Badass

Squad 1923 had brought down yet another Great Spike, and quite possibly in the fastest kill in squad history. Yet not a single person felt the slightest flicker of joy or excitement... Only nineteen of them were left now. Struggling, the survivors dragged themselves up from the ground. "Again—" Da Wu turned, just about to yell for another round, when he suddenly noticed that the remaining two Great Spikes opposite them hadn't immediately attacked after wheeling around. Instead, they had stopped in their tracks. It seemed they, too, had been dazed by the swift kill. "Wait, what are they doing?" one squad member asked, shuffling over. "They wouldn't happen to be sending intel, would they?" another offered. "Who cares?" Da Wu said. Even if the two Great Spikes really were transmitting intelligence, there was no way the squad could stop them in time. They might as well use the lull to regroup. "Can you still stand? Anyone who can, get up! Ready yourselves. In a moment, we do Rushing Thunder again... I'll take the lead." In the Single-Line Rushing Thunder Formation, whoever led was bound to die. Da Wu let out an exhausted yet exhilarated chuckle and forced his drooping eyelids open, knowing full well he couldn't hold out much longer. *** "Qingzi, are you sure you saw it?" Yang Qingbai asked. In truth, the two-man Needlefish-class craft wasn't small. As it had slowed and dropped altitude to circle back, people scrambling across the terrain below had mistaken it for an alien craft belonging to the monster Great Spikes. The ground along their path was overrun with panicked crowds fleeing for their lives. That made spotting anything considerably harder. "I don't know. The craft was moving too fast—it was just a blur..." Han Qingyu wasn't certain either. The reason he thought it looked like a school was because school grounds tended to have a layout distinct from ordinary clusters of buildings. A large part of the scene he had just described was built on an initial hunch followed by mental guesswork. "Then how about I pull up and throttle back up? If push comes to shove, we can make another couple of passes," Yang Qingbai suddenly suggested. "Pull up and speed up?" Even at their current speed, spotting anything was difficult; Han Qingyu didn't quite follow. "Yeah. Go back to our original speed and altitude. Then use whatever impression stuck in your head to match against the blur. Call it out the moment a spot feels familiar. Doing it that way also makes it easier to estimate time and distance," Yang Qingbai explained. Han Qingyu caught on. Looking slightly chagrined, he urged urgently, "Then hurry—do what you said. Pull up, accelerate!" *** Back at its original cruising speed, the Needlefish-class craft streaked like a wisp of smoke, tearing through the high altitude directly above Squad 1923... Because it flew so high, the soldiers on the ground noticed nothing at all. Yet moments later, they still tilted their heads toward the sky. "Fuck their ancestors, they really called for backup! No wonder the bastards stopped attacking all of a sudden," Lei San cursed, his eyes rimmed with red as he stared upward. Over the hillside flanking them, in the distant sky, another shuttle craft belonging to the Great Spikes—the fourth encountered by Squad 1923 in today's battle—was approaching, gradually decelerating as it drew near. And this time, it appeared to be heading straight for their battlefield. In truth, the low-intelligence black-armored Great Spikes had just revised their combat assessment of Squad 1923 upward. That was something the soldiers could never have imagined or guessed in the moment. "What are you still looking at? Go around that way—take the children and the students and run!" Lei San roared toward the parents hiding behind the walls in the distance. Earlier, they had forbidden the parents from stirring and the children from fleeing because such movement would almost certainly draw the Great Spikes' attention, prompting one to peel off and hunt them down. That would have been sheer slaughter. Now, with the arrival of yet another craft, Squad 1923 knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they could protect them no longer. A massacre had become unavoidable. All they could do was tell them to run, praying that a few more might survive, while fighting to their own very last breath. "Get ready!" Da Wu shouted. Now they had to take the initiative and attack before that craft touched down. The remaining squad members shuffled over, falling in behind him. "Have they started running?" "Probably any second now." "Right. The moment they start running, we charge." Da Wu shook his head, then suddenly said, "Hey, do you think... if those kids back there survive, could one of them turn into a super combat power in the future?" "Hard to say, but maybe," a veteran soldier remarked. "Yeah, maybe another Major The Qing will come out of it!" Yin Xiaojie chimed in with a grin. Major The Qing was from the Ninth Army too, and an Eraser to boot. Before today, that had been Yin Xiaojie's proudest point of boast. He had enlisted in Azure relatively late, so he had never met Major Qing or Second Lieutenant Wen. He had only seen Squad 1777's vice squad leader, Qin Guowen, once during the recruit graduation last year. Even though Qin Guowen hadn't picked him in the end, leaving him unable to join the squad where Major Qing had served, Yin Xiaojie hadn't held a grudge. The young man was pure-hearted, thinking only that he needed to work as hard as he could. *If only Major Qing could hear my name one day,* he thought. "Major The Qing?" "Another one of him?!" "Damn it all, he's currently the youngest fighter on the Dome Leaderboard—the man who even cut down Alphonse! Hahaha... Xiaojie, you bastard, you sure know how to dream!" Lei San laughed. The veteran soldiers chuckled along. As the shuttle craft drew closer and closer, they laughed and chatted, deliberately not looking at it. For the moment, they didn't even look at the two Great Spikes standing not far off. "Uh, Uncle Lei, have you ever seen Major Qing?" "Nope, none of us have seen him. Our squad leader's the only one who did. Back when he was a vice squad leader in another squad, he caught the recruit graduation that year and spotted him in the crowd a few times..." "Get ready!" Da Wu cut off the conversation, slapping himself hard across the cheek to clear his head. Then he raised his blade. "Single-Line Rushing Thunder—" *Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!* Source energy erupted from every soldier. Triggered by this burst of source energy, the two Great Spikes nearby waited no longer for the craft to land. With a feral hiss and roar, they brandished their swords and lunged forward ahead of time. Squad 1923's vice squad leader stood his ground, glaring straight at them. The final word—"charge"—hovered on the tip of his tongue, not yet spoken... *Boom!* A roar ripped through the air behind them, high above, sweeping horizontally overhead before hurtling into the distance. The Needlefish-class craft roared past at low altitude, generating a tremendous blast of noise. Roof tiles along its path rattled and rained down. Da Wu froze. The soldiers of Squad 1923 froze. Several turned to look back. *Whoosh!* A streak of blue light flashed across their heads. By the time they snapped their eyes forward, both Great Spikes ahead had already been run through, one after the other. Impaling them was an enormous column sword glimmering with blue starlight. "What is..." *Swoosh!* A figure bolted past them immediately after. The shuttle craft in the air was descending when the figure charged forward, abruptly vaulting nearly a hundred meters into the sky. Mid-leap, with a crisp metallic rasp, he drew twin blades into his hands. *Boom! Riiip—* Two dead iron straight swords tore straight through the craft's nose. Then, dragging along the underbelly, they sheared through to the very tail. *Crash!* The craft slammed brutally into the earth, embedding itself in the ground as clouds of dust billowed into the air. Moments later, the foul, sickening blood of the Great Spikes surged out from within the vessel. A short distance away, the figure touched down and turned around. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. Han Qingyu had swallowed a metal block and pushed his bone source to its limit to drop down. Coming to a full stop in the craft would have taken far too long, and with the crisis unfolding below, there was no time to spare. He had ejected directly from the low-altitude craft, using the column sword to anchor his descent. The maneuver had taken a brutal toll on his body. Far across the distance, their gazes met. Han Qingyu looked at his fallen comrades strewn across the ground, and at the bloody wounds covering every man still left standing. In the very first instant, he wanted to say, *I'm sorry, I came too late...* But when he parted his lips, he forced a smile and offered just one word: "Badass." In this world, particularly the world as it stood today, finding words for death was near impossible. On top of everything one had already grown accustomed to, one simply had to become more accustomed still. "...Y-yeah, damned right," Lei San said, trying his best to keep his composure. "Not bad yourself, Major Qing."