novelno Chapter 1288 Undead Girl VS. Crane Star
Chapter 1288 Undead Girl VS. Crane Star
The mission on Planet Kran has a time limit of only one day, which is neither long nor short.
If the Khwarazmian Federal Parliament were a reasonable person, he could probably get it done in a few hours.
If the other party is a tough nut to crack, then this trip will not be a negotiation, but a demonstration.
He thought for a moment and then found a name in his friends list.
Undead Girl.
In situations where a large-scale battle might be necessary, hiring a necromancer is definitely the right thing to do.
The value of a necromancer's summoned creatures in group battles is self-evident. With hundreds of thousands or even millions of skeletons deployed, even an opponent with level eight defense would have to consider the cost of a head-on confrontation.
Moreover, Lin Yi had dealt with the Undead Girl several times and found her to be reliable.
He opened the chat box, quickly typed a line of text, and sent it.
"Are you there? There's a job I might need your help with."
After sending it, he leaned back in his chair and waited.
Based on his understanding of the undead girl, this guy should be online.
the other side.
The undead girl was curled up on the sofa in her personal space, looking at her account balance on the system panel with a worried expression.
Her personal space is a remodeled ancient castle, with the walls of the hall covered with various trophies, including flags from other worlds, the heads of high-level magical beasts, and some strange and unusual collectibles she brought back from various mission worlds.
The fire in the fireplace was burning brightly, illuminating the entire hall with warmth and light.
But her heart was cold.
I just finished scavenging a world, and the haul was actually quite substantial.
The world's resources were far more abundant than she had expected. She swept through it for two months with three million summoned creatures, encountering almost no significant resistance. Her storage space was overflowing with rare materials, soul crystals, and high-level equipment.
It was really awesome.
When it came time to settle the bill, I really felt the pinch.
She leaned back on the sofa and looked at the bill on the system panel again from beginning to end. Every number felt like a small knife cutting into her heart.
The maintenance costs of three million troops, the energy replenishment of summoned creatures, the repair of war-damaged equipment, the interest on loan repayments... all added up, consuming nearly 90% of her income from this mission.
Of the remaining ten percent, after deducting daily expenses and reserves, she had very little spare money to draw upon.
Don't be fooled by how powerful necromancers are in the world, commanding armies with a wave of their hand and undead surging like a tide.
After it was all over, they practically wore out their pants to feed their summoned creatures.
The undead girl closed the bill, leaned back on the sofa, and stared blankly at the ceiling.
She was thinking about how to secure the next round of funding.
The next mission is uncertain, and if the gap is too long, her summoned creature reserves will start to decline.
Those high-level undead are not to be trifled with; they require a continuous supply of energy, regular soul nourishment, and various rare materials to maintain their stable form.
These things all cost money.
She sighed, sat up from the sofa, contacted the merchant, and prepared to list a few pieces of unused equipment she had acquired during this mission.
Her hands were shaking when she was setting the prices. She had originally planned to keep those items for herself, but she couldn't afford to lose her cash flow.
Just as she was sighing over her friends list, a new message notification popped up.
She glanced at it and instantly sprang up from the sofa.
It was sent by the doctor.
The undead girl's eyes lit up, and her fingers quickly opened the chat box.
"Yes, yes, yes! I have time! I have plenty of time!"
Three messages were sent in a row.
She knows Lin Yi too well; the last time she did a job with him, she really made a fortune.
Lin Yi took the initiative to contact her this time, so something good must be happening again.
"What kind of job? Who are we going to fight? How many? When? Where? How many men do we need to bring?"
She asked a string of questions in one breath, and only after she finished did she realize that her reaction might have been a bit too hasty, but she didn't care about being reserved anymore.
The last time we wiped out the Kerserk tribe, we really fattened her up.
After that mission, she had more life energy and began to think about expanding the scale.
The necromancer's survival rule is simple: the larger the scale, the higher the profits.
The world that an army of one million and an army of two million can consume is not on the same level at all, and two million and three million is another level.
So she gave it a try.
In that recent world, she directly summoned an army of three million.
That feeling was truly exhilarating. Three million undead surged over her like a tidal wave, and the enemy couldn't even muster the thought of resistance. The world's resources fell into her hands like ripe fruit.
At the time, she felt that she was the chosen one, a genius among necromancers, and destined to stand at the pinnacle of this era.
Then the bill arrived.
These expenses were completely overlooked as she swelled up, and she was stunned when she finally received the bill.
She watched her account balance dwindle visibly before her eyes, staring at the long list of expenses. The feeling was worse than being stabbed in the back.
So now she desperately wants to do that again.
They don't need to bear the maintenance costs of the army themselves, nor do they need to worry about logistics and supplies. They just need to follow Lin Yi in and then stand there and collect the money.
Lin Yi's message came back quickly.
"Kran Star, recovery mission. We may need to use force, but we'll negotiate first."
When the undead girl saw the words "negotiate first," she frowned slightly.
Negotiation.
This means that the other party will most likely choose a peaceful resolution, and it also means that she may not have the opportunity to summon a large army to harvest life energy this time.
It's okay to be safe.
The benefits of a necromancer are directly linked to their combat strength.
After fighting a major battle, the life energy and soul fragments she can collect from the battlefield are enough to sustain her summoned creatures for a long time.
If she just goes to make an appearance and the other side surrenders immediately, she won't earn much from the trip.
But she also knew Lin Yi's style; he never acted haphazardly.
If I need to make a call, I will tell her immediately.
"No problem. We can leave anytime."
Lin Yi read the ghost girl's reply again, and after confirming that she was ready, he closed the chat window.
He mentally reviewed the next steps.
Upon arriving on Kran, first observe the situation.
If the Kran Federal Parliament is willing to negotiate, then we should go through the proper channels and talk to them using the Void Ordinance and the identity of the Abyss Physician.
If the other party is adamant or tries to drive him away by force, then the undead girl will need to step in.
Level 8 defensive power isn't top-tier in the void, but for a sixth-tier contractor, the risk of confronting it head-on is too high.
With the undead army of the undead girl as his backup, he can save a lot of effort.
After confirming that the undead girl was alright, Lin Yi immediately accepted the mission from Planet Kran.
[Note: The special mission "Reclaim Kran" has been accepted.]
[Mission Requirement: Obtain access to the planet Kraken.]
[Mission deadline: 23 hours and 47 minutes.]
[Teleportation countdown: 10 seconds.]
With a sudden shift in space, Lin Yi found himself in a city.
The city's style was unlike any he had ever seen before.
The street was wide enough to allow six cars to drive side by side. The road surface was paved with some kind of light gray material, which was smooth but not reflective and had a slight springiness when stepped on.
The buildings on both sides were very tall, but strangely, they were not made of bricks or concrete, but were cast in one piece using a material that Lin Yi had never seen before.
The humans on Planet Kran are somewhat different from the humans Lin Yi knew.
If you had to put it another way, the humans here are somewhat like the Avatars Lin Yi has seen – all of them have blue skin and look tall and thin.
They are at least a head taller than ordinary humans, with long limbs and the same number of fingers and toes as humans, but in a more slender proportion.
Skin color ranges from light blue to dark blue. Some people have fine, silvery-white lines on their skin, which look like some kind of innate mark or something implanted later in life.
Their pupils are vertical lines, completely different from the round pupils of Earthlings.
Some people were sitting in an open-air café by the roadside, holding some kind of steaming drink and talking in hushed tones.
People hurried past on the street, their steps quick, as if they were in a rush.
Some people stood on street corners, holding something that looked like a tablet computer, their fingers swiping rapidly across the screen, occasionally glancing up at their surroundings.
Everything seems normal.
What a normal planet with a social structure should look like.
But this normalcy was shattered the moment Lin Yi and the undead girl appeared.
The moment they landed, the entire city seemed to be put on pause.
Three seconds later, the city sounded its highest level of security alarm.
The sound wasn't a siren in the traditional sense, but a low-frequency hum that vibrated directly from the air.
People on the street began to move the moment the alarm sounded.
In less than ten seconds, the entire street was empty.
The coffee shop chairs were still askew, the drinks on the table were still steaming, and the tablet computer on the street corner, hastily placed down, still had its screen lit up.
But everyone had disappeared.
Lin Yi could sense that the energy fluctuations inside those buildings were rapidly increasing, as if some kind of defense system was being activated.
His gaze shifted from the buildings to the undead girl beside him.
The undead girl was still the same as before, wearing that big round hat that covered her entire body from head to shoulders.
Her hat brim was pulled down so low that her face was completely obscured from the outside; only a small section of her chin was visible peeking out from under the hat.
The next second, countless armored vehicles appeared around the two of them.
Those cars didn't come from a distance; they rose up from underground.
Neat cracks appeared in the ground on both sides of the street, revealing the lifting platform below. The armored vehicles were parked on the platform and slowly appeared on the ground as the platform rose.
The vehicle's shape is somewhat similar to armored vehicles on Earth, but it is more streamlined. The surface is covered with a light gray coating, and you can vaguely see the fine light blue patterns flowing beneath the coating.
The vehicle has a turret-like device on its roof, but it is not a traditional cannon structure. Instead, it is a flat disc with blue light slowly rotating around its edge.
It seems that Planet Kran has a very clear defense mechanism against such sudden intruders.
The entire process, from the sounding of the alarm to the appearance of the armored vehicle, took no more than twenty seconds.
The missing pedestrians have been evacuated to a safe area, the streets have been cleared, and defense forces are in place.
This process was clearly not something hastily put together, but rather a mature defense system that had undergone countless drills and optimizations. Lin Yi looked around; the armored vehicles had formed a complete encirclement.
The first layer consists of ground troops, with armored vehicles arranged in a circular defensive formation, all the discs on the roofs pointing towards Lin Yi and the undead girl.
The second level consists of firing positions on the rooftops of buildings, where the hidden gun emplacements are visible beneath. These emplacements are similar in shape to the discs on armored vehicles, but larger and more numerous.
The third layer is aerial early warning. Although no aircraft have been seen yet, Lin Yi can sense that the energy fluctuations above the city are rapidly increasing.
Seeing the other party's posture, Lin Yi knew that nothing he said would make a difference at this point.
In the face of a mature defense system, the right to speak cannot be won through words alone.
Lin Yi glanced at the undead girl.
"It's your turn to go on stage."
The undead girl's eyes lit up in the shadow of her hat brim.
She had been waiting for these words for a long time.
The moment Lin Yi nodded, the undead girl's lips curled into a grin.
She took a step forward, and a layer of grayish-white mist spread outwards from her palm.
Wherever the fog passed, the ground temperature dropped several degrees, and the air was filled with a musty smell.
That's the aura of the dead.
The fog thickened, and from it came the sound of bones grinding together.
The first to emerge from the fog was the Death Knight.
They are no smaller than those armored vehicles.
Death Knights are generally over 2.5 meters tall, and the Nightmare Beasts they ride have a shoulder height of nearly 3 meters. Their human-horse hybrid physique, combined with their heavy death armor, makes them no smaller than armored vehicles.
Their weapons were all two-handed greatswords, with thick blades and a length of nearly two meters, and dark red patterns flowing on the blades.
The death knights emerged from the mist quickly, one after another, in perfect unison.
They made no extraneous noises, only the dull thud of hooves on the ground and the metallic scraping of armor clashing together.
Next up are the skeleton soldiers.
Tens of thousands of skeleton soldiers poured out of the fog, so many that they couldn't even stand in the street.
The oppressive feeling of tens of thousands of undead lined up needs no words to express it.
The air around us was filled with an almost solidified tension, like a string stretched to its limit, ready to snap at any moment.
Lin Yi heard a short command coming from afar. It was a synthesized electronic voice, flat in tone and devoid of any emotion.
He didn't come to fight, but the people of Kraken didn't know that.
In their eyes, the sudden appearance of two unknown outsiders in the city center, who summoned tens of thousands of undead armies within minutes, seemed like the prelude to an invasion.
So they made what they believed to be the right choice.
attack.
The first wave of attacks came very quickly.
The discs on top of the armored vehicles lit up at the same time, and blue light converged from the edges of the discs to the center, condensing into a fist-sized sphere of light at the center of the discs.
Several blue beams of light shot out simultaneously from the disc on top of the armored vehicle, crossing the street in an instant.
Then came the second wave, and the third wave.
Numerous explosions erupted around the two of them.
The blue beams struck the Death Knights' lines, bursting forth with a blinding blue-white light.
The Death Knight's armor glowed with a dark red light the instant it was attacked, forming a thin protective film on its surface that blocked all the energy from the blue beam.
The armor plate was charred, but it did not break.
They stood still, motionless, like iron walls blasted by artillery shells.
The skeleton soldiers were not so lucky. Those skeleton soldiers that were directly hit by the blue beam were blown to pieces in the explosion, with grayish-white bone fragments flying everywhere.
But the moment those shattered skeleton soldiers fell, the skeleton soldiers behind them had already taken their places.
There were no gaps in the line, and the ranks remained orderly.
The undead girl stood behind the Death Knights' line of fire, her wide robes fluttering in the shockwave of the explosion, and the brim of her hat being lifted by the blast, revealing a small section of her pale chin.
It must be said that the Death Knight's defensive capabilities exceeded Lin Yi's expectations.
Those blue beams were powerful; the energy intensity of each one was equivalent to the full-force attack of a seventh-tier contractor.
However, when it hits the Death Knight's armor, its full power is reduced by at least 60%, leaving only charred marks on the armor plates and causing almost no real damage.
Although the skeleton soldiers suffered significant losses, the undead girls replenished their ranks much faster.
A steady stream of skeleton soldiers emerged from the mist, stepping over the fragments of their comrades, and marched toward the forefront of the battle line.
The armored vehicle lines moved backward, not in a rout, but in an organized retreat.
The disc on the roof of the vehicle continued to point in Lin Yi's direction during the retreat, with blue light continuing to rotate around its edge, ready to launch another attack at any moment.
The first round of fighting lasted less than ten minutes before the Kran Star army was forced to retreat.
A faint rumbling sound could be heard from the sky.
Lin Yi looked up. The gray clouds were very low, and through the gaps in the clouds, he could see some blurry black outlines moving quickly.
Undoubtedly, the other side must have deployed its air force.
Lin Yi could see at least dozens of aircraft.
Their design is completely different from fighter jets on Earth; they have no wings, no tail, and are shaped like a flat triangle.
The surface has a light gray coating, the same material as the armored vehicle, and light blue patterns flash rapidly beneath the coating.
They moved very fast, weaving through the clouds above the city with each turn being extremely smooth.
The undead girl also noticed the commotion in the sky.
“The Air Force.” Her voice was soft, tinged with disdain.
A grayish-white light surged from her palm, this time not spreading as mist, but condensing into dozens of beams of light that shot straight into the sky.
The beam of light exploded the moment it touched the clouds, spreading grayish-white light across the sky.
The magic arrays condensed and took shape below the clouds. Each array was tens of meters in diameter, and its patterns were grayish-white, making it particularly eye-catching against the hazy sky.
Dozens of bone dragons emerged from the magic array.
They were at least three times larger than the aircraft of Cran, with a wingspan of nearly fifty meters, and the bones on their wings made a low, humming sound similar to an organ when they flapped in the air.
Bone dragons have no armor on their bodies; their defense comes from the strength of their bones.
Those grayish-white bones have undergone countless strengthening and tempering processes, making them much harder than ordinary metals and giving them a natural resistance to energy attacks.
Faced with the bone dragon, the air force of Planet Kran began to counterattack.
The triangular-shaped aircraft changed formation the moment the bone dragon appeared.
They converged from their scattered search formation into a dense attack formation, with the apex of the triangle all pointing towards the bone dragon.
Blue beams of light shot out from the tip of the aircraft, striking the bone dragon from different angles.
The beam struck the bone dragon's body, exploding on the surface of its bones.
The bone dragon's body only swayed slightly when it was hit, and then continued to fly forward without slowing down or changing its trajectory.
Where the blue beams struck, the grayish-white coating on the bone surface was scorched black, and fine cracks appeared.
But nothing more.
The aircraft began a second and third round of attacks.
Blue beams of light poured down from the sky like raindrops, so dense that they almost formed a curtain of light.
The bone dragon began its counterattack.
They opened their massive, skeletal mouths, and grayish-white energy condensed deep within their throats before gushing out.
The aircraft began to go out of control the moment it was enveloped in the grayish-white fog.
Their flight paths became unstable, their balance seemed to be disrupted, and they plummeted towards the ground.
Lin Yi saw several aircraft restart their engines mid-fall, and at the last moment before crashing into buildings, they pulled up their noses and flew erratically toward the outskirts of the city.
The rest were not so lucky.
The aircraft, severely corroded by the grayish-white fog, completely lost power and plummeted from the sky like kites with broken strings, crashing onto streets, rooftops, and open spaces on the outskirts of the city.
Explosions rang out one after another.
Blue flames burned amidst the debris, starkly bright against the grey sky.
Soon, everything around them became completely quiet.
The streets were littered with debris from aircraft, blue flames burning and hissing among the fragments.
The number of dead undead soldiers was in the thousands, but that was nothing to the undead girl.
The undead girl withdrew her left hand and summoned the bone dragons that were still patrolling outside back into the magic circle.
She looked down at the life energy she had collected.
better than nothing.
While life energy did escape from the energy sources inside those aircraft when they were destroyed, the amount was too small.
The air force of Kran Star is not worth her wasting her bone dragons on, so she needs to take them down quickly.
Just as the undead girl was pondering how to collect more life energy, a large amount of energy entered their senses.
The auras didn't come from any one direction, but rather surged in from all directions simultaneously, like a giant net slowly shrinking, enveloping the area where Lin Yi and the undead girl were located.
"It's finally here."
The forces on Kran could no longer sit idly by.
If it were only a loss to the city's defense forces, the members of parliament sitting in the building might continue to argue, hesitate, and wait and see.
But the Air Force is different.
The deployment of the Air Force requires the approval of the Supreme Federal Military Council and the simultaneous signing of orders by military commanders from at least three continents.
When an air force is shot down, it's not just a simple matter of "the city being invaded".
This is a direct challenge to the military forces of the Ukraine Federation.
Those forces that are still observing can no longer afford to wait and see.
They have to make a choice.
Their choice was to unite.
At this moment, the major powers on Planet Kran put aside their differences and conflicts and formed a temporary joint command, concentrating all available military forces in order to eliminate Lin Yi and the undead girl who had suddenly appeared.
Armored vehicles, tanks, aircraft, ground troops, air troops—all military forces are converging on this area.
Lin Yi glanced at the undead girl, and the undead girl looked back at him.
Their eyes met briefly in the air.
The undead girl's mouth split open, revealing two rows of neat white teeth.
"It seems our negotiations will have to be postponed for a while." (End of Chapter)