Chapter 977 - 45: King of Thebes

Although the brainwashed desert sea survivors were fearless, they could only affect Sun Hang's team's progress speed in the face of modern weapon firepower.

Looking at the history of human weapon development, since modern times, it's always been a situation where the spear is far stronger than the shield. Under the bullets of the Maxim machine gun, whether it was the Tang Dynasty's Profound Armor Army or the Jin Dynasty's iron phalanx, they were fated to meet their demise on the charge. Into modern times, even strong anomalies like the Black Dragon were obliterated under super high-yield nuclear weapons.

Any commander responsible for anomaly hunting missions would breathe a sigh of relief upon hearing that physical attack means could affect the target.

It's just like fighting a boss in a game; as long as the boss displays a health bar, it means players have hope of defeating it.

As for the bosses that don't even reveal a health bar, all you can expect is a plot kill.

After Sun Hang emptied the sixth box of ammunition belts, the team finally broke out of the tunnel, sweeping away the previous narrowness, replaced by the feeling of insignificance brought by the huge open space.

The internal space of New Thebes was more than ten times larger than Nuer's settlement. Countless bone structures formed a tiered city, and at the top tier stood a gigantic temple, occupying almost one-tenth of the vast space.

It's hard to imagine how much labor and time it would take the desert sea survivors to build such a city and temple, but somewhat reassuring for Sun Hang and the others was that there were no defensive installations densely packed on the city and temple exterior; only a few heavy crossbows were installed at several high points, but under the focused attention of anti-material sniper rifles, these crossbows had no chance to fire a second shot, turning into fragments with their shooters.

"Charge up!" Wang Xiyi roared lowly, punching down a building at the city's base, then pulling out a bone like a beam from the ruins, sweeping horizontally to clear a fan-shaped blank area in front of the group.

"Whoa, what Lin Daiyu pulling willows!" Sun Hang couldn't help but exclaim.

"Don't use that sickly character to describe me!" Wang Xiyi growled lowly, her wings fully spreading behind her, "They're surging up again! Hurry up!"

"Got it!"

Sun Hang suddenly accelerated, leaving the rest of the team behind, and almost instantly rushed to the temple's entrance.

Like the Holy Temple in Nuer's settlement, although there were a large number of buildings made of anomaly bones on the temple's exterior, the core area inside was entirely remnants from the old era. After smashing through several bone roadblocks blocking the path, a thick, rune-covered alloy door appeared squarely in Sun Hang's sight.

Sun Hang was just about to use brute force to break open this door, but a sudden warning deep within made him forcibly stop the power he'd amassed.

He retreated two steps, pulled out his pistol, and fired repeatedly at the door.

The bullets hitting the alloy door didn't produce a crisp collision sound but sank deeply as if into some biological tissue, with eerie screams coming from deep within the door.

In the next moment, the runes on the door suddenly moved like tadpoles, quickly gathering, twisting, and deforming into two tortured-looking faces.

"What is this?" Sun Hang felt the memetic aura from the door and instinctively planned to use Taotie's ability to devour it, but as he was about to act, the two faces displayed a pleading expression.

"Please..."

"Don't..."

The vague voice accompanied by the movement of the faces' mouths came from inside the door, and at the same time, Sun Hang noticed that the battlefield below suddenly fell into a strange stalemate—all the desert sea survivors stopped dead in place as if under a binding spell. At first, Candle Dragon didn't catch on, firing repeatedly at dozens of unmoving survivors, but soon they realized that even pressing the gun barrel against the survivors' faces didn't make them budge.

The team immediately stopped shooting, and several people simultaneously looked up at Sun Hang, seemingly asking what was going on above.

"Surrendered?" Sun Hang looked at the two faces on the door.

"This is... our destiny... I'm just following... the prophecy of the gods..."

"Who are you?" Sun Hang wasn't interested in listening to their mystical spiel and directly interrupted to ask.

"Amun..."

"Ra..."

"The ruler of this survivors' settlement?"

Sun Hang learned from a prisoner that New Thebes had two "Priests," these two people used the names from Ancient Egypt mythology, likening themselves to gods in the myths, choosing the names "creator" and "Sun God," and when these two gods merged, they became the famous "King of Thebes—Amun Ra" in Ancient Egypt mythology.

Of course, these two "half-baked Hunters" leftover from past allied forces' research facilities naturally couldn't be the real historical King of Thebes, not even remotely related, but their current situation left Sun Hang slightly puzzled.

He initially thought the door's role was equivalent to a "display"; Amun and Ra were deep inside the temple, using this door to communicate with the outside. But upon closer investigation, Sun Hang found the core memetic sequences of these two guys locked within the two heavy door panels.

In other words, they were actually prisoners bound in this door, or, like the door gods pasted on house doors in Xiazhou's rural areas.

If even the "King of Thebes" is only fit to be the doorman, who is the real master of this temple?

"Why did you attack the sand barge outpost?" Sun Hang asked again.

"To... bring out... the destined one..." Amun and Ra murmured, "Besides the destined one... eliminate all... The prophecy says so..."

"Destined one? Me?" Sun Hang pointed to himself.

[P.S. H1N1 has been pretty strong lately; knowing my weak resistance, I decided not to go out, yet caught it going downstairs for coffee, immediately knocked out... Luckily took Tamiflu in time, and besides headache and fatigue, there were no other symptoms... but I originally planned to finish the current book and fully focus on writing the new one, now feels like it'll be delayed again...]