Steel Steam and Flame

Dalton, who had reached middle age in his life, took off his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes hard, causing a dazed glare. The heavy rain and scenery outside the window did not become clearer, but became blurry. The sound of rain reminded him that the gray and frosted scenery was a curtain of rain.

Put your glasses back on and wait for two or three seconds until the scene becomes clear again under the focus of the lenses. Perhaps the eyes lost their "perception" and the brain got a short rest. The hallucinatory "suppression" just now immediately reconstructed the form in thinking, and the details were just like real objects.

The strange bee that seemed strange under the rain was right in front of him, silently flapping several pairs of transparent wings, and its clustered spikes cut through the raindrops falling around it.

"A new species of bee that only appears during heavy rainstorms?" Dalton wiped his hair, which was losing its luster, and thought about the various strange plants that had appeared around the school in recent years, and made a guess.

Flowers with strange colors, trees with strange shapes, tough vines that seem to grow ferociously without sunlight but with rainwater, etc. There are too many similar things, for him as a teacher and for students of this small school. , has lost its freshness.

There are also plant diseases that have never been seen before! Even as he was talking to himself in his head, Dalton never failed to emphasize the situation. The wide flat land used by the school for outdoor activities and exercises, and the huge coniferous trees on the edge of the flat land, were taken away by strange plant diseases.

That was planted when the school was founded. It has decades of history and decades of growth. It is so tall and healthy. But since a piece of mold-like thing climbed up to their roots, decades of accumulation were wiped out in less than half a month.

"It's not entirely a lie. Until now, they are still providing wood with a faint fragrance for the fireplace." Dalton sighed with regret. Looking out the window again at this moment, he could no longer see those towering coniferous trees. . For a long time, he graduated from school and came to this school to teach. For more than thirty years, he has always regarded conifers as another version of himself, hoping that he could also grow slowly with time. In all aspects, , without any regression.

The death of coniferous trees had a great impact on Dalton during that time.

"Ding! Ding ding..."

The school bell rang, bringing Dalton back to the real world. Shaking all over, he pretended to calm down and unzipped his clothes, tidied his clothes, then picked up the courseware he had prepared, got up and went straight to the classroom not far away.

The classroom is very spacious, and the lighting fixtures have been repaired countless times in the past few months, and are finally stable and no longer flickering.

The students were very quiet. But it would be better to say that the torrential rain, which would stop for who knows how long, had absorbed all the sunlight remaining on them, leaving no trace behind. Dalton hadn't seen the students' sunny faces for a long time.

Maybe it has something to do with himself. After the coniferous tree died, he became a little pessimistic. Dalton often thought about himself in this way.

Dalton tries to make every minute of the fifty-minute class as interesting as possible. The children in the classroom are all fourteen or fifteen years old. The memories of their school days should not be completely covered by the haze of the heavy rain.

According to the prepared courseware, Dalton slowly and carefully explained the contents of the book with his experience as a teacher for more than 30 years -

"Boom!" A sudden sound broke the harmony and warmth of the classroom. All the students, including Dalton, were attracted by the sound, which came from the window.

It was a weird bee. Dalton didn't even see it clearly. He just saw a shadow and the bee automatically appeared in his head.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!" Before anyone in the classroom could react, the sound of bees hitting the window glass was heard one after another. And he couldn't see the trajectory of the bees at all. Dalton only felt that he just blinked. There was only one bee outside the window, but in an instant there were three bees!

There was no way to catch the traces of their flight. When Dalton blinked again, there were five bees in total. Surprised, the five obviously strange bees discussed it and retreated some distance together, about half a meter away. So in Dalton's increasingly surprised eyes, five bees rushed towards him at the same time——

The glass shattered without any resistance. The broken glass fell to the ground. Fortunately, there were no students near the window, and the broken glass did not hurt anyone.

"Everyone, stay away!" Dalton remembered to shout at this moment. He picked up the book and ran from the front of the classroom to the window. While shouting, he was preparing to use the book to drive away the bees. It looks very weird. If it is toxic, it will be very troublesome to go to the hospital in heavy rain.

But his speed was no match for the bees, which left no flight traces at all. When he picked up the book and walked less than five or six steps, five bees were already hovering in mid-air, above a student.

"Kalia, don't move!" Dalton said immediately. When encountering this kind of danger, it seems that not moving is the standard way to deal with it. Moreover, even his own movements became slow and cautious, as if bees were on his head.

"Yes." The reply's voice was a little weak, but there was no feeling of fear in it. Instead, it was full of doubts. The student named Kalia remained still, but the next moment, due to a feeling that came from nowhere, she timidly raised her head to look at the hovering bee.

Because the bees gave her a very weird feeling, a feeling of meeting again after a long absence. It’s like,,, it’s like I know these bees! Kalia thought about the matter clearly at once and was sure of it.

So in Dalton's sight, Kalia slowly raised her fair-skinned right hand, as if waiting for a flying butterfly to dock, and gently approached the bee.

Amid the envious cries of classmates and Dalton's exclamations, the five weird bees, like bee-shaped butterflies, flew down in a slow way and actually landed on Kalia's right hand side by side. superior!

"Teacher, they seem to be very close to me!" Kalia smiled, "I feel like they should know me."

At the same time, in the large city next to the town where this school was located, an "explorer" suddenly opened his eyes and let out a long breath. In front of him, a strange bee was flying in the air, telling an inexplicable message in a strange trajectory.

“Immediately,,,contact the confirmed member,,,”