Run

When a low-probability event happens repeatedly, it is naturally no longer a low-probability event. When a single person repeatedly shoots down drones, then no matter how dull someone is, they should realize that this person isn't human. Not an ordinary person. Who knew what kind of person he was, but he was definitely not someone who would lie at the mercy of drones. "Whoa!" A sudden outcry shattered the silence among the drone operators. "What did I just see? God is shooting down drones!" "Blow him up! Take him out! Use heavy drones to blow them to pieces!" Right now they were using only their smallest drones, but there were heavy drones available—ones that could carry over ten kilograms of explosives, packing the punch of an artillery shell, capable of directly obliterating heavy fortifications or blowing up tanks. Real military drones. The problem was that military drones of that caliber were exceedingly scarce. They generally weren't authorized for use without requesting permission from higher headquarters. "Are you crazy? How are we going to explain calling in a heavy drone to higher command? Tell them five of our small drones got shot down?" "He really can hit them! He really can shoot down drones! Five in a row—have you ever seen that? Have you ever even heard of that? Who among you would believe it? I mean, if we tell higher command that, who's going to believe it?" "There's footage! Why wouldn't they believe it? I saved the video." Chaos erupted; everything devolved into a clamor at once. A bomber drone operator called out loudly, "Let's send out bomber drones! Use mortar shells—point-detonation on impact. He won't have a chance to dodge." "If you fly high, you'll easily miss or they'll dodge it. If you fly low, you'll easily get shot down. How high do you plan on dropping from? A hundred meters? With the fall time from a hundred meters, they'll have run out of the blast radius long before it hits." "Then fly several at once and drop simultaneously!" The racket made the commander's head pound. Unable to take it, the commander pressed a hand against his forehead and roared, "Shut up, all of you!" The commander turned his head to look at the drones lined up outside. He was in a tough spot. Drones were limited in number. There were eight suicide FPV drones in total: six small ones—one had been expended first, and then four had been shot down by that miraculous marksman. Now only two suicide FPV drones remained, but those were reserved for tanks and armored vehicles. They couldn't be used for antipersonnel duty—it was too wasteful, and once spent, they couldn't be replenished in the short term. In addition, there were twelve bomber drones: six smaller ones that could only drop a single hand grenade each time, and six slightly larger ones capable of dropping mortar shells. There were also four reconnaissance drones taking turns in the air, tasked with monitoring this sector of the battlefield and providing situational awareness to the forward command post. True military drones required launch rails. Their forward small-drone control post couldn't launch them and had no authority to deploy them anyway; they could only report to headquarters to have them launched from the rear and flown into the target area. A quick tally of the equipment made it clear: they had fourteen operational drones left in total. FPV drones were out of the question, which left them with no choice but to deploy the bomber drones. If he had known five would be shot down, he would have sent bomber drones from the start, since bomber drones were reusable. "Bomber section, deploy. Four drones, four operators flying simultaneously. Don't give that marksman any reaction time or room to escape." The operational profile of bomber drones was to hover over the target and quietly drop hand grenades or mortar shells. Although they fell quickly, it still took time; if a ground target ran fast enough, the blast wouldn't kill them. Comparatively speaking, bomber drones were less efficient. To increase their effectiveness, the best method was to deploy several drones to drop ordnance at the same time. That shifted the tactic from a stealthy ambush into a coordinated bombing run. Without realizing it, the commander had adopted an honorific tone. Previously, they wouldn't have spared a second glance at a target marked for death, but now, he couldn't help referring to "that marksman" instead of habitually calling him "the prey." "Two for the primary strike, two to cut off their escape, and launch two more as reserves. Send out six drones, all loaded with mortar shells!" The commander changed his order, suddenly feeling that four drones might not be enough to guarantee success. Six drones took off, controlled by four operators. Now it was a proper drone formation. No one bothered monitoring their assigned sectors anymore; everyone clustered around a single screen to watch how the bomber drones would finish off this miraculous marksman. "That guy's like an anti-aircraft gun." "Come on. An AA gun can fire thousands of rounds without bringing down a single plane." The chatter continued. The three FPV drone operators remained silent, staring intently at the screen, while the four bomber drone operators were already focused on the displays mounted to their controllers. Of course, patching the feed to the big monitor was an option, but most of them preferred their handheld screens. The six drones formed up into a flight and located the targets without trouble. "Found them." "Still running. Must have covered two kilometers by now." "They haven't stopped." An FPV drone's final attack was a direct dive-bomb ram into the target, whereas a bomber drone hovered above to release its payload. Of course, dropping on the fly without hovering was also an option, but that yielded a much lower hit rate. With the targets on the move, they had to calculate the altitude and shell's descent velocity, then apply a lead offset before dropping. That added some difficulty, but not much. Dropping mortar shells from four drones amounted to carpet bombing. Even if the accuracy wasn't pinpoint, as long as the shells landed in the trench, they were guaranteed to kill all four men. "Drop from a hundred meters?" "Too high. Fifty meters is plenty." At fifty meters, a drone was just a tiny black speck in the sky, though the buzzing of its rotors would already be audible. "No, drop from a hundred meters. Fifty meters is cutting it too close." Operators rarely had to think about release altitude, because normally there was no need to. Today was unusual, so they increased altitude. Calculating target speed and altitude, four drones spaced three meters apart dropping simultaneously would lay down a twelve-meter kill zone inside the trench. A lethal envelopment—inescapable. "He looked up." "He's using a Saiga-12 shotgun!" "A shotgun's range is very short." That was how people were: once rattled, they tended to spout pointless nonsense. "They spotted us!" The targets had noticed the drones. They halted their steps once again and looked up into the sky together. Moreover, the operators noticed that there weren't just four targets below this time; scattered around them were many other soldiers, poking their heads out and looking up at the sky. It seemed the consecutive shoot-downs earlier had drawn the enemy's attention. "They actually stopped moving? Suicidal! Drop the bombs!" the commander ordered, full of swagger. Using a shotgun against FPV drones was indeed effective, but against bomber drones, it was useless. Once the flight altitude increased, the birdshot fired from a shotgun rapidly lost its kinetic energy. At a hundred meters, birdshot couldn't even reach. Even if it could, how was one gun supposed to hit four drones? If they had scattered and run, dealing with them would have been trickier, but bunching together without moving was pure suicide. The drones swiftly reached the optimal airspace. No need to calculate lead, no need to estimate the targets' movement speed, just... Wait! What was the target doing? The target tossed aside the shotgun in his hands and yanked a rifle from his back? The target raised the rifle? Did he want to shoot down drones with a rifle? It should have been a joke, but after he had brought down five drones, no one dared assume he was joking. And who would dare think the target was foolish now? Still, shooting drones with a rifle—wasn't that taking the joke a bit too far? Even after the target fired and sent the first drone's screen to black, the onlookers could hardly believe their eyes. Only when the second drone's screen went black did the commander suddenly jump to his feet. "Run!" Now this joke was truly getting out of hand. Drones high in the sky, running away—what kind of insane nonsense was that? No one cared whether "run" was the right word to use for drones; everyone understood what the commander meant. The operator who hadn't released his ordnance banked his drone sharply to one side, while the other released his mortar shell in haste. As the mortar shell fell, the four men below broke into a run, but they didn't even need to: the shell landed on the flat open ground off to the side, completely unable to harm the four men in the trench, merely giving them a start at most. Since when did haughty drones in the sky get driven off by an infantryman on the ground with a rifle, forced to dump their bombs in a panic and scramble away? The commander swallowed hard. He looked at his subordinates in sheer bewilderment, his voice trembling as he said, "Who has... who has any, uh—for God's sake! You operators, which one of you can come up with a goddamn idea to kill that fucking beep-beep-beep-beep-beep!" Sheer panic, not rage. When people were enraged, they could still maintain a shred of respect for their enemy, but when pushed into blind terror, they resorted to vile profanity instead. Yet these operators had always just flown a drone over, blown the target up, and called it a day. Their targets had never possessed any capability to resist; it was unilateral slaughter. Now, asking operators accustomed to one-sided butchery to come up with tactics to counter an infantryman on the ground? What drone operator or drone expert anywhere in the world would ever study a topic like that?! Panic was the only sensible reaction; bewilderment was completely normal. "Bomber drones don't seem to work either. We should still deploy heavy drones." The commander said blankly, "And what do I say? Tell them an infantryman with a gun shot down eight of our drones, so please dispatch our precious heavy drones to blow him up? Is that what I'm supposed to say?" Silence. Humiliating, agonizingly awkward silence. "Let's launch another strike. Two hundred meters. Drop from an altitude of two hundred meters!" "That's a living human who can shoot and run, not a corpse! From two hundred meters, by the time the mortar shells hit the ground, they'll have run ten meters away!" Clutching his helmet hard with both hands, the commander stared at the screen, looking utterly incredulous. "Dammit! We really ran into a ghost today. Fuck! Drop the bombs—two hundred meters!" Their mouths said it wouldn't work, but their bodies complied honestly enough. If a hundred meters didn't work, make it two hundred. In truth, shooting a near-hovering drone with a rifle wasn't impossibly hard. Hitting a drone at two hundred meters, however, truly was. But the targets were on the move again, and they were running quite fast. The moment the drones hovered, they ran; while the drones flew, they ran too. In the end, the drones had no choice but to release their shells while on the move. This time, the marksman didn't hit the drones, but the problem was, the mortar shells didn't land anywhere near him either. Dropping mortar shells from a height of two hundred meters into a one-meter-wide trench was no easy task to begin with. All three shells dropped by the three drones missed completely. The commander was helpless. He didn't curse this time; he simply let out a long sigh, then said with deadpan calm, "I'll submit a request for heavy drones. Don't speak a word of what happened today. If you don't want to become laughingstocks, you'd better keep your mouths shut." There was nothing more to say. It was best to cut their losses and admit defeat cleanly. The operator who had failed first whispered, "God isn't on our side today. He went to shoot down drones."