Victory at Qingshi County!

Within twenty minutes of the air raid, the entire northern district of Qingshi County was transformed into a sea of fire. Those survivors from the northern outskirts of Qingquan City had apparently tampered with their fortifications. The propeller-driven planes strafed the rooftops of the buildings indiscriminately, and soon flames flared up from the structures like lighters. Fire was everywhere across the urban district. Scorching heatwaves and thick smoke completely cut off their retreat southward. Awoken by earth-shattering explosions, He Shu had just scrambled out of bed when a messenger brought orders from Lord Lion Fang—he was to take his men immediately to put out the fire. An order delivered in person by Lord Lion Fang was nothing He Shu dared drag his feet on. He promptly rallied his men, who had been uselessly firing rifles into the sky, and rushed toward the fire in the south. What he had not expected, however, was that just as he arrived flustered at the blaze with his men, an airplane plummeted out of the sky right before his eyes. And it crashed in the street less than fifty meters away from him! He Shu froze on the spot, but quickly realized what had happened. A burst of fury surged into his skull. Thinking of his brothers who had perished under the air raid and the boiling sea of flames around them, he threw any thought of firefighting to the wind. Without a second word, he led his entire hundred-man unit charging toward the crash site. A hundred against one—forget a living person, not even a rat or a cockroach could have slipped past under his watch! And in fact, that was true. The unlucky pilot scrambled around like a headless fly and was quickly cornered in a dead-end alley. Looking at the pathetic wretch yelling while trapped in the alley, He Shu's lips curled into a cruel smirk, his eyes full of malice. He stopped a subordinate beside him who had shouldered a rocket launcher ready to fire, taking out a smoke grenade instead and tossing it into the alley with a wicked grin. Then he waved a hand forward. "Take him alive for me!" He Shu swore. If he caught that bastard, he would make the damned pilot regret ever being born into this world. He would test every torture he had ever heard of or seen on that man until he squeezed every shred of intel from his mouth. Then he would slice off his flesh piece by piece, tossing it into a pot of boiling oil right before his eyes to fry it crisp. Licking his lips in excitement, before He Shu could even decide which part to eat first, shrill screeches rang out behind his head. He Shu whipped around, his gaze colliding squarely with an overwhelming rain of fire. The wailing shrieks sounded like a pipe organ playing. Concrete fortifications crumpled like paper before it, effortlessly blasted skyward by sheer, overwhelming destructive force. There was no time to drop to the ground. Even dropping to the ground offered nowhere to hide. Terror and panic flashed across He Shu's eyes for a fleeting instant. And in the very next second, he and his entire hundred-man unit were blown sky-high along with the street beneath their feet! At that moment, in the sky. Piloting his battle-scarred glider, Luo Yu lifted his goggles and craned his neck to peer out of the cockpit. That one glance made him click his tongue involuntarily. "Holy crap..." This firepower... Was totally criminal! Within a six-hundred-meter radius, at least fifty 130mm rockets had landed. The saturated firepower delivered to the battlefield in an instant had carved out a silent circle right in the center of the raging inferno. He had originally planned to fish Coach Mosquito out. From the looks of it now, that wouldn't be necessary... For a moment, the ace pilots circling overhead forgot to dive, and the clamorous gunfire on the ground fell into an unspoken pause for several seconds. It was as though someone had pressed pause on the world; only the scalding smoke drifted in eerie quiet. At that same moment, on the second floor of the department store. Gazing north through the reinforced windows, Lion Fang's face was a blank mask of shock. Beside him, Bernie looked equally stunned. The ear-splitting roar of the explosions had momentarily led him to believe the enemy had used a tactical nuke. Just what kind of opponent were they fighting...? Swallowing hard, Bernie offered a word of comfort to Lion Fang beside him—and to himself as well. "It's fine... firepower of this caliber can't be sustained." "We only have a hundred-man unit and two firing points in the south. As long as they weren't bunched together taking a direct hit, at most they took thirty percent casualties... forty percent at the absolute outside." The reloading process for rockets was exceedingly cumbersome—firing for ten seconds and reloading for ten minutes was standard practice, not to mention how expensive they were. If twenty or thirty lives could trade for nearly fifty enemy rockets, it was undeniably worth it. In truth, Bernie's judgment was not wrong. What he did not know, however, was that the hundred-man unit dispatched by Lion Fang to fight fires had not dispersed among the ruins; every last one of them had run off to corner the lone enemy pilot. Lacking sufficient radio gear, they didn't even realize that the preceding barrage had wiped out an entire company of theirs in one stroke... ... South of Qingshi County. At the boundary where forest met urban ruins. Standing on a half-collapsed elevated pier, clad in power armor, Chu Guang was overlooking the entire battlefield through two Hummingbird drones. A quarter of an hour ago, the vanguard composed of the First Corps and players had arrived at the front lines, setting up a temporary command post and erecting a radio station that brought a ten-kilometer radius within communication range. Simultaneously, the ten self-propelled rocket artillery vehicles belonging to the Goblin Corps' artillery detachment had completed deployment and unleashed a round of saturation bombardment upon Qingshi County. "Awe-inspiring firepower..." Binoculars in hand, Vannus stood beside him, astonishment written across his face. Though he had participated in drafting the battle plan, the destructive power of the New Alliance's rocket artillery had far exceeded his expectations. Chu Guang smiled faintly. "Does the position ahead look familiar?" Vannus pondered for a moment before replying. "...It resembles the command style of the Expeditionary Force's 21st Myriad Corps. They excel at digging trenches and constructing bridges and frontline fortifications." "Looks like you'll be seeing an old acquaintance soon." Vannus offered a helpless smile, not taking the bait. "The saturation barrage is over. The enemy shouldn't have recovered from our bombardment yet. I recommend initiating the next phase of the plan now." "My thoughts exactly." Small talk was over. Chu Guang reached out with an index finger and tapped the side of his helmet, bringing up the holographic screen. After a brief pause, he commanded in a steady voice: "Xiao Qi, update Operation Plan No. 2 onto each corps' VM!" A lively voice chirped in his ear. "Right away, Master!" The moment the words fell, Chu Guang gripped the war hammer slung across his back and, under the eager gazes of the players, leveled it cleanly toward the front. "The Bone Chewer tribe's fortress is right ahead of us. Let's go smash in their front teeth." "Entire army—advance!" Unable to keep their feet still any longer, the players who received the attack order answered with deafening, cloud-shattering roars. "For the Alliance!" "Long live Dawn City!" "The Administrator kicks ass!" "Demacia!" "Awoooo!" Rousing yet completely uncoordinated battle cries echoed across the field as the campaign to liberate Qingshi County officially commenced. Under the cover of supporting fire, players surged forward behind their respective corps commanders, some even excitedly blowing homemade bugles. Long before the operation began, the New Alliance command had drawn up Operation Plans No. 1, 2, and 3 based on gathered intelligence. These battle plans detailed specific steps down to each individual corps, allowing the commander on site to decide which plan to implement based on battlefield conditions. During the campaign, corps of differing sizes would undertake different battlefield tasks, and the score calculation rules varied depending on the type of mission. Some teams were tasked with attacking strategic installations, while others focused on pushing the front lines and seizing control points; in principle, highly mobile units handled infiltration and encirclement, while high-breakthrough units spearheaded assaults against fortifications. As for tactical choices beneath the corps level, right down to individual players, they were decided jointly by corps commanders and their teammates. Tested by so many battles, any player qualified to serve as a corps commander was an elite player deeply trusted by their peers. They understood better than anyone how to draw out their squad's maximum potential. And the fact that their squad members had stuck with them across so many version updates was ample proof of their personal charisma or organizational prowess. Corps scale determined the upper limit of a corps, but whether they could fill their ranks depended on the players' own efforts. Whether it was keeping teammates happy or paying them real-world salaries, so long as it did not violate server rules, Chu Guang would never interfere. Returning to the front lines. The printing factory located on the edge of the county town served as the Bone Chewer tribe's first line of defense in southern Qingshi County—and the first stubborn thorn in the players' path. Stationed there was a hundred-man unit led by Tie Shou. They had previously deployed two 12mm heavy machine guns and two 60mm mortars in the area, mobilizing slaves to dig nearly a kilometer of trenches, fronted by barbed wire and sharpened wooden stakes. In addition, twenty Panzerfaust rocket launchers and ten 7mm light machine guns had been distributed throughout the trenches. A frontal assault would inevitably have been a grueling slog, with interlocking crossfire pouring from rooftops and trenches turning into an infantryman's nightmare. Naturally, Chu Guang was not going to let players blindly swarm in to feed themselves to the meat grinder. Before attacking the area, four 100-kilogram aerial bombs and twenty-four 100mm howitzer shells rained down on Tie Shou's unit's position. Before the first round even truly began, the mortar positions and rooftop heavy machine guns Lion Fang had deployed inside the printing factory were obliterated outright by the New Alliance's long-range firepower. Following that barrage, the once-intact concrete factory building was left teetering on the verge of collapse. Yet before the marauders hunkered inside could even recover from the pounding, another tight salvo of mortar shells rained down right on top of them. "Fuck! These people never stop!" Spitting out a mouthful of bloody sand, Tie Shou, wearing a baseball helmet, pressed his head tightly to the ground, terror and shock warring in his heart. Before joining the Bone Chewer tribe, he had been an underground prize fighter. Though no stranger to brawls and bloodshed, when had he ever witnessed a spectacle like this? When pillaging across the central River Valley Province with Lion Fang, they had occasionally encountered tough nuts to crack, but those survivors had at best rolled out a few crude homemade cannons or artillery purchased from major factions. The former were powerful but wildly inaccurate, looking fierce while hitting nothing; the latter hit accurately, but once their ammo was spent, they were left high and dry. A charge or two was usually all it took to route those unprepared weaklings. Nothing like these madmen... Shells rained down as if they cost nothing, while planes in the sky strafed their positions run after run. Listening to the roar of artillery, Tie Shou felt his teeth chattering, his hands trembling uncontrollably around his gun. He was an Awakened. Yet the power coursing through his veins gave him no sense of security whatsoever! "Boss! When are reinforcements getting here?!" "Where's our artillery?!" Our artillery? Hearing his subordinates' terrified shouts, Tie Shou's face warped into a grim, bitter smile. He might not know what was happening behind them, but watching the planes buzzing across the sky, he could guess with his toes what state the artillery positions were in. Especially after that earlier rocket barrage, he had completely given up any hope of fire support. Right then, the New Alliance's mortars ceased their bombardment of the position. Yet Tie Shou's wildly pounding heart leaped into his throat instead. He knew what the end of a barrage meant. Attempting to scream out the terror trapped in his chest, Tie Shou clutched his helmet and unleashed a hysterical bellow: "Prepare for battle!!" The mortars laid down a volley of smoke shells, instantly blanketing the front of the battlefield in dense fog. The light machine gunners poked their heads back out of the trenches. Yet as the marauders flicked off their safeties to open fire, they discovered to their horror that two armored trucks plated in welded steel had already burst through the smoke. The light machine guns spat tongues of flame, bullets raining against the truck, only to leave egg-sized dents on the steel plates. Ignoring the hail of incoming gunfire, the trucks angled slightly to the right, presenting their broadsides to the marauders' position. Immediately afterward, the marauders in the trenches saw with dread that two quad-mount anti-aircraft guns were pointing directly at their faces. "Gunners, load high-explosive!" Leading the infantry behind them, Canyon Escaped Mole excitedly slapped the side of the truck and shouted to the player at the gunner seat, "Aim for their machine guns and tear 'em apart!" At that moment, both leveled quad-mount AA autocannons roared together, vomiting thick plumes of fire! *Thump thump thump—!* With the thunderous roar of autocannons, over a hundred 20mm high-explosive rounds rained down on the marauders in an instant. The gunners and loaders beside the light machine guns were killed on the spot. Tearing shrapnel and bursting flames transformed the serpentine trenches into a living hell. Tie Shou, who had been steadying a light machine gun, was blown apart instantly, half of his head sent flying out of the trench. The assistant crouching beside him went weak in the knees, completely robbed of the will to fight. One marauder gathered the courage to shoulder a Panzerfaust rocket launcher to fire back, but the three-hundred-meter distance was just outside his effective range. The New Alliance had reverse-engineered plenty of Legion Panzerfausts and even produced several extended variants, so they knew its specifications inside and out. Trailing a tail of flame, the rocket flew only two hundred and fifty meters before plopping weakly onto the ground; because its terminal fuse failed to trigger, it didn't even chew up a clump of sod. "Brothers! Charge!" Seeing the marauders' defensive line crumbling, Brother Mole blew his whistle with gusto. Under the suppression of the two quad-mount AA guns, he led the Skeleton Corps on a charge. Aside from the six vehicle crew members and gunners who stayed put, each of the forty-four infantrymen carried an LD-47 and an entrenching shovel. Only Elven King Fugui held an extended-barrel semi-automatic with its bipod swapped for a long bayonet, shouting "Urah!" at the top of his lungs as he charged. Round after round of bombardment had pushed the defenders inside the printing factory to the brink of collapse. With their centurion dead and that death-knell whistle sounding, they could no longer rein in their terror. Defying their orders to hold the line at all costs, they abandoned the position and fled backward. Mole was not about to give them a chance to regroup. The two quad-mount AA guns swept relentlessly across the fleeing marauders leaping out of the trenches. Soon, the clearing between the trenches and the printing factory was strewn with severed limbs and torso pieces, with not a single intact corpse to be found. "Surrender your weapons or—good, hands on your head and squat down." Elaina jumped into the trench and was raising his muzzle toward a marauder when he noticed the man had already thrown his weapon down. Elaina held his fire and gestured for the man to put his hands on his head and crouch. Captives yielded higher scores than kills. And score meant contribution points and money. Their objective had been taking the printing factory, and now that it was accomplished, there was no need to waste ammunition. Not far off, Brother Mole had already led his men into the factory building; the battle was wrapping up. Only then did Elaina realize that the dirt underfoot had been soaked into mud by blood. Beneath his boots lay half a mangled corpse, unrecognizable from shape alone. "Sheesh... this is brutal," Elaina clicked his tongue involuntarily. Before they had even reached the trench, the three ten-man squads stationed here couldn't even scrape together a single squad between them. Just then, Elven King Fugui limped into the trench, cursing under his breath. "Fuck me, it ended before I even fired a single shot, and I took one to the leg! Wonder which bastard did it!" With that, he glared at the captive. "Was it you?" The captive trembled, unable to understand what the man was saying and daring not say a word, only burying his head lower. Elven King Fugui didn't give a surrendered prisoner a hard time, though. He pulled out bandages from his pack and hastily bandaged himself up. "Looks like this battle's almost over." Elaina glanced northward past the trench toward the town's urban area. The Death Corps, led by Brother Edge, had already charged forward, engaging the marauders stationed in the abandoned residential quarters in close-quarters urban combat. Heavy exoskeletons were difficult to maneuver in confined terrain, and their "semi-convertible armored trucks" couldn't drive into the ruins, leaving mop-up duties to the light infantry. Judging by the fierce gunfire, the fighting there was intense. Marauders holed up in stairwells and narrow alleys fought like cornered beasts; rooting them all out and eliminating them one by one was no easy task. Even so, Elaina wasn't worried about them. As one of the few Level 10 corps in the New Alliance, the Death Corps' combat strength was solidly Tier 1, boasting many of the server's top-ranked high-level players. The reason the unit seemed bloated was primarily to accommodate new players looking to group up, which was why they had adopted the most "cost-effective" human-wave assault doctrine. Different corps had different rules. Some only recruited acquaintances; some accepted only Strength-types or Awakened; others didn't care about sequence or level, as long as everyone had fun. The Death Corps fell into the latter category. Other than requiring members to be fearless and follow orders during guild operations, they had no prerequisites, and members could come and go freely outside campaigns. At that moment, Brother Mole, drenched in mud and blood, came striding toward the pair from the printing factory with assault rifle in hand, looking ecstatic. "...The printing factory is secured! Our new mission is to rest and reorganize on site, and keep an eye on the southern gateway to Qingshi County for our friendly forces while we're at it!" Having just wrapped bandages around his thigh, Elven King Fugui asked excitedly: "Are the war scores out yet?" "How could it be that fast? Every campaign settles up a day late," Mole said, catching his breath as he sat on the lip of the trench with a chuckle. "But I've got a feeling our MVP is in the bag this time!" Taking the first line of defense in under five minutes, fifty guys wiping out an entire hundred-man unit and taking twelve captives! Best of all, not a single player had gone down! It was a textbook "infantry-armor coordination" breakthrough—well worth all the drills and trench-digging exercises he had run with his teammates in the northern outskirts! If this didn't earn them MVP, he could only assume the other friendly units were using hacks. While the three were chatting and slacking off, the jungle muscle-heads clad in olive-green armor entered the urban district under the lead of Midnight Chicken Slayer. According to Operation Plan No. 2, if the air raid and artillery bombardment failed to bring down the department store, the task of storming the enemy command post would fall jointly upon the Jungle Corps and the Storm Corps. As for the Burning Corps, by now they should have pushed into the southern sector of the battlefield, guarding against enemy reinforcements and cutting off the Lion Fang thousand-man unit's retreat. Those guys were the truly terrifying badasses. Several of the server's highest-combat-power big bosses were among them. Even pinched between enemy reinforcements and Lion Fang's thousand-man unit, they had the confidence to handle it with ease. However, Mole estimated they probably wouldn't run into reinforcements. It was twenty kilometers from the northernmost tip of Qingshi County to Xizhou City proper. Even if the enemy reacted immediately, mobilizing reinforcements took time. A mere thousand-man unit obviously couldn't hold out that long. "...The Jungle Corps is advancing. Looks like the second line of defense has been taken by the Death Corps." Mole glanced at his VM; they were nearly half an hour ahead of schedule. Elven King Fugui looked up at the sky. "By the way, our planes are starting to head back." Elaina remarked with a wry expression: "Can they land in one piece?" "Haha, doubtful!" While the members of the Skeleton Corps had wrapped up their mission, the Jungle Corps and Storm Corps, having pushed deep into the urban area, had made contact with the enemy. Splitting into two different attack vectors, the two forces launched a ferocious pincer assault against the marauders' positions. "Madness! Total madness!" Standing at the very front line clad in a KV-1 exoskeleton, Midnight Chicken Slayer held an LD-47j light machine gun, yelling excitedly as he pushed forward while madly spraying bullets at the marauders behind the roadblocks. Beside him, lined up abreast, the Strength-type brutes all shared the same style as their corps commander, firing bullets as if they were free. The players in the rear ranks, also wearing exoskeletons, had detached their right shoulder armor and bracers to hang them across their chests, lobbing grenades over the wall of men to blast sky-high the marauders pinned behind cover. In reality, the bullets were indeed free; they only factored into campaign scoring. Did Brother Chicken Slayer give a damn about that, though? He and his boys clearly couldn't care less. As long as it felt good, that was all that mattered! On the other flank, the Storm Corps was advancing just as smoothly. Under Brother Spring's command, Battlefield Atmosphere Group took along Perception-type I'm the Darkest and spearheaded a platoon-sized force, carving straight through an entire marauder hundred-man unit. Beaten back step by step, the marauders could only resort to their trump card: releasing a mutated brown bear that had not yet been domesticated with a psychic interference device. Yet before the brown bear could even let out a roar, a giant white bear clad in heavy steel armor slammed it against a wall with a massive paw. "Roar—!" Pinning the mutated brown bear to the wall, Rou Rou roared into the bear's face, though her hesitant expression showed she was still feeling somewhat self-conscious. As for the pinned mutated brown bear, probably baffled as to why this creature had white fur and wore armor, it froze in place and didn't even resist. Rou Rou looked anxiously at her teammates beside her. "I-I-I... what do I do next?!" Tail stepped closer to examine the pinned bear, stroking her chin in thought for two seconds before exclaiming in realization: "It might have fallen in love with you." Rou Rou nearly choked on her own spit. "Pfft! How is that possible?! How did you even reach that bizarre conclusion?!" Tail: "Ehh! Isn't it totally reasonable?" Catching up from behind, Sesame Paste wore a look that hovered between laughing and crying. "Everything about this seems ripe for ridicule..." "Ummm... anyway, it surrendered, and we don't kill prisoners of war," Sisi said, studying the docile brown bear for a moment before nodding. "Decided. From now on, it'll be the second mount of the Rou Rou Knights!" Rou Rou: "Wait, what the heck is the Rou Rou Knights?! And wasn't it supposed to be the White Bear Knights? Why is there suddenly a brown bear in it?!" Sesame Paste: "Huh? I thought the weird part was calling it a mount." Sisi shifted her gaze awkwardly. "Well, white bears are pretty rare around here..." Tail completely changed the subject, her eyes sparkling as she gave a thumbs-up. "Ooh! Great job, Rou Rou! You captured a big guy—let's see who dares call us the 'Atmosphere Cheerleaders' now!" The White Bear Knights was registered with the Merchant Guild; despite having 'knights' in the name, it had nothing to do with either knights or corps. Not that it mattered. Long ago, Tail and Sisi had tagged along with Brother Spring's crew, and they had simply dragged Sesame Paste and Rou Rou along with them. The three wore Light Cavalry exoskeletons worth ten thousand silver coins, and the gear on Rou Rou had been bought with profits from their previous merchant runs. Even though they paid for their own equipment, that didn't stop Tail from leading the charge at the very front. Not far away. Brother Battlefield had already breached the department store with his men. Inside, gunfire raged violently, punctuated from time to time by grenade blasts. Judging by the sound, the fighting was quite fierce. Lion Fang had not surrendered, continuing to hold out with his personal guard. But as the gunfire moved deeper into the building, that so-called resistance was clearly just a death throe. Soon, the Jungle Corps, having attacked along the main thoroughfare, shattered the marauders' defensive line deployed along the highway and chased the routed troops all the way to the foot of the building. The Jungle Corps and Storm Corps successfully linked up. After conferring, the two corps commanders decided that the Jungle Corps would send a ten-man squad inside to assist, while the rest would guard the building's various exits. Space inside was limited and could only deploy so many troops. The collision physics in this game were absurdly realistic, with no clipping whatsoever. Sticking a rifle barrel through a teammate's body to shoot wasn't possible here; crowding too many people into one place only got in the way. "...Looks like the battle is over." South of Qingshi County, beside the highway wreckage. Accessing the players' camera feeds from the backend, Chu Guang switched to Battlefield Atmosphere Group's first-person perspective, watching as the man kicked open a locked iron door and led his troops into Lion Fang's hideout, pinning the marauder chiefs against tables and walls. "Nobody move!" "Hands on your heads!" The audio from the feed was noisy. Signal reception inside the building was poor, causing the video to stutter frequently and shake violently. Yet that didn't stop Chu Guang from appreciating the defeat and dejection etched across the marauders' faces. After this battle, the corridor from Qingquan City to Xizhou City would be completely opened, and nothing would stand in his path any longer. The New Alliance's railroad would advance to the front lines alongside the supply convoys. As a steady stream of provisions arrived from the rear, he would use concentrated artillery fire to show the Bone Chewer marauders where they truly belonged. "Three hours faster than expected in the battle plan... the combat strength of your citizens is simply unbelievable." After watching the footage Chu Guang shared on the VM, Vannus couldn't help expressing heartfelt admiration. Even the Youth Corps formed from officer cadets might not have done any better. Perhaps when drafting operational plans next time, he could consider more aggressive offensive strategies to capitalize on their strengths to the fullest. Glancing up at the sky, Vannus continued: "We concluded the battle before noon. The Fang clan headquarters in Xizhou City probably hasn't even received the news yet." "All the better." Chu Guang smiled faintly. "We can push the front line another ten kilometers forward." The copper mine was to the west of Qingshi County, located within the People's Alliance geological park. To ensure production could proceed smoothly, holding the front line at northern Qingshi County was not enough; they had to push a bit farther. He had studied the map: ten kilometers north of Qingshi County was a mountain col, where a defensive line could be established on the southern high ground. Vannus hesitated. "Wouldn't that be too aggressive? If their reaction is fast enough, they might not leave us much time to dig fortifications." Chu Guang shook his head, his tone relaxed. "Then that's all the better to catch them off guard!"