unilaterally control the experimental world. The whole world combined cannot defeat them, not to mention that these camps are divided into different parts of the world. Coupled with the unilateral suppression of technology, even if the camps carry out joint actions, they can only do so with their "acquiescence" - the so-called "natural algorithm system" of the Purifiers predicts the theoretical future, and their experimental agency uses various means to push the real process towards the predicted future.

Most of the destroyed worlds are the ones where a certain camp in that world discovered this during the period and attempted to break through the fate controlled by the Sirens with its own abilities but failed, resulting in large-scale deaths of combat forces in one or more camps, which is far from the deduced future, so they are abandoned worlds.

Back to the point, the 300-man executor team is ten times the number of Zhou He's ship girls, but for Xuefeng, this is just a number. At their stage, the gap in quality cannot be made up by quantity.

"I'm going."

Gathering his thoughts, Xuefeng's eyes became sharp again and he turned and walked away.

"Snowwind."

Looking at her back, Zhou He called out, and before she turned around, he continued, "Be careful."

"I'm tired of hearing these bland exhortations."

Xuefeng took two steps forward, then stopped without warning and turned to look at Zhou He. He put one hand on his waist and raised his chin proudly: "The congratulatory speech suitable for me, Xuefeng (Lord), to attack should be more elegant, more gorgeous, and different from ordinary people. This will make me more motivated!"

Zhou He was stunned when he saw this. He scratched the back of his neck with his hand and looked left and right, looking at Xuefeng's proud expression with his eyes closed, waiting for praise. It was like something was tickling him in his heart, and he didn't know how to answer for a moment.

"Hey! You gotta say something too!?"

Xuefeng was feeling good about himself at first, but before he could get an answer, he quietly opened his eyes and saw Zhou He's indescribable strange expression. Shame suddenly emerged from the bottom of his heart. He felt his cheeks burning, and he jumped up and glared at Zhou He with what he thought was a vicious expression. Without waiting for his answer, he turned around and ran away quickly.

After Xuefeng ran away, Zhou He squatted down and covered his face with his hands. It was not that he deliberately did not speak, but Xuefeng's sudden cuteness overloaded his brain. This strong contrast was really too much of a burden on the heart.

It took him a while to give new instructions to others.

……

"The bad omen is really not the core."

In the island's safety zone, Zuikaku reluctantly pulled the plane back to replenish ammunition - she squatted for a long time, and at the moment when the ominous storm was too small to affect the carrier-based aircraft, she dive-bombed those strange ominous entities like a hungry wolf, feeling extremely satisfied.

"Well, the commander has given me a message. According to Xuefeng's judgment, the core of this world is the testers, and they are preparing to encircle and suppress Kaga-senpai and the others."

Xianghe next to him digested the instructions conveyed by Zhou He and explained the matter to the people around him.

Zhou He's new order was very simple. Their aircraft carriers would launch an air strike on the fleet led by the tester, while Bismarck and others would move westward while being alert to the Purifier fleet, trying to keep as much distance as possible from the fleet led by the tester, and together create time and opportunity for Xuefeng to decapitate them.

"Tester, I remember that she seemed to be killed by the two seniors from the First Air Battle in another world last time. This time it's our turn."

After hearing what Shokaku said, Zuikaku became eager to try, and Shokaku also narrowed his eyes. Zhou He once praised her and Zuikaku for surpassing the two in the First Carrier Battle, so they couldn't perform too badly this time.

"First Air Force..."

Yorktown couldn't help but whisper when she heard the familiar name. In her memory, her last stop was the duel with the Sakura Empire's aircraft carriers. Now, Akagi and Kaga, who were members of the First Carrier Fighter, did not join the port, and her two sisters did not join the port either.

She clasped her hands in front of her chest and prayed silently in her heart, hoping that Enterprise and Bumblebee could reach Hong Kong before the Akagi sisters joined.

As for the battleship Kaga? Both her existence and her usual behavior were so strange that Yorktown didn't even consider her as the historical aircraft carrier Kaga in his memory.

"Anyway, we just need to create opportunities for Xuefeng, right? Xuefeng has already come out."

The Royal Ark was not very interested in their past, because the target of her cover was the destroyer Xuefeng. She was restless inside and was very alert, interrupting the other three Zhenghang's reminiscing about the past.

"After this battle, it's really over. I'm tired and want to go home and play games."

Nagashima echoed from the side, but it was impossible to tell from her words whether she was truly tired or just pretending to be tired.

"Ah."

Shokaku and Zuikaku looked at each other and stopped talking. Instead, they began to adjust the flight targets of the carrier-based aircraft that were still flying around the map outside, and at the same time released more carrier-based aircraft to circle overhead.

As they made their move, Bismarck and others who received the order also began to move away from the battlefield.

The Purifier who observed this was also surprised: "Isn't the ominous entity the key core?"

This time she really didn't know.

Generally speaking, they have full control over the Mirror Sea, and the fundamental reason is the monitoring equipment they place there.

The bad omen itself has the ability to interfere with and distort electronic equipment, so in areas where the bad omen exists, they will not install too many monitoring and management devices. Currently, this mirror sea overlaps with the bad omen activity area. The sudden death of the builder is a particularly rare case, and it can be said to be the only one.

In the absence of external equipment and database support, even if he was one of the real-name managers of the Purifier, an experimental institution, he had no way of locking onto the core of this world. He could only act according to his subjective thinking and put the blame on the bad omen first.

But now, she is innocent, the builder died suddenly, the omen has been resolved, and the world overlap has not ended. So, there is only one answer - she contacted the tester and asked whether the builder set the core data on her before he died suddenly.

"it's me."

The tester's answer was a little blunt: "After the builder finished paving the mirror sea, she noticed an abnormal spatial resonance phenomenon. At the same time, someone wanted to snatch control of the mirror sea from her, so she temporarily placed the data on me, who was the farthest away from the singularity."

"Who is so powerful that he comes here to interfere with our efforts to build the Mirror Sea? It can't be those meta ship girls who came from nowhere."

When Purification heard this, he was immediately excited. There is another expert?

"No, it's something in that singularity."

The tester poured cold water on her: "You also see that the test is not as good as the test. You are not as good as the test. You are not as good as the test. You are not as good as the test. You are not as good as the test! "

"That's it? I've already thought of it."

The Purifier actually knew nothing, but she pretended to know, and her tone became serious: "If this is the case, our body will die here, and the stored data may not be able to return to the host. In order to preserve this information, you as the core will self-destruct. As long as this space is released, I can return to the host with the information."

"..."

The tester was shocked by her determination, but said: "I refuse. Even if I am destined to die, I will try to find out what this singularity is."

"Oh, really? But it seems your whereabouts have been discovered. If nothing unexpected happens, that meta Yukikaze is approaching. Go and fight her."

Purification was not interested in this at all. She only knew that if her machine died here, then the important data of her "close contact" with these ship girls here would be lost, which was something she would never allow to happen!

"Oh, it's still uncertain who will win or lose."

The tester snorted coldly and cut off the connection.

After standing there and thinking for a while, the Purifier decided to help the tester die faster, so he assembled the fleet of Executors that obeyed his orders, marked the fleet led by the tester as an "experimental opponent", and launched an attack on it.

"Forgive me, this is a necessary sacrifice in order to discover the secret of this singularity earlier."

Purifier never thought that she would have to fight against her colleagues one day. After three seconds of silence for the tester, she touched her chin and showed a grim expression: "I, the Purifier, am not a treacherous person."

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