What was the best way to test a weapon's performance?
Actual combat, of course.
Specs on paper and battlefield performance were two entirely different concepts. No matter how brilliantly a weapon performed on the firing range, nothing compared to taking it out and testing it in real warfare.
The Burning Corps, stationed at the very front line, soon received their first major combat mission following the launch of Operation Warrior...
Late at night.
Northern district of Xizhou City.
A squad of marauders carrying rifles was creeping down a pitch-black street, their flashlights darting warily along both sides of the roadway.
From time to time, they swept their beams upward overhead.
Days of relentless attacks had thrown the entire tribe into constant panic.
Before this, the guerrilla fighters formed by local survivors had already caused them enough headaches, but now Xizhou City had welcomed an even nastier group of uninvited guests.
These people were not only well-armed, possessing brutal firepower and superb training, but their physical capabilities were also extraordinary. Many of them even displayed traits distinctly belonging to the Awakened.
Weaving through the abandoned city like wraiths, these paratroopers hunted down isolated patrols, or launched surprise raids against fixed checkpoints, sentry posts, and blockhouses.
What made it worse was their cunning tactics: the moment a fight dragged into a stalemate, they immediately disengaged and retreated, giving their pursuers no chance to chase them down.
Even more exasperating for the marauders, the ambushes never hit the same part of town twice in a row—they might even strike the southern and northern sectors of the city simultaneously.
This gave the radio-deficient marauders endless grief.
Lacking enough communication devices to equip ten-man squads, they had to rely on flares to report the general location of an attack.
Whenever multiple installations came under assault at once, the sky filled with signal flares and siren alarms howled across the city.
As for where the enemy was concentrated, where they were few, and what kind of equipment they carried—none of these critical pieces of intel were known. The centurions and chiliarchs responsible for defense zones frequently found themselves paralyzed, not knowing where to send reinforcements.
Yet even that wasn't what tormented the marauders most.
The truly fatal problem was that those phantom-like blue jackets seemed completely inexhaustible.
Occasionally the marauders managed to gun down one or two attackers, but the raiders' numbers never seemed to dwindle.
Just how many paratroopers did these blue jackets have?!
Did they even have enough planes to train so many people?
This string of baffling questions hung like a curse over the heads of Golden Fang and the rest of the Fang Clan's leadership.
That included Wulun, who had earlier boasted before Golden Fang and sworn to drag those ground rats out into the open.
Over the past week, he had led his men to kill at least eleven New Alliance paratroopers, even wiping out an entire four-man squad in one encounter.
Yet, eerily...
A man he had killed three days ago appeared before him again today.
"...Twins?"
Moving his smoking gun barrel away from the corpse, Wulun knitted his brows and glared at the face on the ground. The more he looked, the more familiar it seemed.
Could it be a clone?
That wasn't impossible.
After all, clones weren't exactly rare in this day and age.
Still, conditioning a clone to act like a normal person was no easy feat, let alone shaping them into well-trained soldiers.
Noticing the vital signs monitor strapped to the man's arm, Wulun reached down and unclipped it, tapping his index finger twice against the right side of his exoskeleton helmet.
"Hack into VM system."
A line of windows projected across his helmet visor.
[In progress...]
The New Alliance's blue jackets hadn't just reconfigured the operating system of the vital signs monitor to turn it into a wrist-mounted terminal; they had even rewritten the entire OS in their own invented language.
However.
Hacking into a mere terminal was child's play for a combat assistant AI equipped with a "Grade-A Hacking Plug-in."
Leaving the breach to the AI, Wulun waited quietly for several seconds.
Suddenly, two dialog boxes popped up simultaneously on the VM screen and his helmet visor.
[Unauthorized access detected. DNA authentication failed.]
[System wiped.]
Staring at the Chinese characters flashing on the VM screen, Wulun was dumbfounded.
"...What the hell does this say?"
...
A residential building five hundred meters away.
Three players lay prone along the roof's edge, peering through binoculars at Lao Liu's corpse down by the wall corner and the squad of exoskeleton soldiers standing beside it.
Lost Noob whispered in dismay, "Damn... Customs boss squad!"
Prop Master clicked his tongue. "Tsk, tsk. Knocked out the second his boots touched the ground. Lao Liu really had it rough..."
Lost Noob agreed, "Rough indeed, plus one. Got wiped by the boss team before he could even pick up a gun."
"Rendezvous failed... Side quest canceled. Let's do the main quest," Baigei Daiju said, watching the icon vanish from his VM before quietly backing away from the building's edge.
Lost Noob fingered his semi-automatic rifle, looking longingly at the pack of 'elite mobs' on the street below.
"Damn, I really want to take a potshot."
Prop Master nodded in agreement.
"Their exoskeletons look expensive as hell. They'd probably sell for a ton of silver coins!"
Baigei Daiju rolled his eyes.
"Keep dreaming. Mission comes first."
Tonight they had only two tasks: one side quest and one main quest.
The side quest was to recover their teammate who had parachuted onto the battlefield. Nobody expected Lao Liu to be so unlucky as to land right on the open street and run headfirst into a patrolling boss squad, dying instantly before even touching a weapon.
As for the main quest, it was to hit any marauder sentry post on the north side and sow chaos throughout the northern district.
The main force of the Burning Corps would strike an ammunition depot in the southern district of Xizhou City in the early morning hours, where enough munitions were stockpiled to supply a thousand men.
What they needed to do was cause as much pandemonium in the north as possible before the main force moved in, tying down the marauders' reinforcements.
To sum it up in one phrase: raise hell!
The bigger the commotion, the better.
Of course, they had to avoid tangling with that squad they had just seen.
With their current gear, going toe-to-toe against exoskeleton-clad soldiers armed to the teeth was wishful thinking. In a real firefight, the enemy would double-tap them—one in the chest, one in the head. Without full protective armor to absorb the blows, no matter how high their stats were, they would drop dead in an instant.
The trio quietly withdrew from the rooftop.
Heading roughly one kilometer in the opposite direction from the exoskeleton squad, they quickly located a Fang Clan sentry outpost.
To restrict guerrilla operations, the Fang Clan had erected checkpoints at every highway entrance leading into Xizhou City.
A marauder stood inside the guard shack, dangling a homemade rolled cigarette from his mouth.
Two others stood on either side of the road barrier, chatting away loudly. Another sat by a campfire holding an unidentifiable skewer of meat, occasionally chiming into the conversation.
Seeing this, Baigei Daiju immediately gestured for his teammates to halt. Without a word, he unslung the RPG launcher from his back, slotted a high-explosive rocket into the tube, aimed at the barricade, and squeezed the trigger.
With a sharp whoosh,
A streak of white smoke shot forward, and the RPG slammed squarely into the roadblock.
Boom—!
Before the two marauders standing beside the barrier could react, the concussive blast blew them off their feet.
Howling shrapnel ripped through the air, gouging jagged scars into the asphalt and concrete walls.
"Rocket!"
The marauder inside the guard shack ducked beneath the window as debris sprayed inside. Crying out in terror, he hurriedly drew a flare gun and fired into the sky.
Ignoring the blood covering his face, the marauder beside the fire scrambled frantically into the rubble, thrusting his rifle out from cover and firing wildly.
Bullets zipped and slammed into a storefront window a dozen meters away from the players.
Seeing the green flare shoot into the air, Baigei Daiju grinned. Shoving the smoking launch tube back into his pack, he racked the bolt of his rifle.
"Objective complete!"
"Boys, weapons free!"
"Let 'em have it!"
...
Rat-a-tat-tat—!
Across the rubble-strewn street, gunfire echoed in a deafening chorus, shattering the city's quiet night.
Having wiped out the sentry post, the trio didn't linger. Before reinforcements arrived, they moved on toward the next target on their map.
Meanwhile, a W-2 ground-attack aircraft sporting shark-mouth nose art had quietly slipped into the airspace above Xizhou City.
Hanging beneath its fuselage was not an aerial bomb, but a 'Switchblade' drone with its rotors folded inward.
Double-checking the heading and distance on his VM, Mosquito, wearing a pilot's cap and wind goggles, smoothly clicked off the release mechanism's safety and shouted at the top of his lungs,
"Testing, testing! This is Mosquito, copy, over!"
Static crackled across the comms channel.
"...Burning Corps copies. This is Lao Bai... We're on station and ready to commence operations on your mark."
"Roger that!"
Replying briskly, Mosquito hit the release toggle and chuckled. "...Drone is going live. Control handed over. Have fun!"
Detaching from the pylon, the Switchblade glided unpowered toward the target airspace.
At the same moment, in a dingy alley in southern Xizhou City.
Sitting on the pavement with headphones on, Kuang Feng looked up at Lao Bai, who was keeping watch at the alley mouth.
"...Connected."
The drone's camera feed had synchronized to his VM.
Lao Bai nodded, flashed an OK sign, and closed the channel with Mosquito.
Right then, a plump, gray rat about a meter long scampered out from the other end of the alley, followed by several smaller minions.
Lao Bai crouched down.
Skidding to a halt, Qiangren Suonan stood on his hind legs and delivered his reconnaissance report in his distinctly shrill, raspy voice.
"I checked it out myself!"
"The tank is still parked in the northeast corner of the underground garage. Hasn't moved! Beside it are two modified anti-aircraft trucks—probably driven in earlier today!"
Lao Bai gave him a thumbs-up.
"Thanks, bro."
Qiangren Suonan chuckled. "Don't mention it! Lots of folks inside. We're in for a good show in a bit!"
Rising to his feet, Lao Bai cleanly racked his rifle's bolt, then turned toward Fang Chang and Kuang Feng, making a hand gesture.
"Get ready to move!"
"Copy that!"
Replying tersely, Kuang Feng tapped his headset twice and slowly closed his eyes. His consciousness synced into the perspective of the gliding drone overhead, deploying its six folded rotors.
The Switchblade drone shared the same control circuitry as the Y-1 Firefly, even using identical flight software.
It could be operated either via the VM touchscreen or through neural-link equipment, achieving full immersion with the help of communication relay stations.
Giving the VM data one last look, Lao Bai flicked off the screen and took the lead out of the alley.
[Mission 1: Destroy the ammunition depot located at the Television Station in the southern district.]
[Mission 2: Use the experimental 'Switchblade' suicide drone to destroy a Conqueror 10 tank and photograph the wreckage.]
The former television station grounds in southern Xizhou City comprised three buildings plus a two-level underground parking garage, garrisoned by two to three hundred marauders and twenty to forty artisans serving the Fang Clan.
This was an outpost of the Fang Clan outside the Sixin District, commanded by a centurion named Fenghou, and it doubled as his private domain.
According to the intel brought back by Qiangren Suonan, midnight was the moment the camp's guard was slackest, particularly between 12:00 and 12:30.
With guard rotations approaching, barely any sentries kept their minds on patrol duties.
The camp's munitions depot sat in the basement of the station's west wing, while the easternmost underground garage happened to house a Conqueror 10 undergoing maintenance.
Both objectives could be tackled at once.
The operation officially began.
Leading Fang Chang, Lao Bai moved swiftly down the dark street toward the television station.
Prone on a rooftop, Ye Shi used an LD-47j semi-automatic rifle fitted with a makeshift suppressor to pick off the two sentries posted at the main gate and in a wooden watchtower, covering Lao Bai and Fang Chang as they reached the perimeter wall.
They vaulted over.
Steering clear of the campfires, the two hugged the walls as they advanced. Just as they were about to round a corner, however, sluggish footsteps approached from their front right.
Lao Bai quickly threw up a hand to stop Fang Chang, held up two fingers, and clenched his left fist.
Fang Chang understood instantly. Nocking an arrow from his quiver, he slipped behind a wooden crate on the left.
Lao Bai let go of his rifle, drew his dagger, and crept silently up to the corner baseboard, flashing a sign to Fang Chang behind cover.
'Ready?'
'Ready.'
Hidden in the shadows, Fang Chang held his breath. As he drew back the bowstring, he counted down in his head.
'Bullet Time—'
'Activate!'
The instant two marauders rounded the corner, Fang Chang released the bowstring, and Lao Bai darted out from the wall at the exact same moment.
Thwip—
A fleeting whistle sliced through the air. The marauder on the left took an arrow straight through the throat. Eyes bulging, he let out a choked gurgle and collapsed backward in a spray of blood.
The one on the right had no time to react at all. Before the hum of the bowstring faded, a large hand shot out from the gloom, clamping over his mouth while a blade slit his throat.
Releasing his dagger,
Lao Bai caught the other marauder as he fell backward with the arrow in his throat, silently dragging both bodies into a shadowy alcove.
Giving Fang Chang an OK gesture, Lao Bai regripped his slung rifle and signaled to push forward.
They infiltrated deeper along the walls. The sentry on the rooftop above had already been taken out from afar by Ye Shi, leaving the compound eerily quiet, as if haunted.
The atmosphere here was particularly gruesome.
A heavy stench of blood hung over the entire camp. Corpses were strung up or nailed to wooden utility poles and window frames everywhere.
Some had already decomposed and reeked of rot.
Most of them were local survivors.
Whenever the marauders executed captured survivors, they drained their blood and smeared it across walls in crude graffiti and bizarre glyphs, using it to curse and terrorize the survivors hiding underground and the resistance guerrillas.
In practice, however, the tactic had proved utterly useless.
The bloody brutality had only hardened the resolve of the local survivors to fight to the bitter end, willing to battle these man-eating beasts to the death with black powder, bows, and spears.
Covered by Ye Shi, the two worked in flawless coordination, silently dropping five more patrolling sentries before slipping into the station's west wing undetected.
The ammunition depot was hidden on the basement level of the west wing, its heavy iron door locked tight. The sole key sat inside a drawer in the guardroom.
Unfortunately, brother Qiangren Suonan was a bit too bulky; otherwise, he could have sneaked straight into the guardroom and swiped the key while the guard dozed.
Softening their footsteps, Lao Bai crept into the guardroom, executing a practiced quiet walk and backstab to slit the sleeping marauder's throat before pocketing the key from the drawer.
They unlocked the door and slipped inside without a hitch.
Sweeping their flashlights across the depot, both players widened their eyes in unison.
"Holy crap..."
"These bandits sure have been living large."
Ripper rifles were propped against the walls like firewood, easily numbering over a thousand. At the NPC store's retail price of a hundred silver coins each, the rifles alone were worth a hundred thousand silver.
Not only that, several rooms were stacked high with crates and bundles of ammunition. Loose cartridges gleamed amber and silver in the flashlight beams.
Among them were purchased brass-cased rounds, homemade steel-cased munitions, and even reloaded cartridges assembled by slaves and artisans.
From the corridors to the partitioned rooms, this space of under five hundred square meters was crammed full of military hardware!
Lao Bai did a rough calculation: the weapons, ammo, and other supplies here were worth at least a million silver coins easily!
"...Man, they even have 100mm shells here." Standing at the doorway of a room at the end of the hall, Fang Chang clicked his tongue as he eyed rows of amber shells on the racks.
This loot was insane!
Lao Bai said, "Probably for the Conqueror 10. A bit shorter than the ones we captured at Qingshi County."
The Conqueror 10 came with various turret configurations and corresponding calibers, though most used a 100mm main gun.
Fang Chang wore a wistful look.
"What a shame. If only we could haul this out!"
"Haha, keep dreaming. You think this game has storage rings?" Lao Bai chuckled, pulling pre-portioned packs of composite explosives from his backpack and tossing half to Fang Chang. "Hurry up and get to work. Quick in, quick out."
All the munitions in the depot had already been photographed for record. Destroying verified targets yielded significantly higher mission rewards than blowing up vague objectives.
Placing the explosives beneath the ammo crates, Lao Bai and Fang Chang set their delayed fuses, then promptly evacuated the depot, retracing their steps out of the television station grounds before the patrol shifts changed.
Confirming his teammates had pulled out and the approach to the garage was clear, Kuang Feng dropped the drone's altitude. Whistling through the air, it dove toward the underground parking entrance and sped along a pre-plotted route straight for the tank in the northeast corner.
The whine of six rotors quickly drew the marauders' attention, but by the time they spotted it plunging into the garage, intercepting it was out of the question.
Skimming low along the floor, the drone zipped underneath the tank's hull. Its fifteen-kilogram warhead detonated instantly—the blast from the aluminized explosive rivaled that of two 155mm shells!
Especially within the confined space of an underground garage.
The ferocious shockwave not only scrapped the multiton tank on the spot, but also pulverized the two anti-aircraft trucks parked beside it and the patrol rushing to investigate. A quarter of the garage collapsed entirely, leaving a massive crater in its wake.
The marauders across the entire camp were stunned senseless. Clambering frantically out of bed, they rushed from the main barracks before they even had time to get dressed.
A crowd sprinted toward the munitions depot.
Yet before they reached the guardroom, a blinding flash erupted before their eyes.
This explosion was several times more powerful than the first. The entire west wing seemed to be blown sky-high.
Cooked-off ammunition popped and roared like firecrackers, hurled into the air by the concussive blast as crackling tongues of fire turned night into day.
Across the compound, marauders fell dead or wounded by the score, their agonized wails filling the air.
Standing among the ruins, the centurion's face was painted with pure despair.
Recalling Lord Golden Fang's ruthless cruelty and bone-chilling tortures, his trembling hand drew his pistol and shoved the barrel into his mouth.
That solitary gunshot was so faint amidst the boiling chaos of the night that nobody even noticed...
"Damn, that was monstrous!" Ye Shi, recording the explosion from the edge of his rooftop, couldn't help but marvel.
The searing draft of air blew all the way to his position.
Tainted with the foul stench of scorched meat...
When he had seen people debating explosive formulas on the forum, he hadn't thought much of it. Now he had a deep appreciation for just how dangerous those folks were.
He only hoped they spent all that excess time and energy inside the game, and didn't try pulling crazy stunts in reality...
Saving the video to his VM, Ye Shi stowed his semi-automatic rifle and left the building at once, heading for the rendezvous point eight hundred meters away.
Lao Bai and the others were already waiting for him.
"By the way, what about the kill confirmation photo?" Ye Shi asked Lao Bai, suddenly remembering a key detail.
Fang Chang glanced at the green marker on his VM map.
"...Qiangren Suonan went over to snap it. We might as well head back to the forward operating base and wait for his report."
The entire camp was now in utter ruin; nobody would pay attention to a fat rat rummaging through the rubble.
Besides, Xizhou City was already in the grip of a rat plague.
Rats scurrying through the debris after an explosion were completely normal. Even if someone spotted him at a time like this, they wouldn't bother.
Still, they had truly kicked a hornet's nest this time.
An enraged Golden Fang deployed five whole thousand-man units, issuing a death order to the chiliarch responsible for southern patrols that night:
If he failed to purge all New Alliance paratroopers from Xizhou City before the end of the month, he would be shaved into a human stick and tossed into the lake to feed the crabs!
The marauders across Xizhou City went completely berserk.
Patrol units swelled from ten-man squads to full hundred-man companies. Instead of patrolling main thoroughfares, they shifted to sweeping every building floor by floor in a carpet search.
Yet the players weren't rattled in the slightest; if anything, they were thrilled beyond belief.
What did this mean?
It meant the enemy was tilting!
Only with feedback came motivation. Next time they'd ramp up the pressure—this time they wiped out a battalion of the Bone Chewer tribe, next time they'd aim for a division.
Even so, the forward operating base in the abandoned department store was clearly no longer safe. The radio station deployed on the apartment roof also had to be relocated east.
After conferring with the other squad leaders in the chat group, Lao Bai made an immediate decision: each squad leader would disperse their men, dividing into eight-man squads and four-man teams to melt into the city's ruins, back alleys, and subterranean transit tunnels.
Just as the guerrilla war between the Burning Corps and the Bone Chewer tribe reached a fever pitch, Chu Guang received the battle report from the front line and immediately convened a combat meeting.
"Two pieces of good news!"
"In the early hours of the morning before last, guided by our ground troops, our Switchblade successfully destroyed a Conqueror 10 tank inside an abandoned underground garage in southern Xizhou City."
"Judging by photos of the wreckage, the tank's chassis suffered catastrophic damage. The hull structure is heavily warped, and two pairs of road wheels were blown clean off."
"Practical results demonstrate that a fifteen-kilogram warhead is more than sufficient to inflict destructive damage on the chassis of a Conqueror 10! The tactical concept of suicide drones is viable!"
"Our intelligence personnel retrieved parts of the drone wreckage from the blast site."
"Because the attack was over in seconds, most direct eyewitnesses perished in the blast, and the subsequent depot explosion drew all enemy attention. In all likelihood, our enemy still doesn't know what weapon took out their tank."
Hearing this, the officers present beamed with excitement.
The news that their new gear could counter enemy armor brought even more joy than taking Qingshi County or annihilating Lion Fang's thousand-man unit.
It meant they had another viable card to play.
And a trump card at that!
Chu Guang was equally pleased.
Unlike the officers present, however, his thoughts stretched further into the future.
Being able to destroy a Conqueror 10 tank did not merely mean the New Alliance held the initiative in the upcoming decisive battle against the Bone Chewer tribe; it meant that even when facing the Legion's armored torrents, they possessed the strength to put up a fight.
Of course, Chu Guang also knew that if direct conflict ever broke out with the Legion one day, what they sent wouldn't just be tanks...
Vannus looked at Chu Guang, his instincts telling him the Administrator wasn't finished.
"Were there two pieces of news?"
"That counts as one."
Pausing to gather his thoughts, Chu Guang continued.
"The second piece... what I consider good news."
"The Bone Chewer tribe has altered its deployments. They've rushed more troops to the front line and dug blast shelters and vehicle revetments in a ravine five kilometers from Pine Valley. Our reconnaissance aircraft spotted their trucks and anti-aircraft vehicles, but no tanks were seen."
"In addition, a massive number of slaves have been sent to the front. Aerial photos show they brought along a handful of modified excavators, bulldozers, and other construction machinery."
"At a conservative estimate, there are five thousand men there!"
Five thousand!
Hearing that number, the faces of many officers in the tent turned grim.
Including Vannus.
The registered permanent residents of the New Alliance barely numbered just over five thousand in total, including the elderly, children, and women.
The enemy simply had too many bodies!
Vannus knitted his brow, though his mind was turning over something else.
"This strongly resembles the combat style of the 21st Ten-Thousand Corps... The commander is most likely Dillon. Those blast shelters and the anti-aircraft guns positioned on the high ground are probably prepared for the tanks moving to the front."
The commander of the 21st Ten-Thousand Corps!
That man was dangerous!
Vannus could already guess his plan.
It was nothing more than using terrain and defensive works to preserve his armored assets, then concentrating manpower and armored superiority to smash through the New Alliance's line under anti-aircraft cover.
Anti-aircraft vehicles couldn't stop every plane, especially when ill-prepared.
It looked as though the marauders were already prepared to sacrifice a portion of their tanks, determined to overrun the New Alliance's positions even at the cost of massive casualties.
Evidently, continuous losses and casualties had pushed them to the brink.
"...Whether it's Dillon, Golden Fang, or someone else, my gut tells me the decisive battle against these savages is right around the corner. Our opponents have begun to realize that stalling will only lead to ruin... but coming to that realization now is a little too late."
Placing both hands flat on the table, Chu Guang swept his eyes across the officers standing in the command tent, his voice crisp and decisive.
"We will intercept the Fang Clan's armored force at Pine Valley."
"That place shall be their grave!"
Chapter 317