Chapter 2833: Severed Tail
However, since everyone on the train was an A-level player, they definitely wouldn't be short on defensive items. The group held their breath, confirming that the mutated birds outside couldn't get in as long as they stayed calm.
This attack lasted for nearly a minute. Given the length of time and the fact that the train was traveling at high speed, it was clear just how vast the area covered by this flock of birds was.
Just as the players thought the storm was about to pass, a sharp, cold light suddenly cut through the night, piercing through the bodies of several birds before embedding itself in the broken window!
The defensive barrier that had been blocking the outside instantly developed cracks. As the flock surged forward, another cold light flew in, this time directly penetrating the newly reinforced barrier!
Someone recognized what had flown in. "Looks like the fangs of a giant bird-beast. No idea where it came from, but with the train's acceleration, it could tear through the barrier again. Use a protective shield—a shield made of high-grade metal, even if it deforms, it won't break easily."
The defensive barrier wasn't removed, and the players in the carriage quickly pulled out their protective shields. Some were handheld, others could automatically assemble, and the better ones were high-quality items capable of automatically defending against surrounding dangers.
Of course, it would be best if they didn't have to use these shields at all. After all, the combat power of a mutated beast group that could completely break through a defensive barrier was no joke—encountering one was pure bad luck.
But less than two minutes later, one of the carriages was breached. At first, only a few birds flew in, but unexpectedly, these birds let out an abnormal screech as they were dying. The moment the sound rang out, a massive creature suddenly appeared on the tracks. Its enormous silhouette was hard to make out in the darkness, but the one thing that was certain was its size—it was huge, even larger than a single carriage!
The players in the attacked carriage didn't even think about ignoring the train's safety to kill the mutated giant bird. Seeing the situation, their first instinct was to flee to other carriages. But what no one expected was that the giant bird didn't dive into the carriage at all. Instead, it grabbed the front door of the carriage and dragged it off the tracks!
No one knew how the bird managed to match the train's speed on the tracks, but the moment the carriage was seized, the train's emergency system activated automatically. The transition car split apart from the middle, abandoning the dragged carriage and all those behind it!
As the carriage left the tracks, the players in the rear carriages smashed through the windows, trying to jump to the front. But only three players, who were closest, managed to board the front carriage and gain a chance at survival. The rest, no matter how fast they were, were left behind by the train!
Even more terrifying was that, just three seconds later, the space around the train shifted to daylight. Looking back at the tracks behind, everything was calm and normal. If not for the wrecked transition car still lying there, no one would have believed what had just happened!
At that moment, all the survivors on the train understood that most of those left behind on the tracks with the train were doomed. Even if the Game Government Base sent people to retrieve them, they wouldn't be able to hold out that long.
The outside of the carriage was smeared with bird blood and remnants of bird carcasses. The giant bird's claws were still embedded in the carriage floor. This almost silent yet swift killing and hunting made some of the newly promoted A-level players on the train sober up.
Even as A-level players, on the tracks of the Dimension Train, they were still very fragile.
"How did those mutated birds manage to catch up to us?" someone found it unreasonable. After all, the carriage was attacked because the smaller mutated birds had sent out a signal. Although the sound was brief, it still took time for the giant bird to hear it and fly down. Why couldn't the train's speed shake it off?
Humans naturally fear the unknown and the incomprehensible. Because they don't understand, they have no way to defend themselves or guarantee their safety. This feeling of floating in midair, with no solid ground, not only made them feel danger but also made them irritable.
Just as the crisis had passed, the few players who had managed to return to the carriage got into a conflict with the players from the last carriage.
This drew the attention of players in other carriages. They couldn't afford to make things worse.
Xu Huo didn't pay attention to the noisy people behind him. He observed the sky outside through the dirty window.
Earlier, he had realized that the tracks were actually separated from the surrounding space. Those fleeting spaces might not contain the oxygen needed for survival, and the train might not be able to run in such unstable spaces.
So the tracks must have been specially created.
In the past, when xenomorphs attacked the train, they suddenly appeared from around the tracks. Due to the spatial barriers, players couldn't observe what was happening on either side. They only knew that the xenomorphs would suddenly appear ahead of the tracks, waiting to pounce as the train passed.
But in the previous attack, the giant bird needed the smaller birds to provide its location. This showed that it actually didn't know the situation on the train. Perhaps it couldn't see, so it could only determine whether there was prey by hearing the cries of the smaller birds when they were killed.
It had appeared suddenly from high above. It wasn't strange for it to pass through space, given the setup around the tracks. But when the train accelerated, even if it heard the cries, it shouldn't have been directly in front of the train.
Impurities floated in the air. Xu Huo faced the light but still found it difficult to determine whether there were several spaces with different time flows near the tracks. Even though he had made further progress in temporal evolution, he couldn't break through the real spatial walls to identify temporal forces.
But if the time flow in the space around the tracks was also different, it seemed reasonable. The "speed" of the train might not be "speed" in the eyes of the xenomorphs.
Just like how people caught by faster temporal forces suddenly aged, a blink of an eye could feel like decades had passed.
Currently, the time in different wormhole point zones within the game also varied. Some were fast, some slow. Perhaps a zone where a player had just completed a copy last year would be completely different when they returned.
Players could freely move between these spaces, but that didn't mean they could speed up or slow down with time. Players aged at the same rate no matter which zone they entered. If the time span was large enough and they returned to their original zone, they might see old acquaintances still looking the same while they themselves had aged prematurely.
If these xenomorphs passed through the track space like players passing through zones with different time flows, then this state of relative speed balance wasn't impossible.
Of course, this situation could only be a surprise attack. Time met in parallel at this moment but wouldn't stay that way forever. That's why xenomorph attacks on the train were always fleeting.
"What bad luck," the man in the same carriage suddenly said, looking at his arm. Without realizing it, a wound had appeared on his arm, and black liquid was flowing from it.