Two trails of white smoke split from the fiery glare of the explosion. Under the gaze of everyone watching, one plummeted toward the valley, while the other plunged toward the airfield.
Had that missile struck the runway, it would have blasted a massive crater right in the center of the airfield.
Yet as sheer luck—or misfortune—would have it, the H-55 Hurricane was midway through takeoff, already past the point of aborting.
"Fuck!"
Watching the white streak reflected against the cockpit window, Ke Lun's face twisted in horror. Cursing violently, he shoved the throttles all the way forward.
The twin engines erupted with sudden bursts of flame, hurtling the aircraft forward with escalating speed.
At the same time, he kicked the rudder slightly to the left, trying desperately to evade the incoming missile.
However—
The danger was one step faster.
Although the missile did not score a direct hit on the aircraft, landing instead beside the runway, with a metallic hydrogen warhead, a direct hit made practically no difference.
Boom—!
The blast wave expanded at a terrifying speed, sweeping shrapnel and gravel with it as it slammed into the bomber's flank, shredding the Hurricane's right wing into a sieve in an instant.
One engine abruptly stalled!
With the left engine still churning out full power, the plane violently slewed into a sharp spin across the runway, snapping the landing gear with brutal force.
Amid a screech of grinding steel that set teeth on edge, the bomber flipped onto its side, its broken wing gouging a deep trench into the dirt.
Fractures spiderwebbed across the cockpit canopy before it shattered into countless shards with a loud crash.
His face contorted in agony, Ke Lun let out a muffled groan and instantly blacked out as the world spun violently around him.
Yet right before losing consciousness, he managed to reach out with his right hand and slam the button beside the control stick.
It was the delayed detonation button, preset for thirty minutes, and only he knew the override code to disarm it.
While the forces stationed at the airfield might not necessarily lose, General Griffin had warned him not to overestimate General Macklen's competence.
He did not care whether he lived or died; he cared only for His Majesty the Marshal's ambition to conquer the world.
If the ground troops were ultimately defeated and failed to recover this nuclear warhead...
Then at the very least, the Alliance could never have it...
***
Meanwhile, in the skies above the airfield.
Looking down at the ground through his cockpit canopy, the pilot sitting inside the Sabre fighter was completely dumbfounded.
During his diving pass just moments ago, he had successfully shredded that bizarre aircraft with autocannon fire, yet who could have imagined the damn thing was still holding onto an unlaunched missile?!
What stunned him even more was that the opposing pilot, knowing full well that a single additional strafing run would finish them off, hadn't considered ejecting at all; instead, he had completely abandoned maneuverability in exchange for horizontal speed to break the sound barrier!
Everything had happened far too fast.
In Mach-level combat, both sides had only mere seconds to make decisions.
His Adam's apple bobbed. He struggled to squeeze a few curt syllables from his throat.
"Goddammit..."
Just what kind of madmen was he fighting against?
He had nearly two hundred autocannon rounds remaining.
Although he could make another diving pass on the ground, there hardly seemed to be any point.
Stripped of protection from recon vehicles and machine gun nests, General Macklen's perimeter had already been overrun by those barbarian cavalrymen.
At two hundred meters, cavalry were a laughingstock.
But at twenty meters, no one was laughing anymore.
Especially out on the open Gobi wastes...
Thick smoke began rising from the wreckage in the middle of the runway.
Looking at the wing shard embedded in the fuselage's belly, the pilot seemed to realize something, and his complexion drastically warped.
Without an instant's hesitation, he wheeled the nose around toward the west and shoved the throttle to the firewall.
At the same time, pinned hard to his seat by inertia, he shouted into the comm channel where only his voice remained:
"...This is Sabre! We have taken fire from Alliance ground forces. Hurricane is unable to take off! Mission cannot proceed! Requesting permission to RTB!"
"Repeat, requesting permission to RTB!"
The nearest airfield was a thousand kilometers away; naturally, no one could answer him.
Yet whether anyone answered or not, he had to withdraw...
***
Not only was the pilot in the sky stunned and bewildered, but so was the ground-bound "air force" down below.
Having just climbed into his jeep, Macklen stared blankly at the black smoke rising from the airfield, a tinge of despair gradually surfacing in his eyes.
Not only because that was his last and only escape route...
...but even more so because of what was loaded on that plane...
The officer clutching the steering wheel swallowed hard and glanced nervously to his side.
"General... are we still going?"
They had originally intended to go to the airfield to stop the plane.
Looking at it now, there no longer seemed to be any need.
General Macklen's throat moved. After a long moment, he squeezed out the words:
"It's over."
With those words, his shoulders slumped back against the seat.
The officer beside him froze, his eyes filled with astonishment as he looked at General Macklen.
This man, once brimming with vigorous ambition in the prime of his life, seemed to have aged more than a decade in a single instant...
The thunderous pounding of hooves surged to the south of the camp, accompanied by deafening battle cries that shook the heavens.
As the elite of Petra Fortress, every single mount in this cavalry unit was a black stallion from the Great Desert. And every warrior in the saddle was, without exception, a fierce and battle-hardened fighter.
Having lost the protection of heavy firepower, the southern defense line of the Legion camp was instantly trampled to pieces. Surging into the perimeter, cavalrymen rampaged unchecked, spearing anyone in sight with fixed bayonets or firing rifles, throwing the entire camp into bloody chaos.
"Capture the enemy commander alive!" bellowed the guard captain charging at the fore.
Yet the riders had already worked themselves into a blood frenzy; no one cared about his orders. Trampled and bayoneted corpses littered the ground everywhere, among them not a few who had fallen to their knees to surrender.
Surrender?
Why didn't you think of that while crouching behind your machine guns earlier?
Even if you're surrendering—
Wait until I've slaughtered half of you first!
Thinking of their comrades who had perished during the charge, the cavalrymen roared with rage.
Whether they were Wellanites who had come from afar or Falcon Kingdom soldiers, they had all become meat on the chopping block. Anyone who rushed out or stood outside the tents was killed on the spot.
Nor did those hiding inside the tents fare any better.
To avoid getting horse legs tangled in tent ropes and cloth, the cavalry never charged the tents directly. Instead, they flicked lighters to ignite bottles stuffed with cotton wadding and filled with kerosene and alcohol, hurling them hard into the tents.
These makeshift Molotovs were far more effective than grenades and cheap to make—giving them a shake before throwing made them burn even better.
Seeing the flames behind them, Centurion Wisde immediately led his troops back from the western front to reinforce the rear.
Although the defenders of Petra Fortress were numerous, their combat capability was not on the same level as the Falcon Kingdom's.
Many militiamen were so poorly trained they couldn't even dig proper foxholes, thinking that scooping out a hole and shoving their heads in was enough, unaware that half the backs of their heads were sticking out in plain view of the enemy.
It was precisely for this reason that Wisde had had the leeway to detach a thousand-man Retinue Army unit, regrouping them before charging back toward the airfield.
However—
Just as he rode his three-wheeled motorcycle to the edge of the camp, before he could even join the fray, he saw flashes of fire erupting due east.
Boom—!
Even before the deafening roar of artillery could reach them, bursts of flame bloomed across the dunes.
Before two decuries could disperse and hit the dirt, the single high-explosive shell wiped both squads out entirely.
"Tanks!" a retinue centurion shrieked in despair at the top of his lungs. "Everyone disperse!"
Yet that desperate scream was utterly useless—not even enough to count as a dying struggle.
Those were tanks!
And more than just one!
Along the distant horizon slowly being cloaked in night, black silhouettes emerged one after another.
Tanks arrayed in a single line, their dark gun barrels thrusting forward in unison, trailed by a vast, churning plume of dust.
Looking at the iron flood materializing on the horizon, despair crept across the faces of the Falcon Kingdom soldiers.
They didn't even have anti-tank weapons.
Against monsters like that, they were utterly helpless!
That first shell had merely been the prelude.
Once the first struck home, the other dozen-plus tanks opened fire in rapid succession.
Across the open Gobi wastes, deadly plumes of dust and debris detonated one after another, wiping out zones the size of basketball courts.
Any organism grazed by the fire of the blast was blown into a smear of shredded flesh.
And even without a direct hit, countless men were sliced apart by high-explosive fragments or had their internal organs ruptured by the blast waves.
A nearly full millennium unit was halved in a single volley.
The caliber of those shells was plainly well over 100 millimeters—likely 150 millimeters or more.
Without fortifications or cover to take shelter behind, facing the king of ground warfare, infantry could expect nothing but a one-sided slaughter.
Right now, only the tank cannons were firing.
Once they closed to the effective range of coaxial machine guns, an interlocking web of fire awaited them.
Clambering up from his overturned motorcycle, Wisde stared at the distant iron torrent. His resolute eyes first held confusion, which then sank into bottomless despair.
"...It's over."
Everything was over...
***
The battle outside Lost Valley was already over.
With the arrival of the Alliance tank forces, General Macklen completely gave up any hope of fleeing.
In truth, it was too late anyway.
Unless it were an aircraft, nothing could cover a hundred kilometers within an hour.
"General... what should we do?" the officer behind the jeep's wheel asked, looking despairingly at General Macklen beside him.
He didn't even know which direction to run.
Macklen's Adam's apple bobbed; he couldn't squeeze out a word for a long time.
He did not consider himself a failed commander. He had deployed every unit to where it belonged and made the soundest tactical dispositions.
Yet he could not conjure a ten-thousand-man legion out of thin air, much less order nonexistent troops to attack.
Where were Griffin's tanks, anyway?
Even if Camp 530 had fallen, at most a third of the armor should have been lost.
That bastard couldn't have failed to anticipate that if the Alliance deduced their plan, they might dispatch mobile forces to raid the airfield.
But where were the Conqueror tanks?
Where was that "Prowler" the army bragged about so relentlessly?
Why did he see only Alliance tanks?
And why had the garrison of Petra Fortress suddenly crawled out of their turtle shell?
Hadn't the nobles of the Falcon Kingdom sworn up and down that even if heads rolled outside, those cowards would never dare emerge from their shell?
Where on earth had things gone wrong?
He simply could not comprehend it.
However...
Saying any of this now was pointless.
Before a megaton-yield three-phase bomb, all struggling was in vain.
Silently, Macklen drew his pistol, trembling as he aimed it beneath his chin and clicked off the safety.
He closed his eyes, yet his shaking index finger felt as heavy as lead; though he trembled for some time, he could not pull the trigger.
With humiliation stamped across his face, he lowered the weapon and gazed up at the night-draped sky.
So be it...
It was merely trading one way to die for another.
The thunder of artillery from the northeast drew nearer, while the pounding hooves and blood-chilling battle cries of cavalry echoed from the south.
The officer in the driver's seat suddenly started the engine and slammed down on the gas.
Thrown back against his seat by the sudden acceleration, Macklen uncharacteristically showed no anger, asking with a bitter smile:
"Where do you plan to go?"
"The valley! If we can hide in the valley, we have a chance to live!" His boot welded to the accelerator, the officer's eyes were bloodshot.
Theoretically, perhaps that was true.
Whether cavalry, infantry, or those tanks, all would be reduced to ash in the nuclear blast...
The jeep's trunk held chemical protective suits and other survival gear. If they hid deep inside the valley, they might actually survive.
The desire to live rekindled in Macklen's chest.
Just then, however, he caught sight of a truck hurtling out from the distant valley, speeding toward the airfield.
What was that truck trying to do?
Macklen frowned slightly.
An ominous foreboding crept into his heart.
Just like the ominous premonition he had felt days earlier...
***
In the truck.
Gripping the steering wheel, Sisi glanced in the rearview mirror, then looked toward the burning aircraft ahead. Tapping her earbud with an index finger, she said:
"Ah Wei, you've made up your mind?"
"Yeah! I've made up my mind!"
Her short hair blown into a bird's nest, Tail nodded from behind the machine gun mount, a rare look of earnestness on her face.
"I already thought about it when Teddy died... maybe everyone is really alive."
Surprise flickered across Sisi's face.
The same was true for Sesame Paste in the passenger seat and Rou Rou in the truck bed.
"...Digital life? Or something like that... Honestly, I don't really understand it either. But with the other NPCs, I've always felt they aren't just background extras in an RPG or tool characters to hand out quests.
"They cry, they laugh, they have people they hate and people they love. They run their own lives, not just repeating scripted routines. They're truly living their lives, just like we do in reality."
As she spoke, she grew vexed herself, unsure of how best to put it.
Sisi glanced into the rearview mirror, lost in thought.
"Yeah, but if you look at it that way, what about the enemies we kill...?"
Tail answered in a resolute tone:
"They're alive too."
"Then..." Sesame Paste parted her lips blankly.
Tail replied without hesitation, "Even so, when it's time to shoot, I'll still shoot! No matter what, robbing and murdering are wrong, and if the bad guys refuse to surrender, more people will die. So if they won't surrender, it's better if they just die."
Sisi gave a surprised glance in the rearview mirror at Tail, who could barely keep her eyes open against the wind.
Still, she said nothing more.
She had actually pondered this question long ago, but her immersion was rather flexible.
Even Oscar-winning screenwriters couldn't make every plot and every character appeal to everyone, let alone an ordinary RPG.
She simply chose to immerse herself in whatever interested her.
As for the rest, she took it as it came.
You couldn't go around killing people in real life, but in a game...
Dead was dead.
"I say... do any of you know how to disarm a nuke?" Clinging to the truck bed railing with her paws, Rou Rou called out nervously as she eyed the burning plane.
"Nope! Haven't a clue!"
Rou Rou said, half-laughing, half-crying:
"Then what's the point of us going over there?"
"There's bound to be something we can do..."
Sesame Paste offered some comfort, though in truth she had no idea what to do either; she was just a teacher.
Tail: "Exactly! Like hauling the nuke into the valley!"
Rou Rou froze.
"But if we do that, the ruins..."
"Yep. Save the dungeon, or save the people outside—it's a multiple-choice question with only one pick..." Sisi remarked casually as she gripped the wheel. "That's why I told Ah Wei to be sure."
Rou Rou: "What if we drive the truck as far away as possible?"
Sisi: "To the west is Petra Fortress, to the east are our friends from the Skeleton Corps, so we could only drive north. I don't mind sacrificing myself... Want to gamble on how far we can make it before it blows?"
Tail: "It's fine, Rou Rou! The game map is huge. Ah Guang will just have to work hard and make a couple more!"
Rou Rou sighed and sat back down in the truck bed.
"Fair enough."
Besides, the rewards from this expedition were already plenty.
A nuclear weapon produced different destructive effects depending on where it detonated.
An airburst undoubtedly inflicted the greatest casualties on personnel.
Whether through shockwaves or thermal radiation, an airburst achieved the widest coverage, and radioactive fallout could be carried hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away on atmospheric currents.
Next was a surface burst.
A deep crater would form at the hypocenter, with a portion of the shockwave venting upward in a cone.
This method was primarily used to destroy hardened fortifications, producing slightly lesser effects against personnel.
As for an underground detonation, that was mainly for nuclear tests.
The center of the Great Rift Valley contained sufficiently deep caverns, likely gouged out by some orbital weapon; though partially filled in over the passage of time, depths of a hundred meters or so remained.
That was their objective.
As long as they dropped the nuclear warhead into that nearly vertical shaft, the blast's collateral impact would be minimized.
The truck skidded to a halt beside the airfield.
The group scrambled out in a flash.
Grabbing the entrenching shovel resting beside her seat, Sisi was about to step forward when Rou Rou volunteered:
"Let me do it!"
Though Mutant-path players had clumsy hands with tools, their base stat sheets were overwhelmingly monstrous.
Having located the bomb rack, Rou Rou let out a roar of exertion and ripped away the sagging steel plate, exposing the nuclear warhead nestled inside the belly along with the metal brackets securing it.
Fortunately, the thing could be detached.
Ignoring her singed fur, Rou Rou threw her entire strength into snapping two aluminum alloy struts and finally hauled the roughly person-tall warhead and its mounting frame out from beneath the fuselage.
Looking down at the cylinder on the ground, a sudden wave of lingering dread washed over her. She glanced cautiously at her teammates.
"...Is this thing going to blow?"
Sisi shook her head.
"No idea. If it doesn't, all the better. What we're doing is just in case."
***
Meanwhile, somewhere inside Lost Valley.
Waking from his stupor, Luo Yu shook his groggy head and looked around, confusion slowly welling in his eyes.
"...Where the hell is this?"
Ahead was pitch darkness, like some nameless cavern. Behind him, faint slivers of light filtered in amid the howling whoosh of wind, meaning he was likely perched high up.
The Cloud Dragonfly lacked conventional ejection seats, equipped instead with a far more protective escape pod.
The parachute had failed to fully deploy, sending the pod crashing directly into the mountain face—its front half wedged into a cave, while its rear hung exposed outside.
Judging by the concrete debris scattered about, this place didn't look like a natural geological formation; it looked more like it had been plastered over with shoddy cement.
According to posts by other players on the forum, local residents lent Lost Valley a mythical aura, and in earlier times there were believers of the Sky God. This was presumably the temple they had built... or a corner of it.
Yet Luo Yu couldn't help feeling that rather than a temple, this looked more like a shaft dug out by grave robbers.
Still, events from a hundred years ago were impossible to verify now.
Perhaps there had never been any believers, only a handful of scavengers who came here picking through junk, later stamped with labels they themselves never knew through distorted rumors.
Such coincidences were hardly unprecedented in history...
Clambering out from the wreckage, Luo Yu located the survival kit inside the escape pod.
A 5mm pistol, two 15-round magazines, basic medical supplies like bandages, a flashlight, and other tools.
Regrettably, however, his copilot buddy hadn't survived. Inside the crushed seat remained only a pool of blood, not even an intact body.
To say nothing of the VM strapped to his leg.
Luo Yu held a moment of silent prayer for him in his heart, packed the second survival kit into his backpack, and headed deeper down the cave with his flashlight, searching for an exit.
The wide tunnel led who knew where, but the dark red mold patches in the corners looked strikingly familiar.
Swallowing hard, Luo Yu drew his pistol and chambered a round. Holding the flashlight in a reverse grip in his left hand, casting a narrow beam, he crept cautiously forward.
The patches on the walls grew denser.
A rust-eaten ladder appeared ahead.
The path above was blocked by massive collapsed boulders, while below lay pitch-black darkness that seemed bottomless.
With no other option, he could only press on.
Especially after descending via a dilapidated stairway, at least half of an entire wall was encrusted in red mold.
Not only that, even the surrounding air carried the rancid stench of spores.
Just as Luo Yu had anticipated, a gnawer appeared ahead.
Yet right as he muffled his footsteps, preparing to sneak up and knife the creature, it seemed to notice him.
And then...
It spoke.
"Hey, is that a flashlight? Don't point it at me. The slime mold hates bright things."
Luo Yu froze, his gun nearly going off by accident.
"You talk?!"
"What do you mean 'I talk'...? You have a bizarre accent. What dialect is that?"
Luo Yu took a step back while keeping his eyes locked on him, moving the flashlight beam aside as he asked warily:
"Who are you?"
"Who am I... Hmm, good question, but I can't quite remember." The speaker didn't seem to pay any mind to the gun, replying casually.
Luo Yu's eyes were full of bewilderment.
What the hell?
"Can't remember...?"
"Names are for other people to use. It's been so long since anyone visited that I forgot."
The speaker gave a hearty chuckle, still standing with his back turned, without looking around.
Luo Yu stared at the back of his head.
"Can you turn around?"
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah..." Luo Yu nodded.
The figure didn't make a fuss and turned around readily.
Yet the moment Luo Yu laid eyes on him, he was completely stunned, unable to keep a "Holy shit" from slipping out.
That face—
No, it could hardly be called a face anymore. It was like a log of rotted wood soaked for ages in water, hideously contorted into pure grotesque horror.
Those rotten-wood lips parted and moved as the figure spoke in a cheerful voice:
"Right, it's been so long since I've seen a living person. Seeing you jogged my memory about a few things from the past..."
Pausing for a second, he added:
"You may call me White Dove."
Luo Yu was slightly stunned. The name sounded vaguely familiar.
Then it hit him—he suddenly remembered the work Sisi had translated on the forums earlier.
With disbelief surfacing in his eyes, he asked, dumbfounded:
"...You're a researcher from the Academy?"
White Dove pondered for a moment.
"The Academy... Ah, that's truly a nostalgic name. Are those nerds still around? Or have they rotted away in the swamp?"
"Probably still around..."
Even if only as background lore in this game.
Looking at that chilling face, Luo Yu couldn't resist pressing on with the question he cared about most:
"Wait, didn't you die years ago?"
White Dove nodded.
Perhaps because it had been an eternity since he had encountered a living soul to talk to, he began chattering away:
"Mm... Had things gone as expected, I would have grown old uneventfully and lain down in a coffin like any other old man. But in the end, I couldn't resist my curiosity about these ruins. Can't be helped—everyone from the Academy is like that. It's so hard for us to rein in our interest in ruins... even though I left the Academy many years ago."
Luo Yu's expression grew subtle.
The Alliance's chief researcher had also come from the Academy, but that guy's curiosity about ruins was rather lukewarm; in comparison, he was far more interested in his coffee machine.
"So what state are you in right now?"
The man confessed frankly:
"Symbiosis."
"Symbiosis?!"
Seeing Luo Yu's wide eyes, he smiled and said:
"Don't be so tense. Symbiosis isn't parasitism. Two organisms coexisting, sharing each other's prosperity, possessing without dominating... Don't you think that sounds wonderful?"
Before Luo Yu could collect his thoughts, White Dove glanced toward the pitch-black corridor behind him.
"Oh, by the way, let me introduce my partner... Hey, Xiao Hong, come out and say hello to our guest."
A spine-chilling dread crept up Luo Yu's back.
Stiffly turning around, he saw a humanoid creature eight—or perhaps nine—feet tall.
In the peripheral beam of the flashlight, he glimpsed a bloody, vivid crimson.
Its facial features were abstract; its mouth and nose were mere rough contours with no discernible openings, as if they had not yet evolved.
Its eyes were particularly peculiar: hemispherical like a fly's, assembled from countless hexagonal facets, faintly radiating a scarlet glow.
Two slender arms hung by its sides, ending in flared openings like wide sleeves, yet devoid of any hand structure.
As for its lower body, it was even more abstract.
Beneath a slender waist hung an inverted cone of creep, resembling the trailing hem of Lissandra's dress.
At first glance, this thing looked a bit like the evolved organism that had appeared in the previous Tide.
Only, it wasn't quite as ferocious.
If one had to point out a difference, the one that had emerged from downtown Qingquan City was like a shark with a gaping, bloody maw, whereas the one before his eyes was more like a dolphin.
Tendrils as thick as index fingers wafted out from behind it, circling around him like a dolphin's snout, though without drawing too close.
Watching those tendrils mere inches away, Luo Yu swallowed nervously.
He had no idea what kind of monstrosity this was.
He only hoped the shitty devs had a shred of humanity left in them.
Chapter 444