Necromancer, What the Heck Is That 055 You Summoned? Part 50

When the Flying Shuttle, a vehicle that would have been revolutionary even on Blue Star, roared down the hillside, what cavalry could compare? They were all amateurs!

Chapter 81: Racing Across the Plains

To surround such a large area, Gaoshi Territory had already spread its sentry posts extremely thin.

After Liushuang took one out with a single shot, the gap between the two remaining posts was wide enough to fit a train sideways with room to spare. Naturally, there was no chance of them stopping the Flying Shuttle from crossing the encirclement.

That had been their last chance. At the time, Chen Mo's riding skills had not been particularly polished, as he had been unable to practice while moving in the mountains.

After riding a short distance, however, Chen Mo got the feel for it again. He kept twisting the throttle, and the electric motorcycle sped over the bumpy roads across the plains, the jolts drawing occasional cries of surprise from Liushuang.

The little girl held Chen Mo tightly around the waist, reminding him that, a long time ago, when he took a girl for a ride, he had occasionally been unable to resist squeezing the brake.

Don't ask. If anyone asked, the road was bumpy.

Magic beacons rose one after another behind them, and the alerted cavalry stationed there hurriedly spurred their horses in pursuit.

The direction Chen Mo had chosen for their breakout was one the enemy had not expected, because it was right next to a straight official road where warhorses could run at full speed.

Gaoshi Territory had assumed that even an enemy who had lost his mind would never run this way.

Unexpectedly, what should have been a case of riders catching people on foot turned into four hooves chasing two wheels-and those two wheels belonged to a damn full-speed, black-tech off-road vehicle.

By the time they reached the main road, they truly couldn't even see its taillight. All that remained was a straight tire track pointing toward the distant horizon.

More than an hour later, the Fifth Knight hurried over, his face ashen. After questioning the men in detail about what had happened, he let out a howl like a wild wolf.

"Signal the troops ahead and tell them to stop them!"

"Cavalry battalion, after them! You must capture them!"

What followed was a chase that drew in most of South Pass Territory.

They chased, but couldn't catch up!

On the sixteenth day of the eleventh month, in the Moonrest Dynasty's Year of Thunder and the Mist Moon Divine Court's Year of True Knowledge, Chen Mo drove the Flying Shuttle with an entire cavalry squad chasing him for twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, he let the little commandery princess practice shooting.

Commandery Princess Liushuang sat facing backward, tied herself to Chen Mo with a belt, and tried shooting fast-moving targets while traveling at high speed for the first time.

With her foundation as a second-tier warrior, the little commandery princess adapted quickly. She hit five times in ten shots: four men and one horse.

The last victim, the Gaoshi cavalry captain leading the squad, spun a refined spear so fast it left afterimages. But the skill that had once formed an impenetrable defense against arrows was now little more than a juggling act in the face of sniper rifle bullets.

As the cavalry captain fell from his horse, the remaining cavalrymen turned their mounts around as one and scattered.

They tried to block them, but couldn't.

Unfamiliar with the geography, the two knew nothing beyond the fact that Cloudmist Territory lay to the north-not the locations of cities, the routes, or the lay of the mountains and rivers.

So, when the roads were good, they traveled boldly and headed straight north. If the surrounding terrain was complicated and villages crisscrossed the area, they sent the Skylark ahead and avoided enemy eyes as much as possible.

The all-terrain vehicle climbed slopes and crossed ridges, and when they came to a place it really couldn't get through, Liushuang could carry it as she ran.

Under those circumstances, intercepting the highly mobile two-person team was like looking for a needle in the sea.

But even if it was like looking for a needle in the sea, Gaoshi Territory's troops still had to pursue them.

Whether they could catch them was a matter of ability, and could also be blamed on the terrain, the weather, equipment, luck... and so on.

But whether they pursued them at all was a matter of attitude, and there was no avoiding responsibility for that.

With so many pursuit parties scurrying all over the place, they were bound to run into each other sooner or later.

The farther north they went, the more open the terrain became, and the harder it was for Chen Mo and Liushuang to hide their tracks.

Thirty kilometers west of Jinhan City in South Pass Territory, an elite ranger scout squad from Gaoshi Territory picked up Chen Mo's trail with the help of a scouting falcon.

The elite squad lived up to its reputation. Though there were only four of them, every one was a third-tier Silver Armor warrior.

They wore lightweight chain mail that glimmered cyan, with tiny wind-element runes engraved on the links to greatly reduce their weight and increase their speed.

Their mounts were one in a thousand as well: Black Wind Steeds, all six feet high at the shoulder, with knotted muscles and coats as dark as ebony. Taking advantage of the somewhat complicated terrain, they managed to keep up with Chen Mo by sheer force.

They had come well prepared, carrying protective magic charms carefully crafted by the territory's mages, along with mana spirit crystals to recharge them.

Liushuang fired five shots in succession without accomplishing anything.

Chen Mo was unhappy about that.

Isn't this wasting my bullets?

You can afford to use up your magic items, but my bullets are precious. I can't keep wasting the precious load capacity supplied by the Bloodline Altar on this.

And I haven't even killed you, but you're still chasing me?

Eat a Wasp!

What could a drone weighing only three hundred grams carry? Certainly not a conventional weapon.

After considering how various weapons had performed in actual combat in the other world, Eastern Xia concluded that intense heat and fire worked best against these thick-skinned, heavily built fellows who often wore armor.

No matter how powerful an explosion was, it would still have trouble penetrating heavy armor, especially when warriors of the Starry World had extremely strong instantaneous defenses.

The aluminum-magnesium mixture that had once brought down a fifth-tier orc grand knight was still the best. With temperatures high enough and sustained burning, whether it was plate armor, battle qi, scrolls, or magic implements, surely it would burn through them.

Compared with traditional aluminum-magnesium incendiary bombs, the Wasp sacrificed the initial explosive effect and devoted all the space saved to enhancing two functions.

Automatic targeting and forced restraint.

For automatic targeting, the Wasp selected targets in this order of priority: head-neck-chest-waist and abdomen.

For forced restraint, the Wasp drone released a mist of anesthetic gas as it approached, slowing the enemy's reactions. It then drove its "stinger" in hard, instantly melting the point of contact to form a physical bond and hold on tight.

The ranger in the lead was lucky enough to take a Wasp sting, which latched directly onto his forehead.

The effect was comparable to a facehugger.

No magic protection could withstand a three-thousand-degree flame roasting a forehead at point-blank range.

It worked so quickly that the ranger scout managed only a brief cry before his skull was carbonized and his brains roasted dry.

Having witnessed this, the other three scouts turned and fled without hesitation.

They had shown the proper attitude, and their captain had already been paid as the price. It was time to retreat.

Chen Mo watched for a moment and, seeing that the enemy had indeed fled far away, turned around in satisfaction and quickly returned to collect the spoils.

Each additional type of magic item he collected could yield more research results back home.

This was another advantage of the new Wasp: its focused attack left the rest of the body relatively intact.

Including the equipment.

From that day on, Chen Mo had more room to operate. Gaoshi Territory's people continued to chase him, but their pursuit became, how to put it, increasingly halfhearted.

They shouted and yelled, fired arrows from a distance, and made exaggerated movements, but the farther they chased, the farther behind they fell.

In this way, they escorted Chen Mo and Liushuang all the way to the Xinpo River on the border between South Pass Territory and Emerald Territory.

In the Starry World, territories customarily used natural features as boundaries. This was also one way the fragmented small states protected themselves.

The river was one of the River of Crystal's major tributaries. The marquis had established his final defensive line here, gathering large numbers of elites along two bridges, one upstream and one downstream on the Xinpo River. He had even delayed his attacks on South Pass's cities to do so.

Then Chen Mo chose a river mouth more than ten kilometers from either of the two main defensive positions. With a few blasts and threats, he chased away the handful of patrol soldiers there, then openly rode the Flying Shuttle into the surging river under the watchful gaze of the enemy's scouting eyes and a sky full of magic beacons.

That's right, the Flying Shuttle could go on water too!

How else could it be called an all-terrain vehicle?

Chapter 82: Safe Return to Cloudmist

As an amphibious electric motorcycle, the Flying Shuttle showed the Starry World its versatility for the first time.

After it raced down the riverbank, two inflatable airtight membranes unfolded from its sides. A rapidly spinning motor pumped air into them, and they swelled like life jackets, steadily supporting the heavy vehicle.

Pop-out paddles on the sides of the wheels served as oars. Though the blades were a little small, they beat the water fast enough that the vehicle moved through it without difficulty.

With this system supporting it, the Flying Shuttle could float directly across the river.

Whether it was the scattered elite scouts on the riverbank or the Gaoshi commanders gathered around a mage's scouting eye in the bridgehead camp, all they could do was look at one another and watch Chen Mo cross the river at his leisure, reach the bank, retract the membranes, and ride away.

Before leaving, Liushuang fired a shot toward the south bank, blasting apart the Gaoshi three-tower flag planted on the embankment.

The falling flag crashed heavily into the rushing river and was instantly swallowed by the muddy waves.

With that, the great pursuit, which had mobilized more than ten thousand people and cost tens of millions in equipment, supplies, and magic items, had become a grand farce.

Chen Mo didn't feel much about it. As they said back home, beating a wheelchair in a Ferrari wasn't much to brag about.

But after their safety was assured, the little commandery princess, who had seemed to forget everything over the past few days, looked back at the lands they had left far behind, and her eyes reddened despite herself.

The little girl performed a reasonably proper noble salute toward the opposite bank, then climbed back onto the Flying Shuttle.

"We've made it this far. You should know the way home, right?"

Liushuang nodded gently. "Mm. From the bridge, go straight north for two hundred arrows, and we'll reach Violet City in Cloudmist Territory."

Converted, that was only forty kilometers-not even half an hour at full speed.

Though on these lousy roads, they couldn't go full speed.

"What was that salute you just gave? It looked different from the ones before."

"That was the noble high mourning salute. It's performed when a respected elder or esteemed person... passes away forever."

"From the sound of it, there's a low mourning salute too?"

"Mm, there's also the noble middle mourning salute and low mourning salute... They're used on different occasions. There are two hundred and sixty-two forms of etiquette in all. Lady-in-waiting Linda told me about them so many times, but I only... only remembered a little..."

"..."

Chen Mo took a deep breath and offered a consolation that wasn't really consolation. "It feels like you grew up all at once!"

Liushuang slid the rifle back into the gun case on her back, turned slightly, and pressed her face against Chen Mo's back.

"Actually, Grandpa Locke's injuries could have been healed, but he was afraid I wouldn't leave, so he gave up..."

"Uncle Peiwen... he didn't have to die either..."

"And Linda. I used to think she was so annoying, always making me memorize my lessons... But from now on... there won't ever be anyone to make me do that again..."

"They've all gone to be with my mother, and left me here all alone..."