Armor-Piercing Munition: Face Me, Carbon-Based Monster!
Chapter 177 - 63 The Land of the Fallen Furnace

Chapter 177: Chapter 63 The Land of the Fallen Furnace

Xie Liu finished speaking, and Chen Jian was stunned.

Two War Gods, two unidentified space aircraft, and an even larger plane, likely a certain model of a large transport aircraft.

And they all crashed within Tongling City.

----No, it shouldn’t be a crash.

If it were a crash, Xie Liu wouldn’t have been able to find any aircraft wreckage at all, only a pile of scrap metal and craters from explosions.

This must be an emergency landing, but why did they have to land here?

This formation is obviously not a conventional transport escort formation; after all, no one has ever seen four bombers escort a single transport aircraft.

By contrast, Chen Jian felt these five planes were in some sort of transit maneuver.

But where were they going, and why did they have to land here?

Just a piece of simple information brought countless mysteries to Chen Jian, while Xie Liu and Ji Xing, standing aside, were completely unaware of the seriousness of the problem.

"So, is this information important?"

"We saw so many planes in the Anqing Ruins, and according to you, they could appear anywhere, so it doesn’t seem surprising for them to crash here, right?"

Ji Xing spoke with some confusion, while Chen Jian shook his head and replied:

"No, quite the opposite, it’s oddly excessive."

"It’s hard to explain the operation mode of fighter jets and their formation rules to you, but I can give you a simple example."

"For instance, Xie Liu’s Holy Blood Team is composed of a Ranger, Shield Guard, a Scout, and a doctor like Xie Liu. It’s a fully functional team capable of handling most sudden battles."

"The operation of fighter jets generally follows similar rules, although adjustments may be made depending on the nature of the mission, the core principles remain unchanged."

"And now, the situation Xie Liu saw is equivalent to four Shield Guards dying in the same place, with no trace of any other team members around."

"You think this situation isn’t strange enough?"

".... I understand now."

Ji Xing exhaled deeply and said:

"So the strangeness lies not in the planes themselves but in the reason they ended up here."

"Exactly."

Chen Jian gently rubbed the trigger of the rifle on the table, pondered for a moment, and said:

"The largest nearby airport is the Air Force Tenth Division’s airport, and only that airport is qualified to station space aircraft."

"This means these planes likely took off from the Air Force Tenth Division Base, and the transport aircraft they escorted was likely carrying important cargo from the base."

"Could the missing item... be here?"

"That’s right... the pilots probably chose to make an emergency landing precisely because of the special nature of what they were transporting."

"Something must have happened, forcing them to land halfway instead of making it to their destination."

"And the four bombers, loaded for escort, sustained damage upon landing, resulting in the nuclear bomb explosion and thus creating the dirty bomb effect, which is the source of the radiation."

"But if this logic holds, a new problem arises."

"A transport plane can land in an emergency, but why would bombers do the same?"

"I don’t understand... We have to go into the forbidden area to take a look!"

Chen Jian decisively made the decision, then turned to Xie Liu and asked:

"Did you pay attention to the highest radiation levels? What was the maximum?"

"The highest was 640, but only for an instant, most of the time the values fluctuate between 200 to 300."

Xie Liu immediately answered, clearly not just focusing on the alarm sound as Chen Jian had said, and keenly noted the values as well.

Chen Jian couldn’t spare the time to praise Xie Liu’s initiative, as he was quickly calculating the safety range of radiation doses in his mind.

640, that’s 640 mSv per hour.

This level is still too high, and although not all areas will reach such radiation levels, considering the time the team would need to spend entering and exiting, up to about five hours, the radiation they would endure would exceed the safe dose.

Once radiation damage hits a moderate level, in this post-apocalyptic world lacking modern medical means, no one can save them.

Either they have to shorten their exposure time.

Or they need to reduce the radiation they endure.

The former is extremely difficult because even a round trip for Xie Liu took nearly six hours, and for ordinary people like themselves with relatively weaker mobility, the time required would be even longer.

And the latter...

Carrying lead plates in?

This is a paradox of dilemma: the higher the protection, the slower the pace.

The slower the pace, the more radiation they endure.

No way to break the impasse unless they can find new equipment....

Seeing the troubled expression on Chen Jian’s face, Xie Liu tentatively asked:

"Captain, should I go again?"

"Or, let Ji Xing go once?"

"You can give us a list of the information you need to collect, and we’ll report back immediately once we have it..."

"That’s not feasible, the situation there is too complex, we must see it with our own eyes to draw conclusions."

Chen Jian shook his head and said:

"There’s a lot we don’t even know what it is, only at the scene can we make some deductions."

"Let’s think of other ways. If it’s really impossible, we can stay at the periphery of the forbidden area, find a high vantage point, and observe from a distance; maybe we can still gather information."

"Understood."

Xie Liu said no more, and Chen Jian synced the intelligence he had just received with Shen Yue and the others.