Chapter 717 No chance left?!

Just as he was about to press the launch button.

“Pong—!”

A muffled thud, completely different from the previous bullet impact, suddenly came from his abdomen.

The sound didn't seem to come from the outside; it was more like a miniature bomb inside him being detonated, the dull echo making his internal organs tremble.

The fortress shook violently and instinctively looked down at its abdomen.

The thick exoskeleton armor, now resembling cheese melted by high temperatures, had a hole about the size of a bowl, transparent from front to back.

The metal at the edges was irregularly molten, with strands of red-hot molten iron slowly dripping down, making a soft "hissing" sound, which mixed with the burnt smell of flesh and skin.

A completely black bullet, half of it already pierced through his back and lodged in the exoskeleton armor, revealing its blood-stained tip.

The remaining half, still hot, was deeply embedded in his stomach, stuck firmly between his intestines.

The pain of a broken heart is almost unbearable.

But what's ten times more painful than the pain of a broken heart is when the bullet is still stuck in your intestines.

"Ugh—!"

After a brief period of numbness, a wave of excruciating pain surges forth.

The face beneath the fortress mask contorted instantly, covered in beads of cold sweat, and the muscles spasmed uncontrollably.

He stared intently at the ion shield still held in front of him, the black armor-piercing warheads still firmly lodged in place, the azure energy still resisting them.

"No...it's not the previous one...it's another one..."

The fortress's thinking was somewhat sluggish due to the intense pain, but his battle instincts allowed him to analyze the situation rapidly.

"The bullet that hit my shield earlier is now inside my intestines... So the second bullet hit the first bullet, and then it instantly stopped there, with all the kinetic energy transferred to the first bullet."

The law of conservation of kinetic energy?!

The physics knowledge I learned in high school suddenly came to mind with unprecedented clarity.

What a painful realization!

If he could be given a second chance to go back to high school and face that physics exam again, he would definitely not leave it blank again.

The intense pain caused the fortress to briefly lose consciousness.

He forgot that since two black bullets hit his shield one after the other, it also meant that two silver bullets should have also veered off course and hit Shadow Scorpion one after the other.

He was holding a shield, his intestines were broken into countless pieces, what about the Shadow Scorpion?

At the critical moment, Shadow Scorpion, relying on the amazing flexibility and reaction speed granted by scorpion mimicry, suddenly twisted its body into a strange arc, narrowly avoiding the first silver bullet.

The bullet grazed his ribs, leaving a deep gash on his exoskeleton, and fragments of armor fell off.

Before he could catch his breath, a second silver bullet, with an even more treacherous trajectory, was already upon him.

Damn it!

Alarm bells rang in Shadow Scorpion's mind. There was no way to dodge now. He could only swing his metal scorpion tail with all his might, creating a series of sharp afterimages as he blocked the attack like lightning.

"clang--!"

The sharp tip of the scorpion's tail collided violently with the silver bullet. The enormous impact shattered the scorpion's tail, cracking its stinger with fine lines, while the bullet was also ejected, flying away to who knows where.

"Now!"

Akh's eyes flashed with bloodlust. He suddenly exerted force with his feet, creating a small crater in the ground. He closed in, his high-energy particle dagger spinning rapidly, tearing through the air, and aimed straight at Shadow Scorpion's heart.

"Clang—Sizzle!"

The blade of the short dagger rubbed violently against the hard exoskeleton, sending out a long string of dazzling sparks.

The exoskeleton's defenses far exceeded expectations; the particle dagger failed to penetrate it completely, only causing Shadow Scorpion to feel a chilling sensation in his chest.

"court death!"

Shadow Scorpion was both shocked and furious, and let out a cold laugh from behind his mask.

His arms, like pincers, swiftly gripped Ah's wrists from both sides, while his scorpion tail drew a shrill arc, lashing back with its sharp stinger aimed directly at Ah's temple.

If this blow hits, the head will explode like a watermelon.

"Don't even think about it!!"

Witnessing the danger, a teammate abandoned his dual pistols without hesitation—Shadow Scorpion cunningly used Akh's head as cover to shield his own vitals.

His teammate lunged forward from the side, using his chest to tightly embrace the rapidly lashing metal scorpion tail.

"puff!"

The scorpion's tail slammed solidly into his chest!

He groaned and spat out a large cloud of blood mixed with fragments of internal organs, his chest visibly dented.

But his eyes were unusually bright, his feet were firmly planted in the ground as if rooted to the ground, and his core muscles were tightened like steel bars as he exerted force, using all his strength and weight to pull Shadow Scorpion down hard to the ground.

Caught off guard, Shadow Scorpion lost his balance due to the suicidal fighting style, and his arms, which were reaching for Ah, faltered.

Now!

Ahr roared, pouring all his anger and power into this strike.

"die!!!"

Instead of continuing to thrust at the hard breastplate, the short blade swept upwards along the curved surface of the armor with a violently rotating force.

The blade rubbed against the exoskeleton, producing a piercing, sharp sound, and traced a dazzling trail of sparks as it rose upwards.

The sparks shot upwards until they completely covered the smooth white mask.

"Snap—!"

A crisp cracking sound rang out.

The mask shattered instantly!

The only downside is that when Ahr exerts himself at his limit, he ultimately cannot achieve perfect control.

The crack left by the blade on the mask does not bisect it from the exact center, thus lacking a sense of symmetry.

The slit tilted slightly to the left, starting from the Shadow Scorpion's lower right jaw, cutting upwards across his lips, creating a gap that revealed his gleaming white teeth.

Continuing upwards, they severed the bridge of his nose, almost cutting off the tip;

Finally, it grazed his left eye, causing the eyeball to burst instantly, and the bloodstain went deep into his hairline.

The excruciating pain caused Shadow Scorpion to let out a bloodcurdling scream, but in the end... it did not die immediately!

"Ughhhhhh—! My face! My eyes!"

The Shadow Scorpion let out a shrill scream and went into a semi-mad state.

The exoskeleton joints made a "crackling" sound, and the scorpion's tail swung violently.

The teammate, already severely injured and coughing up blood, could no longer be held on and was forcibly thrown away, falling like a kite with a broken string into the grass more than ten meters away.

Freed from its restraints, the scorpion's tail once again lashed out like lightning towards Ah's wide-open back.

"Die! Die!"

The shadow roared hysterically.

Ah, however, seemed not to see the approaching scorpion tail, or rather, he simply didn't care.

He neither dodged nor evaded; instead, using the momentum from his previous upward slashing motion, he twisted his body slightly, gripped the hilt with his left hand, and raised the slightly chipped particle blade with both hands. He then aimed it at Shadow Scorpion's remaining, venomous right eye and stabbed it fiercely.

A life for a life! To perish together!

His teammate fell to the ground, foamy blood gushing from his mouth, his consciousness beginning to fade.

But at the last moment, he raised the gun that he had somehow found beside him.

He didn't aim, nor did he have the strength to aim accurately; he pulled the trigger entirely on his last bit of will and feeling.

"Bang bang bang—"

The bullet hit the scorpion's tail joint precisely (or perhaps luckily).

Although it failed to break the scorpion's tail, it caused the tail to tremble violently, slightly deviating the trajectory of the attack.

The scorpion tail, which was originally meant to pierce Ah's heart, was instead, due to the interference of the bullets, pierced Ah's right scapula with a "thud".

The enormous impact, carrying tearing kinetic energy, instantly sent him flying sideways.

A severed arm, clutching a short, dark blue particle blade, with jagged edges broken at the shoulder, spun in the air before finally falling to the ground with a "thud," its fingers twitching slightly from nerve reflexes.

"Well!"

Ah let out a painful groan, his body flying seven or eight meters away like a broken sack, rolling several times on the ground before stopping.

The wound on his right shoulder, the size of a bowl, bled profusely, instantly staining a large patch of grass red.

His face was ashen, and cold sweat beaded on his forehead. He tried to prop himself up with his left hand, but the intense pain and blood loss left him weak and unable to move. He could only kneel on the ground, breathing heavily.

On the other side, Shadow Scorpion's situation was equally dire.

He shakily got up from the ground, one hand tightly covering his face, but blood and tears still kept flowing out from between his fingers.

Ah's final, two-handed thrust with the knife, though not fully successful due to the piercing of his shoulder, still managed to plunge the blade into the area below the latter's right eye, creating a deeper and longer gash.

The new gash cut horizontally across the bridge of the nose from below the right eye, eventually merging with the vertical wound next to it.

It happened to form a crooked yet symmetrical cross-shaped scar on his face, which can be considered as "making up" for the "regret" of asymmetry in another way.

"You ruined my face, you deserve to die!"

Shadow Scorpion's voice was muffled and unclear due to the gap in his lips, but the resentment and madness it contained were chilling.

His only remaining right eye was fixed on Ah, who was lying on the ground. The shadow scorpion illusions surrounding him seemed to sense the extreme anger of the main body and turned their heads to stare at Ah as well.

They took steps together, walking towards Ah, who was unable to resist.

The scorpion tails behind them, their stingers gleaming with a cold light, rose high one by one.

His teammate next to him struggled to raise his gun, but Fortress, who was also enraged by his severe abdominal injury, turned around and kicked him hard.

"Bang!"

How could a teammate who was already seriously injured withstand a blow from the fortress in a fit of rage?

The gun in his hand shattered into pieces instantly. He was hit head-on by a speeding truck, spitting out blood. He was thrown back more than ten meters and crashed into a protruding rock. He lay motionless, his fate unknown.

On the other side, under the saturation bombardment of cluster bombs, the lynx dodged left and right, its head spinning from the shockwaves of the explosions, its ears ringing, and it was only its strong willpower that kept it going.

Fortunately, Hawkeye's second shot hit Bastion's abdomen, causing the latter to shake and slightly deviate from its aim when firing the second wave of cluster bombs.

Otherwise, they would probably have been blasted into dust by the second wave of cluster bombs.

He was frantically running and rolling through the grass, frantically switching the view through his tactical goggles, keeping a close eye on what was happening on Ah's side.

Seeing Ahri fall to the ground with his arm severed, seeing his comrades fall one after another, seeing a group of Shadow Scorpions approach step by step... he was extremely anxious.

However, behind them, the white spider-like creature, like a persistent ghost, was rapidly closing in.

His seven intact mechanical limbs swung wildly, wave after wave, keeping him constantly on his toes. He couldn't even find a moment to raise his gun, let alone fire another shot to save the dying Ah.

Xu Yingyan's eyes were also wide open, almost bursting out of their sockets.

The horrific scene of his teammate being torn in two haunted his mind, and an immense sense of self-blame gnawed at his heart like a venomous snake.

If he hadn't confidently announced "target killed," his teammates might not have let their guard down and wouldn't have been ambushed and killed by Shadow Scorpion.

Now, are we just going to watch Ahri die right before our eyes again?

As he hopped and leaped through the craters and scorched earth left by the explosion, dodging the sticky webs and strange silk sprayed from the white spider's ranged range, he desperately kept the sniper rifle pointed in Akh's direction, his finger already on the trigger.

But before he could pull the trigger, his vision was suddenly enveloped by a huge shadow falling from the sky.

Up close, they were two wings that seemed to be made of water-like light and shadow, with a wingspan of over four meters.

Like a solid curtain, it fell straight down, completely blocking his entire field of vision.

"Bang!"

The bullet burst from the muzzle, only to crash violently into the shimmering wing surface.

The point of impact instantly triggered a violent energy ripple, and where the ripple spread, the inner, pale white metal skeleton was faintly visible.

The pitch-black bullet ultimately pierced through and became stuck on the wing surface, unable to advance any further.

The fire crow's cold voice came from within:

"You can barely take care of yourselves, you're about to die, and you still have time to worry about others... You people are really something else."

Xu Yingyan was covered in sweat, which mixed with dirt and gunpowder smoke, sliding down his forehead and into his eyes, causing a stinging sensation.

But he didn't bother to wipe it; one eye was fixed on the enemy hovering on the ground, while the other eye, through his tactical goggles, was fixed on the desperate scene on Akh's side.

He felt that he had caused the death of his teammates, and now it was Ah's turn.

If given the chance, he would be willing to give his own life to save Ah's without hesitation!

But... there's no chance anymore.

The fire crow's outstretched wings, like a cage of death, shut out all his hopes.

Therefore, given the chance, Hawkeye would be willing to trade his own life for Ahr's, but the problem is that Fireraven's four-meter wingspan blocked his shooting angle.

what to do?

Who can save Ah?

……

(End of this chapter)