The smoke-filled tunnel was a harrowing scene of utter ruin, mountains of corpses and seas of bones mingled with countless fruiting bodies and players' bodies.
The thick stench of blood mingled with the musty reek of spores, delivering a powerful mental shock to every player who ventured deep into the tunnel.
Yet rather than fear or cowardice, most players likely felt a rush of thrill and satisfaction.
And looking at the casualty ratio, the exoskeleton-clad players were undeniably on top!
Although Thea, personally entering the fray while flailing her tentacles, had indeed slaughtered many careless players with her absurd regeneration and damage output, most of the other fruiting bodies and evolved organisms left behind to defend the tunnel were at most a minor scare.
The Death Corps had already chewed through the toughest bone for them, leaving Thea as the only real threat remaining.
Even though Thea inflicted considerable casualties on the Skeleton Corps, she still could not escape her doomed fate.
Under the relentless, surging assault of the players, she finally collapsed into a pool of jet-black blood with an unwilling roar.
Honestly, Mole had thought about capturing her alive; after all, Luo Yu made everyone pretty envious.
Keeping a boss as a pet—just thinking about it was badass.
Unfortunately, she gave them zero openings. Her dozens of tentacles devoured players as fast as wolfing down meals, so he had no choice but to give up on capturing her alive.
The moment she collapsed, all the slime mold fruiting bodies she controlled froze in their tracks, standing dazed in place as if they had lost their souls.
Without outside intervention, these fruiting bodies would probably act on instinct for a while, and after a period of dormancy, a new mother would emerge from the surviving population to lead them forward.
That mother would likely be even more aggressive than Thea.
Now, however, Yu had already devoured the broodmother in the city center. Channeling the broodmother's power, it could slowly assimilate these out-of-control fruiting bodies into its own puppets.
Of course, the players still in the tunnel knew nothing of this right now. They were cheering for their hard-won victory.
The backdoor raid tactic worked!
They had successfully defeated Thea before she could transform into a new broodmother!
The Tide, which usually dragged into a stalemate for half a month or even a month or two, had ended completely in less than twenty-four hours after erupting!
"MVP!"
Looking at the fragmented pile of scarlet fungal matter before him, Mole panted heavily, wiped the black blood from his face, and murmured continuously as the exhaustion in his eyes was replaced by growing excitement. "This time the fucking MVP has gotta be mine, right?"
It wasn't just Mole.
Excitement glittered in the eyes of everyone standing there.
At the cost of nearly a hundred casualties, they had finally defeated Thea, the mastermind of this Tide!
Setting his rifle aside, Mole pulled a gunny sack out of nowhere, walked up to the three-to-four-meter-tall corpse, and began picking up scarlet fungal chunks to stuff inside.
Seeing this, Elven King Fugui's mouth twitched. "Damn, bro, you planning to give our Lao Na an extra course?"
One look at Fugui's expression and Mole knew what nonsense he was on about. He rolled his eyes at him. "What are you thinking? I'm collecting materials."
Both the Scientific Expedition and the Alliance Biological Research Institute were interested in this stuff. Farming favorability with Yin Fang and that white-haired lady when he had downtime might just unlock some hidden quests or whatever. Those two places had the highest technological specs in the entire Alliance.
While Mole was busy, Lao Na happened to hear someone calling his name, so he curiously walked over holding a flashlight. "Vegetables? What vegetables?"
Elven King Fugui couldn't hold it in and dry-heaved, clutching his stomach, while Mole's face crumpled as his stomach convulsed.
Associating this thing with veggies...
He felt like he wouldn't be able to stomach mushrooms for quite a while.
Just as Elaina was looking bewildered at what was wrong with them, a row of pale-blue pop-ups appeared on everyone's VMs.
[Congratulations to "Skeleton Corps" players Mole on the Run, Elven King Fugui, Elaina... and others for defeating Thea!]
[This achievement will be recorded in the Hall of Fame!]
[Due to the death of Thea, the Tide will end within half an hour, and expansion point settlements will also be finalized within half an hour.]
A long list of IDs was displayed in the announcement, both the living and the dead.
But what thrilled everyone most was not that long list of IDs, nor was it entering the Hall of Fame—it was the final line of the pop-up:
They had ended the Tide!
Moreover, this glory was officially acknowledged by the game, beyond all dispute!
The crowd erupted once more, cheers echoing through the tunnel again.
"Brother Mole is awesome!!"
"Hahaha, this time the MVP is a locked-in deal!"
"By the way, does this count as kill-stealing?"
"Steal my ass! We dealt all the damage ourselves, how can you call that kill-stealing?"
"Damn right! If anyone claims we kill-stole, I'll throw hands!"
Mole grinned from ear to ear.
After playing second or third fiddle for so long, he finally had a shot at being number one!
Yet just as he was thinking this, Elaina, who was fiddling with his VM, suddenly let out a soft exclamation. "Are the points being tallied this fast this year? The expansion just wrapped up and they're already out."
Although the devs hadn't posted the leaderboard yet, players were already flexing their settled scores on the forum.
Elaina opened the Skeleton Corps interface and saw that the corps point column indeed showed the settlement was complete.
Hearing him, Mole quickly asked, "How many do we have?"
"87,000! *Hiss*..." Elaina drew in a sharp breath and muttered in shock, "Holy shit, that one boss gave forty thousand points by itself!"
The thing was, this boss wasn't even that hard; they had only lost about a hundred brothers.
The reward was absurdly generous!
Hearing that, Mole's face lit up with pleasant surprise. He hurriedly closed the pop-up on his VM and opened the corps interface as well.
When he saw the string of digits stamped behind their total points, his fist clenched involuntarily and he shouted in excitement, "Badass!"
Corps total points and individual points were separate, calculated by a fixed formula.
Generally speaking, six- and seven-digit scores were fairly common, but this expansion was an unusual case.
Objectively, this Tide had been stronger than last year's; after all, even evolved organisms like Titans had appeared, and the fruiting bodies had used better tactics during assaults.
However, because the overall strength of both players and NPCs was vastly greater than last year, this "starter village monster siege" event looked somewhat trivial.
From the Tide's official eruption to its end, it hadn't even lasted twenty-four hours; reaching five digits was already remarkably high.
With over eighty thousand points, they were unquestionably at the ceiling for this expansion!
"What about the Burning Corps?! Check how many points Lao Bai and the others got!" Mole couldn't be more satisfied with his own corps' score, and amidst his glee, he immediately turned his attention to his rivals.
Anticipating that the boss would ask, Elaina scrolled his index finger across the VM screen and quickly found it. "The Burning Corps... looks like someone made a thread. 71,000 points. Not bad."
To be fair, that score was quite good, only about ten thousand points behind them.
But Mole was already drunk on triumph. Hearing that Fang Chang was ten thousand points lower than him, he roared with laughter.
"Hahaha! Little scrubs, just you wait! When I hop on the forum later, I am definitely going to mock that dog Fang Chang mercilessly!"
Elven King Fugui also chuckled. "If even the Burning Corps only has seventy-odd thousand, we've got this in the bag."
Elaina swiped his finger across the VM screen twice more and nodded. "Pretty much. Spring and his boys are around 60,000. The Death Corps brothers are around 50,000, probably dragged down by casualties again. The Goblin Corps... Goblin... Holy fuck?!"
Seeing the number in the thread, Elaina froze, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.
111,000...?
He instinctively thought he'd counted wrong, but no matter how he counted, it was three ones followed by three zeros.
Swallowing hard, he stammered in disbelief, "One hundred and eleven thousand?!"
The moment they heard that number, the circle of players standing around were instantly struck dumb.
"How much?!"
"Holy shit?!"
"Did you add an extra fucking zero?! How the fuck could anyone get over a hundred thousand! The whole battle only lasted a few hours!"
"I counted several fucking times... Holy crap, Luo Yu contributed eighty thousand points all by himself." Scrolling further down the thread, Elaina took another sharp breath.
Upon hearing this, the crowd erupted into an uproar.
"???"
"Eighty thousand by one guy?!"
"What the fuck..."
"Has to be fake, right?!"
Listening to the clamor around him, Mole was completely dumbfounded, frozen in place as if struck by lightning.
Just thirty seconds ago, he was convinced that the MVP was in the bag.
Instead, reality struck him upside the head.
What's more, the one who snatched his MVP wasn't that dog Fang Chang, nor was it that scheming Spring, but fucking Mosquito.
Coming to his senses, Mole let out a wailing screech.
"Holy shit, it's rigged!"
"This is definitely fucking rigged!"
***
Someone was furious, so naturally someone was ecstatic.
For instance, a certain Mosquito who had mysteriously claimed the MVP.
With spores blanketing the streets, air support had been absurdly inefficient—worse than an anti-aircraft gun fired horizontally.
Even a veteran pilot with top-tier skills like him hadn't killed many, to say nothing of the rookies who had barely learned to fly.
In a battle lasting only a few hours, the rookies of the Goblin Corps had crashed twenty W-2 ground-attack aircraft and nearly dropped bombs on their teammates' heads twice.
No matter how hard Brother Mosquito pushed, their score was only a tiny sliver higher than third- and fourth-rate corps like the Silver Corps, utterly stuck in the mud.
When he climbed down from his plane cursing up a storm, he had practically given up, having already figured out how to shift the blame onto the dog devs who were out to get them.
Yet Brother Luo Yu, who usually never raided with the corps, hit him with a massive surprise.
Eighty thousand points!!
By taking down the city center broodmother, they had not only staged a miracle comeback in total points, but had also blown Lao Bai, Mole, and Spring right out of the water!
Mosquito refreshed the forum several times, and besides themselves, he didn't see a single group breaking into six digits!
"Hahahaha! Great job, brother! As expected of the ace pilot I hand-picked!"
"Heh-heh, I'd like to see who dares say our Goblin Corps sucks this year! I can brag about this score for a whole year—ptui! I can brag about this all the way to open beta!"
Talking wasn't enough to satisfy him. Mosquito took a lightning-fast screenshot of the corps interface and posted it on the forum along with a grinning emoji.
In fact, before he could pull off this flex, rookies who had died early and received word offline had already done so.
Still, that didn't stop him from flexing all over again.
Watching Mosquito chuckle fiendishly with his VM in hand, Feng Qing offered a subtle reminder: "Corps Leader, your laugh sounds a lot like a villain's."
Yet whether because her voice was too quiet or because Mosquito was too swept up in his euphoria to hear anyone else, his laughter didn't subside at all; instead, it grew even more arrogant.
Observing this mentally unstable fellow, the ground crew gave his aircraft a wide berth, silently mourning for him in their hearts.
Surely this shelter resident must have been traumatized by his comrades' casualties, which was why he was acting so unhinged...
It was probably best not to disturb him right now.
Gui Gui glanced at Feng Qing in surprise. "Ugh, since when did you get the illusion that this guy was ever a good guy?"
Feng Qing paused, thinking for a moment.
*Ummm...*
That actually makes sense.
For a moment, she couldn't think of any way to refute it...
***
With the final boss battles concluding, the broodmother in the city center and Thea on the North Second Ring Road having fallen one after another, the "Return of the Tide" expansion officially drew to a successful close.
This was probably the fastest-cleared expansion since *Wasteland OL* launched.
More than half the time had been spent on pre-war preparations, while the actual fighting took less than a single night to wrap up.
In the wasteland's early hours—noon in the real world—as players logged off one after another, the official *Wasteland OL* website was in a frenzy of jubilation.
Not only because of the firsthand battle reports brought to the forum by online players, but also because of the announcement posted on the official website shortly after.
[Server-Wide Announcement: The "Return of the Tide" expansion has officially ended!]
[In this Tide, approximately 3,690,000 fruiting bodies, 1,411 evolved organisms, 1 mother, and 1 broodmother were eliminated!]
[Players who eliminated 5 or more evolved organisms during this expansion will receive the limited title "Transcending Evolution"; players who eliminated over 10,000 fruiting bodies will receive the limited title "Slime Mold Terminator"! (Casualties caused by operating indirect firepower do not count toward kill counts)]
[Since the world of *Wasteland OL* is dynamically generated by AI based on player behavior feedback, player choices will have permanent effects on the main storyline. With the fall of the downtown broodmother, the two-century-long Tide draws to a close; moving forward, there will be no more Tides in the Qingquan City region! You have thoroughly ended a conflict that lasted two centuries. The reborn Qingquan City will surely become the brightest pearl on the wasteland. Congratulations!]
[Additionally, event points have been distributed to personal accounts, and the lucky draw and reward redemption features are now open! Thank you all for your active participation! The test data generated during the expansion will provide invaluable reference for the development of *Wasteland OL*, and we will continue our utmost dedication to bringing all closed-beta players even richer gaming experiences and fun!]
Tail: "Giao! The Tide is gone?! There won't be any in the future? QAQ"
Meat Mountain Steamed Bun: "Hiss! We've already missed two expansions! QAQ"
Sisi: "The main, main storyline should be reaching the south soon... probably. (Guilty)"
Sesame Paste: "Ahaha... While it's a bit of a pity I didn't see what the city center broodmother actually looked like, the bizarre mutants we ran into along the way were pretty fun too. (￣▽￣)"
Elaina: "No need to look, that thing's already been shaped by Luo Yu. (Funny)"
Tail: "??? (°Д°*)"
Makabazi: "Hahahaha!"
Gun Tong Xi Tou Ji: "Bro's into some pretty freaky stuff. (Funny)"
Qiangren Suonan: "My bro Scavenger would call you a master! (Funny)"
Scavenger Lv99: "You thief shouting to catch the thief! You're the one running the biggest fucking harem."
Qiangren Suonan: "?"
Wo Xiang Jingjing: "Haha, I suggest the devs give Brother Nan a 'Harem King' certificate—oh wait, an achievement, I mean. (Side-eye grin)"
Luo Yu: "?? What the hell? What do you mean 'shaped by me'? (Bewildered)"
Elaina: "Eww, isn't it? I dunno, that's what Ye Shi told me. (Funny)"
Luo Yu: "Don't listen to his bullshit. To be precise, Yu ate that thing. It really didn't have much to do with me."
Fang Chang: "So what actually happened down there? I've been waiting forever."
Jieyan: "Hurry the fuck up! Stop leaving us hanging!"
Luo Yu: "*Cough*, don't rush, I'm telling it now. Anyway... this involves a massive lore pit the devs dug way back in the background setting—or rather, a giant pie they drew."
Commander Spring: "That colony?"
Luo Yu: "Yeah, its location is Alpha Centauri B, the People's Federation's first extraterrestrial colony planet, and also their last... That planet and Earth's ecosystem are two completely different models. Their ecosystem isn't composed of multiple species; instead, a unified consciousness governs everything.
"Omnipresent and omnipotent, It determines the species, population, and even lifespans of every living being on the planet, indirectly influencing ocean currents, temperature, greenhouse gas emissions, and so forth. In short, Its existence allows the planet's environment to maintain an incredible equilibrium amidst dynamic evolution.
"Compared to that planet, Earth—which updates a minor patch every few million years and rolls out a major patch every tens of millions of years—actually seems much less hospitable. That memory didn't mention how long It had existed, but It must be vastly older than human civilization—so long that It has already forgotten the very concept of time.
"By the way, Its name is Gaia."
At this point, Luo Yu stopped typing. After thinking for a moment, he offered an analogy he considered fairly vivid.
"That is a broodmother encompassing an entire planet.
"And the big guy we took down entrenched in the city center is probably only equivalent to a single hair on Its leg."
Chapter 639