Lihua Mountain, southern foothills.
The Field Operations Department agents searching for Yao Yu had already reached the mountainside. There were several abandoned orchards here, as well as quite a few buildings—the villagers responsible for tending the pear trees lived on the mountain for most of the year, and the warehouses used to store freshly picked pears had also been built here.
Compared to the foot of the mountain, the terrain here had suddenly become much more complicated, and the search had grown considerably more difficult.
"Prepare to deploy the all-terrain drone swarm," the team leader said over the communications channel.
Several Field Operations Department agents carrying chest-high boxes on their backs stopped and crouched down, opening the boxes behind them with their teammates' help.
Though they were several hundred meters away, Sun Hang could still see clearly with his eyesight—hundreds of mechanical spiders crawled out of the boxes and scattered in every direction, crawling into those buildings that might serve as hiding places in the blink of an eye.
"S9 all-terrain autonomous intelligent drones." The team leader explained to Sun Hang, "A single soldier can carry fourteen hundred units, enough to cover a three-hundred-meter-radius complex area. They are especially suited for search operations in urban areas with complicated terrain... Their only weakness is poor battery life. At full power, each drone can only operate for twenty-five minutes on a full charge."
"This thing is fully automatic?" Sun Hang asked.
"Before they discover a suspicious target, the drones remain fully autonomous. Once they detect one, the corresponding intelligent module activates. It automatically summons other drones within a certain range, repeatedly scans the area where the suspicious target is located, and sends a notification to the control terminal... that is, us." The team leader nodded. "So it's quite difficult to fool these