Chapter 862: Are They Working Together? They’re Targeting Us!!!

As Hawkeye spoke, his right hand had already reached for the long rectangular black metal gun case at his feet.

Inside the case was the sniper rifle he treated like a treasure, specially handcrafted to his specifications.

With his top-tier marksmanship, combined with the three-dimensional coordinates constructed by the drone, wind speed and humidity data, and ballistic calculation assistance, he needed only 5 seconds to precisely predict the sparrow’s flight path for the next second.

Then a single bullet would be enough, and the timing would be well within reach.

Zhang Shenyi did not immediately agree, instead he pondered for 2 seconds. In the end, he shook his head, vetoing the sniping plan.

“No. The ballistic trace will expose us.”

He paused, then gave an order to another team member by the window:

“He, use the sentry to bait it, divert the sparrow’s attention, and create an evacuation window for Chen Town.”

At the same time, he spoke into the microphone, issuing commands to Chen Town, who was still lying in ambush in the grass:

“Chen Town, heads up: confirm the enemy has high-altitude mimetic recon units, and they’ve locked onto your area.

The sentry will give you roughly 15 to 20 seconds of breathing room. Seize the moment and crawl back immediately toward pre-set evacuation point B.

Move fast and stay concealed.”

Point B was of course not the single-story house, but a pre-marked evacuation point behind a depression in the ground.

The Worries Relief Studio had marked out five such evacuation points as soon as they arrived.

In the grass, Chen Town silently adjusted his posture again, slowly shifting the positions of his head and hips, aligning himself with the retreat direction.

At the same time, he lowered his voice to confirm once more:

“Understood. Evacuate to B. What about the corpse?”

Zhang Shen answered decisively:

“Abandon the body!”

Off to the side, the man from the Mechanical Department, who had been straining to listen, suddenly went three shades darker in the face. His lips twitched, as if he wanted to stress the potential evidentiary value of that corpse.

But he knew saying anything more would be pointless. All he could do was silently hypnotize himself in his heart:

“Don’t get mad, don’t get mad. They’re professionals, just excessively cautious and brave, that’s all.

Forget it. It’s just a corpse, just a White Mask. If we let it go, we let it go.

As long as they can keep their word and eventually bring Feng Mu back alive for me, the result will be the same.”

By the window of the single-story house, the team member called He quickly pulled out a tactical tablet, his fingers sliding rapidly across it as he brought up a concise command interface and edited and sent instructions to the sentries.

In the grass, one Mechanical Leech that had been lying silently at the roots suddenly lit its compound eyes with a faint red glow, and a subtle sound of gears turning came from inside its segmented body.

Its six pairs of legs kicked hard against the soil, and the Mechanical Leech’s slender body darted through the blades of grass, setting off an unnaturally violent swaying of the leaves.

As expected!!!

In midair, the sparrow immediately seized on this anomaly. Its wings canted in an instant, deftly shifting its flight angle, and its black bean-like eyes locked onto the source of the disturbance.

Almost at the exact same moment!

By the roadside, the pupil of Iron Claw’s left eye also rotated slightly, and the eight ferocious mechanical auxiliary limbs on his back shifted shape, driving spike after spike into the ground.

They lifted his incredibly heavy body straight up, nearly 2 meters off the ground.

The pure white, featureless mask turned in sync toward the patch of grass where the abnormal swaying had come from, a cold killing intent beginning to spread.

The next second!

“Whoosh—!”

A withered yellow blur shot out of the grass like a bolt—it was the Mechanical Leech, its initial launch speed astonishing, fast as a bullet, hurtling unflinchingly toward the sky twenty-some meters up.

The sparrow in midair reacted extremely fast, instantly locking onto the incoming leech. It adjusted its flight angle, trying to evade.

But the leech’s launch velocity was simply too high, and its angle was viciously precise.

Despite the sparrow’s best efforts to dodge, the edge of one fleshy wing was still scraped hard by the Leech’s sharp front legs.

“Sssrriiip—”

A few feathers drifted down, and a streak of dark red blood sprayed out from the torn “skin and flesh.”

The mimetic detailing was impeccable.

However, up in the high air, multiple stealth drones had already pushed their lenses to maximum zoom, and the crystal-clear capture footage streamed back to the single-story house.

The footage returned to the main screen in the house and was immediately analyzed frame by frame.

On the screen, beneath the sparrow’s torn wing, within the supposed flesh-and-blood biomimetic tissue, there was a faint glimpse of the metallic sheen of an internal framework and micro-circuitry.

The attacked sparrow was enraged (or rather, its defense protocol was triggered). The frequency of its wingbeats spiked to an abnormally high rate, and in an instant it caught up to the Mechanical Leech, now at the apex of its parabolic arc.

The Mechanical Leech at this moment was suspended in midair, unable to perform any effective evasive movement, completely reduced to a sitting duck.

The sparrow’s sharp beak clamped precisely onto the midsection of the leech’s body. There was a crisp “crack” as the Mechanical Leech’s hard shell, strong enough to withstand small-caliber bullets, was bitten open in a single snap, exposing the delicate mechanical structure within.

“Pong!”

A not particularly loud but oddly muffled explosion sounded in the air.

The Mechanical Leech had triggered its preset self-destruct program. The built-in micro high-explosive device detonated, a modest fireball surging out and instantly engulfing the sparrow’s head.

Half of the mechanical sparrow’s face, along with part of its biomimetic structure, was blown to pieces, revealing the twisted metallic framework beneath and flickering electrical sparks.

Like a real bird hit by a shotgun, it shook violently in midair, tilting and wobbling as it plunged toward the dense grass below.

Directly beneath its falling trajectory, several other leeches that had long been coiled and ready in the grass suddenly sprang out from different angles, their front ends opening to reveal suction mouthparts, biting down toward the damaged sparrow.