64: Disassembling the Giant

"Since this big guy won't move, I'll help loosen the soil for it!" Jiang Ran growled low, his thrusters bursting at full power.

Facing the gradually tightening encirclement, he chose to capture the leader to defeat the followers.

The "Tyrant" mecha was like a heavy torpedo, charging straight toward the massive Crab King with unstoppable momentum.

The High-frequency vibration blade in his hand...

...carved a visible white torrent through the water, heading straight for the gap at the excavator bucket's joint.

However, the monster's reaction was faster than expected, or rather, more shameless.

Just as the blade was about to strike, the Crab King slammed its center of gravity down, and that massive yellow bucket acted like a closing city gate.

With a "Clang," it smashed down in front of itself, completely retracting its head and body inside.

"Zzzzt—!!!"

The invincible High-frequency vibration blade slashed hard against the thick steel plate of the bucket.

It didn't slice through like a hot knife through butter as it would with ordinary armor.

Instead, it erupted into a cluster of dazzling, blinding sparks.

The massive recoil traveled back through the Mechanical Arm, numbing Jiang Ran's hand and causing the mecha's entire right arm to tremble violently.

On that rusty manganese steel bucket, only a shallow white scratch remained.

"Don't waste your energy!"

Old Chen shouted over the communication channel: "That's high-manganese steel used for mining! It has extreme work-hardening properties!

The harder you hit it, the harder its surface becomes!

Even an anti-tank missile might not blow it open from the front; are you trying to give it a scratch with a knife?!"

Before his voice faded, the Crab King hiding behind the bucket launched a counterattack.

It didn't even need to peek out its head.

It simply raised the thick Hydraulic Breaker on one side and delivered a skill-less, heavy smash against the deck in front of it.

"Boom—!!!"

A terrifying release of kinetic energy.

Although the strike didn't hit Jiang Ran, a massive shockwave instantly exploded underwater.

The surrounding murky water turned into a hammer heavier than a solid object, slamming hard against the "Tyrant" mecha's chest.

"Warning: Attitude imbalance! Gyroscope subjected to severe impact!"

Jiang Ran's vision went dark for a moment, and the mecha stumbled backward uncontrollably.

Before he could steady himself, the surrounding "little crabs" that had been waiting for an opportunity pounced.

Several Iron-Eating Crabs the size of millstones acted like rabid dogs, biting down hard on the mecha's leg armor.

Though they couldn't break the defense, they severely slowed his movement speed.

"This thing..." Jiang Ran kicked away a crab trying to climb onto the cockpit.

He gritted his teeth, looking at the monster still cowering behind the bucket, only its two breakers showing as it frantically smashed the ground.

This was absolute tonnage suppression.

It didn't need to hit you; it just needed to smash the floor, and the shockwaves were enough to make it impossible to move.

And attacking it was like stabbing a tank's main armor with a fruit knife.

"Head-on confrontation won't work."

Jiang Ran retreated quickly, opening up a safe distance: "Its defense has no blind spots.

If I keep wasting time like this, I'll be drowned by these small fry before I can even break that turtle shell."

"Damn it, the vibrations are getting stronger!"

The mecha's alarms blared in unison.

The Crab King clearly had no intention of letting Jiang Ran go.

The breakers on both arms hammered the ground frantically like pile drivers, each vibration carrying a frequency that felt like it would shatter his internal organs.

Jiang Ran controlled the mecha to dodge clumsily through the rock piles while rapidly observing his surroundings.

The previous rounds of indiscriminate, violent demolition...

...had smashed the surrounding terrain to pieces, but they also produced some unexpected consequences.

The surrounding water became incredibly murky.

Not just because of the silt.

But because a thick, black liquid was gushing out from those broken truck chassis, slowly floating upward.

"This is..."

Jiang Ran reached out and grabbed a handful in the water; the mecha's sensors immediately provided an analysis result.

"Heavy oil?"

"The fuel tanks of the abandoned engineering vehicles have ruptured!"

Old Chen's voice rang out: "This ship has been sunk for decades, the tanks corroded long ago, and the shockwaves have leaked everything out.

Be careful, that stuff is hard to clean off the sensors!"

Jiang Ran looked at the large patches of spreading black oil slicks.

Then he looked at the Crab King in the distance, hiding behind its bucket like a turtle, and a flash of inspiration suddenly crossed his mind.

"Old Chen, what connects the bucket on that crab's back to its flesh?"

"Chitin and biological glue secreted by the Metal Parasitic Fungus, of course!"

Old Chen answered subconsciously: "Although that stuff has high hardness, it's essentially an organic polymer material. Why?"

"As long as it's organic matter, that's fine."

A fierce smile curled at the corner of Jiang Ran's mouth: "Organic matter is always afraid of heat."

He suddenly stopped his retreat and instead charged toward the area where the fuel leak was densest—

—a pile of wreckage from magnesium-aluminum alloy wheels.

"Doesn't it like hiding in its shell?

Then I'll give it a sauna!"

Jiang Ran pulled out the "Thunder" Electric Spear from his back and twisted the output power directly into the red zone—"Overload Mode."

"Zzzzt!!" Terrifying ghostly blue electric arcs danced frantically at the tip of the spear.

The next second, Jiang Ran slammed the spear, flickering with the light of death, into the pile of magnesium alloy wreckage soaked in heavy oil.

"Boom—!!!"

In this deep-sea high-pressure environment, ordinary fire might not burn.

But the chemical reaction produced by high-voltage arcs igniting magnesium alloy was enough to create an underwater storm.

Dazzling white light exploded instantly.

The heat from the burning magnesium, reaching several thousand degrees, instantly boiled the surrounding leaked heavy oil and seawater.

Large clusters of crimson bubbles, mixed with black oily smoke, rolled upward.

The once bone-chilling waters turned into a boiling pressure cooker in just a few seconds.

"Since it's wearing iron clothes..."

Jiang Ran looked at the rapidly spreading hot, murky water: "...then don't blame me for adding some fire."

Just as Jiang Ran expected, although this deep-sea behemoth possessed indestructible armor...

...its sensory system appeared fragile when faced with such extreme physical environmental changes.

The magnesium alloy burning intensely released thousands of degrees of heat, turning the surrounding water into a pot of boiling white soup.

Countless dense, high-temperature bubbles surged upward frantically.

They not only obscured vision but also created intense thermal interference, completely blinding the Crab King's heat-sensing compound eyes.

"Screee—!!"

Feeling the rapidly rising water temperature, the Crab King, which had been hunkered down in defense, finally panicked.

The high temperature was conducting through the metal, roasting its fragile internal soft tissues. It no longer squatted calmly.

Instead, it frantically swung its pair of terrifying breakers, performing indiscriminate blind bombardment on the murky waters around it.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

Every strike was like a depth charge exploding, causing turbulent currents to surge.

"Now!"

Without any hesitation, Jiang Ran piloted the "Tyrant" mecha and dove headfirst into the boiling white mist.

This was practically suicide.

In that curtain of bubbles where one couldn't see their own hand, two breakers weighing several tons were smashing wildly.

If it even grazed him slightly, the mecha would turn into scrap metal.

Bang!

A crisp yet muffled gunshot pierced through the noisy sound of the water.

In the distance, Su Qingyu, propped up with an Anti-material Sniper Rifle, opened fire.

A specialized Armor-piercing Explosive Round accurately drilled through the wildly dancing crab claws, hitting the edge of the Crab King's left compound eye.

Although it failed to penetrate the thick eyelid...

...the light from the explosion made the behemoth flinch, causing a momentary pause in the rhythm of its swinging breakers.

"Good shot!"

Jiang Ran seized this fleeting fraction of a second. The thrusters fired.

The mecha performed an extreme sideslip in the water.

Like a slippery fish, it slid past the edge of the breaker that had just smashed down and hadn't had time to retract.

That rough hammerhead was...

...less than ten centimeters from the mecha's cockpit. Jiang Ran could even hear the ear-piercing friction of the breaker's hydraulic rod as it retracted.

But he didn't stop.

Crossing the death line, ahead was that towering mountain-like yellow bucket.

The high temperature had indeed worked.

Observing at close range, Jiang Ran clearly saw...

...those silver-grey biological glues that had originally bonded the bucket and the crab's back tightly together.

They were now becoming viscous and softening due to the heat, even starting to ooze yellow grease.

"Its 'glue' is melting."

A cold light flashed in Jiang Ran's eyes. The mecha exerted force, leaping by using the breaker still stuck in the ground for leverage.

He was like a climbing gecko, jumping directly onto the Crab King's broad back.

This was its visual blind spot and its fatal weakness.

Standing on the Crab King's back felt like standing on an erupting active volcano.

The manganese steel bucket beneath his feet was incredibly hot; the mecha's foot sensors even sent out high-temperature warnings.

And the behemoth was frantically shaking its body, trying to toss this annoying flea off its back.

Jiang Ran activated the magnetic suction devices on the soles of the feet.

He pinned himself firmly to the yellow steel plate, his gaze quickly scanning the surroundings.

In the center of the backplate connecting the bucket to the body stood a thick, rusted black iron pipe.

It was the excavator's original exhaust pipe.

But the monster clearly hadn't discarded it.

At this very moment...

...that curved iron pipe was spewing out puffs of hot, greyish-white exhaust with every heavy breath of the monster.

Accompanied by a "huff-puff" sound like a bellows being pulled.

"Found it."

Jiang Ran's eyes lit up. This biological tank's internal metabolism was extremely fast.

Especially in this high-intensity combat state.

It needed a massive heat dissipation and ventilation channel.

It utilized this ready-made industrial exhaust pipe as a "trachea" leading directly to its internal core organs.

"Since you like playing with machinery so much..."

Jiang Ran released his right hand from the vibration blade, and the Mechanical Arm quickly reached for the ammunition rack at his waist.

A high-explosive grenade painted with a dangerous red ring was gripped in his hand.

This wasn't an ordinary fragmentation grenade, but a Thermobaric Grenade specifically used for blowing up defensive fortifications.

Detonated in a confined space...

...the ultra-high-pressure shockwave it produced could instantly shatter all soft tissues within a ten-meter radius.

"Then have a taste of the Industrial Revolution."

Jiang Ran didn't hesitate, directly pulling the pin with his mechanical fingers.

Seizing the moment when the exhaust pipe had just puffed out exhaust and was sucking in fresh air...

...he leaned down sharply and slammed that ticking messenger of death into the hot black hole.

"Gulp."

The grenade slid down the wide pipe.

With a crisp metallic clink, it instantly vanished into the bottomless darkness.

"Hold it in!"

As the grenade slid down, Jiang Ran felt it wasn't enough.

He grabbed a nearby fragment of a broken deck, slammed it over the exhaust outlet, and jammed it tight with his combat blade.

The entire sequence was seamless, taking less than three seconds.

At this point, the behemoth beneath his feet seemed to sense a foreign object intrusion.

It let out a panicked low growl, its body suddenly stiffening.

But it was too late.

"Retreat!"

The moment he finished planting the grenade...

...Jiang Ran immediately deactivated the magnetic locks on his feet, and the rear thrusters fired at full power.

Pushing the mecha like an ejection seat, he flew backward away from the crab's back.

Almost the instant he left the crab's back—

"Pfft—!!!"

A very muffled sound came from within the behemoth's body.

The sound wasn't deafening like an explosion in an open area.

Instead, it sounded like a massive, muffled fart.

The Crab King's massive body suddenly expanded by a circle.

Immediately following, hundreds of jets of high-pressure blood mist and black smoke erupted from the gaps in the indestructible excavator bucket backplate.

"Hiss..."

The Crab King let out a scream that didn't have time to escape before being choked in its throat.

The high temperature and shockwaves raged frantically within its enclosed internal chambers, instantly turning its internal organs into a mess of pulp.

The two massive breakers that had been swinging and bringing the threat of death were like puppets with their strings cut.

They instantly hung down limply.

"Clang!"

They smashed heavily onto the deck, never to move again.

The massive body, like a collapsing skyscraper, slowly knelt into the mud.

"Done."

Jiang Ran landed steadily ten meters away, watching the industrial behemoth still twitching slightly and bleeding from its orifices, without letting his guard down.

He regripped his High-frequency vibration blade and walked back step by step.

The Crab King was now completely paralyzed.

But those scarlet compound eyes still held a trace of venomous light, staring fixedly at the approaching mecha.

"Don't look at me like that."

Jiang Ran walked up to the massive head.

"In this world, no matter how good the equipment is..."

Jiang Ran gripped the blade with both hands and raised it high.

The blue high-frequency blade hummed in the murky water, like a death sentence.

"...it still depends on who's operating it."

Hand raised, blade fell.

"Zzzzt—Squeltch!!"

There was no resistance.

The high-frequency blade cut precisely through the softened gap, like slicing through a piece of hot tofu.

It instantly severed the bundles of tough white muscle fibers and the central main nerve cord.

Having lost its nerve connection, the massive, hideous head still dripping with dark green blood...

...instantly lost all support, slowly sliding off the torso and rolling onto the muddy deck.

Those scarlet eyes flickered twice and finally extinguished completely as the bio-electricity was cut off, turning into a dull grey.

The surrounding small Iron-Eating Crabs that had been watching hungrily...

...the moment they sensed the "King's" pheromone signal vanish completely, they immediately scattered like startled birds, scrambling back into the dark piles of scrap cars.

The world finally went quiet.

Only the mecha named "Tyrant" remained, holding a long blade still dripping with blood, standing in the center of this steel graveyard.

And behind it was that "core," still emitting a charming, ghostly blue light.