At the exact moment Tianhong was killed amidst the chaotic fighting by the commander of the Desert Corps, on the other side of the battlefield, Morton, who had also been converted into an android, fell beneath the scattered gunfire of the Death Corps.
Both of his legs had been blown off, along with one arm. Not a single intact component remained across his entire body, and damage reports chimed incessantly through his master control program.
Yet even so, he still did not cease fighting. Drawing his sidearm with his only remaining left hand, he tried to take aim at the Deathclaw charging headlong toward him.
*Bang—!*
The bullet broke from the barrel, but whistled past its target.
"Roar—!"
The Deathclaw unleashed a furious roar. In the blink of an eye, it lunged into point-blank range, clamped its jaws around his last remaining arm, and tore it cleanly from his shoulder.
Electric sparks flew in all directions as acrid smoke billowed from Morton's mangled shoulder joint.
The Deathclaw planted one massive foot onto his chest, spat out the severed forearm, and opened its bloodthirsty maw once more.
Morton stared at it expressionlessly, calmly awaiting death, only to see the gaping maw yanked back.
Perhaps worried that his mount might get an upset stomach, a cavalryman clad in an exoskeleton leaped down from the lizard's back, casually unhooking an entrenching tool slung at its side.
The edge of the shovel had been sharpened, allowing it to serve as a bayonet or a breaching axe.
Gazing at the man walking toward him, the previously silent Morton suddenly spoke.
"I do not understand..."
Looking down at the limbless android torso lying on the ground waiting to die, Brother Edge raised an eyebrow, shovel in hand.
"Don't understand what?"
Morton met his gaze, his voice an intermittent electronic drone.
"How... did you accomplish this? We had... at least... four active-duty Human Alliance officers. We anticipated we might not hold... but against wastelander rabble... it should not have been this fast."
According to their tactical simulations, the three defensive perimeters deployed around Shelter 13 should have held for at least half a month. It was mathematically impossible for them to crumble in a single night.
Yet the outcome of this battle had completely defied his calculations.
The mechanical soldiers who should have held out far longer had suffered a systemic collapse in ways he had never conceived, while these fragile organics had endured longer than he ever could have predicted...
"'Active-duty officers'? That's rich..."
Looking at the bewildered scrap of iron, Brother Edge grinned and quipped with a chuckle,
"Your war lasted three years. Ours has been going on for two centuries. What on earth makes you think you're more professional than us? Just because your commissions have a rubber stamp from the Human Alliance?"
The electronic eyes set into the metal skull flickered faintly, then dimmed.
"I see..."
They had lived in the glory of the past for far too long.
Whether it was the Celestials...
Or himself, before he became one of them.
Morton said nothing more. Having finally comprehended it all, he silently accepted this outcome of defeat.
Gunfire continued to echo in the distance.
Though their commanders were dead, the mechanical soldiers, who had no concept of mortality, did not stop. They continued executing their prior directives,
even though they had lost every reason to keep fighting.
In a sense, they were cut from the same cloth as the Celestials who made them.
The era that belonged to them was already over.
Still living two hundred years in the past, rather than helping rebuild the world, they had become obstacles barring mankind from stepping into a new era...
Burning steel carpeted the wasteland beneath the ancient space elevator. The clash of blood and fire persisted throughout the entire night, right until the morning sun hung above the dimly lit horizon.
With the final humanoid combat armor reduced to scrap, the slaughter finally concluded with an Alliance victory.
As for the cost...
While not utterly catastrophic, it was by no means light.
Even though the railguns' preemptive strategic strike had eradicated the Enlightenment Society's surface combatants and mutant cannon fodder, the Celestials' robotic army had still inflicted substantial casualties on the players.
In this single battle alone, the total casualties across the dozen-odd participating corps reached twenty thousand.
Among them, the Death Corps suffered the most brutal losses, with eleven thousand dead.
Of course, their roster was also the largest on the server, hovering steadily around thirty thousand members.
The Skeleton Corps, composed primarily of armored units, suffered comparatively lighter losses.
Blood dyed the reddish-brown sands an even deeper crimson, resembling a glistening sea of blood beneath the rising sun.
The sole comforting grace was that players who died in battle did not truly perish.
Three days from now, they would awaken from their incubation pods to once again behold the morning sun bathing the earth...
***
On the official *Wasteland Online* website, the forums were in a frenzy.
Spectators were busy engaging in pointless flame wars, arguing over whether the Celestials or the Enlightenment Society were stronger and how they stacked up against the other wasteland factions, while players who had logged off early waited for newly deceased comrades to bring back fresh, firsthand battle reports.
Soon enough, victory dispatches arrived from the front line, and reward announcements simultaneously flooded the screen.
Talan the Raider was far from the only one who received server-wide announcements and limited titles.
Brother Edge, Brother Mole, and virtually everyone else unlocked achievements of their own, their names ascending to the website's Hall of Fame bathed in golden glory.
After months of waiting, they had finally gotten a hearty, thrilling decisive battle, leaving nearly every participating player thoroughly satisfied.
Coupled with the massive heap of event points and rewards, the three-day resurrection cooldown and the withdrawal symptoms from being unable to log in did not seem quite so unbearable.
Presumably.
Brother Edge: "Hell yeah! Hahahahaha! Haven't had this much fun in forever! (Grin)"
Roller Hair Washer: "Just feels a little lonely, empty, and cold. Didn't expect this Enlightenment Society to be so brittle—one map-wipe shot and they just fell over. (Sigh)"
In Debt God: "Speaking of which, now that the Enlightenment Society is dealt with, is it time to hit the Eastern Empire next? (Smirk)"
Elaina: "Salen: Don't you dare come over here!! (Funny)"
Elven King Fugui: "I don't think it'll come to that. We can't just conquer our way through everyone who looks different from us. (Funny)"
Canyon Escape Mole: "Unless a new expansion drops. (Funny)"
Leftover Egg Old Man: "Still, they're running on slavery to this day. Analyzing it objectively, it's not impossible."
Battlefield Atmosphere Group: "True enough, but they've already begun to change. New West Sail Port, for example, is actually a great start. Even if the people there are small and weak for now, they'll eventually grow and become a political force driving reform within the Eastern Empire. If we recklessly barge in, it might backfire instead—who knows, we might just spawn another half-baked monstrosity."
The former Legion had indeed been an incoherent monstrosity; after fracturing, it had actually become far more normal.
The Eastern Empire was the Eastern Empire not merely because they had an emperor named Salen, but because of the shared longing buried deep within the hearts of everyone living upon that soil.
The latter was the cause, while the former was merely the outcome.
In this regard, the Wilante of the Wilante Province and the Wilante of the Batoya Province were fundamentally different.
The former had already possessed a tradition of constitutional governance back in Julius's era; otherwise, no matter how loud that consul shouted, he wouldn't have been able to change a thing.
And while the Southern Legion had walked the path of militarism for a time, the backbone of its society consisted of citizens, officers, and industrialists—a stark contrast to the Eastern Legion, where landowners and military nobles formed the core of society.
Whether the Wilante of the Eastern Empire admitted it or not, the ecological niche of an autocrat objectively existed, along with the tens of thousands of slave-owning masters who relied on that autocrat.
The moment a tangible sovereign was toppled, an intangible sovereign would inevitably emerge to fill the vacant niche.
This was not unique to the Eastern Empire; it was a systemic dilemma shared by all forms of feudalism.
Relatively speaking, the Eastern Empire's brand of feudalism was actually considerably advanced.
At the very least, whether it was their emperor or the tens of thousands of military nobles themselves, a desire for progress existed within their minds.
I'm the Darkest: "Tsk, why does your tone sound more and more like Fang Chang?"
Kakarot: "Reasonable suspicion: an eighty percent chance he had some illicit affair with an NPC too. (Smirk)"
Battlefield Atmosphere Group: "???"
Luo Yu: "Right now, I'm only curious about one thing: what will the next expansion be? (Looking at the sky)"
Feng Qing: "Maybe another planet?"
Lv. 99 Scavenger: "Damn, isn't that leap a bit too huge? (Dumbfounded)"
Canyon Escape Mole: "You people are impossible to please. Back when we hadn't even stepped out of Qingquan City, you clamored day in and day out about flying into space. Now that we're actually up there, you're shrinking back? (Funny)"
Laplace: "Wait, so *Wasteland Online* was actually just a prequel in the open-beta lore setting?! (Shocked)"
Madam, You Wouldn't Want That Either: "Even though everything about this feels wrong, why does it strangely make sense? (Crying laugh)"
Lv. 99 Scavenger: "Badass! Using a prequel as the beta test is unmatched."
Tail: "Whoo-hoo! *Star Sky OL*, launch! (Wearing sunglasses)"
Qiangren Suonan: "I'm crying. Can I delete my rat account and reroll? (Crying)"
Fawai Kuangtu: "Come to think of it, how come we didn't see Lao Bai and his crew flexing this time? That's unscientific."
Commander Spring: "Their battlefield wasn't on the ground—it was at the Lagrange point. If I remember right, their attack was timed around the same as ours, so it's probably not over yet up there."
Thunder King Professor Yang: "Holy crap, you're telling me they're already playing *Star Sky OL*?"
Tyrannosaurus Warrior: "Fine, I have officially been flexed on. (Crying)"
Canyon Escape Mole: "(Funny)"
***
The war on the ground had ended.
NPC troops from the Alliance First Army began moving in, and after a brief rest, the players also started clearing the battlefield.
The Enlightenment Society had left behind a wealth of good salvage.
In particular, the pre-war exoskeletons and power armors scattered across the field were nearly ninety percent new—the kind you could put to use right after a quick wash. The players, who had never seen such abundance, were practically beside themselves with joy.
Although equipment wasn't distributed on a finders-keepers basis and had to be redeemed using battle points, there was nothing wrong with "trying them on" before turning them in.
The NPCs of *Wasteland Online* were not as rigid as those in other games. They did not probe excessively into the origins of gear worn by players; only during the "registration and binding" stage did they enforce relatively strict audit procedures.
Aside from the equipment and wreckage abandoned on the field, the most valuable assets were the black boxes hoarded by the Enlightenment Society and the production facilities replicated using them.
These black boxes had all been plundered by the Enlightenment Society from other shelters, and now they had become treasures belonging to the Alliance.
Wave after wave of First Army heavy trucks drove into the Enlightenment Society's production facilities, then headed off toward the Ravenca Industrial Zone.
These treasures would be loaded into containers, shipped by freighter to the ports along the Death Coast, and then routed to either the Daybreak City Industrial Zone or retained along the Death Coast to bolster local reconstruction, depending on their intended use.
Just as the players were having a field day salvaging the battlefield, a group of people arrived from the direction of the Ravenca Industrial Zone.
Evidently, the stench of blood permeating the air had attracted not only vultures in the sky, but scavengers from the surrounding area.
Back when the Enlightenment Society and mutant mercenaries still operated in this region, practically no one dared approach, but the situation had inverted completely.
After all, watching convoy after convoy of trucks rolling toward the Ravenca Industrial Zone, even the dimmest mind understood who had won last night's great battle.
Following the tire ruts in the dirt, scavengers along the way had tracked their way here one after another.
Watching the growing crowd of scavengers, a player standing guard at the checkpoint stepped forward and shouted to the clamoring throng,
"The battlefield is still being cleared. It's not safe here. I suggest you wait until it's secure before coming back!"
The scavengers buzzed in commotion for a moment.
A brown-skinned woman with hair bound in dreadlocks stepped to the front and called out to the player before the barricade,
"My lord, this is our livelihood! Once it's safe, what would you need us for?"
Her murky eyes held a hint of respect and two parts cunning, while the remaining seven parts were pure vigilance.
Although rumor had it that the Alliance had a good reputation, nobody could be sure the rumors were entirely true.
Even so, she was still willing to try her luck here.
After all, nowhere else one could scavenge junk could ever hold a candle to the treasure trove sitting at the foot of a space elevator.
Before the player could reply, several scavengers near the front of the crowd chimed in, shouting,
"My lord, we can help you clean up the battlefield... for a fair price!"
"We don't mean any harm, we just want to earn a bite to eat!"
The two players exchanged a glance. One of them stepped forward and addressed the scavengers in the front row.
"We understand your situation, and I personally don't see a problem with it, but I don't have the final say. I have to request instructions from my superiors."
"Thank you."
The female scavenger tossed him a playful wink.
However, her distinct look was far too "wasteland punk," failing to spark any interest in the young player and instead leaving him thoroughly flustered.
His bashful demeanor drew a chorus of laughter from the crowd, considerably lightening the mood before the checkpoint.
The local wastelanders were far more outgoing and passionate than those in the River Valley Province; it was just a pity their appearance lagged somewhat behind.
The message was relayed up the chain of command, quickly reaching the First Army headquarters.
Following a brief council, the supreme commander, "Wrench," promptly approved the scavengers' request.
Although unexploded ordnance and residual war machines scattered across the battlefield posed safety hazards, those stationed here had to consider more than just security—they also had to establish a reliable order in the region.
Providing jobs and assigning tasks to these scavengers was an integral part of establishing that order.
Rather than letting these people risk arrest and explosions sneaking onto the battlefield to steal spoils, it was far better to enlist the majority at a fair price, and then use an iron fist to deal with the desperate outlaws licking blood from blade edges, driving up the latter's risks and costs.
Ultimately, once the battlefield was cleared, they would return this scrap field to the scavengers and buy back valuable disassembled parts from them at fair rates, completing the transition from wartime order to peacetime governance.
The Manager intended to build a new settlement here.
Beyond resettling the nearby scavengers, that gentleman also hoped that the residents of Shelter 13 would take part in the construction of this settlement, shouldering once again the responsibilities and duties they had once abandoned...
***
At the entrance to Shelter 13, the heavy alloy blast doors slowly opened.
Guided by the Watchers, the hurried crowds filed through the long corridor one after another, departing the cradle that had sheltered them for over a century.
Ahead lay the wasteland.
And their future home.
The morning sunlight cast across faces marked by vastly differing expressions. As the people gazed upon the desolate ruins and the scorched battlefield, their faces were etched with helplessness, confusion, and fear.
Until yesterday, they had still been listening to Director Feng's sweet promises, believing that as long as they joined hands with the Enlightenment Society and the Celestials, their future would be boundlessly bright and wonderful.
Yet reality was nothing of the sort—
All they saw were devastated ruins and death strewn everywhere.
"Ahead lies the wasteland..."
Squinting at the road before them, Medical Miracle spoke to Director Feng beside him and the secretary who still loyally supported him,
"You've been comfortable for two hundred years. It's time you learned to face reality."
Feng Zhiheng stared into his eyes, his face pale from severe blood loss and devoid of expression. Only after a long silence did he force a sentence past his lips.
"You can see it for yourself... Most of them are not prepared for this."
Medical Miracle smiled.
"And so?"
Looking at this thoroughly unsympathetic man, the corners of Feng Zhiheng's mouth twitched faintly. He lowered his voice.
"Because of your plans, they were driven out in haste... Is that fair to us?"
Before Medical Miracle could speak, Zhuang Lan, who had walked over while dragging the leader of the Enlightenment Society by the scruff of his neck, answered in his stead.
"That is a question I should be asking you. When Shelter 68 threw open its doors to explore ways to rebuild a civilized world, you were living the life of the Era of Prosperity prematurely inside Shelter 13... Was that fair to us?"
Feng Zhiheng's eyes flickered evasively, but in the end, he could not escape that piercing gaze. He brushed the question aside.
"And so? You have already proven that those beggars are not worth saving. Those people are the root cause of every problem—"
"Anyone can debate that question, but not you," Zhuang Lan said, looking him in the eye, enunciating every word. "Nor can I."
Why? Because shelters were not built to protect any single group—they were built to protect everyone.
That was the sole source of legitimacy that had permitted them to sacrifice the lives of some in order to concentrate resources and ensure the survival of others first.
From the very beginning, its purpose was to preserve the embers of civilization, no matter how convoluted the path might become.
If even that most fundamental responsibility could be shirked, then police could refuse to enforce the law because a victim was not pure, and firefighters could refuse to rush into a burning building because the victim happened to be the arsonist.
Yet that was obviously unacceptable.
Whether it was worth it was a verdict left to future generations. Saving those who had survived was the duty of the blue coats right here and now.
Looking at the struck-dumb Director Feng, the corners of Zhuang Lan's lips suddenly curled into a mocking smile.
"No wonder they never called you Manager, and you never dared call yourself one either."
Gazing at that blank face, she remarked in a half-joking tone,
"At least you still have a shred of self-awareness."
Chapter 1048