The dusk falling from the sky seemed to set the horizon ablaze. Across the boundless Gobi desert, wrecked steel and slowly burning flames were everywhere to be seen.
At the very same time the "Cloud Dragonfly" launched its surprise attack on the airfield, nearly a hundred kilometers east of Lost Valley, the tank battle between the Alliance's Skeleton Corps and the Falcon Kingdom's 1st Armored Motorized Millennium had reached its final moments.
The forty heavy tanks of the Falcon Kingdom's 1st Armored Motorized Millennium were virtually wiped out!
The remaining four had broken down on the Gobi wastes with ruined engines and shattered treads, left to await a rescue that might never come...
Before a 60-megajoule railgun, equivalent armor one meter thick—or even one and a half meters thick—was as flimsy as paper.
After all, before the Prosperity Era, those were naval guns mounted on warships!
Against ground-crawling vehicles like tanks, a single hit to the upper glacis or the turret was more than enough.
As fate would have it, because the Legion commanders misjudged the Alliance's firepower and stretched their defensive line far too thin, the Alliance's armored formations punched clean through the Falcon Kingdom's paper-thin defenses virtually unopposed.
Scattered along more than ten kilometers of front line, the heavy tanks had no choice but to bite the bullet, leave their cover, pivot around, and attempt to assemble while giving chase.
With the enormous disparity in firing range and the open terrain of the Gobi desert, these heavy tanks quickly turned into mobile iron coffins.
And cursed with terrible mobility, once locked onto by the railguns, they didn't even have a chance to evade, left entirely at the mercy of 60-megajoule shells picking them off one by one.
Faced with a hopeless battle, many Falcon Kingdom tank crews gave up entirely, abandoning their vehicles and fleeing the instant a railgun drew a bead on them.
They were tanks handed down by their suzerain anyway.
It wasn't their place to grieve over scrap metal.
At least a third of the Conqueror 10s were paralyzed by panic in just this way.
By comparison, it was actually the fifty Conqueror 5 light tanks that gave the Alliance considerable trouble, relying on their superior mobility.
Yet light tanks were still light tanks; no amount of agility could offset the deficit in armor and gun caliber. There was no need for the tank destroyers to get involved—a single 155mm high-explosive round was enough to finish one off.
The vast majority of Conqueror 5s weren't disabled by armor penetrations, but rather had their crews killed by the overpressure shockwaves of high-explosive shells.
Brother Mole even believed that if their mission objective hadn't been the airfield, and if he had been given enough time and ammo, they could have wiped out this armored force without taking a scratch...
However, things never unfolded as smoothly as planned.
Plans failing to keep up with changing reality was the norm.
Had the Legion anticipated that the Alliance could mount 60-megajoule railguns on tanks, they certainly wouldn't have deployed in this stretched-out snake formation to guard against them; instead, they would have concentrated all their armored units like the Alliance, using the intervals between the tank destroyers' shots to rush inside two kilometers.
Had the Alliance anticipated that the Prowler tank had already been deployed to Sunset Province and known from intelligence that it was waiting along the Skeleton Corps' advance route, they surely would have postponed the start of the entire operation... even if doing so increased the risk of suffering a nuclear strike.
Unfortunately...
This game was too realistic to entertain "what-ifs."
As the Prowler tank joined the battle, the Skeleton Corps, whose breakthrough had been going fairly smoothly, quickly found itself bogged down in a bitter fight.
Even a twenty-kilogram steel dart backed by 60 megajoules of muzzle kinetic energy still could not pierce the Prowler's Meissner effect armor.
After an intense, desperate struggle, the only five Type 2B tank destroyers were ultimately picked off and destroyed one by one by that impenetrable monster.
On the official forums of *Wasteland OL*, a chorus of wails arose.
Players who had been "kicked offline" by that boss kept popping up on the forums to share their firsthand grievances, posting in droves about how unscientific it all was.
"Fuck! Did that thing lock its HP?!"
"I hit the damn thing with at least two shots, and it didn't even flinch!"
"Sixty megajoules! Even a naval gun can't pierce it?!"
"...It's definitely hacking."
"Where are the devs! Calling the dev!"
"Maybe that dog dev is driving it himself!"
Probably working overtime, with no time to browse the forums.
In the end, Ah Guang never showed up despite all their tags.
And in the eyes of many, this only confirmed their suspicion: "Dog Guang is definitely the one driving that thing to abuse us."
Aside from those venting curses, many players were analyzing the armor's weaknesses.
"What's the deal with that turtle shell?"
"The setting compendium on the official site mentions it's related to superconductivity... but doesn't explain how it actually works or what the principle is."
"Superconductivity... so conductive shells won't work?"
"Could very well be true. Besides, railgun kinetic slugs have high conductivity to begin with. Those shots of ours looked like direct hits, but they might not have even touched the hull."
The so-called Meissner effect is the phenomenon where a superconductor expels magnetic fields during its phase transition from a normal state to a superconducting state.
According to descriptions on the forum, when a projectile approaches the Prowler tank, it undergoes a phase transition to a superconducting state due to some mechanism.
At the same time, the Prowler generates a magnetic field of its own. When a superconductor enters this magnetic field, lossless induced currents form on its surface, producing an opposing magnetic field of equal magnitude.
On the surface, it appeared that the projectile bounced off the armor, but in reality, the projectile never made contact at all—it was repelled by the magnetic field at infinitesimal distance.
Coupled with steeply sloped wedge armor, conventional kinetic weapons couldn't penetrate its defenses at all, at most scratching the outer plating.
The only thing Brother Mole could be grateful for was that, although the boss fight had gone poorly, the scales of overall victory still tipped in their favor.
The mission objective was never to wipe out every enemy tank in an encounter, but to raid the northern airfield at Lost Valley, a hundred and fifty kilometers from the battlefield.
Unreasonably overpowered though the "Prowler" was, it was only a single vehicle.
His final order to "break into small groups" and "advance dispersed" had proved effective after all; fewer brothers had been destroyed and knocked offline than expected.
Despite heavy casualties, fifteen Type 2 tanks had successfully moved beyond communication range.
For the remaining off-road trek of nearly a hundred kilometers, two to three hours should be plenty.
Barring any accidents, they should arrive before sunset.
Having stayed behind to delay the pursuers, the only thing he could do now was trust his teammates...
Shaking his groggy head, Brother Mole, who had been offline for quite some time, finally dragged his wavering consciousness back from the dark.
Half an hour ago, his tank had taken a shell.
At the time, he hadn't felt a thing—only a sudden jolt beneath his feet, followed by a pale-blue pop-up before his eyes: [Connection Lost].
And the kind where you couldn't reconnect no matter what you tried!
Because the No. 60 railgun used on the Type 2B was paired with a metallic hydrogen battery, once pierced, survival was virtually impossible.
So after finding himself disconnected, Brother Mole had all but given up hope of logging back in.
Yet the absence of a respawn cooldown ticking down inside his helmet rekindled a spark of hope in his chilled heart.
Perhaps his persistence moved the server; after trying for nearly half an hour, his vision blurred for an instant and he was back inside the tank.
He actually reconnected!
Discovering that this "zippo" hadn't exploded, Brother Mole had no time to rejoice, nor did he hesitate for a second; he immediately logged off to summon his two fellow crew members back into the game.
Judging by the scene before him, however...
The only one who had successfully reconnected with him seemed to be the driver sitting in front of his left leg.
As for the one in front of his right leg, he had been reduced to a sticky pool of blood and charred flesh—even the Administrator probably wouldn't recognize him now.
"Holy shit..."
Brother Mole clicked his tongue.
Even with sensory filters dampening the horror, looking at that mangled corpse still sent an uncontrollable chill creeping across his scalp.
If this game ever got an official publishing license, he'd spell his name backward!
Forcing down the nausea roiling in his gut, he began checking the tank's condition.
The shell had struck the lower right front glacis. Although it had punched clean through the reinforced hull along with the engine and their Strength-type human autoloader, by sheer luck it hadn't damaged the turret.
The left fuel tank was intact, eliminating the risk of a fire.
The metallic hydrogen battery was located on the upper right glacis, only a hair's breadth from being grazed by the shell—thankfully, that hair's breadth had spared them.
Brother Mole tried charging the capacitor, but pressing the charge switch yielded no reaction at all, its indicator light stuck on red.
Having confirmed the damage, he immediately shouted to the driver in front of his left leg:
"The capacitor is busted! How are things on your end?"
"Engine is totaled! Chassis drivetrain is snapped, this baby's ready to be melted down at the scrapyard... Fuck, infantry outside!" Wedged amid the twisted steel, the Constitution-type driver pressed his eye to the observation slit and yelled in alarm, "It's Falcon Kingdom guys!"
Hearing infantry closing in, Brother Mole's heart tightened. He gripped the periscope and swiveled it due west, in the direction the tank's nose was facing.
Nine men were limping down the dunes over there; judging by their gear and weapons, they were light infantry from the Falcon Kingdom's 1st Armored Motorized Millennium.
Carrying rifles in their hands and anti-tank rocket launchers on their backs, they were spreading out cautiously to encircle this unexploded Type 2 tank destroyer.
His Adam's apple bobbed. Brother Mole unhooked the LD-50 carbine hanging inside the turret and unfolded its folding stock.
"...Go fix the capacitor. I'll deal with them."
"Fix the capacitor?!" The Constitution-type player froze for a second, glancing back at Brother Mole in surprise. "What's the use of fixing that? A railgun's metal slug can't penetrate that monster's defense anyway!"
Earlier, five railguns had fired simultaneously, and that thing had stood there without flinching an inch.
According to the forum veterans, that armor was probably designed specifically against railguns. Any metallic projectile was completely hard-countered, with no way around it.
As for HEAT rounds and high-explosive shells...
They had already tried every trick in the book.
"We only get one shot either way..." Brother Mole said in a low voice. "It might not work, but I want to try one more time."
"Fine..."
The player nodded, squeezed out from his warped seat with difficulty, and located the toolbox next to the loader.
The damaged capacitor sat right by the loader's right foot.
Looking at the blood carbonized by electrical current and the cleanly severed wires, the player felt his scalp tingle with dread.
Brother Mole's voice came from above.
"Can it be fixed?"
He bit the bullet.
"...I'll do my best."
"It's on you."
Brother Mole took a deep breath, his left hand gripping the hatch handle and his right clutching the LD-50, intending to climb out of the turret and open fire before the infantry got any closer.
Right at that moment, however, a rapid burst of gunfire suddenly rattled from outside the tank.
Hearing the gunfire, Brother Mole was taken aback.
The sound of an LD-47?!
Having played *Wasteland OL* for so long, he wouldn't mistake the sound of his own allies' weapons.
Without hesitation, Brother Mole immediately swiveled the periscope toward the shots.
To the front right of the tank, Elaina was prone atop a dune, spraying bursts from an LD-47 down at the Falcon Kingdom soldiers.
Besides Old Na, Elven King Fugui and three other armored grenadiers from the Skeleton Corps were firing along with him.
As mechanized infantry players of the Skeleton Corps, both their combat awareness and sequence levels ranked near the top of the server.
Caught off guard by the plunging fire, the ten-man squad below was quickly turned into sieves, tumbling into pools of blood.
Seeing the threat neutralized, Brother Mole tapped his index finger against his VM, instantly switching to Elaina's comm channel.
"Old Na! What's the situation on your end?"
"We're all good, just wiped a squad... Holy shit? You're still alive?" Hearing Brother Mole's voice, Elaina paused mid-reload, dumbfounded.
Earlier, he'd been knocked senseless by an HE round in a foxhole. When he logged off and visited the forums, he happened to see Brother Mole's post and assumed the guy was done for.
And yet, holy crap, he'd actually reconnected!
Since when did Agility-types have the recovery power of Constitution-types?!
"Heh heh, after being unlucky for so long, isn't it only fair that I hit the jackpot once? My hearing's a bit messed up, but it's no big deal. It's just that our tank is pretty much totaled, though my driver's doing emergency repairs..."
Hitting the jackpot, huh.
Elaina's expression turned odd.
Wasting all your luck just on staying alive—isn't that a total waste?
You should've saved it for the gacha pulls...
Still, now wasn't the time for snark.
Seeing that Brother Mole was alive, he quickly asked:
"Can your tank be fixed?!"
"The engine is probably a lost cause, but the onboard capacitor should be fine. Just reconnect all the broken wires and we're good to go... probably." Catching the glare from his crewmate fixing the parts, Brother Mole hastily tacked on that last word.
Elaina swallowed hard.
"Then... what do we do now?"
Brother Mole took a deep breath to steady his nerves.
"Can you see that Prowler?"
Elaina grabbed the binoculars hanging from his neck and swept them across the surroundings.
After quite a while, he answered:
"Can't see it... Wait, there's a huge plume of smoke to the southwest, heading in our direction!"
"Yeah, probably heard your shots. I figure he'd come over to investigate," Brother Mole said.
Prone beside Elaina, Elven King Fugui peered in that direction as well, muttering under his breath:
"That's bizarre... Does that iron hunk's engine not produce heat? I can't spot a single heat source."
He had felt it was weird earlier too.
Other tanks glowed white-hot with heat.
Only that Prowler appeared pitch-black in his thermal vision.
"Not seeing a heat source is normal; seeing one would be abnormal."
Brother Mole drew a deep breath and continued slowly, "Listen closely... Regardless of whether this works, we have one chance left, and only one."
The corps members fell silent, awaiting his orders.
Brother Mole paused before continuing:
"To the northwest of your position, there's a disabled light tank... If I remember correctly, it was knocked out by a 155."
Elaina asked at once:
"And then?"
"Find a way to start it up!" Brother Mole said.
Elaina stared blankly.
"Holy shit... I've never driven a tank before."
With that, he quickly glanced at Elven King Fugui beside him, hoping to find a confident look on the guy's face, only to find him looking equally lost.
The Alliance's trucks weren't hard to drive—anyone with hands could do it.
A tank was an entirely different story.
Not to mention, it wasn't even their own tank, but an enemy one.
Still...
In Brother Mole's view, that didn't matter.
He never expected the Conqueror 5's 60mm "pea-shooter" to pose any real threat to the Prowler.
Taking a deep breath, he said seriously:
"Don't worry! Just follow my lead..."
...
On the Gobi wastes.
Having received word that the infantry had engaged the enemy, Stan directed his driver to turn around and advance toward the dunes to the northeast.
There was a destroyed Alliance tank over there.
Unlike the other tanks, it hadn't flared up like a lighter, merely sitting dead below the reverse slope of a sand dune.
Because the Alliance tanks had dispersed in flight, Stan hadn't had time to verify the kill, leaving it to the infantry of the 1st Motorized Millennium.
Yet he never imagined...
These trash heaps couldn't even manage a simple task.
"...11th Infantry Squad, report your status immediately!"
Only static crackled on the other end of the comm channel.
Ever since the gunfire broke out earlier, he had waited for a long time without receiving any reply.
Anger burned in Stan's eyes, and he couldn't help spitting a curse:
"Useless garbage..."
Tossing the communicator onto the rack beside his canteen, he pressed the switch again to activate the Meissner effect armor and ordered the driver:
"Target northeast, advance at thirty clicks!"
The driver answered crisply:
"Understood!"
No figures were visible amidst the swirling yellow sand in the distance, but he couldn't have mistaken the gunfire from a few minutes ago. He presumed it was a driver who had crawled out of the wreckage making a last-ditch struggle.
Stan didn't care about a few stragglers; what enraged him was that the infantry couldn't even handle a simple battlefield cleanup.
Handing over the great Grand Marshal's tanks to these worthless wretches was a complete waste!
The target drew closer.
With his eye glued to the gunsight, Stan tapped the driver's seat with his boot, and the driver knowingly brought the tank to a halt.
A short distance ahead.
At the foot of a sand dune two kilometers away, the desert-camouflaged wreckage of a tank lay quietly dead in its tracks.
A mangled, gaping hole was stamped into the lower glacis, punched clean through.
The turret drooped motionless, just as it had more than an hour ago.
With damage of this severity, the tank was undoubtedly a total loss, but the crew inside might not have died outright; there was still a fifty-fifty chance someone had survived.
Looking at the ten corpses two hundred meters in front of the wreckage, Stan sneered inwardly.
There were no footprints around the tank.
No bloodstains either.
The surviving crewman was most likely still hiding inside the hull, playing dead.
"Load high-explosive," Stan ordered in a frigid tone, intending to send his opponent on his final journey.
"Understood!"
The loader seated in the hull swiftly slid the armor-piercing round from the breech and chambered an orange-tipped shell in its place.
Yet just as Stan was about to finish off the wreckage with an HE shell, the tank's flank armor took a sudden blow.
*Whew—!*
A short, sharp screech scraped across the hull.
Rather than a cannon shell, it was more like a toothpick scratching across a chalkboard.
Judging by the sound, the shell's caliber wasn't even a hundred millimeters.
Stan clicked his tongue in irritation, signaling the driver to pivot the hull sixty degrees to the left toward the source of the shot.
Yet when he caught sight of the tank through his sight, he froze for a split second.
A Conqueror 5?
"Is that our tank?"
The driver noticed it too, glancing back at Stan in confusion.
Stan frowned, but quickly caught on. With a sneer, he flipped the weapon safety off.
"...Just a few bugs in their death throes."
Who were they looking down on with that sixty-millimeter pea-shooter?
Sitting there completely still, no less.
They probably haven't even figured out how to drive the damn thing!
Meanwhile, inside the targeted Conqueror 5 light tank, Elaina was scrambling frantically to shove a shell into the breech.
As he yanked the breechblock shut, he shouted to Brother Fugui in the gunner's seat:
"Did you hit it?"
"Direct hit!" His eye glued to the sight, Elven King Fugui answered offhandedly.
Curious, Elaina pressed:
"Did it work?"
"Work... like hell it did!"
Watching the Prowler swing its massive barrel straight at them, Elven King Fugui's face instantly went green.
Even though he knew he wouldn't actually die, and even though he knew this was just a game, being stared down by that gaping black muzzle still terrified him to no end.
The horrifying aura of dread struck straight to the depths of his soul...
He could already envision himself being blown into pulverized smithereens.
"Fuck me... Does Brother Mole actually know what he's doing?"
Seeing the stiff expression on his face, Elaina guessed what was happening and said with a wry grimace:
"No point asking that now. We can only trust him this once... Either way, one more shot before we bite it?"
"Son of a bitch... Aaaagh! Fuck!" Elven King Fugui cursed and roared like a madman, "I'll take you down with me!"
The instant flame flashed in the optics, he pulled the trigger almost on pure reflex.
The tongue of flame spat from the sixty-millimeter pea-shooter practically licked the tip of the incoming high-explosive round.
The blinding fireball of the explosion swallowed the turret in an instant!
Before either could even hear the detonation muffled through the steel, they were shredded into sieves by armor spalling from the interior and shrapnel tearing through the cabin.
This time, whether Agility-type or Constitution-type, they were as dead as dead could be.
However—
Before Stan, having obliterated them, could mock his foes for their folly, the sneer on his lips froze forever.
The sharply defined wedge armor buckled and folded inward; the twenty-kilogram steel dart struck like a heavy pestle pounding rice cake, blowing the hull straight in half.
The final frame burned into his retinas was the turret catapulted into the air and the secondary detonations of fire.
Right up until his death...
he never understood what had happened.
At the same time, inside the ruined Type 2B tank destroyer, electrical sparks sizzled and popped, causing the Strength-type brother—who had been dead for over an hour—to twitch his mangled, bloody legs in a macabre post-mortem spasm.
The capacitor that had just been repaired was now completely fried.
The Constitution-type driver sprawled beside the equipment was convulsing violently from the shock as well, thrashing around for quite some time before recovering his senses, having come within a whisker of being booted offline for good.
Shaking his head,
the player scrambled frantically to the driver's vision slit the moment he regained awareness, pressing his eye to it in a rush.
When he saw the roaring blaze on the dunes, he was completely astounded.
"...Holy shit?!"
A curse slipped out of his mouth, and he whipped around to look at the corps commander seated below the turret.
"It worked...?"
"Yeah..." Brother Mole had taken quite a shock himself, though due to the distance, it wasn't as severe as the driver's.
"Fucking legend!!!" Swallowing hard, the player pumped both fists in wild excitement. "Bro, how did you pull that off?"
Leaning back against his seat, Brother Mole let his tense shoulders drop completely and explained patiently:
"The Meissner effect doesn't just apply to superconductors moving toward a magnetic field; the force resisting changes in magnetic flux also acts on superconductors moving away from it... That means the moment it fires, whatever field it uses must be deactivated, otherwise the phase-transitioned shell couldn't even leave the barrel. It had two choices: either shut down the magnetic field, or shut down the field inducing the phase transition in the conductor.
"Whichever option it chose, as long as Newton's coffin lid remains firmly in place... that was the optimal firing window.
"As long as we fired the instant it fired, and as long as we hit it before its armor came back online... we had a chance to destroy it."
Pausing, he added:
"Of course... that was only my hypothesis."
It was lucky it was Meissner effect armor.
If it had been a deflector shield, that would have been far beyond high school physics.
If he couldn't even grasp the underlying principles, he really would have been helpless.
Though totally bewildered by the explanation, the Constitution-type player still swallowed hard.
"...Well, you guessed right."
Brother Mole nodded and gave a weak smile.
"To be exact, I gambled right..."
Without the protection of the Meissner effect armor, even the thickest alloy plating was nothing more than a sheet of paper before a 60-megajoule railgun.
The moment his index finger released the switch,
he realized his back was drenched in cold sweat, yet a faint, relieved smile spread across his face.
Despite heavy casualties, the Skeleton Corps had ultimately wiped out the enemy's armored force and even destroyed the seemingly invincible Prowler...
While failing to reach the airfield on schedule was unavoidable, this was the absolute best outcome he could have achieved.
At least fifteen tanks had pushed through to reinforce the attack.
And the toughest obstacle, the Prowler, had been eliminated.
With the "Ace Pilot's" micro, holding out for a few minutes shouldn't be too big a problem.
He didn't know if the Administrator would see his efforts, but in his mind's eye he could already see that glittering gold pop-up window:
[Congratulations to "Mole on the Run from the Canyon" and fellow players for securing the first kill of the "Prowler" tank!]
To leave a line like that on the Alliance's monument—
This life was totally worth it!
...
Elsewhere, in a distant, peaceful world.
No matter how fierce the fighting raged on the front lines, the atmosphere here was always carefree, a haven shared by players and armchair gamers alike.
Having logged off, Elaina was already shooting the breeze with everyone on the forums.
Hearing that Brother Mole intended to solo the Prowler, the armchair gamers who had just been analyzing the boss's weaknesses began tagging Professor Yang to come open a betting pool for everyone.
Elaina: "Don't bother betting, guys. Brother Mole hasn't logged off in so long, I'd say there's an eighty percent chance he's already handled it. Opening a pool now is just handing out free money. (doge)"
Just then, Mosquito chimed in with a cheeky remark:
"How do you know he isn't hiding from the forums out of embarrassment?"
Ye Shi: "Holy shit! That makes sense!"
Xinghe Bu Ru Meng: "Ahem, brothers of the Skeleton Corps, where are you guys? Did your tanks fall into a ditch? I've been waiting so long my gum has turned into rubber."
Elaina: "Ahem, we ran into an armored division, but we already took care of it... By the way, why are you offline? What happened on your end?"
Xinghe Bu Ru Meng: "Sigh, what could I do? We got jumped by fighters. Dodging a strafing run of autocannons and who-knows-what kind of missile was already plenty good."
Yaya: "Doesn't that mean the nuke is about to take off?! Σ(゜ロ゜;)"
Tengteng: "!!!"
Cut the Crap: "Holy shit?!"
The lurking non-combat crafters were instantly flushed out.
Xinghe Bu Ru Meng: "Ahem, before getting disconnected, I launched our last missile at the airfield. The range was pushed a bit beyond the limit... but it shouldn't be a big problem!"
Elven King Fugui: "A single missile? Is that enough punch?"
Xinghe Bu Ru Meng: "It's a metallic hydrogen warhead, bro! That's metallic hydrogen! It's gotta be enough! T.T"
It didn't even need to hit the plane; as long as it blew a crater in the runway, the aircraft wouldn't be able to take off anyway.
Elaina: "Whew, that's a relief. By the way, where's Luo Yu? Why haven't I seen him around? (doge)"
Xinghe Bu Ru Meng: "Ummm... beats me. I'm wondering the same thing."
Chapter 443