Chapter Fifteen: There Are Still Experts

Just over ten meters above Zhuang Xiao, on the cliff face, the small but bulging-bellied wisdom insect hid in a crevice in the cliff face when the battle began!

It has a gun. It comes out now and fires a shot at Qi An, who can purify, while simultaneously leaping towards Zhuang Xiao.

If those flower-like tentacles were to envelop Zhuang Xiao, he would immediately undergo a complete transformation!

Qi An fired his shot hastily and with terrible aim. It grazed Zhuang Xiao's face, startling him so much that he crouched down.

However, the cicada also shrank back and failed to leap down!

Zhao Bohan's attack followed immediately, his automatic rifle firing in rapid succession, turning a section of the loess cliff into a honeycomb, and sending the Huichong flying in blood and flesh.

Yu Shuang, with a ghostly figure, leaped onto the protrusion on the cliff and pulled Zhuang Xiao down.

The next second, she raised her rifle and, the instant Zhao Bohan forced the Huichong out of the cliff crevice, shot it through the cyst on its forehead!

The battlefield fell silent, with only the sound of the wind remaining.

At this point, the wind is good, as it can quickly disperse the stench carrying polluting information. However, as the stench spreads, it also attracts more fallen insects.

Zhuang Xiao came into close contact with a cicada, whose contamination level was already close to 55%. Qi An got up and gave him an injection of blocking agent to purify the contamination on the spot.

After a while, Zhuang Xiao regained consciousness, and his ear-piercing howls echoed through the valley.

"Dr. Qi! Sister Qi! You saved my life, waaaaaah!!"

If it weren't for the fear of being beaten up by the two captains, Zhuang Xiao would have clung to Qi An's leg and begged her to protect him from now on.

She chased away the dreadful worm, and the emergency purification was so fast, so stable, and so reliable!

It felt so good, like my brain got a massage! I felt so energetic!

With Sister Qi by their side, how could their Wind Chaser Team 2 not crush all the special forces teams in the base and climb to the top of the team rankings?!

Although she couldn't grab onto Qi An's leg, she only managed to grab the hem of her camouflage jacket. But Zhuang Xiao, who was desperately trying to howl after surviving the ordeal, was still unceremoniously dragged away by Yu Shuang, who said, "Go dig for insect oil!"

Qi An glanced at Su Qingran and Zhao Bohan's pollution levels; one was 46% and the other was 38%.

"Don't worry about me, I can take the medicine and it will go down," Su Qingran said.

Zhao Bohan's case didn't even touch the level 2 mutation red line, so it was perfectly safe.

Qi An nodded to the two of them, swallowed two small blue pills, and said wearily, "Then I'll go meditate for a while."

She sat back in the car, and Zhao Bohan glanced at her pollution monitoring bracelet, slightly puzzled.

Yu Shuang looked at Qi An as if she were looking at her own younger sister, or as if she were looking at an SSR divine equipment that she had unexpectedly obtained and was reluctant to use. She cherished it very much and only went to work on the insect oil after making sure that Qi An had no scratches or bumps.

The wind subsided and the sky brightened a bit.

Including the Wisps, the team harvested a total of 32 Fallen Insect corpses, from which they extracted 30 milliliters of high-energy biofuel. Although they lacked the resources for further purification and refining, this amount of fuel was enough for their three vehicles to travel over 100 kilometers in the wild.

Everyone was wearing filter masks while operating the equipment, and the contamination level was still rising, but much more slowly.

Racing against time for half an hour, the team left behind a scene of carnage and headed towards Jiu!

The weather seemed to be improving when we set off, but two hours later, the wind picked up again, and the sandstorm once more blotted out the sun.

The sound of gravel hitting the car window made me worry that the tempered glass might be shattered at any moment, and the visibility ahead was at most 30 meters.

"I'm fucking impressed!" Yu Shuang cursed.

The effects of insect pheromones made everyone a bit irritable. Communication was lost again, the red dot on the locator was completely lost, and the extremely poor road conditions were pushing people's patience to the limit.

"This is the coordinate he gave us before, but it seems like nobody's here..." Zhuang Xiao put on infrared imaging glasses, while Tang Long lit two chemical glow sticks and stuck them out of the car.

This was the ruins of a low-rise residential complex. The only sound was the wind. They searched the ruins but received no response. The only source of heat they found was a group of hyenas sheltering from the sandstorm in a half-collapsed building.

Upon seeing the two-legged creatures armed with guns, the hyenas turned tail and ran.

"Scattering out to search is not feasible. We can't contact anyone right now, and we can't provide timely support if we encounter danger."

"Drones are unusable, so we can only guess in one direction to search!" Zhao Bohan shouted.

The crowd responded sparsely and were about to leave when Qi An took off his filter mask.

"Sister Qi?" Zhuang Xiao asked, puzzled.

Qi An sniffed hard in the ruins, wondering, "Does it smell bad?"

Everyone was taken aback. Zhuang Xiao also took off her mask and sniffed carefully. "It seems there really is! It's over there on the stairs!"

They are now in the collapsed apartment building. The place Qi An is pointing to is the emergency staircase leading to the basement.

The others also took off their masks and smelled it one after another.

In terms of sensory enhancement, they were all stronger than Qi An. Qi An didn't actually smell it; he relied on his senses.

There was a spy bug's corpse at the top of the stairs; it was shot in the head.

There's no way anyone else could be in this godforsaken place. It's 99% likely that it was Jiu who attacked it. He encountered the Fallen Insects while waiting for backup here!

Yu Shuang smiled and gave Qi An a thumbs up, "It's all thanks to you, our team's lucky star!"

"Zhuang Xiao, take off your mask. Smell the Fallen Insects, observe their bloodstains, and lead the way for us. Xiao Qi, keep an eye on Zhuang Xiao's contamination level," she ordered.

"Yes, Captain!" they both answered readily.

With a clear direction for the search, everyone became excited!

With eyesight and a sense of smell far exceeding those of ordinary people, Zhuang Xiao activated "military dog" mode, staring at the sandstorm and painfully sniffing as he walked.

Qi An struggled to sense his surroundings in the harsh weather, constantly correcting his course. After 20 minutes, he finally found the place.

It was a thermal power plant, with huge cooling towers reaching from the sky to the ground, appearing and disappearing amidst the sand and dust.

Flames leaped in the air, and the air was thick with the stench of worms' flesh and blood.

This must be a battlefield of a great battle; I know that without even sensing it.

"Could the mother nest be here?" Yu Shuang asked incredulously.

This is obviously a joke; if the mother nest were here, they wouldn't be able to get close at all.

"Tang Long, blow open the entrance in front!"

The convoy had arrived at the power plant gate, but the gate was blocked by the ruins of buildings and the corpses of fallen insects. Yu Shuang immediately ordered the gate to be blown up.

Tang Long placed a bundle of detonators in a sheltered spot, cut off a section of the fuse, lit it, and quickly turned his back.

The entrance exploded with a deafening roar, sending debris flying everywhere and smoke and dust swirling in the gale.

All the magazines were full, and the rocket canisters and a whole box of rockets were placed next to Tang Long's seat. The entire team was ready for a bloody battle and charged into the power plant with bated breath!

However, it was quiet inside.

In the vast power plant, only flames, fueled by the raging winds, devoured the buildings and corpses; in this apocalyptic scene, there was not a trace of life.