Free Web NovelChapter 226: Chapter 147: The Furnace Well, Ling Shuyan’s Arrival (Part 2)
With this in mind, Lin Feng no longer hesitated. He drew the Level 29 Electromagnetic Cannon from his waist, switched it to Armor-Piercing Bullet mode, then started firing deeper beneath his feet.
The firing speed of the Armor-Piercing Bullets in the water was several times slower due to the resistance and friction of the surging current. At the same time, the surrounding heat waves caused their warheads to gradually melt.
Several Armor-Piercing Bullets didn’t even make it fifty meters before their casings dissolved, causing them to disintegrate just outside the core furnace at the bottom.
Even the few that managed to trigger a detonation were fleeting, washed away in an instant by the surging, superheated water.
Aside from illuminating the space below and stirring up vast clouds of boiling bubbles, they had no destructive power against the core furnace.
Seeing that he couldn’t destroy the furnace core, Lin Feng, though drenched in sweat, forced himself to calm down.
Suddenly, a plan formed in his mind. He turned and started firing wildly at the shaft walls around him.
At this short range, the Armor-Piercing Bullets successfully penetrated the carbonized layer and detonated violently inside the shaft walls.
The shockwaves from the explosions created a massive wave at the bottom of the shaft, which surged upward and pushed Lin Feng directly toward the opening at the surface.
As the walls collapsed, rocks and sediment cascaded into the mouth of the furnace below, not only burying the fleshy valve of the opening but also insulating the high-temperature Energy within and preventing it from spreading.
Unable to perform heat exchange with the water, the furnace became like a sealed pressure cooker. With its temperature and pressure skyrocketing, it began to expand continuously!
By this time, with Shen Jie’s help, Lin Feng was already back at the edge of the shaft opening. Before he even found his footing, he grabbed Shen Jie and quickly backed away from the hole.
About ten seconds later, a colossal BOOM erupted from the Biological Melting Furnace below.
Along with the muffled roar, the entire shipyard ground trembled violently. With the twenty-meter-wide shaft as the epicenter, the concrete ground instantly fractured, spiderwebbing outward in all directions. The fissures, twenty to thirty centimeters wide, were bottomless, and steaming hot water continuously surged up from them.
The clear water in the shaft turned a murky blackish-yellow. As the furnace violently exploded under high pressure, globs of dark-red, scorching magma scattered outward like a blossoming cloud of pollution, causing countless ink-black bubbles to float to the water’s surface at the mouth of the shaft.
As the bubbles burst, an irritating gas wafted into the air.
Fortunately, Lin Feng had already brought Shen Jie back to the docks. By now, the Tier Two Corps squad had also led over a hundred Warriors in clearing out the Zerg Race from the shipyard.
They were now guarding the shipyard’s main gate, holding off a large Black Spine Zerg Swarm that was rushing from the city to reinforce.
The boom of Shotguns was incessant.
But when the high-pressure explosion from the furnace within the shaft triggered an earthquake and a collapse, both the Zerg Race and the Warriors paused their fight.
Then came another unsettling sound of something splintering.
Underwater explosions inflict Damage in two waves. The first is the initial shockwave and vacuum bubble that expands outward upon detonation. After these effects dissipate, the vacuum at the center of the explosion violently collapses back on itself due to the immense pressure.
This creates a two-stage push-and-pull Damage effect!
And so, the shipyard’s docks near the Great River were torn asunder before sinking completely into the water.
Like a collapsing levee, river water began to pour in frantically, extinguishing the superheated boiling inside the shaft.
The influx of river water also temporarily slowed the successive collapses happening around the docks.
Even Lin Feng couldn’t help but swallow as he watched the terrifying, landscape-altering effects of the explosion.
The high-pressure detonation of the furnace core had destroyed half the shipyard, an area of over two square kilometers, and the destruction had started two hundred meters underground...
’This kind of power is comparable to the effect of a 100-kiloton TNT Nuclear Bomb detonating underground!’
’It could even kill a High-tier Mother Empress instantly!’
’No wonder the Mother Empress here set up the biological reactor for forging Giant Mandibles right beside the Great River.’
’She did it to prevent an accident from causing a self-destruct-level, devastating blow to herself and the entire Swarm.’
With the destruction of the furnace core, the reinforcing Black Spine Zerg Swarm seemed to receive an order from the Mother Empress and began retreating back into the city to hide.
Lin Feng, who had rushed over, frowned slightly at the sight.
"Don’t pursue them. First, clean up the battlefield at the docks and collect any useful Biological Material."
"Without the protection of Tanks, and with our lack of experience in urban warfare, recklessly pursuing them into the city is just suicide."
The five Tier Two Awakeners nodded in agreement.
The last time in Jia City, due to a moment of carelessness on Lin Feng’s part, they had been surrounded and ambushed by a Black Spine Zerg Swarm. This time, most of the hundred Warriors were not even Tier One Awakeners; there was no way they could fend off a Swarm that would attack with suicidal frenzy in urban combat.
This was especially true for some of the new recruits, who could barely handle the Shotgun’s recoil. They often had to rest their badly bruised shoulders after firing just a few shots in a row.
After ordering everyone to clean up the battlefield, Lin Feng had the Tier Two Corps squad remain on guard against a Zerg Race sneak attack. He then led Shen Jie and several dozen ordinary Warriors back to the side of the shattered and collapsed docks.
The aftershocks of the explosion gradually faded.
A crater a hundred meters in diameter was left in its wake.
Washed clean by the river water, the churning black mud and scorching hot water had all disappeared.
Now they needed to send someone to dive into the water and head to the bottom to search for the Orange Quality Giant Mandibles forged inside the furnace.
Lin Feng estimated there would be quite a few.
He immediately sent men to collect the steel cables from the nearby docks, tie them into a rope hundreds of meters long, and fasten it around their waists.
