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AFS 2: Strange Flame Strangeness - Part 10 - The Chaos That Reigns When Space Crabs Descend
🕑 Added 2025-03-30 18:25:35 +0000 UTCPart 10
The battlefield smelled like mech grease, dust, cut trees and barbeque space crab. The sounds echoed through the jungle and caused birds and beasts to retreat. And I was left with a dilemma.
I had a limited amount of spiritual energy and no pills that could help me replenish my energy. While cultivating worked, it took too much time to be useful in a fight. This meant I couldn’t act unless I was certain, and I’d already used a significant portion of my energy today just creating that pill to heal Chad. My final move was something that would use up around 60% of my current spiritual energy pool at the beginning of Golden Core.
So, I had to choose: use my energy in small attacks, taking out crabs left and right, and possibly forcing my nominal brother and his actual sister to finish the bipedal crab by themselves. Or save my energy for one big blast.
Damn it.
Spring and YaoYao fought together beautifully. They took shots at the alien, slicing off a part here and there, but they were in no way close to killing that thing. It hopped around incessantly, as if it knew I’d murder it the moment it stopped moving.
The blue team blasted the star crabs near them quickly and efficiently, but they were running low on their batteries, having chased us through the night.
The red team were killing it, between one member acting as a fast tank and the other as their long ranged damage dealer.
Alright. I’d wait for the perfect opportunity. That would be when the alien was completely still for at least a few seconds. As long as things didn’t get worse.
Which, of course, it did. Goddamn it. A couple dozen star crabs descended into the clearing with a loud buzzing noise.
They overwhelmed the blue mech team, who took out six of them before their mechs’ legs were squeezed off and their mechanical heads smashed.
Maya’s voice rang over the comms. “Never leave a star bug alive!”
She must have activated the emergency ejection because her team’s cabins blasted up from the back of their ruined machine. They shot high into the sky.
Fortunately, the cockpit was the one part of the mech where the people who designed them didn’t waste money. It had a lot of armor, just not enough to survive a direct blast from a bipedal space crab. Which it needed since it had to survive the self-destruction blast and shrapnel as both mechs exploded and took out another half dozen flying crabs.
Even I had to dodge a few screws that made their way over to me.
Before the blue team’s cabins could come back down, a rescue drone picked them up and started carrying it toward HQ.
Even though no one could see me, I gave their team a brief salute. I hoped Maya and her team had enough luck getting back to base alive in this mess. Frankly, I respected her for following through and taking out as many of humanity’s enemies as possible.
Now there was only the red team, us, and a shit ton of star crabs that never seemed to end.
The red team killed crab after crab, keeping them off my white team. Though Spring certainly took out whatever crabs came close to his sister while defending against the gray-alien crab. I’d never seen him pilot so well. He must have finally gotten used to his new physique.
The red team’s shooter backed up to the treeline. A massive armored mantis crab suddenly darted out from the shadows and grabbed the arm of the long ranged mech. It pulled the arm off at the joint and bit down on the head of the mech. The pilot used his other rifle, pointed it at the neck of the mantis, and fired.
The mantis’ triangle shaped head fell off, but it was already too late for that mech. Sensing weakness, the crabs swarmed over it.
The pilot maneuvered its remaining arm to blast the crabs clinging to its back even as its legs gave out. “There is no surrender! All bugs must die!”
Then his cockpit blasted out from the back just before his mech exploded, taking out a dozen crabs and stopping the mantis’s regeneration.
Ah, shit. Well, at least a majority of the small fry were taken care of. It seemed like the rest would easily get taken out by James and his shield bashing mech.
The bipedal crab, Big Gray, looked like it was about to fire a blast at YaoYao. Spring shot at its arm just as it moved. It was a feint! Instead, it aimed at James’ mech just as it threw his shield at two crabs, leaving his chest wide open. It left a tiny mark on the surface of the red mech, exactly in front of where the pilot would sit. The mech spasmed, and moved into the crouch position, something that happened when the pilot went limp.
Ah, fuck. Even if the pilot was dead, there was still the engineer alive in there. They might be injured... and the mech was still usable.
I used pillows of divine sense to run through the air and reach the red mech. There was a hidden manual release on the outside of the cabin, which I quickly found and pulled. The door dropped open.
James sat there unconscious with a hole in the center of his chest where his heart was. He was still alive though, because of his SS-rank physique. The engineer in the back had unstrapped herself and taken out the medkit. She stared at me in shock. Her hands shook.
To give myself time, I expanded my divine sense and thickened it to the peak of Nascent Soul to pressure every single crab alien nearby. Aside from the bipedal one, they all backed off. My nose started to bleed from the effort, but I ignored it. I didn’t know how much longer Spring and YaoYao could keep it occupied, so I had to hurry.
“I can save him,” I said, and used my enhanced strength to rip open the hole in his uniform, which was gross since it was soaked through with his blood. Fortunately, I didn’t have to touch it myself since my suit came with gloves.
I used my divine sense to see the hole that pierced his heart. Fuck. While I couldn’t take care of the energy poison just yet, I could definitely prevent him from dying.
Since I didn’t have healing pills, I created a thread and needle with my spiritual energy and sent it deep into his chest. I swiftly sewed each organ properly and pulled the string tight. Thanks to that, his healing factor started to repair the damages, but it would still take time. Frankly, the only reason I could do this was because the people in this universe had such diffuse energy and no cultivation to speak of. If I had tried this with a cultivator from my past life, my energy would have been rejected too fast for the stitches to help for very long.
“W-what is that?”
Instead of explaining, I glanced at the engineer and grabbed the wound cleaning spray and a bandage she’d taken out. I sprayed it on the closed hole in his chest and slapped a bandage to it.
“Is he going to be okay with just this?”
“It’s fine.” After tossing the stuff back into the bag, I pulled James out of his pilot seat and handed him to the engineer. She barely managed to hold him up. Her Physique must have been shit, but she still had SS-rank spiritual energy if she was an engineer in this challenge.
“Wait, Lord James needs to stay there so I can pull the emergency eject.”
“We’re not ejecting. I’m taking over.”
“What?”
“Our fellow humans already gave us the order, right? ‘Leave no bugs alive. Now, get him strapped in and... I don’t know, hold on for your life?”
Her lip trembled.
“Now! The crabs won’t stay off us for long.” My head was already getting light due to overusing my divine sense at such a high level, and I was only using it at peak Nascent Soul.
“I’ll strap us both in. It will be tight, but at least we won’t get knocked around.”
While she focused on that, I used my cleaning technique to get rid of the blood on my hands and everywhere in my new mech’s cabin. The last thing I wanted was to get flipped over and taste a mouthful of this asshole’s blood. I tasted enough of my own throughout the years and that was bad enough.
When I sat down, the mech read the information from my suit and began to adjust everything in the cabin from the straps that belted me in automatically to the arm connectors I had to place my arms through to control this damn thing. If I hadn’t used a heat shield back when I collected my strange flame, I could never have reconfigured this mech quickly enough to get back into the fight in time.
I pulled the switch above me, and the cabin closed. For a brief moment, the place was completely dark aside from a tiny hole that shined a light onto my neck. Then the mech booted up. The screens turned on and showed me what the outside looked like, as if the mech’s exterior didn’t exist.
Finally, I was fucking piloting again!
I glanced back. “Are you strapped in, Miss Engineer?”
“It’s Hanna, and yes.... Ah...”
“Lin.”
“Lady Lin. It’s an honor to fight with you. May we both be lucky enough to survive this.”
I grinned. “Luck? I make my own luck.” How else could I survive for a thousand years in a vicious cultivation world with a dumbass harem protagonist? “Keep my knees drenched if you can. They’re gonna need the extra coolant.”
“Yes, pilot!”
I stopped using my divine sense to emit pressure and just used it to examine where everyone was.
Spring and YaoYao were continuing to hold their own as if they had plot armor... which they might. There were still around ten crabs left. But it would be a waste to attack them when taking out Big Gray was our top priority.
“Oh, what’s this?” I noticed a file at the corner of the screen and opened it. It was a playlist with some interstellar rock in it. We definitely weren’t supposed to have music in this thing. I grinned. “James, that naughty boy.”
With the flick of my thumb, I pressed play to continue. As the sound of an epic Free Bird-like guitar solo echoed through the cabin, I pushed the shitty mech forward and pulled out its unused, bendable sword. “Let’s fucking go!”
