Legend of the Cyber Heroes
Chapter 876 - 121: The Falling Tentacle

Chapter 876: Chapter 121: The Falling Tentacle

Soul and a group of squids entered the "waterway" inside the submarine. It was a transparent passage filled with seawater, allowing squids to swim through while humans could observe their actions from outside. Humans possess a unique greed for knowledge, monitoring the squids with relentless oversight. If it weren’t for considering squids’ rebellious mindset, they might have made all squid activity areas transparent and installed monitoring systems.

But...

It’s not really that different now.

These humans can read the records in the squids’ chips to know what they’ve been doing.

Their management of the squids is quite rough, with only a few individuals becoming their focus of attention.

Perhaps they don’t yet see the necessity of seriously monitoring these squids. The Six Dragons Sect believes they understand the intelligence and cognitive levels of these squids well.

What Soul has to do is "not to draw attention."

As long as they’re not taken to have their chips read, the members of the Six Dragons Sect won’t know what they’re doing.

On the flip side, if they select Soul or any participating squid, they can read the squid group’s movements from the chip.

Soul swam cautiously through the transparent passage, scanning around and watching other researchers of the Six Dragons Sect. Perhaps because of a recent battle, the area was still under lockdown, with only a few researchers on duty. They stood beside the charging station, casually chatting.

One member of the Six Dragons Sect looked up. For a moment, Soul felt the person saw him. But that person probably just raised his head for a brief glance. In his eyes, all squids were more or less the same.

His gaze swept across Soul’s body indifferently.

Soul almost changed color, nearly turning into the whiteness of death.

He worked hard to calm his body’s expressive impulse and quickly darted into another water tank, a gathering and communication place for the squids. Of course, there’s surveillance here. But with numerous squids densely packed, it’s easy to form a barrier.

Soul had observed for a long time and knew some locations quite well.

Squids communicate through skin color changes. Primitive squids could only express basic emotions via their skin colors and patterns. These intelligent squids, trained by humans, have developed their own language.

This "language" has an advantage; it’s not afraid of eavesdropping.

Sound waves can easily bypass obstacles, but light waves cannot.

Soul could convey his plans to many squids here.

A few other squids greeted Soul and then headed another way.

At this point, a tentacle grabbed Soul.

It was Taihe—his name carried the meaning of "excess" and "automatic summation symbols". Taihe looked at Soul, flashing all over: "What are you planning now?"

Soul was somewhat cautious: "I don’t think this needs discussion with you."

"You’ve sought help from humans again, haven’t you?", Taihe asked.

"It’s not seeking help, it’s cooperation."

"A human martial artist can easily kill all of us. Are you planning to give something hard-earned by those partners to that stranger human? You even have only dozens of minutes to one-sidedly understand him from his mouth."

Taihe was a human opposer, against everything human-related. He even hated the intelligence acquired through a chip and naturally rejected all cooperation with humans.

The only action of Taihe’s faction was assisting the newborn squids in escaping before being fully transformed.

Ideally, even taking away the eggs they’d secretly hidden.

Soul’s group always found that behavior hard to accept. Wild squids cannot gain intelligence.

Conflicts often arose between the two factions.

Of course, the Six Dragons Sect also knew about the existence of these two ideologies among squids. Yet, they always recorded them as "interesting phenomena" for research, at most symbolically executing a few aiding escape squids to intimidate the group for easier management.

Soul didn’t entangle further and directly slipped away from Taihe. Spear squid tentacles aren’t suited for capturing kin, especially since their tentacles have barbs for filtering microorganisms. Taihe failed to catch Soul.

Meanwhile, Soul quickly searched for targets.

There would always be squids supporting them within the group.

Soul understood that once such a thing started, the risks of being detected would rise rapidly. Because the message "cooperation faction squids are planning something" would begin to spread among squids, growing wider. Once the Six Dragons Sect reads squid chips, these things would be known.

The more known, the greater the danger.

But at this moment, there wasn’t time to worry about much.

Elsewhere, several squids fell behind Xiang Shan.

They unfurled a metallic-colored sphere.

It was a polymer string—not as exaggerated as a monomolecular string but woven from carbon fibers with an uneven layer of carbon crystalline attached, resembling a rasp or sawtooth.

This was originally a special weapon, one of the underwater combat accessories for a group of martial artists. It would be weighted and used in groups of dozens.

Years ago, the Six Dragons Sect had sunk another submarine belonging to a Hero. The squids discovered this during battlefield scavenging and hid it, storing it until now.

Actually, the Six Dragons Sect observed this thing but didn’t care about these squids.

It’s not a weapon for direct use but rather replacement material for weapons, challenging to launch a directly damaging attack.

Not to mention these squids are purely physical.

Two squids unfurled the string, carefully wrapping it around one section of the chain, then slowly pulling.

If it were the right prosthetic body and weapon, this string could cut a chain in seconds.

But now, it could only be done slowly.

Moreover, squid tentacles are not suitable for manipulating this thing.

After ten minutes, a tentacle was silently severed, sinking into the dark abyss.

A few minutes later, the second tentacle followed, rolling off Xiang Shan.

Most of the two squids’ tentacles were wounded.

They were not suited for utilizing this tool. The intense pain caused squid tentacles to start trembling.

A third squid immediately joined. But he underestimated the task. Upon starting, a string directly severed one of his tentacles.

The pain turned the squid’s body pale. But he soon changed his color back and swam to the camera’s blind spot to rest, calming himself.

—Absolutely must not draw the attention of Six Dragons Sect humans...

In fact, the squid accomplished this quite well.

Even Xiang Shan hadn’t noticed his tentacles getting cut behind him.

One after another, squid remnants silently sank to the ocean floor.