Chapter 696 - Underground City

“Bang!”

“-10022!”

“5550!”

A Double Armor-piercing Bullet covered in a layer of Psionic Energy spun at high speed and hit in between the red eyes of a Level-60 Commander Grade Mutant Rat about the size of a calf, puncturing through its skull and brain. Blood splattered into the air!

It had been over ten minutes since Feng Luo’s group entered the underground zone of the military base.

The direct distance between their current position and the building that they first entered was less than 200 meters.

The reason they moved so slowly was that in addition to the surviving Mutant Meerkats that they had encountered in the corridor, they also encountered a horde of over 200 Mutant Rats in their current position!

It was clear that the underground part of the military base had become the nest of various desert creatures.

The good thing was that all the monsters had a concept of a domain.

And in 200 meters, even with a forked road in the middle, they had only encountered two waves of monsters.

“Boom!”

“-2845!”

With the strength generated from Charge, she leaped into the air and then descended. Using a thick alloy shield, she slammed into the Commander Grade Mutant Rat’s almost broken head. Rose Thorns seized the opportunity and killed this low HP Level-60 Commander Grade monster that had amazing attack power!

The number of rats in this wave was higher than the number of Mutant Meerkats, and their base level exceeded Level-60.

The good thing was that their HP was not all that high – similar to the Mutant Meerkats. Moreover, like the Mutant Meerkats from the earlier battle, their attacks were pure physical attacks.

As such, in this relatively simpler underground corridor environment, the people from Nightless City Club had enough power to cover the entire area. Therefore, the wave did not deal too much damage to their team!

Of course, with numbers like this and monsters at that level, it was impossible for there to be no threat at all!

Based on Boss Feng’s chest plate, which was seriously dented and bleeding profusely due to multiple scratches, and the large hole in Chairman Jiao’s energy robe, one could tell that this battle was not as easy as the earlier battle!

Although they were gregarious monsters, the rats’ level was quite high, which meant they were not easy to deal with.

“Squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak…”

The good thing was that after the Commander Grade monster died, the remaining 100 plus Mutant Rats immediately made an escape. They ran and disappeared in the various dark corridors in front of them!

Naturally, the group of players had no intention of giving chase!

Additionally, the items dropped by the Mutant Rats in this unexplored region were quite decent. After killing over a hundred rats, energy crystals worth tens of thousands of credits were dropped!

However, they did not know the location of the research base at that moment. So, consumable items like ammunition needed to be conserved as much as possible. They would avoid battles as much as possible!

Their target this time was not to farm monsters or to explore the region. It was to complete the mission!

“Mu Zi, how is it? Can it still be used?”

After half a minute, Chairman Jiao looked very expectant and asked Mu Zi. Mu Zi was standing beside a wall and had just disassembled the surface of the device. Then, he grabbed a storage and computation core chip from within. After that, he quickly placed the chip on a Chip Master reading device.

Now that there wasn’t anyone in the base, did it mean that they could not read or obtain data inside the base?

For players who had special devices or instruments for ruin explorations, it was clearly not the case!

After killing the Mutant Rats, the group discovered that the location of the rats’ nest had an intelligence terminal mounted on the wall.

A terminal like this typically stored data about the ruin. Occasionally, it would even have a structural map of the base!

As such, Mu Zi, who was a Chip Master, naturally started to act.

Mu Zi quickly clicked on something on the device. After looking at the details that were displayed on the screen, he looked delighted and said, “Yes, it is usable… Moreover, this terminal is probably a branch computer in the area. It actually has a structural map of the base!”

However, a few seconds after Mu Zi lowered his head to analyze the 3D structure of the underground base extracted from the device, his face became stiff. Then, he suddenly took a huge breath in!

“Hmm? Hold on… Tsk, no way!”

“What’s wrong?”

The others were confused.

“Look at this!”

Mu Zi had a shocked expression. He immediately enlarged the image on the device and projected it in the air using his Scout Bracelet.

“Holy sh*t… No way!”

After looking at the enlarged image clearly, the others either took a deep breath or frowned.

The location of the A-2 research base could not be found from the map of the base obtained on the terminal!

Even though they failed to find the location of the target research base, the incredibly detailed structural image provided them a map of the entire underground base.

The most shocking thing was that…

“The radius is over 20 kilometers?”

After looking at the annotation on the structural image, everyone’s immediate reaction was the same as Mu Zi’s. They were dumbfounded.

The underground base actually had a radius of over 20km, and the widest area even exceeded 50km!

This was not an underground base!

It was an underground city. Moreover, it was an underground city that was bigger than an average city!

The area spanned over a thousand square kilometers, which was a size that was as big as second-tier cities in the game. It might even be larger than some of the more average second-tier cities, and might be closer to a first-tier main city.

It was hard to imagine that a mega underground city of such a size was actually inside the Death Desert.

Perhaps it was more accurate to say that the place was an underground ruin. Up till that moment, it was the largest underground ruin that anyone had ever seen!

“Phew! This ruin… If we could explore it, it’d be hard to imagine what kind of reward we’d be able to get!”

Dai’s eyes widened as her breath seemed to quicken its pace.

“Not guaranteed!”

“A ruin’s worth cannot be measured just by its size!”

“From the areas that we walked past earlier, we can see that there was not even one defensive combat machine. There won’t be any valuable items – at least in this area!”

Rose Thorns shook her head and poured cold water on everyone else.

“Most importantly, this is a zone with high-level monsters. The difficulty of exploring this ruin would be ridiculously high at this current juncture!”

“Since the monsters’ levels are too high, the items they drop would also not be usable… That is why even large guilds might not be willing to risk investing in exploring a high-level ruin like this. They’d probably wait until they are Level-60 or higher!”

Rose Thorns’ words helped a few of the others regain their senses from the delight and surprise they gained when they discovered this “giant ruin.”

It was true that this underground ruin was the largest they had ever seen. However, a large ruin did not mean that it was valuable.

Or perhaps, at the current moment, exploring a ruin like this would cost a lot of manpower and resources, and the investment might not be worth the return!

Only Feng Luo remained quiet and kept to himself, which is the second time that he did that by now.

The reason was that he began to ponder about something after glancing at the image which Mu Zi enlarged and projected.

He was in deep thought at first. But then, his gaze locked onto a region on the map as if he had discovered something that intrigued him greatly!