Not far behind the Heart of Steel, a slightly smaller airship trailed close behind.
Inside the bridge.
Staring at the drastically remodeled Heart of Steel nearby, General MacLaren's face was clouded with dark resentment.
He still remembered when he stepped off that airship, how that guy in the tin can of a power armor had mockingly congratulated him.
He swore to himself.
The humiliation suffered here would be repaid tenfold in his lifetime!
Standing not far beside him, Adria, captain of the Adjudicator, frowned in deep thought for a long while before suddenly speaking out of the blue.
"I still can't wrap my head around how someone could possibly wrest that thing away."
Compared to his Adjudicator, that monstrosity was armed with cannons like a hedgehog. Even if it faced an army of a hundred thousand head-on, the latter would likely be helpless against it.
Although there was no mockery intended in his words, they sounded particularly grating to MacLaren's ears, causing the general's brow to twitch involuntarily.
"It was an accident..."
Seeing that his peer had no desire to elaborate, Adria gave a regretful shrug and pressed no further.
Even though he wore one more star on his shoulder than MacLaren, he had to consider the background behind the man.
Unlike Griffin, who had risen from the common ranks, MacLaren, like himself, belonged to the aristocratic officer corps. Even though MacLaren had suffered terrible misfortune alongside the officers of the eastern expansion faction, he would not lose his influence because of it; in fact, his record of service on the eastern front might even serve as valuable credentials.
Political stance was one thing, but in a place like Triumph City, one's social standing was an equally unavoidable reality. They both belonged to the air force hierarchy; there was no need to make an enemy over a few careless words.
A brief silence hung in the bridge.
Just then, MacLaren spoke up of his own accord.
"By the way, how did Griffin die?"
"A stroke," Adria replied reflexively. MacLaren, however, curled his lip in utter disdain.
"Cut the crap. I never saw that fool have a single health problem in his life."
Adria fell silent for a moment and sighed.
"Don't put me on the spot. He was from the army. If you're curious, you should ask Joseph—he might know something."
MacLaren said nothing, giving a slight nod. His gaze remained fixed on the Heart of Steel outside the bridge windows.
On the distant deck, planes were being wheeled out one by one. Astonishingly, those aircraft had neither propellers nor engine exhaust nozzles.
"A very bold concept," Adria remarked admiringly. "I heard about it from the captain of the Falcon Kingdom's royal guard. They hoist these wooden planes onto airships and drop them, using the airship's altitude to provide gliding momentum... Planes like these do away with propellers and engines entirely. Two carpenters can put one together.
"Though not being able to take off from the ground seems to be a limitation, it's quite an interesting expendable tool."
Once he returned, he planned to mention it to his acquaintances in the Air Force Equipment Manufacturing Bureau to see if they could produce something similar.
Still, a glider alone was useless.
It involved retrofitting strategic assets like airships, which would require not only convincing Air Force Command, but also finding captains willing to cooperate.
That would likely prove quite difficult.
Ultimately, Triumph City saw no value in learning from the natives' gear, nor did it view this conflict as a war against the Alliance—rather, it saw it as a contest between Triumph City and Ideal City.
"Can we climb a bit higher?" MacLaren, his eyes fixed on the deck, suddenly asked.
Adria nodded and gave a casual wave of his hand.
"Climb three hundred meters."
The adjutant standing by snapped to attention.
"Yes, sir!"
...
The Adjudicator gained altitude, reaching the best spectator seat available. Not far away, amid the churning dust and sand, a long, spindle-shaped craft also accelerated into position above the battlefield, hovering in place.
Including Wu Changnian standing aboard the Heart of Steel,
representatives from various factions were watching the Alliance's next move.
And the Alliance's performance did not disappoint the spectators.
Thirty gliders took off from the airship's flight deck one after another, riding the howling, churning air currents as they plunged toward the combat coordinates twenty kilometers away.
At the same time, beneath the billowing dust, Enterprise's 26th Strike Team had already engaged in fierce combat with the Blackstone mutant tribe.
Ten suits of power armor were deployed in the vanguard, bionic soldiers closely followed, and exoskeleton-equipped troopers brought up the rear.
Orange-yellow tracer rounds darted through the ruins like glowing sparks flying from a forge.
The battle was locked in an intense stalemate!
Although Enterprise had power armor and potent Gauss weaponry, the mutants held an absolute numerical advantage and superior physical stamina.
Unless their craniums were blown open by scorching metal slugs, they would continue charging forward with whirring chainsaws and dangling jaws, even if half their faces were blasted away.
"Smash 'em!"
"Chop 'em up! Into the boiling oil!"
"Wulululu!"
After gunning down over a dozen mutants, Yun Song saw a shorter mutant burst into close quarters.
Yun Song decisively discarded the broadsword-wide Gauss rifle in his hands, drew the scimitar strapped to his right thigh armor, and with a resounding clang, parried an incoming hand axe.
This blade was a gift from a general in the Lion Kingdom, said to have been forged from "heaven-sent alloy" blessed by the Spirit of the Sand Sea—which, plainly speaking, was just starship armor steel.
Armor steel salvaged from a starship was leagues beyond any scrap metal scavenged from the wasteland. The mutant's hand axe cracked instantly from the shock.
The mutant stumbled back, a flicker of surprise surfacing in its bloodthirsty eyes. Clearly, it hadn't expected this iron hulk, larger than even its hulking kin, to move with such agility.
Yet the surprise lasted only a fraction of a second, quickly overtaken by the craving for flesh and blood.
"Roar—!"
With a ferocious bellow, it swung the cracked axe and charged forward again. But before it could take two steps, a smooth, fluid white arc severed its throat.
Watching the severed head fly through the air, Yun Song flicked the blood off his scimitar and scooped up his Gauss rifle from the ground without hesitation. Backing away with practiced calm, he opened fire on the roaring mutants rushing toward him.
More than two hundred corpses lay strewn haphazardly across the ground, yet the gray-black mutants pouring from the ruins seemed endless.
"Damn it... Are there really only two thousand of these bastards?" Su Ming discarded a scorched barrel and cursed as he slotted in a fresh one.
"Roughly? Who can say for sure... I could only make an estimate based on their rations and building scale. Maybe they're growing mushrooms in underground tunnels," the drone operator replied, his scalp tingling with dread.
The mutants of the Great Desert were completely different from those on the East Coast,
both in combat style and living habits.
If this were the East Coast, they would have already called in tactical nuclear warheads or airdropped self-propelled heavy fire-support bots.
The front line formed by the power armor suits had clashed head-on with the mutants.
Three of the suits had already drawn half-meter-long combat knives, engaging in brutal melee against mutants wielding hundred-kilogram sledgehammers.
Just then, the drone operator yelled at the top of his lungs.
"Most enemy units have congregated around the bombardment coordinates! Now's the best window! Captain! How much longer on the Alliance?"
A calm reply came over the comm channel.
"Support request has been sent!"
Almost the instant the words fell, a series of booming thuds echoed from the distance.
Flashes flickering through the dust haze resembled thunderclaps under a clear sky. Accompanied by sharp whistling shrieks tearing through the air, trails of white smoke rained down directly over the battlefield.
Pillars of explosive fire soared into the sky. Expanding shrapnel and dense smoke detonated between two leaning skyscrapers, instantly engulfing over a hundred mutants.
One of the towers was struck by several artillery shells. Its warped rebar could no longer bear the load, and the entire structure began to collapse downward.
Looking up at the collapsing skyscraper, countless bloodthirsty eyes finally filled with sheer terror, but it was already too late to run.
Mutants had only enough time to instinctively raise their arms to shield against the falling debris and dust before they were crushed into paste beneath the mountain of concrete.
The collapsing building set off a chain reaction; struck at its base, the other skyscraper began to crumble as well.
The two high-rises toppling sideways formed a colossal, crisscrossing, fractured wall of ruins that bisected the battlefield right down the middle.
The resulting shockwave blasted stones and rubble hundreds of meters away, sending undulating ripples across the surface of the nearby quicksand.
"Woohoo!"
Shouldering his Gauss rifle, Su Ming pumped his fist in excitement and cheered wholeheartedly.
"Beautiful shot!"
The distant cannon fire ceased.
Yet the Alliance's offensive did not halt.
The buzzing in the sky drew steadily closer as desert-colored crosses appeared above the 26th Strike Team.
"What's that?" Gu Wei raised his muzzle toward the sky, then lowered it again.
"The Alliance's gliders. They took over the job of clearing the mutant nest," Yun Song answered briskly over the comms, finishing off a downed mutant with a casual strike. "Don't just stand there gawking. Wait any longer and there won't even be any warm soup left for us."
Su Ming spoke up.
"Warm soup? You mean the stuff inside the mutants' lair?"
The comm channel went dead silent for a moment.
"...It was a metaphor. Stop grossing me out, damn it."
...
With their retreat cut off by the collapsed towers, the attacking mutants were trapped like cornered beasts.
The 26th Strike Team instantly shifted from defense to offense, charging toward the shell-shocked mutants. Taking advantage of the fact that their wounds had not yet regenerated, the troopers delivered point-blank finishing blows with daggers and sidearms.
Against mutant variants, there was never any need to show mercy.
Gunfire rattled continuously around the ruins. In just a few minutes, nearly two hundred more mutants fell to the weapons of the 26th Strike Team under Yun Song's lead.
"Enterprise's strength isn't half bad. I thought their ground troops were a bunch of pushovers." Adria watched with a hint of appreciation in his eyes.
While equipment superiority accounted for more than half of their performance, the individual combat prowess of the soldiers was not to be underestimated either. They had chosen an enhancement path similar to the Academy's, making heavy use of smart weapons and bionic prostheses. Yet their battlefield performance presented a starkly different style from the flashy contraptions of the Academy.
"Well, when it comes to dealing with mutants, they can be considered experts." The adjutant beside Adria offered an ambiguous assessment.
"Heh," MacLaren gave a cold, mocking smirk. "After all, they created this mess. If they aren't experts at it, who is?"
Compared to Enterprise,
he cared far more about those wastelanders who had defeated him once before...
Last time, the defeat had come too quickly, too suddenly. He hadn't even gotten a clear look at how those paratroopers had overwhelmed his marine soldiers, who had been armed to the teeth.
MacLaren stared intently out of the bridge, his gaze locked onto the gliders diving toward the ground.
*Come on...*
*Let me see what you bastards are really made of.*
...
In truth, the Burning Corps possessed no remarkable landing technique whatsoever; the way their gliders hit the ground could be described as utterly clumsy at best.
The aircraft plunged into the mutant tribe's stockade like scattered flower petals. Their reinforced wings and noses acted like plows, ripping off the roofs of countless shacks.
One glider crashed straight into the livestock pen, its belly smashing directly into a cauldron of boiling oil.
A mutant shaman, who had just finished delivering a newborn, was startled out of its wits, unable to comprehend where these two-legged livestock had come from.
Dropping the whimpering infant into a nearby basket, it drew a butcher knife and charged toward the nearest aircraft with a howling roar.
Yet before it could get within five paces of the plane, rattling gunfire erupted as three fully armed warriors burst from the fuselage and blasted its head apart.
"Fuck! I almost landed in the boiling oil!" Spitting out a mouthful of bloody saliva, Ye Shi scooped up an aircraft machine gun knocked onto the ground and shoved it hard toward Jieyan beside him.
Thank goodness this plane had no fuel tank!
Even if it caught fire, they wouldn't have to care.
"Hahaha! I'll call Elaina over!" Jieyan chuckled and joked as he racked the heavy machine gun.
"Piss off!"
Ye Shi rolled his eyes.
Mid-sentence, a sharp premonition of danger surged into his mind. Almost purely on instinct, he swung his muzzle and pointed his LD-50 carbine at a nearby metal partition.
*Rat-tat-tat-tat—!*
Muzzle flashes spat fire. A clattering burst instantly punched over a dozen bullet holes through the metal panel.
A cloud of blood burst from behind the perforated barrier. A mutant soldier wielding a rifle was shredded like a sieve, letting out an agonized yelp before collapsing into the dirt.
Setting his bipod on a tilted metal drum, Jieyan immediately squeezed the trigger of his heavy machine gun.
Scorching tongues of flame roared from the barrel, instantly weaving an impenetrable web of firepower down the twisted, winding alleyway.
Before a 12mm heavy machine gun, neither the mutant flesh nor the scrap-metal barricades in front of them offered any more resistance than paper.
While the players lacked the advanced Gauss weaponry and caseless rifles of the 26th Strike Team, in terms of lethality against soft targets, the Alliance's weapons were hardly inferior.
The only difference was the shape of the wounds left on the corpses...
Nearly a hundred players landing via gliders unleashed a tempest of blood and gore throughout the Blackstone mutant tribe's stockade.
Having never anticipated a surprise attack on their rear, the mutants inside were caught entirely off guard. To make matters worse, their main force had suffered catastrophic casualties in the bombardment and could not pull back in time to reinforce the camp.
Once the livestock pen holding human captives was secured by the Alliance soldiers, the Heart of Steel initiated a second wave of bombardment targeting coordinates provided by the players.
Faced with encirclement from all sides and wave upon wave of artillery barrages, the mutants' resistance quickly disintegrated.
"By the way, where's Lao Bai? It's almost over, so why haven't I seen him?" Seeing that the mutants in the stockade were nearly all wiped out, Ye Shi shouted over his shoulder.
"He parachuted down, so it'll probably take him a while. Let's finish our work—" Before Kuang Feng could finish his sentence, a loud *thud* shook the ground nearby.
A dark silhouette crashed straight onto a row of corrugated iron sheds, its hulking bulk flattening the ten-meter-wide structure entirely.
Several adolescent mutants scrambled out of the collapsed shacks in search of weapons, but before they could take two steps, rattling gunfire pinned them to the ground.
Soon, a hearty voice came through the comm channel.
"What a coincidence. Looks like I got here right on time."
Ye Shi paused for a second, then chuckled in amusement.
"Just barely. If you'd floated up there any longer, that parachute jump would've been for nothing."
Jieyan laughed heartily. "Hahaha!"
...
Although the mutants of the Blackstone tribe were far stronger than the ones the players had encountered on 76th Street during the pioneer days, the Alliance today was no longer what it used to be.
The fierce battle lasted less than twenty minutes. Soon, only sporadic gunfire and exhausted bellows remained both inside and outside the stockade.
At the center of the camp, before a bizarre altar.
Watching the group approach from the bottom of the steps, a wrinkled mutant shaman wore a rare expression of panic and dread as it stepped forward with both hands raised.
It was dressed in beast-pelt garments, and a skull strung on a cord hung around its neck.
"Wait! Please let me see your leader! There may be a mis—"
*Bang—!*
A scorching bullet punched through its cranium, cutting short its desperate plea for mercy.
Looking at the corpse sprawled on the steps, Ye Shi spat on the ground.
"Misunderstanding my foot."
See the Administrator?
Who do you think you are?
Kuang Feng glanced at the young man.
"You killed it. Who are we going to ask for clues about the crew members now?"
Ye Shi froze, awkwardly scratched the back of his head, and mumbled guiltily,
"Didn't Lao Bai say to leave none alive..."
He had to admit, seeing their captive kin upon landing earlier had genuinely made his blood boil.
Lao Bai patted his shoulder with a smile.
"Don't worry. There are plenty of guys lying around who haven't gone cold yet. We can grab any of them to question."
With that, he walked up to the mutant shaman's body, preparing to inspect the corpse. However, when his eyes fell upon the mutant's clothing, his brows furrowed.
The woven patterns formed inverted triangles stacked on top of one another, resembling an upright torch and its flickering flame.
Lao Bai looked up at the altar ahead, only to find that the symbol carved into the stone wall was identical to the one in his memory.
The Torch?
Yet this was the Great Desert, thousands of kilometers away from the Death Coast.
How could the emblem of the Church of the Torch appear here?
Lao Bai's furrowed brow tightened further.
A coincidence?
Still, now was not the time to ponder the question.
Using his combat knife, Lao Bai cut a strip of linen from the shaman's clothing. He looked up at the altar ahead and waved his right fist.
"Keep moving!"
The outer mutants had been cleared.
Barring any surprises,
the boss fight should be right ahead!
...
Yet to the players' disappointment, there was no legendary super mutant inside the altar.
There wasn't even an elite mob.
On second thought, it made sense.
If such a terrifying creature had existed, General Klaas would have deployed it during the earlier expedition rather than holding back such a trump card to the bitter end.
After taking down a few rifle-bearing mutants guarding the altar, the group smoothly entered the great hall constructed from concrete rubble.
The place appeared to have once been a factory. Inside the workshop was a backup generator fitted with nuclear batteries, and it was still running.
Following the electrical cables, the group soon reached a side hall of the altar, where they discovered twelve upright cylindrical incubation pods.
The vats were filled with dark green fluid, submerging pale bodies whose faces were concealed behind respirators.
Bubbles steadily drifted up from the base of the pods, making it clear that the apparatuses were still operating.
Frowning, Lao Bai walked up to the control console. Just as he was about to try operating it, he realized to his embarrassment that he couldn't make heads or tails of a machine even mutants could run.
If Fang Chang were here, maybe he could figure it out...
He looked toward his comrades with an awkward smile.
"...What is this?"
Ye Shi asked, bewildered, "A clone synthesis unit?"
Recalling what he had seen on 76th Street, Kuang Feng shook his head.
"Doesn't look like it..."
"Those are treatment pods."
An unfamiliar voice sounded from behind, interrupting the players' conversation. Though spoken in an entirely different language, it cut into the discussion with surprising seamlessness.
The group turned to see Yun Song, captain of Enterprise's 26th Strike Team. He had unlatched his helmet visor and was walking over with his rifle in hand.
"Treatment pods?" Lao Bai asked in the Human Alliance language, puzzled.
"Correct."
Stopping before one of the culture vats, Yun Song looked at the apparatus with a complex expression, speaking slowly.
"They throw fertile human females with good compatibility, who are suitable as breeders, into the treatment pods... Once healed, they are used repeatedly.
"The mutants capable of operating this equipment are usually the tribe's shamans or chieftains... It's the same on the East Coast."
"How did these bastards learn to use this gear?" Lao Bai couldn't help asking.
"These devices aren't particularly difficult to operate. Sometimes the software includes simple tutorials, or even automated execution AIs..."
Pausing, Yun Song continued with a heavy look.
"Of course, it's also possible that humans taught them."
It was worth noting that while mutants were an entirely different species from humans, they were not completely incapable of communication.
In fact, they spoke the Human Alliance language too; most of them were simply dull-witted.
The few clever mutants quickly stood out from the horde of fools, becoming shamans or herders of the tribe. They knew how to trade things humans desired for things they needed.
Like slaves.
Or the tools to produce more slaves.
Mutants had no concept of pharmaceuticals.
They had to have treatment pods, cloning tanks, or a chieftain with exceptional breeding management skills.
Otherwise, with their barbaric birthing practices and the harsh environment of this region, no matter how long their individual lifespans were, they could never reproduce to a scale of over a thousand.
Yun Song strongly suspected that the Legion's General Klaas had taught these mutants how to use the treatment pods.
After all, the Wilantes were fully capable of doing so.
And they had every motive.
"Let's not dwell on that. It's good to fight alongside you..."
Glancing at the imposing power armor on Lao Bai, Yun Song bumped his fist against Lao Bai's shoulder and remarked with slight surprise,
"Is this the one from before? Incredible... You actually repaired it."
Lao Bai grinned.
"We retrofitted the interior a bit. It's not as advanced, but it works fine."
Initially, Yin Fang had helped repair it, and later, when Enterprise's delegation visited Qingquan City, Lao Bai had bought some parts from the Changge Group.
Yun Song remarked with genuine emotion,
"Prosperity Era power armor is leagues better than anything produced in the post-war years. It's just a shame we don't have the capacity to fully restore it either."
Pausing for a moment, he looked earnestly at Lao Bai and asked,
"I've searched around, and the people we're looking for aren't here. How do you plan to handle these... and the survivors rescued outside?"
Lao Bai glanced around and replied offhandedly,
"Probably the usual routine. Once their treatment is finished, we'll send them to the Refugee Home."
Yun Song asked in confusion, "What's that?"
"A place like a relief shelter."
Yun Song was momentarily taken aback, evidently not expecting the Alliance to possess such an institution. After a moment of silence, he spoke.
"Still, I think... switching off their respirators might be kinder to them. Very few people can ever recover from a hellish experience like this."
Early on, they had also delivered rescued survivors to nearby settlements, but they soon realized that doing so only caused more grief.
Most survivor settlements refused to accept those who had been captive to mutants. Even if they did Enterprise a favor for the sake of money, the most they would do was give them a few scraps of food and leave them in some out-of-the-way corner to fend for themselves.
And most of the rescued victims felt no gratitude; some even resented the soldiers for not giving them a swift end or taking them to Ideal City.
At first, he had tried to help those extra "troubles" that unexpectedly cropped up during missions, but after a few more operations, he found it only brought needless heartache.
Truth be told, not everyone had been captured; quite a few were flawed products spawned mistakenly by cloning vats.
Mercy, perhaps, lay in sending away those who had entered this world by mistake so they could begin a new life.
Lao Bai was silent for a moment, then gave a shrug.
"I don't know. Maybe you're right. But that choice belongs to them, doesn't it? At least we're doing the part we can do."
They didn't just abandon the people they rescued.
Among those freed from marauder dungeons, quite a few had ultimately failed to move past the trauma and chose suicide.
Yet there were also those who started anew and found happiness in their new lives.
"Perhaps." Yun Song nodded slightly in respect. Looking at Lao Bai and the Alliance soldiers behind him, he said, "I'll leave this place to you."
With that, he turned and walked outside.
The battle was over.
The Pioneer and the entrance to Vault 0 lay not far from this encampment.
Before welcoming Enterprise's high-level delegation, he needed to lead his troops in thoroughly sweeping the battlefield and eliminating any security hazards in the vicinity.
Watching the NPC named Yun Song depart, Lao Bai suddenly thought of something and looked toward Ye Shi standing nearby.
"By the way, bring inside those NPCs we rescued outside... if any of those survivors are still alive."
"Roger that."
Understanding his brother's intention, Ye Shi flashed an OK gesture, turned, and headed out the door.
Lao Bai turned his gaze back to the row of treatment pods.
Judging by the survivors floating in the nutrient solution, these culture vats couldn't regenerate severed limbs, but they could accelerate the healing of bodily injuries.
This was remarkably similar to the incubation pods used by the players.
The only difference was that the incubation pods used by players were calibrated strictly to matching genetic sequences; they couldn't be used by others, let alone lent to fellow players.
As for the cheaper "hibernation pods," they merely served as save points for players, devoid of any accelerated healing functions.
While players probably had no use for them, to NPCs with only one life, these contraptions were extraordinarily useful and well worth salvaging.
In the wasteland, as long as one didn't die on the spot, even severe injuries like severed arms or legs had plenty of remedies.
Lao Bai suddenly realized that this Great Desert truly concealed quite a few treasures.
Thinking of the legendary Vault 0, his anticipation grew all the keener...
Chapter 502