Even with both of his hands bleeding profusely, the moment he connected to the mechanised being, bits of metal and wire turned ‘alive’. It reactively attempted to connect to Gnawbones and the moment the wires touched Gnawbones, they stung him with needles and connectors.
At that point in time, Gnawbones could feel that his entire consciousness was being transferred to somewhere else while his body was being fed into the robot as fuel. There was nowhere else for the Air Force General to run and he thought that hiding within the robot was his best way of surviving.
“I do not want to die! I do not want to die! What is happening to me?! Those lab coat traitors! What did they do to me without telling me?!” Gnawbones said as he felt that he had melted away while his body was being taken apart by the robot.
But what he did not know was that he was being reborn as the robot started to feed itself data from Gnawbone’s body structure. It was initially a corpse catcher robot where the lab coat Demon Rats had the idea of stealing the abilities of the cultivators and turning them into data for the robot to grow into.
For example, if Yue Han had been kidnapped by the big headed robot, the robot would then assimilate his DNA data and mould itself to be a clone of Yue Han with his skills, replicating as much as it could from the data itself. At the same, it would kill the cultivator that was within it. This was not something that the Research Demon Rats could think up in 24 hours rather it had already been a work in progress for some time.
It was only with Gnawbones’ continuous pestering that they had decided to give him the prototype and threw in a Chimaera Variant they made haphazardly so that he could stop bothering them. After all, they started to think that they were looking at defeat with each day of the invasion.
Some of them even had the gall to think of defecting to the other side but most assumed that they would not survive the extermination should the humans have managed to reach their labs. Yet, behind the backs of their Demon Rat leaders and generals, the Head of the Demon Rat Research, Transquick Foulscratch had decided to take a gamble should the Cultivators and Monsters had reached the deepest level of the Demon Rat Research.
They would attempt to parley for their lives and if it does not work out, the least they could do was to detonate the entire facility to kingdom come. What was dangerous was that the deepest level of the Demon Rat Research was close to a major node of the lifestream of the Farming World.
But detonating the area also means destroying the lifestream node and it could have serious repercussions to the Northern Region and potential backlash on the planet in near future. This was the only trump card they had on their sleeves and the only way to secure a proper negotiation with the humans.
However, all of those did not matter right now as they continuously pumped out all the prototypes they had been storing for months and were releasing them against the humans. Dr Transquick believed that if the humans still had to cross the trial of fire set by them so that they could be worthy of their knowledge even though he had reluctantly admitted to himself that some of the human’s technology was superior to his team by ten fold.
So by sending his teams’ military prototypes out to the field, it was like a desperate attempt to demonstrate that the Demon Rat Research might prove to be useful if they were to be taken in. Naturally, many of them had pledged loyalty to the Demon Rats’ society as a whole but after looking at the technology used by the humans, they could not help to wonder if they could reach that pinnacle someday.
—
Once the Corpse Catcher Robot had digested and assimilated Gnawbones, it started to shape as the Air Force General himself. The latent powers of Gnawbones started to surface and a backpack rocket began to emerge from the back of the robot as if the metal robot was some living evolving unit. The general’s resource was a missile rocket, which was also one of the reasons why he had been chosen to be the Air Force General, not because of his merits.
Mini rockets started to grow from his phalanges not just from his fingers but his toes and tail too. And once prepped, the Corpse Catcher immediately shot out an entire load of rockets into the entire field, slaughtering Yue Wen in the process before the rest of the Pandawans could assist.
“What the hell! Gnawbones had some form of new armour?!” Deng Long responded as he took cover from the barrage of rockets that continued the moment the other Pandawans arrived at the scene.
“I heard someone very familiar!” Corpse Catcher Gnawbones boomed his voice through the robot’s loudspeaker. “Give me that flying machine once more and I may yet spare your life!” It was taunting everyone within the vicinity so that he could search for any unnecessary movements and annihilate them once it got into range.
And Deng Long’s agitation from his provocation was exactly the thing that the Corpse Catcher needed.
It immediately reloaded the entire arsenal of rockets and shot out indiscriminately, causing a carnage of explosions. Thankfully, Deng Long was a defensive cultivator and his techniques along with the equipment he bought from Jin were able to shield most of the kinetic knockbacks. But as the Corpse Catcher enjoyed unleashing its rockets to eliminate one sole Pandawan, Gnawbones had forgotten that he was way too exposed hovering in midair unleashing his burst of missiles.
That allowed Jing Ru, the Gunning Giraffe Cultivator to be hiding in between the rubbles and took a clean sniper shot at the Corpse Catcher. One deep breath and a slow trigger push were all that was needed to put the annoying Gnawbones down to the ground. With all the noise on the battlefield, her sniper rifle shot was merely another note in the War Symphony that Gnawbones failed to notice in his ecstasy of delivering punishment against Deng Long.
But as he fell to the ground, the other Pandawans rushed in to confirm his death before moving forward. To them, it was Demon Rat that was worth quite a few points but to the Demon Rat High Command, they were finally relieved of that annoying general and continued with their fight.
