As the last rays of the setting sun were swallowed by the shadow of the hive, Lin Yi tapped his knuckles three times lightly on his tactical glove.
"Let's go." His voice was low, but like a taut string, it struck each team member's communication headset precisely.
Long Wu's heavy armor boots crunched on the scorched earth. He turned to look at Lin Yi, the golden patterns in his pupils flickering with his breath—a sign of the true dragon blood surging within him. "Boss, the smell in that mother nest is really strong." He sniffed, swallowing the rest of his sentence, his Adam's apple bobbing. "It's even more disgusting than the rotting flesh we smelled in the Abyss dungeon last time." After all, Chu Yao was carrying the tactical terminal at the front, and that girl was very sensitive to smells.
Chu Yao was indeed frowning.
Her fingertips danced across the holographic terminal screen, a pale blue stream of data flowing through the neural interface on her wrist into the outer defense network of the nest. "The vulnerability in the outer energy barrier is 37% smaller than expected." She turned to Lin Yi, her hair streaked with gunpowder dust. "But your spacetime rift was opened too conveniently, perfectly positioned between the transducers of their two main defense nodes."
Xuanmingzi lagged behind the group, and the eerie flame in the bronze lamp flickered twice.
He raised his eyes, the lamplight casting deep lines of light and shadow on his face: "The Night Owl's senses are sharper than rumored." His voice was like shattered jade settling in a cold spring, "When I broke through the barrier just now, I clearly felt a spiritual force sweep over me—not a mechanical scan, but a living thing."
Lin Yi's temples throbbed twice.
He could clearly hear his own heartbeat, not from nervousness, but because the power of spacetime within him was surging along his spine to his limbs.
As a mythical-level professional, he could sense that the flow of time inside the nest was 0.3 seconds slower than outside—a subtle difference that was enough to expose any careless intruder.
"Remain silent." He raised his left hand, a translucent ripple of spacetime appearing in his palm. "For the next thirty seconds, stay close to my rhythm."
The metal outer wall of the mother nest gleamed coldly in the night. As soon as Lin Yi's fingertips touched the layer of energy membrane that shone with a faint blue light, the entire wall suddenly began to writhe as if it were alive.
Countless silver tentacles emerged from the gaps in the metal, weaving a dense net in the air—this was a secondary defense that they hadn't triggered when they bypassed the outer defense line!
"Take cover!" Long Wu shouted, his dragon tail popping out from the backpack on his lower back, sweeping across Chu Yao's waist and pulling her behind him.
But Chu Yao's terminal had already lit up red. "This isn't mechanical defense; it's bioelectrically powered!" She quickly swiped the screen. "The energy frequency... matches the brainwaves of the Night Owl soldier we captured earlier!"
Lin Yi's pupils contracted to thin slits.
He finally understood Xuanmingzi's warning earlier—Night Owl did not rely on mechanical defense at all, but transformed the mother nest itself into a living entity!
The energy flowing within those metal walls was clearly like blood vessels, and the tentacles from before were the nerve endings of this "giant beast".
"Time Freeze, Miniaturization." He uttered a low shout, and the ripples in his palm suddenly expanded into a light shield with a diameter of two meters.
The team members felt a sudden lightness around them, and even Long Wu's heavy armor seemed to have lost its weight. From the outside, their movements appeared to be compressed into a 0.1-second time fragment, while the Mother Nest's defensive tentacles remained in a stiff state of "sensing the intruders".
The moment the tentacles brushed against Chu Yao's hair, the team had already pressed themselves against the shadows of the inner wall of the nest.
Cold sweat broke out on Long Wu's back. He could feel the vibrations as the barbs on the tentacles scraped against his heavy armor. "If these things were to pierce his flesh..." He shuddered and didn't dare to think any further.
"Quiet." Xuan Mingzi's lamp suddenly moved closer, the ghostly light reflecting the flickering shadows in the corridor ahead.
They were three two-meter-tall mechanical soldiers, the gears at their joints whirring like rusty saws. "Patrol, every seven minutes." His fingertips traced paths in the air. "Their thermal imaging scan has a radius of five meters, but their movement is predictable—"
"Turn left and go straight for ten meters, then turn right," Lin Yi replied, his right eye glowing with silvery-white light, a pre-rendering of the Time-Space Dominator's unique "Time Reversal" ability.
Three seconds ago, he had already "seen" the patrol's movements over the next five minutes. "We have a 47-second window."
Chu Yao's terminal suddenly vibrated. She glanced down at the screen and her expression changed drastically: "Trap!"
There's a pressure sensor on the ground, with a trigger threshold of 120 kilograms—Long Wu, lift your foot!
Long Wu's foot, which was about to step out, was suspended in mid-air, and the veins on his forehead were throbbing.
His heavy armor weighed a full 150 kilograms. If someone were to step on it... He looked at Lin Yi, who was staring at the almost invisible silver threads in the cracks between the floor tiles. "Time-space displacement." Lin Yi snapped his fingers, and ripples suddenly appeared on the ground beneath Long Wu's feet. His weight was temporarily "transferred" to his body from three seconds ago. The red light on the pressure sensor flashed, but ultimately did not light up.
"Let's go." Lin Yi crouched down and moved forward first. Just as the toe of his boot touched the next floor tile, a dense net of lasers suddenly fell from the entire ceiling!
Chu Yao's terminal exploded with a blinding blue light in her palm. "It's a voice-activated trap!"
The sound of Long Wu's heavy armor scraping against the metal just now triggered it! "Her fingers traced quantum codes in the air, and the frequency of the laser net began to distort." "I hacked into the control center. Three seconds later..."
\"bite--\"
All the lasers turned simultaneously, forming a protective shield above the team's heads and reflecting subsequent laser beams back.
Chu Yao wiped the sweat from her brow and stuck her tongue out at Long Wu: "Remember to apply enough joint lubricant next time."
But before everyone could breathe a sigh of relief, the metal ground in front of them suddenly cracked open.
Hundreds and thousands of palm-sized mechanical spiders surged out, their compound eyes glowing scarlet, and the sound of their eight legs scraping the ground was like countless steel needles pricking the ears.
"Well done!" Long Wu grinned, and the scales on his neck suddenly burst open, revealing dragon horns protruding from his hair.
His body began to swell, and his heavy armor shattered into fragments with a dragon's roar, revealing a robust physique covered in golden scales. "I've been wanting to unleash my dragonfire for a while now!"
A crimson-gold dragon breath erupted from his mouth, instantly melting the mechanical spiders into molten iron wherever it passed.
But the spiders surged forward like a tide, with new ones constantly emerging from the cracks in the wall.
Lin Yi placed his right hand on Long Wu's shoulder, and the power of spacetime surged in through the point of contact, suddenly accelerating the spread of the dragon flames threefold—under his control, time was exceptionally "lenient" towards the dragon flames.
"That's about it." Xuan Mingzi's lamp suddenly trembled violently, and the ghostly fire transformed into a beam of light that shot towards the ceiling.
Inside the ventilation duct, a dark figure was aiming an energy gun at Chu Yao's back.
The beam of light pierced the shadowy figure's wrist with pinpoint accuracy, the energy gun clattering to the ground, revealing Night Owl's ashen face—his pupils were bloodshot, and his mouth twisted into a wide grin. "So it really is you... the scent of the Time-Space Ruler. I've been searching for three hundred years!"
Lin Yi's gaze suddenly turned cold.
He could sense that this Night Owl's mental strength was stronger than any of the intruders he had encountered before. More importantly, there was a faint sense of familiarity about the other party... like some kind of sealed memory was surging.
"Retreat." He made a decisive move, and a spatial rift unfolded beneath their feet.
The team had just disappeared into the blue light when Night Owl's energy gun shattered the ground where they had just been standing.
"Chase!" the night owl roared, its nails digging deep into the metal wall. "Even if I have to dig through the mother nest, I'll grind your bones to dust!"
The moment the rift closed, Lin Yi heard a roar coming from the depths of the mother nest, as if some sleeping behemoth had been awakened.
He turned to look at his teammates. Long Wu's scales were still covered with molten iron, Chu Yao's terminal screen had a crack, and Xuan Mingzi's lamp flame had dimmed a bit—but in everyone's eyes, the same flame burned.
"Let's go deeper." Lin Yi wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth (he had forcibly overdrawn 30% of his stamina when the spacetime rift opened). "Night Owl has revealed his location. The clues to the Seven Keys of Creation... should be in his lair."
As the team regrouped, a metallic, twisting sound came from afar, as if some enormous creature was awakening.
Chu Yao's terminal suddenly popped up a new alert. She looked up at Lin Yi, her eyes filled with both tension and excitement: "Boss, the energy fluctuations in the core area of the mother nest... are getting stronger."
Lin Yi touched the Time-Space Badge on his chest, where a slight burning sensation emanated—this was a mythical professional's intuition about a key target.
He took a deep breath and activated his spatial and temporal powers to the fullest extent: "Let's go, let's meet this Night Owl."
At the end of the metal corridor, a door covered with unknown runes slowly opened, and in the energy storm surging out from behind the door, seven floating key phantoms could be vaguely seen.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com