The Legion!

The northwest wilderness of Qingquan City. Snow-laden pines and elms thrust out from dilapidated country villas, while withered, yellowing sea buckthorn swayed beneath collapsed buildings. The sole highway had long been buried by time, and as far as the eye could see, falling snow stretched into a boundless expanse of white. This was the border between Qingquan City and Tianshui City, as well as the outer fringe of the southern urban cluster in River Valley Province. Although geographically this wilderness-reclaimed district was closer to Tianshui City, administratively it belonged to Qingquan City, which was more populous and densely industrialized. It bore a rustic name rich in natural flavor: Yumu District. Vast numbers of elms, pines, and cypresses had once been planted here; today, only the evergreens had survived. In that distant utopian era, this area had been a renowned summer resort. Facing Ling Lake to the south and nestled against low mountains and gentle hills to the west, the occasional breeze whispering through the woods and the lingering glow of sunset had imbued it with poetic charm. Residents of both cities who grew weary of metropolitan life would often come here for a few days of secluded retreat. Because high-rises were scarce here and every household had a lawn the size of a basketball court, some people had planted heirloom crops in their backyards. Consequently, the local survivors had actually managed to remain self-sufficient for a time in the early days of the Wasteland Era, forming family-based agricultural communities. Of course, it had long since fallen into ruin. Wild vegetation had swallowed all traces of civilization. In mere decades, the green coverage of this idyllic countryside had surged from sixty percent to a hundred percent, until the boundary between forest and ruins was impossible to discern. As it turned out, once humans adapted to industrialization, they could hardly survive apart from industry for long. Even if many clamored about being tired of urban clamor, ninety-nine percent of them wouldn't last if thrown back into an agrarian age. The heirloom crops grown as hobbies had been insufficient even for the locals, let alone the influx of refugees. As harsh winters arrived, those agricultural communities, large and small, soon vanished behind the veil of snow. With little salvageable scrap and dangerous mutants prowling about, few survivors ever set foot here, save for a few reckless merchants willing to stop over. Now, however, this deserted, forgotten district was bustling with rare activity. A host of uninvited guests had arrived from the north, marching into the area in grand force. They carried identical bolt-action pipe rifles with cheap wooden stocks and barrels made of crude, clumsy cast iron. They wore no armor and no uniform attire, only tattered fur coats and frayed ankle boots to cover themselves. Perhaps the only uniform equipment on them was the shock collar around each of their necks. These people were undoubtedly human. Yet within those bestial pupils, not a flicker of civilized light or reason could be seen. Holding rifles and wearing collars, they resembled a pack of tamed apes. Only the junior officers following behind them, clutching remote controllers and barking orders to urge them forward, resembled living human beings. An experienced observer would recognize the collar-wearers' identities at a single glance. Clones! And the cheapest kind at that! Across the entire Central Continent, there was likely only one organization capable of domesticating clones on a massive scale with high efficiency and fielding them as organized battle units. The Legion! Standing beside a dilapidated house, a man in a navy blue coat watched the marching troops, his vulture-like gaze as sharp as a dagger. His name was Vannus. Whether at Legion headquarters or within the Eastern Legion to which he belonged, it was an unremarkable name. Yet contrasting sharply with that pedestrian name, he harbored the ambition to become a general. His thirst for honor and power had driven him to join the Eastern Expeditionary Force, following General Klaas to march eastward toward the Great Rift Valley in the northern part of River Valley Province. Legend had it that the Enterprise from the Far East had once dispatched an expeditionary force there as well, only to suffer a miserable defeat. Vannus had no desire to comment on the Enterprise's defeat, viewing it with utter disdain. In his eyes, those hedonistic weaklings huddled within the interior of a single province had no grasp of true warfare; their defeat was only natural. The Legion was different. They were warriors born to fight, mortal flesh driven by wills of steel. Whether clone, freeman, or citizen, from the moment of birth, the Legion's iron laws were stamped indelibly upon every heart. Even without advanced equipment, fueled by their yearning for victory and glory and a will to conquer etched into their bones, they could advance in four directions at once, carving out a vast empire across the ruined wasteland and forcing countless tribes large and small to bow as vassals, offering slaves and tribute. The fertile Great Rift Valley would sooner or later bow beneath the Legion's iron hooves. None were spared beneath the Lion Banner; they would punish those who stubbornly resisted with seven days of slaughter, paying tribute to their fallen souls. Though the campaign had stalemated for a year, Vannus harbored not a shred of doubt. Victory was near! He and his men were originally slated to take part in the winter offensive, but just then, a message arrived from afar that could not be ignored. A mobile fortress was heading west! According to gathered intelligence, that fortress hailed from the distant East Coast, ruled by a cadre of aristocrats from the Enterprise—or "senior employees," as they called themselves. Judging by their route, they seemed bound for the west in search of Shelter 0. Coincidentally, the Legion was equally interested in Shelter 0. Logically speaking, this was not something the expeditionary force should meddle in. Moreover, diverting troops at this critical juncture to provoke Enterprise forces was hardly a wise choice. Vannus had voiced his objections to General Klaas, but they were dismissed. In General Klaas's words, to breach the Great Rift Valley's impenetrable Sacred Shield system, the expeditionary force needed this mobile fortress to process nuclear materials and manufacture cheap, effective nuclear warheads for them. Loath as they were to admit it, their tactical nuclear weapons were nearly depleted... "How far are we from that fortress?" Hearing his commander speak, the adjutant behind Vannus reported in a low voice: "Ten kilometers out, sir." Vannus nodded. "Halt here. Unless they're blind, they've certainly spotted us already." The Legion lacked cutting-edge black tech, but that didn't mean they had never seen it. Vannus's strategy was crystal clear. Build fortifications, establish positions anchored in the forest terrain, and pound their rear with artillery to force their surrender. He was confident that as soon as the guns roared, those lily-livered cowards who had never fought a real battle would fall into utter chaos on their own. "Lay out tin foil and insulating foam. Set up the command post right here!" Stepping on the concrete rubble beneath his feet and gazing south, Vannus narrowed his eyes into slits. "Those tin cans won't be easy to crack, but they can't sit there forever." "We'll wait for them right here!" ... Aboard the Pioneer, a light fixed-wing drone took off from the fortress's roof, circling along the edge of Yumu District. Meanwhile, in the combat operations center. Lu Yang stared at the flurry of bright dots on the screen, his brows gradually furrowing. "Legion troops?" The drone operator at the console replied, "Most likely, Captain." Densely clustered dots of light flickered across a front two kilometers wide and two kilometers deep, numbering over two thousand in all, scattered like beans across the ground. Apart from the Legion, he couldn't imagine any other possibility. Lu Yang had heard before that the Legion possessed a DNA fragment banned in pre-war society, capable of accelerating a clone's entire developmental cycle to eight times that of a normal human. These mass-produced clone slaves required only one to two months to develop from embryos into infants ready for decanting. Sent to crowded nurseries, they traversed in a single year the childhood stages that took normal humans eight years. In that one year, they would learn speech—or not, it hardly mattered—and once the time was up, they were funneled into gladiator-like facilities to spend their second year: their adolescence. At this stage, their mortality rate reached as high as fifty percent, with some elite screening facilities hitting seventy percent. These facilities taught them nothing about combat; they served purely as sieves to filter out those who could adapt to the battlefield—or rather, beasts vicious enough to survive. Those who emerged alive were shipped to the front lines on their second birthday, serving as qualified cannon fodder. Because their developmental speed was eight times normal, their theoretical lifespan was only ten to fifteen years. Yet this was hardly a drawback, for in truth, they never lived that long. The Legion was in a state of perpetual war. Whether fighting mutant beasts, barbarians, mutants, or other survivor settlements, the cannon fodder charging on the front lines had an average lifespan of under three years, and at most five. There was a saying that many marauders' slave-assimilation pits were originally learned from the Legion. They would lock captured slaves in dungeons, force them to fight over scraps of food, break their minds and reason, and turn the surviving madmen into cannon fodder—and the surviving cannon fodder into their own... The Legion, however, rarely took that final step. Such mass-produced clones could only ever be slaves, their ultimate destiny nothing more than dying on the battlefield. To guarantee the combat performance of this fodder, every one of them was fitted with a shock collar, and for every ten fodder troops, a junior officer was assigned to oversee them—the Legion's decurions. A force of nearly two thousand seemed imposing, but the vast majority of the cannon fodder possessed negligible combat capability. What troubled Lu Yang far more was why these people had appeared here in the first place. "Have they said anything?" "They haven't responded to our radio calls. Either they don't have radios at all, or they simply refuse to acknowledge us." Lu Yang nodded. "We can rule out the former." "Then only the latter remains," Li De said cautiously, looking at Captain Lu. "We still have four tactical nukes left. More than enough to deal with two thousand people." "That's the best-case scenario—if two thousand men were standing in an open plaza waiting for you to bomb them," Yi Hai, the marine adjutant, shook his head. "They're dispersed through the woods, digging fortifications. Unless we raze that entire forest to the ground... which is impossible. By a conservative estimate, that would take at least forty warheads." Not to mention they were spread across mixed terrain of forest and urban ruins, full of obstacles and natural cover. A few foxholes would drastically reduce the threat of explosives. And those bestial clone maniacs had virtually no morale issues to speak of; flipping the switch on their collars drove them into a frenzy far more effective than stimulants. Lu Yang pondered. "Unless we drop one with a high enough yield." Before Li De could speak, his secretary, Wang Jie, shook her head. "Our uranium-235 reserves are insufficient; we consumed too much earlier. Deuterium can only be extracted by the sea, and producing it... with our current remaining energy, that's essentially out of the question." By the end of the Era of Prosperity, this planet's harnessing of nuclear energy had evolved from early D-D fusion to third-generation controlled nuclear fusion. Namely, pure helium-3 fusion. Under this reaction mechanism, the fusion of two helium-3 atoms yielded two protons and one helium-4 atom, producing zero neutrons in the process. The Pioneer utilized precisely this technology, so naturally they had no reason to stockpile tritium with its meager twelve-year half-life. Rubbing the bridge of his nose, Li De said with a headache, "So what do we do now? Just watch them dig fortifications under our very noses? They're less than four kilometers from our resource gathering site! If they shift even slightly further east, they'll spot our worksite!" "Perhaps they already have and are just too busy digging in right now," a marine veteran ventured a plausible guess. "Let's strike! There's no need to be polite with them! The longer we stall, the tougher this nut will be to crack," the marine adjutant said, resting his fist on the table. "A ten-kilometer perimeter is already dangerous. We can't let them keep this up." Kindness did not mean weakness. Besides, since they were the Legion, there was no need to pull punches against what was essentially an organized army of marauders. Lu Yang was not an indecisive man. Pinching his chin in thought for a moment and weighing the pros and cons, he made his decision in just three seconds. "Launch the offensive at eight tonight!" The Legion possessed little high-tech gear; their most advanced weaponry amounted to man-portable nuclear launchers and laser rifles, which were primarily issued to elite units. As for these troops, they were clearly far from elite, likely equipped with nothing more than recoilless rifles or rocket launchers—to say nothing of guided rockets, they probably didn't even have wire-guided ones. The Pioneer Corps marines not only possessed formidable power armor, but their helmet visors integrated night vision and thermal imaging, backed by fixed-wing aerial drone support from above. Once darkness fell, they could pick them off like blind men! Staring at the main screen, Lu Yang narrowed his eyes slightly. "Since they refuse to talk..." "Then we'll use firepower to teach them human speech!" ... Operational camp. The players who had gone to scavenge in the northern district were returning from the worksite, laughing and chatting as they traded shifts with the "unlucky" regulars and greenhorns who had just arrived from the outpost. Standing in the center of the camp and gazing at the vast crowd returning in the distance, Jieyan yelled at the top of his lungs in excitement. "Group Admin! Fang Chang! Kuangfeng! Ye Shi! Where are you guys?" After shouting for a bit, it wasn't long before four players who looked like they had just crawled out of a coal pit walked over, grinning as they clapped him on the shoulder. "Not bad, brother! You finally made it into the game." Jieyan: "Sigh, don't remind me, it's nothing but tears! By the way, which one are you?" Fang Chang chuckled. "I'm Fang Chang! The unshaven one is Old Bai, the most shameless guy next to him is Ye Shi, and the quiet pervert is Kuangfeng." Ye Shi grinned cheekily. "I object! What do you mean I'm the most shameless? Isn't Kuangfeng the real degenerate? Sure, he barely talks, but running an Intelligence-type build and still clawing his way into the top tier—doesn't that prove how wretchedly sleazy he is?" Kuangfeng: "Piss off." Old Bai stepped forward, slapped Jieyan's shoulder, and laughed heartily. "It really wasn't easy for you! If I remember right, you pre-registered back in Alpha 0.1, didn't you? That should've been the easiest wave to get in on. With more and more people later, the queue got brutal!" Jieyan looked emotional. "Sigh, it's all tears! I literally watched the registration test balloon from ten questions to a hundred. I drew seven times in a row and missed every single one. I was about to lose my damn mind!" Old Bai sighed. "It's fine, you're not the only unlucky one. Haven't you seen how many guys on the forum started posting 'Queue Diaries'? The closed beta slots really are a bit too scarce. Once the open beta hits, it should be much better." "Actually, it's quite a lot already," Fang Chang said with a smile. "What other gaming company fronts this much hardware to players for free? That's four hundred helmets already, right? People are anxious because the game is just too polished. Playing the alpha for this long and encountering only one bug—honestly, I'm pretty amazed." Ye Shi teased, "Brother Guang says: 'I'm working overtime right now, so even if you kiss my ass, I can't hear a word you're saying.'" Fang Chang: "Fuck off! Is your daddy that kind of person?!" Old Bai rested his right hand on Jieyan's shoulder. "Enough bullshitting. Brother Jieyan, we have to head back to the outpost in a bit—we've still got a dungeon to clear over there. A couple of days ago, Tengteng unlocked weaving tech. With so many newcomers waiting for armor upgrades, the demand for devil moth cocoons is bound to skyrocket. Since our quests here are finished anyway, we plan to spend some time clearing Floor B1 of the greenhouse ruins." "In a bit, just follow the main group. Get familiar with the controls first; the game's flow is actually pretty straightforward." "Once you get back to the outpost, we'll carry you through the dungeon to level up!" Hearing that top-tier veterans were going to carry him, Jieyan immediately nodded in delight, grinning from ear to ear. "Awesome, big bosses! I'll definitely put in the work, get some gear sorted out first, and promise not to drag you down!" Ye Shi looked wistful. "You batch of rookies are honestly pretty lucky. The moment you log in, you catch an expansion—and a massive one that opens up a brand-new map! Once you grab the expansion rewards, you instantly graduate from the beginner village. Unlike back when we started, having to build our own kilns to fire cement, smelt iron, and fight with bows and spears." "Yeah, compared to 'Land Voyager', 'Winter Is Coming' was a joke—no gear, no food, not even a hype PV promising the moon, and we had to charge in yelling 'Ura' with bricks in hand," Fang Chang agreed with deep emotion. "You guys are practically the chosen ones; you spawned right into the good life." Jieyan rubbed his nose sheepishly and chuckled. "Keep it down, hehe... Now that you mention it, I really do feel kind of lucky." Ye Shi chuckled mischievously. "Feel touched to the core?" "You bet!" Just then, a rolling, muffled rumble of thunder echoed from the distance. The five buddies from the Cow and Horse Group turned in unison toward the north, curious about what was happening beyond the curtain of snow. Suddenly, however, Ye Shi's expression shifted. A premonition of danger surged into his heart, compelling him to shout almost by instinct: "Hit the dirt!"