"B-Boss, I'm out of ammo!"
"Don't you still have a magazine left?!"
"I-I-I emptied it!"
"#%*@&!"
Seeing marauders closing in, Jieyan, critically low on ammunition, dared not prolong the fight. Dragging along the deadweight that was Lost Noob, he fired and retreated in turns.
Fortunately, they weren't the only ones who had bumped into patrols.
Just as they fled south, dense gunfire broke out across the residential area two streets over.
Silently saying a prayer for his fellow players, Jieyan took advantage of the marauder reinforcements being distracted by the shootout, grabbed Lost Noob beside him, and sprinted away.
Twisting and turning through the alleyways, they finally shook off their pursuers.
Dashing across a street choked with vehicle wreckage, the two ducked into roadside ruins.
From the scattered remains of stretchers and assorted bizarre, discarded equipment, it looked like this place had once been a hospital.
As for which department, there was no telling.
Collapsing into a corner, Jieyan exhaled heavily. He ejected the submachine gun's magazine to check it—counting the round chambered, he had a grand total of four bullets left.
His briefly eased tension plummeted straight to rock bottom.
"We are well and truly out of ammo and food..."
Lost Noob panted out of breath, "Boss... where are we now?"
Jieyan raised his VM to check the map.
"According to the pre-war map, this should be Xizhou City No. 4 Hospital. Next to it are Sixin District Elementary School and the Water Resources Bureau..."
Lost Noob froze. "Sixin District?! Wait, weren't we running south?"
Jieyan wore a helpless look. "Don't ask me, it's my first time in this godforsaken place too."
When running for one's life, who had time to check their bearings? Jieyan remembered heading south at the start, but after a few turns, he had lost track of direction.
Regardless, at least they had gotten away.
Still, with such a massive ruckus, the enemy certainly wouldn't let them off easily.
Worried a marauder patrol might sweep through shortly, the two didn't dare linger. After taking a brief breather, they decided to press on toward the nearest rally point to link up with their teammates and figure out their next move.
They skirted around to the rear perimeter wall of the hospital.
Stepping onto the lid of a dumpster, Jieyan seized the top of the wall with both hands.
Just as he prepared to vault over, however, he caught sight of several beams of light filtering through tree leaves from the gymnasium of the elementary school diagonally across the rear alley.
His hands stopped dead on the wall. Jieyan immediately ducked his head, flashed a hand signal to his teammate behind him indicating someone was ahead, and leaned against the wall's edge to peer closely.
One look, and his heart leapt into his throat.
This wasn't an ordinary school.
The entire place had been turned into a fortress!
Coils of barbed wire were strung along the top of the concrete wall. Defenses resembling crude pillboxes had been erected on the guardhouse, wall corners, and rooftops of both the main and auxiliary school buildings. Behind the firing slits, heavy machine guns reinforced with welded steel plates sat prominently mounted!
The marauders had thrown together barricades from timber and concrete rubble, topped with brush and branches for camouflage, blending the whole fortress into the overgrown surroundings. In the pitch black of the night, Jieyan had nearly missed it completely!
As for the glimmers of light that caught his eye, they were leaking from the gym beside the school building.
The brick wall and iron door on the left side of the gym appeared to have been patched up later. Because it wasn't sealed tight, he could see right inside from his current angle.
Looking down from the sky, one probably wouldn't spot a thing!
"Boss, there's so many people inside..." Lost Noob whispered nervously as he lay against the wall. "There's easily a company stationed here!"
Jieyan rolled his eyes. "I'm not blind!"
It wasn't just people.
Several empty trucks sat parked in the clearing.
In this entire school converted into a military outpost, only the gym had lights on. Jieyan's gut told him something was hidden in there.
Could it be a marauder factory?
Why put the factory just outside Sixin District, though?
There were no high vantage points nearby to get a clearer view of the interior.
Just as Jieyan was scratching his head, the gym's main doors were pushed open, and a truck rolled out from inside.
When the two men peering over the wall saw the truck, they blurted out curses in unison.
Mounted prominently on the bed of the truck was a quad-mount anti-aircraft machine gun.
"Holy crap?! An AA truck!"
"These marauders have that kind of tech?!"
Wearing his headset, Jieyan quickly snapped several pictures of the AA truck rolling out of the workshop and synced them to his VM.
Then came the problem.
His VM was offline. Even if he took photos, only he could see them.
Did he need to find a place to log off and post on the official forum?
Online players wouldn't see forum messages in real time either.
Just as Jieyan fretted over how to share this shocking discovery with other players, a [Signal Connected] icon suddenly popped up in the top right corner of his VM.
At the sight, both of them beamed with joy.
"It's here!"
The signal was back!
...
"Done!"
On the roof of a half-collapsed apartment building, Lao Bai finally breathed a sigh of relief after wrestling with the radio set.
The radio had suffered a minor hiccup earlier. Luckily, it wasn't serious—just a loose battery connector, likely jarred loose from a hard landing.
After fiddling with it for a bit, he had gotten it fixed in no time.
Once the radio booted up, Lao Bai concealed it between the wall and a derelict water tank on the rooftop, leaving only a nearly two-meter-long antenna sticking out.
This portable radio designed by the Scientific Expedition was remarkably convenient. Equipped with a solid-state hydrogen battery pack, it boasted an ultra-long operating life and could serve as a temporary signal relay to provide information support for frontline troops. Whether packed inside an airdrop crate or mounted on the back of a truck, it performed admirably.
With communications restored within a ten-kilometer radius, Lao Bai immediately switched to the team-wide voice channel.
"...Attention all personnel. The radio is set up. Once your area is secure, proceed immediately to Rally Point C!
"Anyone within five hundred meters of me, close in on my position. I have thirty LD-47s, eight thousand rounds of ammunition, and assorted support weapons here.
"Once we're geared up, we'll hit these bastards hard!"
Hanging up the comms, Lao Bai looked up at the sky.
The second wave of drops had already begun. Soon, another twenty-odd brothers would be joining them.
Assuming they landed safely, that is.
Right then, an incoming transmission request chimed on his VM.
Seeing it was a message from Jieyan, Lao Bai hit the accept button and asked at once, "Where are you right now?"
Over the line, Jieyan kept his voice hushed.
"I'm at the edge of Sixin District... A place called Xizhou City No. 4 Hospital."
Lao Bai was taken aback and instinctively checked the VM map. "What the hell? How did you end up over there?!"
"Ahem, things were too chaotic earlier... Never mind how I got here, we found a marauder factory!"
Lao Bai: "...A factory?"
"Yeah! A factory, without a doubt! I can't see the full layout from here, but a truck just drove out of the workshop with a quad-mount AA gun mounted on the bed—looks like it was converted from 12mm heavy machine guns! Shouldn't we blow them to bits?" Jieyan said excitedly.
*Damn? An AA truck?*
Lao Bai paused, then said immediately, "Give me the coordinates!"
Jieyan: "Already marked on the map!"
Lao Bai verified the location on the map and tagged the coordinates with a fire support request icon.
The New Alliance had no strategic bombers, but given sufficient numbers, ground-attack aircraft could achieve the effect of strategic bombing.
Against heavily defended strategic facilities like this, paratroopers like them only had to mark the targets on the map.
The rest was the air force's job.
"Coordinates confirmed... Get to the nearest rally point as fast as you can. I'm calling in an airstrike right now!"
Jieyan replied enthusiastically, "Understood!"
Nighttime bombing accuracy was notoriously tragic; lingering too close risked friendly fire.
Knowing full well how pathetic the Goblin Corps' hit rate could be, Jieyan hung up the call and promptly evacuated the hospital with his rookie partner.
However, the two didn't travel far. Instead, they holed up in a residential building four to five hundred meters away that offered a relatively wide view.
While they couldn't see clearly inside the school from there, the main teaching building and the crude pillbox on top remained visible.
Meanwhile, after hanging up, Lao Bai immediately relayed the intel regarding the AA truck and suspected factory facility to rear headquarters.
Once the second drop concluded, the Goblin Corps flight formation swiftly returned to base, then flew back out in under an hour.
This time, however, Mosquito and the others were not ferrying a third wave of paratroopers.
Instead, they carried twenty-four 100-kilogram aerial bombs!
"Instructor! It's pitch black down there, I can't see a single thing!" Luo Yu shouted in exasperated despair as he gripped his flight stick, staring into the pitch-dark urban sprawl.
Never mind ground targets—if the VM map didn't function like radar, he wouldn't even be able to see the planes ahead of him.
Mosquito's voice crackled over the comms.
"No big deal! We'll fly over in formation, decelerating. Wait for my gunfire signal. When you see me open fire, drop 'em!"
Luo Yu was dumbfounded. "Huh?! W-Will that actually work?"
A bizarre laugh like a squawking duck echoed through the channel.
"Hahaha, no clue! We won't know if it works until we try! Boys, prepare for the drop run. Disengage bomb safeties. Stop staring at your bomb release panels—watch the tails of the planes ahead of you. Everyone drop on my countdown!"
Because the formation was flying very low—less than three hundred meters off the ground—the thrumming drone of propellers quickly alerted the marauders in the city.
Noticing the aircraft, patrols and rooftop sentries frantically shone flashlights up into the sky.
Yet the beams of their flashlights were far too feeble, looking like nothing more than toothpicks to the W-2 ground-attack aircraft overhead.
With so little time, the marauders couldn't mount an organized response and could only fire wildly at the sky with whatever weapons were at hand.
Bullets whizzed past. Mosquito chuckled dismissively, glanced at the VM strapped to his thigh, and double-checked the coordinates, distance, and airspeed.
Before taking off, while the airfield ground crew loaded the ordnance, he had already calculated the rough drop angle, distance, altitude, and airspeed, even marking them on his instruments with chalk. Once on target, all he had to do was mash the release button.
Hit rate?
Did that matter?
Eighty-two percent of each one-hundred-kilogram bomb's weight was the warhead. With such an extreme explosive yield, when more than twenty planes dropped in formation, landing even a single direct hit would suffice!
The destructive power far exceeded that of rockets!
Mosquito's only regret was that nuclear materials were too hard to come by; otherwise, he really would have loved to experience what dropping a nuke felt like.
There was no need to show mercy to marauders anyway.
Those bastards could hardly be considered human—they were beasts that merely looked like men. Not to mention in a game, he wouldn't feel the slightest shred of guilt even in real life.
The marauders on the ground swept the sky in frenzy, bringing rifles, machine guns, and every weapon available to bear in a desperate bid to keep the planes from reaching the factory.
Yet without tracer rounds or searchlights to guide them, they couldn't even tell if they were hitting anything, succeeding only in giving away their positions with muzzle flashes.
Using those scattered bursts of fire, Mosquito reconfirmed the general direction of the airstrike target from the density of ground fire.
All pre-drop preparations were complete!
Mosquito deployed his airbrakes and engaged the siren. All twenty-four W-2 ground-attack aircraft began decelerating in unison, their long, wailing trumpets echoing across the night sky.
Hearing that sound like the arrival of the Grim Reaper, the marauders below scattered in sheer terror.
"Three, two, one—"
"Smash the bastards!" Mosquito had intended to yell "Engage!" but reined it in at the last second.
Twenty-four aerial bombs plummeted from the sky, raining down onto the marauder factory like dumplings into boiling water.
A fiery blast and thick smoke instantly swallowed buildings, pillboxes, roadblocks, sentry posts, the trucks parked along the wall—and the wall itself.
Marauders caught flat-footed had no time to scream before the shockwave flung them over ten meters away.
Those scrambling to drive the trucks away fared even worse; before they could even start the engines, bombs descending from above pulverized them into scrap.
The gymnasium converted into a factory collapsed into rubble amidst the explosions. Surrounding marauders were killed or maimed, the survivors fleeing for their lives...
"Hell yeah!"
Watching the devastation of the workshop from afar through binoculars, Jieyan couldn't help cheering in an undertone.
Beside him, Lost Noob cried out in excitement, "Holy crap! That was insane!"
"Heh, the real fun is still ahead."
Stuffing the binoculars back into his pocket, Jieyan clapped him on the shoulder enthusiastically. "Let's go link up with Lao Bai and the rest. Don't keep them waiting!"
"Once we grab our gear, we'll keep raising hell!"
...
Inside the main tent of the Fang Clan.
Faced with report after report of disaster, Gold Fang slammed his fist into the armrest of his chair in a blind fury, crushing the decorative skull to powder!
"Those despicable, shameless moles!"
"When I catch them, I'm personally gouging out their eyes, cutting out their tongues, and burying them in rat cages with only their heads sticking out until the rats gnaw away all their flesh! Then I'll turn them into oil lamps!"
Ever since the early morning hours, Xizhou City hadn't seen a moment's peace.
First, sentries and patrols everywhere reported coming under attack. Some claimed to have seen one or two men, others said they ran into a ten-man squad, and some went so far as to report being besieged by an entire company—tallying up to over a thousand enemy troops all told!
If he hadn't received a briefing on the frontline situation from Bear Fang just hours ago, he would have thought the blue jackets had marched right to his doorstep!
Flares flew haphazardly across the sky, gunfire echoed through every corner of the city, and two reinforcement squads rushing to help had nearly gotten into a shootout with each other.
And that wasn't the end of it.
Just ten minutes ago, a swarm of planes launched a surprise attack on their garage and modification workshop on the edge of Sixin District. Dozens of bombs rained from above, wiping out an entire production line.
This dealt another devastating blow to the Fang Clan's already strained supply situation!
Furious roars resonated through the hall.
The thousand-man commanders lining both sides stood as quiet as cicadas in winter, holding their breath lest his wrath turn upon them.
Hearing such cruel threats of torture, even Wulun from the Death Coast couldn't help clicking his tongue.
Truth be told, these people were mediocre at waging war, but they had quite an assortment of ways to torment captives. His month and a half here had certainly been an eye-opener.
The harshest torture practiced by the Church of the Torch was merely locking someone in a cage with a Deathclaw as a blood sacrifice. While not a single intact corpse remained once the cage opened, the victim died in just a second or two.
Gold Fang seethed with rage, his clenched fists trembling in fury.
Aside from Wulun of the Church of the Torch, the only relatively composed person in the hall was Dillon, who stood beside Gold Fang.
"The attacks are scattered all across the city, yet occurred almost simultaneously. Judging by their firepower and organization, these people are definitely no guerrillas. Combined with the earlier airstrike, it seems..." Dillon said, his face heavy with concern.
Gold Fang cursed, "Where the hell did these bugs crawl out from?"
Dillon said in a deep voice, "Most likely from the sky."
Gold Fang froze. "The sky?!"
Dillon nodded solemnly. "Paratroopers... I never expected them to have airborne forces ready!"
Most paratroopers in the Legion were elites selected from the youth army, and those capable of deep-penetration missions behind enemy lines were the cream of the crop.
Beyond mastering advanced parachuting techniques, they needed extensive combat experience, exceptional wilderness survival skills, and the resolve to fight with their backs to the wall.
Less than half an hour after landing, with their unit cohesion completely shattered, they had reorganized rapidly to launch coordinated strikes against multiple sentry posts across the city...
Such high combat proficiency astonished even a veteran like Dillon.
Where on earth did these people come from?
Had Boulder City joined the war?
Seeing them debate back and forth without reaching a conclusion, Wulun curled his lip, uncrossed his arms, and walked toward the exit.
From his seat, Gold Fang looked at him and demanded, "Where are you going?"
Wulun replied offhandedly, "To help you drag those blue moles out of their holes."
He and his men couldn't contribute much on an open battlefield, but dealing with these so-called "elites" was right in their wheelhouse.
Wulun had a hunch.
He would see that person again.
This time, he swore to avenge his fallen brothers!
...
On the official forum.
It was 4:00 a.m. wasteland time, 4:00 p.m. real-world time—one hour before peak login hours. The forum was in full swing with bustling activity.
Two hours ago, eighty-two players of the Burning Corps had boarded gliders in batches and parachuted into the urban area of Xizhou City.
Although fewer than fifty brothers ultimately landed safely and reached the rally point, that did not stop Operation Warrior from proceeding.
According to Lao Bai, while evading marauder pursuit, they had set up a radio to coordinate counterattacks.
The marauders never anticipated enemies falling from the sky and had zero experience countering airborne operations. Four or five companies were thrown into utter chaos, led around by the nose across the city by mere dozens of players.
Although many players died while shaking off pursuers, the strategic payoff was astounding.
Not only had they inflicted nearly fifty casualties on the marauders, but they had also destroyed a factory the marauders were using to modify AA trucks.
The latter alone would delay any offensive by at least two weeks, if not a whole month.
On top of that, under the cover of night, the Burning Corps successfully recovered sixteen airdrop crates before dawn!
These included a hundred rifles, 27,000 rounds of ammunition, ten RPG rocket launchers, three mortars, and assorted grenades and support weapon munitions.
This equipment was more than enough to outfit a full company!
More weapons and ammunition would continue to be airdropped onto the battlefield going forward.
Currently, the Burning Corps had divided all their supplies into two caches: one hidden in the basement of a commercial plaza 5.5 kilometers from Sixin District, and the other in the apartment building housing the radio.
The remaining thirty-odd players split into two squads. Aside from players standing watch online in shifts, everyone else logged off to eat.
Come nightfall, they would pull off an even bigger job!
Tail: "Aaargh! Tail wants to skydive too! T.T"
Brother Mole: "Damn! I'm crying from jealousy!"
Elaina: "Jealousy won't help. We can't very well drop our armored truck in there. (Doge)"
Scavenger Lv99: "I'm in the Burning Corps too! Why didn't you bring me! So mad! (Rage)"
WC Really Has Mosquitoes: "You're too fat, my plane can't carry you!"
Scavenger Lv99: "Screw you! Speak with a clear conscience, how am I fat?"
Corner Camper: "Dammit! Who packed my parachute?! I pulled the cord so hard it almost snapped, and the chute still didn't open! I faceplanted straight into the dirt! QAQ"
Free Sniper: "Sob, me too, couldn't get the chute open to save my life!"
WC Really Has Mosquitoes: "Quit whining! I personally inspected every single chute pack. There's no way in hell the chutes were faulty, so don't blame me the second something goes wrong! Night drops are prone to accidents to begin with; if you don't have the skill, don't pop your chute at low altitude! If you don't trust me, pack it yourself next time!"
Corner Camper: "Big bro, my bad! QAQ"
Free Sniper: "Don't be like that, boss! Have mercy on us! TAT"
Yaya: "Hahahahaha! Noobs! Hahahahaha! Cowards! o(*≧▽≦)ツ"
Ye Shi: "LMAO!"
The forum was awash with merry banter.
Players who had landed safely were bragging left and right, embellishing how they had dashed and woven through enemy encirclement to break through and meet up with their teammates.
Players who failed their landings weren't idle either, though their posts took on an entirely different tone.
Seeing how pumped the players were, Chu Guang, lurking on the forum, felt genuinely happy for them.
At this moment, he held two battle reports in his hands.
One was from Xizhou City; the other, from Pine Valley.
The Burning Corps wasn't the only unit to score remarkable results last night.
Just hours earlier, around one or two in the morning, the Death Corps stationed on the front line had achieved an impressive victory of their own...
Chapter 315