The Battle of Broken Blade Mountain!

"...This is Flying Fox. We have arrived in the target airspace!" "Get to work! I don't want to miss today's lunch. Dammit, those gluttons from Wandering Marsh eat like starving ghosts reincarnated. Have they never tasted meat before?!" "Haha! Maybe they really don't get any back home!" "The 'wonton' this morning was pretty good, if that's what it was called—" "Cut the chatter. Keep your eyes on your targets." "Copy that!" On the western flank of Broken Blade Mountain. Twelve Cloud Dragonfly ornithopters flapped their wings, banking aggressively toward one side of the mountain with payload racks bristling with missiles. Meanwhile, three mercenary infantry companies completed their assembly and launched an offensive from the north. It was eight in the morning. Over the preceding hour, their allies in the Alliance had already poured at least five hundred 155mm heavy artillery shells onto the mountain, carpet-bombing every reachable position. As if anticipating the coming assault, the mutants on the mountain stood fully prepared. Vicious eyes glared down the slopes as they gripped their motley assortment of weapons, ready to teach these presumptuous little human things a lesson. The mercenaries below were just as primed. They had journeyed from distant Yunjian Province precisely to slaughter these green-skinned beasts. For the right of residence in Ideal City, and for lavish pay! The instant the two sides locked eyes, literal sparks practically flew— Mercenary commander: "Open fire—!" Mutant centurion: "Chop them to pieces!!" Two roars thundered almost simultaneously. Between the sheer cliffs, dazzling muzzle flashes and crisscrossing tracers instantly erupted. Amid the storm of bullets, one mercenary took a heavy-caliber slug straight to the chest. Blood-soaked armor plating shattered across the ground in an instant. Blood bubbled from his chest and mouth as his comrades seized him by the collar and dragged him behind a rock outcropping. The mutant who fired was swiftly riddled with rifle fire, turned into a sieve by concentrated volleys. Yet right until the final bullet tore into his skull, the brute was still frantically pumping his shotgun and returning fire. The battle exploded! The slaughter reached a fever pitch almost immediately! More and more mutants surged from their bunkers, trading fire with the mercenaries advancing up the mountain. Bodies fell continuously—mutants and exoskeleton-clad soldiers alike. The scene was utter chaos. Deafening gunfire and bloodcurdling screams blended into a cacophony echoing through the mountain valleys. The mercenaries' assault ground to a stalemate, visibly threatening to turn against them. Right then, missiles tipped with metallic-hydrogen warheads plummeted from the sky, detonating into arcs of orange-red flame across the crags without warning! The raging inferno was like an erupting wall of magma, blasting countless goblins into the air! Even the hulking green-skinned brutes were blown into shreds of meat before they could utter a scream. Circling along the mountainside, the Cloud Dragonfly ornithopters maintained continuous fire. The copilots' index fingers remained practically welded to their triggers. Guided by the ground troops, they poured a steady stream of rockets and autocannon shells into the enemy, claiming over a hundred lives in the blink of an eye. "Outstanding!" Seeing the path blasted open by fire, a mercenary hunkered behind cover let out an excited roar toward the sky, then rallied his squad with soaring morale to charge up the winding slope. Advancing alongside them were more than twenty "Hellhound" UGVs. Facing this relentless harvest of firepower, the green-skinned brutes were utterly outmatched. The jagged boulders were soon strewn with severed limbs and charred blood. Under cover from the Cloud Dragonflies, the mercenaries charging up the mountain pushed forward like an unstoppable tide, fighting their way to the mountainside in no time. On nearby Black Cloud Peak, the young men of the 100th Mechanized Mountain Division's 1st Regiment watched with boiling blood. Every one of them was itching for action, eager to move up and reinforce them. "Sir, when do we go in?" an exoskeleton-clad soldier walked up to his commanding officer and asked with spirited enthusiasm. His name was Tang Feng. He had enlisted partly to fight for the fate of humanity, but mostly because of that recruitment slogan on Endpoint Cloud: *"Fight for the fate of humanity."* The officer glanced at him, then shifted his gaze toward the towering mountain in the distance, answering concisely, "When I tell you to." Hearing this brush-off, the eager soldiers deflated in disappointment. They had already reached the front lines, yet they could only watch their allies hog the spotlight. At that very moment, a new shift occurred in the front-line fighting. Having exhausted their ammunition, the two attack squadrons of Cloud Dragonflies turned back to base. Right as they departed, the mutant forces that had been driven into retreat suddenly rallied with ferocious vigor, as if pumped full of drugs. More critically, strange new variants began appearing among the hulking green-skinned brutes. Even after taking bullets through their skulls, they did not die immediately. Instead, they charged like rabid beasts, becoming even more lethal than before their heads were blown open! Caught completely off guard, several mercenaries were seized by their heads and brutally pummeled by the frenzied brutes. Their exoskeletons and bones were smashed to splinters alike; some were even torn open and devoured alive, their throats ripped out and half their faces sheared away. Everyone was terrified by this vicious combat style. They wouldn't die from headshots, nor from a shot through the heart; they charged through suppressive fire without a shred of fear. For a time, almost no one knew how to handle them. Worse still, these abnormally resilient "cockroaches" looked no different from ordinary mutants on the outside. They were like landmines concealed in a crowd, detonating upon contact, and every single "explosion" inflicted massive trouble on the attacking force. The mutants gave them no breathing room. Seeing the humans falter, they howled and surged forward, their onslaught growing all the more vicious. The three mercenary companies fighting on the mountainside were instantly dragged into a bitter struggle. In the blink of an eye, one company was mauled and forced to withdraw from the meat grinder of a front line. Inside the command center. Staring at the aerial feed on the holographic display, Major General Lin Shangwen, commander of the 100th Mountain Division, knitted his brows, his face etched with grim solemnity. The footage was being transmitted from the belly camera of a "Seagull" fixed-wing drone. At this moment, the drone circled five hundred meters above Broken Blade Mountain, providing the only remaining close air support available to the front-line troops. Standing beside him, Chief of Staff Yun Song wore an equally grave expression. After a moment of contemplation, he said, "We have eight tactical missiles left. Let's cover their withdrawal." As the former captain of the 26th Strike Team, he knew all too well how troublesome mutants were to deal with. An ordinary man lost more than half his combat effectiveness upon taking a bullet. But these brutes only grew fiercer the more they were shot, fighting until their final breath. And these green skins were distinctly different from ordinary ones. It was very likely that the Church of the Torch had given them biological enhancements on top of prosthetic modifications. General Lin nodded, but thinking of the Wilante commanders' mocking expressions, he hesitated. "However..." "Whether you face 'pressure' from Triumph City or pressure from Ideal City, you have to choose one, sir." Pausing briefly, Yun Song added, "Even if they are only mercenaries, we can't truly leave them all to die out there." Hearing that, Lin Shangwen hesitated no longer. He turned to his adjutant and ordered, "Order the mercenaries on the front line to withdraw." "And inform them that if they want their full pay, they must bring back at least one mutant corpse!" The adjutant snapped a crisp salute. "Yes, sir!" ... When the withdrawal order reached the front line, the mercenaries locked in bloody combat finally breathed a sigh of relief. The remaining two companies covered each other in alternating bounds, retreating down the narrow, winding mountain path in orderly fashion. Over on Black Cloud Mountain, Carrying Umbrella Not Knife at Midnight widened his eyes in disbelief. "Enterprise is pulling back already?" Didn't that mean the morning's preliminary bombardment had gone to waste? Just then, Sleepy Upon Waking tapped his tactical helmet from the side and mumbled, "By the way, what the hell was that mutant? A new monster?" Hearing mention of a new monster, Fawai Kuangtu immediately turned to him and pressed curiously, "What was it? What did you record?" Sleepy Upon Waking said nothing, merely transferring the footage he had just captured with his quadcopter drone to his VM, playing it for the curious teammates crowding around. On the screen, a mutant missing half its head burst from behind a rock formation, swinging a battleaxe to send an unfortunate soul flying, before barreling toward the soldiers behind him. A squad of Enterprise soldiers concentrated frantic fire on it. Yet the brute seemed to feel no pain, charging until it was perforated into a honeycomb before finally crashing to the ground. Watching the clip to the end, the players gathered around the VM couldn't help swallowing hard. *Holy crap...* *Did it get possessed by slime mold?!* Meanwhile, the battle on the front line raged on. Seeing the forces on the mountainside begin to pull back, the mutants atop the peak were naturally unwilling to let them off. They dragged all manner of guns and mortars out of their caves, raining everything they had onto the human invaders. Just then, however, a slender streak of white smoke plunged from the sky, slamming right next to a cave entrance halfway up the mountain. Several goblins struggling to haul artillery shells shrieked as they were vaporized into blood mist and shredded meat in the secondary explosion. Even the hulking green-skinned brute hauling an iron tube cannon ahead of them was engulfed by the blast, tumbling down the mountainside while howling in agony. The plunging missile deterred the mutants who had been about to pour out en masse. Thinking those wing-flapping flies had returned, they prudently scurried back into their caverns. The Beast King had warned them that several hundred meters of solid rock was the ultimate natural shield, dwarfing even nuclear weapons in protective power. Even yields of tens or hundreds of millions of tons could do little against two-billion-year-old hardened bedrock, at best stripping off some surface rubble and soil or causing a few minor cave-ins. They had already carved over a hundred interconnected tunnels inside the mountain. Even if half collapsed, it wouldn't matter. Yet those humans still hoped to build bridges and roads right over their heads! As long as they didn't blindly charge down the slopes, the supplies stockpiled here could let them hold out until the end of time! By eleven in the morning, the three-hour battle came to an end. This engagement concluded in a stalemate! ... At the very moment the mercenaries withdrew, on the bridge of the airship *Loyalty*, General Lium wore an unmasked sneer. A flick of his index finger unfolded a pale blue holographic screen along his hand's path, projecting a video window filled with static. The Enterprise commander didn't appear on screen, likely too embarrassed to turn on his camera. Lium didn't care in the slightest, remarking mockingly, "Can you people handle this or not? How about you just deploy your regular troops instead of wasting everyone's time?" Black Cloud Peak was a position controlled by the Legion, and his men had been watching from the side. The 100th Mountain Division had remained completely idle on their line, never once lifting a finger. To be frank, rather than the performance of their auxiliary forces, he was far more curious about the true combat capability of Ideal City's regular army—which was precisely what General Salen of the Eastern Legion wanted to know most. Though they were allies for now, no one could guarantee they wouldn't clash in the future. As if trying to save face, a voice came over the comm channel. "...We achieved our operational objectives for today. Today's offensive is concluded." Hearing that, Lium nearly burst out laughing. Or rather, he already had. "Achieved? Wasn't your objective to plant your flag on the summit?" Lin Shangwen said with a dark expression, "That is the ultimate objective. Figuring out what happened to those mutants was today's task." Lium narrowed his eyes, staring at the snow-white static in the window, and gave a sudden laugh. "You're not scared, are you?" He was baiting them, prodding these people to commit their regular troops. Unfortunately, the other side didn't take the bait, continuing in a steady tone, "If you consider studying an opponent's weaknesses and striking at their vitals to crush them in one blow as 'being afraid,' then interpret it however you like. In my view, our men's lives are worth far more." Pausing, Lin Shangwen let out a cold chuckle. "Losing an entire millia in a single day... I truly don't know what you have to be proud of." Hearing the thinly veiled mockery in those words, a flash of irritation crossed Lium's face. Only a flash, however. The ones wiped out were merely clones, not the 31st Myriad under General Modelin. No matter what, with less than a company's worth of casualties, they had successfully planted their banner on the highest point of Black Cloud Peak. Watching the transmission cut off, Lium sneered. "Stubborn as a dead mule." ... *Zhiyuan Post* [At 08:00 today, the 100th Mechanized Mountain Division and the 7th Air Fleet launched a fierce offensive against Broken Blade Mountain. With negligible casualties, they eliminated over a thousand mutants. According to intelligence gathered from the front line, mounting clues directly prove the crimes against humanity committed by the Church of the Torch. Masses of survivors were fed addictive narcotics and forcibly confined for breeding. Furthermore, Apostles of the Church of the Torch applied Era of Prosperity biotechnology to perform extremely hazardous genetic modifications on select mutants, yielding a large number of modified strains that pose severe security hazards... Reported by war correspondent Wu Kai'an.] ... The following morning. A twin-engine Orca transport and a four-engine Overlord touched down in succession upon the helipad and runway of Weifu Military Base. The former carried a panel of biology experts from Yunjian University, while the latter brought technical personnel from the Alliance Institute of Biological Research. Though belonging to different factions, they had arrived on the front line for the exact same purpose. Namely, the mutants who refused to stop fighting even with their heads blown apart. As the officer in charge of the military base, Li Jinrong personally came out to receive them, arranging their quarters in a three-story concrete building located in a corner of the base. It had originally been intended as a field hospital for wounded personnel, but since casualties were not yet extensive, the facility was temporarily unused, making it an ideal wartime laboratory. Without a moment's delay, as body bags packed with specimens were delivered from the front lines, the twenty-odd experts gathered for a brief meeting to divide tasks, then immediately began autopsies and cellular assays on the mutant tissue samples. This work stretched from morning into the dead of night before finally yielding preliminary progress. At the same time, inside Shelter 404. Having just finished a day's work and about to turn in, Chu Guang received a message from Heya. He sat back up from his bed and went to the Floor B4 viewing lounge to meet her. "The test results are out, and they are astounding... The genomes of those mutants contain multiple pairs of chromosomes whose coding genes cannot be fully deciphered by our current technology. Even the experts from Yunjian University found it incredible; they also claimed they've never seen such bizarre mutants before." Glancing over the incomprehensible report in his hands, Chu Guang nodded with a semblance of understanding, then handed it back to Heya. "Astounding... Are all the specimens like this?" Heya: "Only some! While they can broadly be called super mutants, they don't behave entirely like them. They're more like something in between. What do you think we should call them?" Chu Guang glanced at the official website in passing and saw players discussing the matter, so he picked the nickname that appeared most frequently. "...Let's call them zombified mutants, or zombified greenskins—zombified for short?" Heya's eyes lit up, and she snapped her fingers. "Fine, let's go with that... In short, beyond extreme regenerative capability, these zombified variants possess brain tissue self-repair abilities that ordinary mutants lack! In clinical terms, even if their heads are smashed to bits, they can regrow them!" Chu Guang froze, unable to resist asking, "How is that even possible?" His own regenerative capacity was formidable, but it fell far short of regrowing a head after being decapitated or blown apart. Regrowing an entire head was simply absurd. Were these things earthworms? "...Our initial hypothesis is that their nervous system has evolved a 'memory backup' function. As long as a certain percentage of the nervous system remains intact, it can continuously repair the damaged neural tissue. However, when the brain is destroyed, their bodies temporarily lose higher neural control, acting purely under the direction of the remaining nervous system. To put it in more understandable terms, they are governed entirely by instinct." Looking at the stunned Chu Guang, Heya took a deep breath and continued solemnly, "I must warn you, the Torch's biological experts may possess far more technology than we initially presumed. I even have the feeling that while we're probing them, they're probing us as well..." Recovering from his initial surprise, Chu Guang nodded and murmured softly, "That's normal. After all, they might have a hundred experts as experienced as you." He had sensed it long ago. While he was probing the cards in Torch's hand, those people were equally testing the cards in his. Perhaps this entire war served the same purpose. Those zealots were testing the strength of the various factions within the Coalition step by step, using the battlefield of Ten Peaks Mountain to hone and refine their technology. The resistance the Allied forces met on the third mountain was noticeably stiffer than what they had faced on Fu Mountain... In a sense, the greenskins' manner of growth closely mirrored that of the players. Players, unable to be truly killed, grew stronger through repeated respawns. Meanwhile, those brutes iterated rapidly across countless deaths; the newly bred ones emerged crueler and far tougher than their fallen predecessors. Both sociologically and biologically, they were absorbing the civilizational fruits of the Era of Prosperity in an extraordinary way. And they did so with the aid of surviving technical personnel from that era... Thinking of this, a trace of gravity crossed Chu Guang's expression as he pondered the implications. Flustered by the sudden praise, Heya coughed softly and said, "It has nothing to do with how many experts they have; research is a systematic endeavor. Our current research framework was adapted and refined from the Academy. It's already fairly mature, lacking only a bit of accumulated foundation—it shouldn't fall short of Torch... But the problem lies precisely in accumulated data. I actually suspect they might hold records on a lost project." Chu Guang frowned slightly. "A lost project?" "The Gestalt Organism!" Heya gazed at him intently, a flicker of fervor and hunger showing in her eyes. "That Singularity-tier technology! The unfinished Singularity of the Era of Prosperity! Mutants, the Wilante, their eight-times accelerated growth clones... they are all byproducts of that project!" Chu Guang's expression turned pensive. He couldn't help recalling the powder keg that had triggered the collapse of the Reconstruction Committee a century and a half ago—that laboratory on the East Coast. That laboratory was like a squashed cockroach whose eggs had scattered everywhere. That failed military operation became an indelible stain in Enterprise's history, and even the fall of Singularity City was intricately linked to it. Could it be... Torch had somehow acquired data leaked from that laboratory! Judging from Torch's movements around Jinhe City, they had been deliberately recovering scattered data on the 'Gestalt Organism' across the wasteland! At this thought, Chu Guang's eyes flickered. While scheming against an ally right now wasn't ideal, that data could never be allowed to fall into the Legion's hands under any circumstances! Seeing Chu Guang lost in silent thought, Heya continued earnestly, "In any case, I need to visit the front lines, including investigating how to restore Haiya Province's soil..." "Yes, seeing it in person is a good idea." Chu Guang nodded, then recalled something and added, "By the way, wait until the day after tomorrow to depart. I'll head out with you then." "You're going to the front too?" Heya looked at him in surprise, teasing with a mischievous smirk, "You're not worried about me, are you?" Ignoring her playful tone, Chu Guang smiled faintly. "I am, after all, the nominal supreme commander of the Allied forces chosen by the various factions. I was meant to go there anyway. I've just been tied up with rear-echelon affairs until recently." Due to the frictions among the Legion, Academy, and Enterprise, a supreme commander nominated by any one of them would inevitably face vetoes from the other two. Thus, the only 'acceptable' candidates were the Alliance and the Free States representing the Great Rift Valley. Though the latter had received a few votes, it was negligible compared to the Alliance's overwhelming tally. While the Legion's representative grumbled about the vote's outcome, they merely insisted that the commander must be Chu Guang himself, without exercising their veto power. Chu Guang knew the Wilante didn't hold any special fondness for him, nor was it the wastelanders' cliché that 'the Wilante revere the strong.' They simply feared he would appoint Vannus or another 'assimilated' Wilante to the post, which would humiliate them. From Triumph City's perspective, that was far from impossible. After all, the Alliance's personnel appointments never cared about origins, only about conviction and capability. If a serf could become a city lord, a Wilante could naturally become a marshal. Yet in Triumph City, those who defected to the Alliance were branded as traitors and disgrace incarnate. They would never consider striving for equality an excusable motive. If Vannus had been made Allied commander and led them to victory, not a soul in Triumph City would have been happy. Even the name of the airship *Loyalty* dispatched by the Eastern Legion was not without a sarcastic jab at those defectors. Those Wilante just happened to have prominent noses; as for their magnanimity, that was another story—perhaps narrower even than the Academy's. Hearing Chu Guang's reply, a radiant smile bloomed on Heya's face. She said cheerfully, "Wonderful! That way, you won't have to bother mailing specimens to the front." "A physical exam can wait a few days, can't it?" Chu Guang coughed dryly, feeling slightly embarrassed, but Heya shook her head, fixing her eyes on him. "No, this has nothing to do with a regular physical. It's about the Gestalt Organism research." Pausing, her voice took on a touch of fanaticism, her gaze burning with an unusual fervor. It was as though she were beholding an extraordinary experimental breakthrough. "...Others might not know, but I clearly witnessed the entire process of your non-coding genes transforming into coding genes." Her intense gaze made Chu Guang feel a bit uneasy. He picked up his teacup, took a sip, and concealed the fleeting awkwardness on his face. "And so?" Yet Heya's next words nearly caused him to spray his tea across the table. "It might not just be the Wilante—your DNA may also harbor fragments of that Singularity technology!"