"...In recent days, spore concentrations in the air of Qingquan City have continued to rise. According to analytical findings from the Alliance Biological Research Institute, the Tide is confirmed to occur within two weeks.
The Alliance Army Command has currently designated sections of Qingquan City as temporary strategic preparation zones. Residents in the Boulder City and Dawn City areas are strongly advised to mind their personal safety, avoid moving through these sectors if possible, and refrain from lingering outside settlements—especially within the urban ruins—unless strictly necessary.
However, there is no need for excessive panic, particularly for our newcomers. The annual Tide is practically a recurring tradition in Qingquan City. Though they come in overwhelming waves, ultimate victory will undoubtedly belong to us, united as one!
Survivor Daily will bring you the latest first-hand reports from the front lines!"
In Boulder City's Pirate Bay Tavern, the lively atmosphere was like a roaring fire in a hearth, filled with the endless clinking of glasses and boisterous chatter.
Looking at the vintage radio with a holographic screen plugged into the bar counter, a drunken man let out a hiccup and sighed nostalgically.
"Really makes you miss it."
A patron beside him glanced over. "Miss what?"
"House's broadcast," the man chuckled, clearing his throat and projecting his voice loudly. "'...My dearest, dearest listeners, the Tide is fast approaching, and the bumpkins and beggars outside the Great Wall are looking on enviously at our opulent lives. Naturally, we won't open the gates. Instead, we can sit by our warm fireplaces and laugh at them—watch them howl with hunger, watch them wallow in the mud with the gnawers. Meanwhile, under the brilliant command of the militia, our boys have suffered negligible casualties. A few people did die, of course, but those folks didn't have a single chip in their pockets, so they can hardly be counted as citizens of Boulder City.'"
He mimicked House's theatrical cadence so comically that everyone who heard couldn't help bursting into laughter.
"House! Hahaha!"
"If you hadn't brought him up, I'd have almost forgotten the guy!"
Life was getting better day by day.
Still, every now and then, they would reminisce about those unpleasant days of the past and the figures who had long since scrammed.
Some things only became clear in retrospect.
Without even needing any explanation, simply repeating what Mr. House had once said was enough to bring a knowing smile to everyone's face.
"Speaking of which, where did he end up?"
"I heard he went to Red River Town first, but the mine bosses there don't listen to radios at all. So he drifted over to Garbage City. As luck would have it, he actually had listeners there—except they all assumed the Alliance had exiled him, and the councilors there were so terrified they didn't even dare let him through the gate."
"Hahaha! I doubt the Administrator would stoop to his level. If he really cared, House wouldn't have even made it out the city gates."
"I heard that later on, he drifted over to the Bugra Free State. Up there, nobody cares who he is, so he can keep doing what he does best."
After that great upheaval, many inner-city nobles and merchants who had served them fled north to that wonderful place where money could buy anything.
Take Weijia, for instance. Word was he was doing quite well. Once bearing the obsequious look of a lackey, he had managed to carve out the airs of a respectable gentleman after arriving there.
Like a loach, the man had slipped from murky water into a mud pond, living even more comfortably than before.
Yet none of them envied the man.
For the vast majority here, they had suffered enough from the bitterness of "winner takes all." Whoever loved that flavor could swallow it themselves.
If those people won, no one would envy them; if they lost, no one would pity them. From here on out, they would only walk their own path.
Just then, wind chimes chimed by the entrance. Wet footprints stamped across the wooden floor as Militia Commander Joy, fresh off duty, strode over with brisk steps.
"Dumping that blame on our militia isn't fair. We did our job—even if I'll admit we didn't do much back then."
The crowd turned toward the voice. Seeing Joy, the man who had just mimicked House lit up with pleasant surprise, laughing heartily.
"Joy? We weren't aiming at you, of course! We all know you're a good man. How've things been lately?"
Saying so, he pulled out a chair for Joy.
Sitting down compliantly, Joy took a warm towel handed over by the bartender and wiped his face.
The air quality had been terrible these past few days.
Even though the survivors here were long accustomed to the musty air, it still inevitably left their faces and hair grimy.
Returning the towel to the bartender with a word of thanks, Joy ordered a cup of hot mead and said casually:
"...Same as before. We're mainly taking on defensive duties. The Alliance hasn't made things hard on us. As long as we can pin down part of the Tide near the Great Wall, they'll launch an offensive from the North Third Ring to pressure our enemy."
The man placed a hand on Joy's shoulder, giving it an earnest squeeze.
"If things get tough, don't shoulder it alone. Tell us. We can fight too."
The others looked at him just as seriously, without a trace of jest.
Joy paused for a moment before bursting into hearty laughter.
"Hahaha! Come on, fight with wine bottles? Leave professional work to the professionals."
The man grinned as well, though his expression remained somewhat anxious. After all, the inner-city residents had handled the Tide for the past two hundred years. This year marked not only the first time they had to face the threat on their own, but also the most ferocious surge following a warm winter.
"Do you have enough manpower?"
Joy chuckled. "We've never lacked people. What's more, we have a handy bunch this year."
"A handy bunch?"
"The scum from the slums—the bastards who traded with the marauders."
Hearing this, the patrons quickly recalled the crackdown earlier this year.
Those gang members had been stupid beyond belief. The Alliance had loathed them for a long time, but had previously considered it Boulder City's internal problem and couldn't be bothered to intervene.
Now that Boulder City had joined the Alliance, the filthy slums festering beneath the Great Wall became the Alliance's problem. Yet instead of lying low, those blind fools had the nerve to target the Shelter's residents.
Word had it that the Administrator was in Boulder City at the time. Upon hearing the news, he simply waved his hand, and over a dozen tanks fresh off the front lines turned around, sealing off the slums beneath the wall completely. Anyone suspected of gang ties was hauled off for interrogation, and anyone offering armed resistance was executed on the spot.
How many died in the end was anyone's guess, but at least five thousand were rounded up.
After that day, the entire slum had been thoroughly cleared out, and Boulder City's orphanages and welfare homes were packed to the brim with rescued children.
"...I heard the Administrator organized them into a penal battalion and put them through three months of military training out in Qingshi County."
Accepting the mead from the bartender, Joy took a sip to wet his throat.
"It's time for them to pay their debts."
...
Near the geological park in Qingshi County stood an enclosed camp.
Unlike the adjacent geological park that had been turned into a quarry, the people here did not have to spend all their waking hours in sunless mine shafts like the marauders; after all, their crimes were not as severe as those of the raiders.
Consequently, they only had to labor for ten hours a day.
As for the remaining time, they underwent grueling military training—using wooden staves in place of rifles to drill bayonet thrusts and weapon aiming, crawling through snow, and tempering their nerve under machine-gun fire and artillery detonations exploding close by, all to prepare for the looming Tide.
A few who could not endure died during training or collapsed in the mines, but they were in the minority.
Even though the monstrous training regimen bordered on madness, wastelander resilience was famously tough, so just over five thousand had survived.
In a mere three months, these men, once dripping with thuggish swagger, had completely transformed. Even those whose beer bellies had once swallowed their necks had leaned out enough to show their jawlines.
Only after losing freedom and dignity do people truly realize their worth, and therein lay the purpose of prison.
Though this conditioning in the penal battalion was not enough to teach these scoundrels the etiquette and sense of shame of civilized men, it at least made their bodies remember punishment.
Having finished another day of training as usual, an officer from the 1st Thousand-Man Unit of the Alliance's First Corps assembled a group of a hundred-odd convicts in the mess hall and announced their mission two weeks hence.
Though it was expected, when hearing that they would be sent onto the battlefield as cannon fodder, timidity and dread crept across their faces.
Yet facing their fear, the officer continued expressionlessly:
"This year's Tide is unlike those of the past. Many of you will die—perhaps even the vast majority."
A convict swallowed hard, plucked up his courage, and looked at the officer. "What if we survive?"
The officer glanced at him, knowing full well what he was asking, and continued:
"If you survive, you earn the right to be treated as human. As for whether you can become citizens of the Alliance, that depends on your conduct.
"However, the Administrator has promised: once the Tide ends, regardless of whether you have earned recognition as Alliance citizens, you will not have to return here. You will be sent south to clear wasteland as 'probationers,' establishing a new settlement there.
"If you perform well, you will have a chance to become citizens."
At those words, delight showed on many convicts' faces. No matter how bad things were in the south, it was better than staying here; besides, wasn't there Singularity City down there?
As long as they weren't banished to the wasteland to fend for themselves or thrown into mine pits to work like animals until they died, anything was acceptable to them.
Yet some knew of the situation in Jinchuan Province—that it might very well be the Alliance's next battlefield—so a few wore troubled frowns.
Looking at the muttering convicts, the officer said impassively:
"I am not bargaining with you. You have only two choices: either forfeit your humanity like those marauders and work yourselves to death in the mines, or pick up what little pitiful dignity you have left and at least show us you are willing to die to be human."
The mess hall fell silent for a moment.
One convict stepped forward first and raised his right hand. "I'll go."
"Your name?"
Faced with the officer's question, the man hesitated for a moment, then lowered his head. "...Dagger."
Many in Boulder City's slums went by that name. Those who had no names to begin with were often given monikers like Dagger, Cleaver, or Hatchet once they joined a gang.
Noticing the puckered hypertrophic scar on his arm, the officer knitted his brows.
Members of the Dagger Gang tattooed a dagger on their arms as a symbol of identity, and other gangs had similar practices. Previously, the Alliance had identified and captured many lower-tier gang members precisely through those tattoos.
Later, when these men entered the penal battalion, supervisors ordered them to either burn them with fire or scrub them off with sandpaper. Every trace of the insignias had been removed, but the scars remained.
The officer roughly deduced who the man was, but said nothing of it.
"From today onward, your name is Bite. You're in charge of these hundred-odd men." Glancing at the wristwatch on his arm, he added, "Before lights out, report back to me with a count of anyone who wants to stay behind."
Bite breathed a sigh of relief, memorized his new name, and snapped a military salute. "Yes, sir!"
...
With two weeks remaining until the Tide, war preparations had entered their final phase.
Massive shipments of military supplies were transported along the railroad into Dawn City, then ferried via convoys of transport trucks to positions throughout downtown Qingquan City.
After joining hands with Boulder City, the Alliance had repaired the primary traffic arteries within the urban area, both above ground and below.
Along the edge of the North Fifth Ring Road.
Clad in power armor, Chu Guang inspected frontline positions accompanied by Wrench.
Though the defensive perimeter remained the same one as a year ago, this place, much like Dawn City, had undergone earth-shattering changes.
If the Alliance Army had previously been a ragtag force mixing World War II and Cold War weaponry, what stood here now was an indisputable regular army.
Fully automatic weapons were not only standard across the force, but even issued down to squads.
Rows of 155mm howitzers thrust their thick barrels skyward, bristling across the positions like a forest of steel.
It was hard to imagine that just a year ago, most of the Alliance's artillery consisted of third-hand scrap captured from marauders or knock-offs hand-crafted by brother Mosquito alongside a crew of players equally fond of pushing legal boundaries.
And it wasn't just artillery.
The same went for auxiliary gear like exoskeletons.
Back then, welding a few steel plates onto a "KV-1" exoskeleton was already considered fine equipment; now, even cargo-handling laborers wore "Miner" exoskeletons produced in Ideal City.
Naturally, it was not merely the men and gear.
The most intuitive change lay in the positions themselves.
High-rise buildings were linked by concrete walls topped with razor wire to form the innermost defensive line. Branching outward from this line were fire support strongpoints built around skyscrapers that served as natural bunkers, leaving only a few main avenues fitted with passable gates.
Those high-rises serving as strongpoints acted like the bastions of a classical star fort, capable of providing near-total fire coverage over adjacent streets.
The entire defensive line enveloped almost the entire area inhabited by survivors—the south of Dawn City and the north of Qingquan City. If the slime mold fruiting bodies wished to bypass this line, they would have to detour around the city via the eastern or western flanks.
However, because the slime mold's information-exchange rate was tied to spore concentration, the activity of fruiting bodies in any given area was likewise dictated by that concentration.
It was like a server that could only support a hundred players: its processing capacity and bandwidth were fixed. If an administrator forcefully altered server protocols and lifted the online cap, flooding a 100-player server with ten thousand people, the result would inevitably be everyone lagging into a slideshow.
The mutant slime mold relying on "node organisms" functioned the same way. A flaw embedded in its DNA prevented it from projecting the broodmother's will into regions where the spore cloud was thin, leaving it no choice but to mass its strength into a Tide to break through civilization's defenses.
Consequently, bypassing fruiting bodies would only ever be a minority; the vast majority would concentrate on the frontal positions. This was also one of the conclusions reached by the Alliance Biological Research Institute through rigorous scientific study.
The Alliance had no need to follow the Post-War Reconstruction Committee's method of encircling the entire urban area behind giant walls.
Instead, building a defensive line stretching "from areas of higher spore concentration toward areas of lower concentration" was more than sufficient.
"...The positions we built during the last Tide are still intact. This time, we reinforced them and refined our defensive doctrine!"
"Following the General Staff's recommendations, we divided the line into twenty sectors, assigned to twenty thousand-man units. Each sector is further split into ten positions in a three-tiered front, mid, and rear layout, deployed in a '3-3-4' formation to ensure firepower blankets every inch of ground before our lines!"
The detailed improvements were, of course, far more intricate than that. Firepower distribution, logistical resupply, and support methods for each position had all been meticulously designed. But since none of this could be explained in a few breaths, Wrench did not list everything in detail.
During the previous Tide, the Alliance lacked experience in large-scale warfare, but this time was different.
Baptized in the Sunset Province campaign, Alliance officers and soldiers of all ranks now possessed rich experience across various operational modes, including mobile and positional warfare.
Seeing Wrench's face glowing with excitement as he gave his report, Chu Guang nodded approvingly and offered his praise.
"Well done."
Wrench grinned sheepishly, the flush on his weathered face shining even brighter.
Most of the Alliance's first generation of officers were like him—wastelanders rescued by Shelter 404 from the jaws of marauders.
He had no lofty, grand ideological horizons, nor did he care to ponder such matters in daily life.
To a man of simple thoughts, the Administrator's approval was supreme honor.
Looking at the ruddy-faced Wrench, Chu Guang paused for a moment before continuing:
"There is something I should discuss with you, however."
Hearing this, Wrench immediately responded, "Your orders, sir!"
"Not an order, just plans for the future."
Chu Guang smiled and adopted a conversational tone.
"Our armed forces are growing larger, and the old command hierarchy is beginning to feel cumbersome. Once the Tide concludes, I plan to reorganize the army's structure, replacing the old system of thousand-man and ten-thousand-man units with the organizational structure of the People's Federation era."
There had been considerable discussion on the forums regarding the Alliance's military organization. Chu Guang had previously synthesized opinions from several professionals among the players and discussed them with Vannus.
The Legion used thousand-man and ten-thousand-man units to herd troops forward on an attack-move because they had fast-tracked clone cannon fodder grown in three years. Furthermore, Wilante officers were themselves landed military aristocrats, and the entire society's ladder of advancement was rooted in military merit without requiring formal military ranks, making this crude, straightforward structure easy for them to manage.
Although other survivor settlements across the wasteland lacked three-year cloned fodder, human life was cheap and cannon fodder was plentiful, so these settlements followed suit and copied the structure.
In truth, there was nothing wrong with copying it.
Weapons produced by the Legion sold well all across the wasteland, and as the survivor faction with the strongest military power, it was only natural that other factions lacking armed forces would emulate them.
Marauders went without saying: adhering to the law of the jungle, they held immense veneration for the Legion's brute force. Consequently, in marauder tribes, decurions and centurions were not merely titles of authority, but symbols of honor and valor.
Driven by the choices of both survivor settlements and marauder tribes, the structure of thousand-man and hundred-man units became mainstream across the wasteland.
Yet mainstream did not mean exclusive. The Enterprise's structure, for instance, was the exact opposite of the Legion's.
Private military companies in Ideal City mostly operated in squads—an even more extreme streamlining than real-world battalion tactical groups, reduced down to the level of "company tactical groups."
The forces directly under Enterprise organizations were composed of hundred-man strike units.
Still, Ideal City never expanded outward anyway; its direct forces only swept away surrounding mutants, and major troubles were usually settled with money. Adopting such compact, elite units made sense for them.
Yet neither the Enterprise's nor the Legion's military doctrines fully suited the Alliance's needs.
Chu Guang intended to strike a compromise between the two:
Namely, reorganizing the existing NPC corps using the echelon structure of corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions, companies, and platoons, along with the triangular organizational principle.
The reorganized Alliance First and Second Corps would become the Alliance First and Second Field Armies, each commanding ten to twenty standard brigades of two thousand men.
Such a structure was not only clearer and more concise, but also made conferring military ranks far more convenient.
As for the players, they would continue using their original "corps" system.
Up to now, the operational efficiency of each corps was quite good, leaving no need for sweeping reform; at most, minor adjustments would be made to their battlefield roles.
These corps effectively served as the Alliance's "battalion tactical groups," tasked with executing riskier, more exhilarating special operations.
For players possessing formidable individual combat strength, demanding they fight strictly like regular troops was unrealistic anyway.
Based on Chu Guang's experience, players could tolerate being milked for resources—some even derived pleasure from the grind—but the one thing they could never stomach was a developer lecturing them on how to play the game.
Thus, he never told players what they ought to do, only establishing rules regarding what they must not do and what penalties violation would incur.
Taking this opportunity, Chu Guang briefly outlined his plans for the Alliance's future armed forces: Army, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force.
Though two of them were still nowhere in sight, Wrench listened attentively, not doubting for a second that he was being serious.
When Chu Guang finished, Wrench snapped a salute without hesitation, declaring with utter loyalty:
"The Alliance First Corps resolutely obeys your instructions! Your will is the will of our army!"
Seeing Wrench's solemn display of loyalty, Chu Guang smiled faintly.
"No need to be so grave. The reorganization will take place after the Tide; keep it in mind for now, but there's no need to announce it down the ranks yet. The reason I'm telling you in advance is so you can experiment in that direction during the upcoming battle. Afterward, I will convene a meeting at the General Staff and consult officers of all levels for their input."
His voice had barely faded when a prolonged siren wailed from due south.
Both men turned toward the sound in unison.
The grayish-green fog, previously as still as a lake, suddenly surged down the streets toward their defenses like a collapsed flash flood.
The fog was rolling in!
It was the Tide!
Watching the menacing gray fog rush forward, Chu Guang raised an eyebrow in slight surprise.
The Tide was arriving sooner than the Biological Research Institute had predicted.
Still, that was normal.
No weather forecast was ever a hundred percent accurate.
Seeing the rolling fog, Wrench's pupils contracted slightly, and he quickly looked at Chu Guang.
"Administrator, please fall back."
Instincts honed on the battlefield told him this fog was not so simple.
Yet Chu Guang didn't budge. He merely tilted his chin toward the defensive line and spoke succinctly:
"Do not fret over my safety. The ones you should care about are all the people standing behind this line.
"Now go do what you must. I will be here to witness your valor!"
Chapter 629