Across the rolling waves of the open sea, an ocean-going container freighter cleaved through the water alongside Arman's convoy, steering toward Port French Fries.
They were merely twenty kilometers away from the Baiyue Strait!
Right at that moment, the fickle weather abruptly turned from clear skies into a raging storm.
Rumble—!
Lightning flickered above the dark clouds, silver serpents slithering through the rifts in the overcast sky.
Waves pounded against the hull one after another, wringing groans of overburdened agony from the towering steel vessel.
Meanwhile, inside the shipping containers carried by the freighter, matters were in utter shambles.
Even the slightest shudder of the ship was magnified several times over once transmitted to the containers.
And at that very moment, packed into those containers—spaces measuring under eighteen square meters—were half-centuries of men squeezed into every single one.
Inside, the Wilante soldiers sat shoulder to shoulder, knees pressed against the insteps of those before them, clutching their rifles and packs to their chests.
As for relieving themselves, they had only a small bucket, meant to be emptied outside in the heavy rain.
Yet because there was virtually no room to maneuver inside, doing so proved practically impossible, and many simply ended up fouling their own trousers.
And that wasn't even the worst of it.
Owing to the violent pitching and rolling, many had succumbed to seasickness, vomiting profusely throughout the entire voyage.
In this regard, the Wilantes were undeniably tough bastards.
Hardly anyone could endure being steeped in a container reeking of urine, feces, and vomit for a week or two.
Yet this torment, unbearable to ordinary men, was something they had gritted their teeth and endured.
Even so, these hardened men were pushed right to the edge of their mental limits.
Some were already slipping in and out of consciousness, while those still lucid either cursed or prayed.
"Fuck! Once I get back alive, I'm beating the shit out of whatever bastard came up with this lousy idea!"
"Heh, survive first, then talk."
"...I feel like we're gonna fall off!"
"For all we know, we already have."
"Shut your mouths! The ship is still moving forward!"
"You remember the container to our left? I swear there's one missing—"
"I said shut up! We're almost victorious! If you don't want the agony you've suffered these past dozen days to go to waste, then hang the fuck on!"
Struggling to his feet inside the container, eyes bulging, the centurion bellowed with every ounce of strength he could muster, trying to rally his men's spirits.
Yet the violently swaying vessel made it difficult for him even to plant his feet, let alone straighten his back; he had no choice but to brace both hands against the container wall.
Even so, he couldn't keep his footing for long.
A sudden swell slamming into the gunwale easily knocked him flat onto the comrades around him.
Watching the chaotic mess in the container, Pali sat curled up in a corner, his expression stiff and his pale face steeped in despair.
He was an infantryman in the 100th Myriad. He had originally been bound for the frontlines in Brahma Province, until one day his officer abruptly informed him that the folks at the General Staff and the Army Intelligence Bureau had concocted a stroke of sheer genius, and they were needed to carry it out.
And just like that, he went from an honorable army soldier to a "marine."
Evidently, the big brains at the General Staff had never squatted in a shipping container themselves.
If given the chance, he really wanted to shove those bright idea men down a toilet bowl so they could see just how stupid they were!
Outside, the thunder and lightning grew fiercer, as if tearing the entire world to shreds.
The centurion, who had tumbled into the excrement earlier, finally cursed and scrambled back to his feet, still putting on a brave face.
"Right ahead! We've reached the Baiyue Strait! We're almost there!"
Pali suddenly realized that this, too, was a form of prayer.
If they allowed despair to swallow them whole, they might never have held out this long.
Just then, a shrieking groan of metal clashing came from beneath them.
Before anyone could react, their bodies lurched violently with the shuddering impact.
"Fuck—!"
Pali heard the comrade next to him curse furiously, having slammed his forehead into the container wall hard enough to draw blood.
Beside them, the machine gunner was terrified.
"Dammit... I've got a bad feeling about this."
That was the tenth time he had uttered those exact words today!
At this moment, Pali felt the same way. What had set its sights on them might not be just the storm, but Alliance submarines or something else entirely.
Yet fortunately, their container did not tumble from the deck into the sea floor. After a bout of intense turbulence, they finally entered calm waters.
Feeling the waves subside outside, everyone in the container breathed a sigh of relief.
"We survived..."
The unlucky sod with the bleeding forehead patched himself up crudely, and the machine gunner who had been muttering nervously fell silent at last, closing his eyes as if asleep.
Pali panted heavily, listening to his heartbeat steadily slowing down, until a wave of drowsiness washed over him.
How many times had it been now?
He could no longer remember.
It felt as if the moment he stepped onto this ship, he had surrendered all control over his own destiny.
Worse yet, the people making every choice on his behalf had never once asked what he thought.
Where this ship was sailing, what would become of those aboard, when all of this would end—no one had ever given him an answer.
He had had enough.
Perhaps he had known all along where the real enemy lay.
At the very least, the ones subjecting him to this miserable ordeal weren't the folks at Port French Fries...
Time crept along like a snail on a leaf, and the misery was as endless and suffocating as silk coiled around a cocoon.
Later, Pali had probably fallen asleep, though he might just as well have been staring blankly without realizing it.
In any case, before his stomach had begun to rumble, his comrade peered through a slit in the container and caught sight of the harbor drawing near.
The squawking of seagulls echoing through the container walls seemed to confirm it.
"We're here..."
A sliver of light illuminated the young man's face.
Opening his eyes, Pali saw the youth's face radiant with excitement, as if gazing upon the finish line of their ordeal.
"Shh! Quiet!"
Standing up front, the centurion made a shushing gesture, then snatched up his assault rifle and gripped the container door with hands stained in ginger-yellow liquid.
According to plan, the instant they hit the ground, they were to deploy rapidly, seize the entire port, and prepare the way for the Southern Legion's fleet and monitors to enter the strait.
A low hum resonated outside—the gantry crane at the port. Massive mechanical arms latched firmly onto both sides of the container, hoisting them bodily off the deck.
The whole process was remarkably smooth, even steadier than resting on the deck, like riding an elevator.
Yet everyone inside held their breath, nerves stretched taut as they gripped their rifles tight.
"Ready..."
The centurion clenched his left fist, his trigger finger already flicking the safety off.
Right then, the container finally set down, jarring everyone's shoulders.
At the very same instant, a calm, measured voice called out from beyond the doors.
"Listen up inside! You are surrounded. I know you've got your hands gripped tight on your guns right now... but if you want to leave an intact corpse for yourselves and your buddies, you'd better not do anything stupid."
Inside, Pali froze, utterly stunned.
Not just him; the centurion by the door was equally dumbfounded, rooted to the spot.
Before anyone could process what was happening, the container door was torn clean off with a resounding crash!
Two hulking figures stood outside, their cybernetically modified bodies towering like iron pagodas.
One of them was absurdly outfitted: a gorilla-like arm welded with a cannon barrel as thick as a boa constrictor, while his other arm held an embedded, viciously toothed chainsaw.
Pali couldn't help wondering if even a tank standing before this monster would be sliced clean in two with a single swing!
"...Jungle Corps," the machine gunner beside him whimpered, voice trembling. "I've heard of them... At Ten Peaks Mountain, a hundred of those bastards slaughtered an entire mountaintop of mutants."
The soldier with the bandaged head stared blankly, swallowing hard.
"You gotta be kidding me..."
Pali's eyes widened as he stared out the opening.
Behind those two towering hulks sat a quadruple anti-aircraft machine gun.
Its 20 mm barrels were leveled horizontally. Judging by the eager grin on the gunner's face, armor-piercing incendiary rounds were already chambered, just waiting for anyone to make a false move.
At this point, whatever had happened on Ten Peaks Mountain hardly mattered to him anymore.
If they couldn't get through this standoff, he wouldn't even have the luxury of falling into the sea to feed the fish.
"Surrender, pal."
Midnight Chicken Slayer walked up to the centurion, plucked the assault rifle from his grip, tossed it into a nearby forklift bucket, and flashed him a grin.
"See? Throwing down your gun is a lot easier than picking a fight with me, isn't it?"
Before his cybernetic frame, the tall, burly centurion looked like a shivering little chick, and the rifle tossed into the bucket looked no bigger than a toothpick.
The centurion stood frozen, teeth chattering. He wanted to show some backbone, but his body refused to cooperate.
Midnight Chicken Slayer paid him no further mind, handing him over to the brothers waiting nearby, before shouting into the container:
"Alright, folks, drop the magazines from your rifles, put your hands over your heads, and file out in an orderly line.
"We'll arrange a bath for you lot... Christ, now I see what your plan was. You wanted to stink us to death, didn't you? Come on out, chop-chop."
Watching his commander yield without a scrap of resistance from start to finish, Pali knew that this war, which had barely begun, was in all likelihood already over.
Yet for reasons unknown, there wasn't the slightest bit of dismay in his heart—only an overwhelming sense of relief.
It was over...
Perhaps he wasn't the only one thinking that.
The comrade who had peeked through the slit earlier had clearly known what was waiting outside.
This was nowhere near Port French Fries; it was an empty wasteland with nothing but a solitary dock.
Clearly, from the moment they boarded the ship, the Alliance had been waiting for them right here—even specially setting up a gantry crane just to unload them.
Though they had paid a steep price, all the agony endured along the way had ultimately amounted to nothing more than a punchline.
However, petty details like that—much like the fearsome reputation of the Jungle Corps—no longer mattered to him.
The ferocious-looking men didn't give them a hard time; they merely ordered them to discard their weapons, strip down to their underwear, and squat on the cordoned-off beach.
Though a few fresh recruits had literally pissed themselves in fear, Pali felt oddly at ease.
After all, if these people genuinely intended to execute them, there was no need to go to such trouble.
Scuttling them at sea or riddling the containers with bullets would have been far more efficient than herding them onto a beach to squat...
Elsewhere, Crawling Model Worker curiously peeked into the container whose door had been ripped off.
Even though he had anticipated what lay inside, the visual assault the moment he poked his head in still turned his stomach.
"Holy shit... Who the fuck could survive in a place like this?"
Piltover Paratrooper wore an expression of sheer disgust as well.
"Even livestock ships aren't packed this tight. Gotta hand it to these bastards for putting up with it for a week or two."
To him, this didn't feel like taking prisoners of war so much as rescuing a batch of trafficked human chattel from snakeheads.
Xiao Xiao Xiao Bookworm narrowed his eyes and chuckled with a sneer.
"Isn't that just how imperialists always are? Sweet-talking their own people while shoving them headfirst into a bucket of shit... The ones bellowing 'Long live the Wilantes' are the very same ones who treat their own people the most ruthlessly."
Crawling Model Worker turned to him.
"Wait, is the Legion an empire? I thought Xilan was."
Piltover Paratrooper grinned cheekily.
"Come off it. I can call myself Superman; does calling yourself an empire make you one? By that logic, the Red River Alliance calls itself an alliance, so the laborers there must be living in pure equality, right?"
Watching them shoot the breeze, Midnight Chicken Slayer growled in his resonant voice:
"Stop bullshitting. The next container's coming."
The chattering players scattered at once, returning to their positions.
"Back to work, back to work."
"I bet there're fifty in the next box."
"I put my money on fifty-one!"
"Heheh, my luck's good today, let me crack open the next blind box..."
...
What unfolded next played out just as Pali had imagined.
Under the tireless operation of the two gantry cranes, container after container across the two freighters was unloaded and emptied.
During the process, some noticed the strange scene onshore, broke out of their containers, and leapt into the sea, only to be chased back ashore before long by aquatic mutants.
And those were the lucky ones.
A few slower swimmers had their throats ripped out by sea beasts before the retrieval speedboats could even reach them.
After all, this wasn't Port French Fries or Port Youtiao; the offshore waters lacked mutant-exclusion nets, making straying too far from the beach rather hazardous.
Every Wilante who made it ashore was herded onto the sand and made to squat.
Standing by the cordoned boundary, a few militiamen from Port French Fries looked upon these bedraggled soldiers with wry expressions.
"...Launching a raid stuffed inside shipping containers. What the hell were they thinking?"
"Ghost only knows."
Before long, a man in an open-collared shirt walked up before the gathered captives.
Holding a bullhorn in hand, he shouted toward the bare-chested men:
"Listen up, big-noses on the beach! This is a coastline roughly two hundred kilometers away from Port Youtiao, a place... well, let's call it Port Mantou for now.
"As for you, you are its very first residents.
"I imagine some of you are thinking of fleeing into the woods; hell, some have probably already tried. Let us take three seconds of silence for those idiots who couldn't wait for someone to finish talking. The mutant wildlife in this forest is probably the most vicious and diverse on this entire planet. Even with a psychic interference device, it's nearly impossible to suppress so many species at once.
"So don't dream of escaping with whatever half-assed tricks you picked up in boot camp. If you truly have the chops, we won't stop you—just carry a camera with you so we can enjoy the show.
"Alright, enough chitchat. Let's talk about what concerns you.
"The moment you detonated a nuclear warhead on our soil, our war with you had already begun. Over these past few days while you were drifting at sea, our allies' fleet coordinated with our submarines to wipe out your fleet and monitors in unpopulated waters a thousand nautical miles from here.
"Funny thing, really—all twenty of those vessels were crammed with artillery. Must have taken a lot of work to produce all that steel, and now every bit of it is sitting at the bottom of the ocean. If you're curious about how the battle went down, I can bring you a newspaper sometime.
"In any case, starting today, this is your new home.
"The Alliance brothers asked me to tell you that you don't have to build this place like a POW camp. After all, you'll be living here for quite a while, and plenty more of your compatriots will be joining you later.
"So working hard is for your own good... I bet it's not the first time you've heard that line, but this time it's actually true. As someone who's been through it, I give you my word.
"In addition, ships will dock here every day to bring food and supplies. However, at Port Mantou, outside of the mantou itself which is free, even the pickled vegetables cost money. If you don't fancy dipping steamed buns in seawater every day, you'd better put some elbow grease into your work.
"That's right—the Alliance requires us employers to pay wages to POWs. Personally, I think it's a waste; back in my homeland, there's a whole mob of folks willing to work for them for free... so long as someone pays for a boat ticket to ship them here.
"Still, when you're on someone else's turf, you play by their rules, don't you? You don't have a choice, and I shouldn't need to tell you that."
His throat parched from speaking, the man fished out a mineral water bottle, twisted the cap off, and took a swig.
The myriarch squatting in the front row glared at the man, asking in a raspy voice:
"Who are you?"
The man glanced at him and said nonchalantly,
"Eser. Former myriarch of the 3rd Myriad in the Imperial Expeditionary Force, and current mayor of Port Youtiao."
The myriarch stared at him in utter disbelief. Only after a long pause did he manage to squeeze out a sentence:
"...You didn't go back?"
"Go back? Back where? The empire's gone, so should we have joined that idiot Alaiyang in the grave?" Looking at the myriarch, Eser smiled, patted him on the shoulder, and thrust the half-empty water bottle into his hands. "This is a great place. You'll come to love it."
With that, he left the dumbfounded man where he knelt and strolled off toward the next formation.
...
Meanwhile, back at the Alliance's Settlement No. 1, a squad of Guards soldiers clad in exoskeletons raided a restaurant, pinning Greg to the floor while he was mid-meal.
In fact, the moment he saw them appear, Greg had realized disaster had struck and scrambled to flee.
Yet how could a traveling merchant like him outrun Awakened warriors injected with genetic enhancement serums?
In the blink of an eye, the exoskeleton-clad soldier flashed before him and slammed him back down onto the floor boards.
"What are you doing! Let go of me!" Greg struggled desperately to break free, but the hand clamping his arm was like an iron vise, twisting him in grimacing agony.
Yet across the table, Arman calmly took a sip of black tea.
Setting his cup back onto the saucer, Arman spared a glance at his unsightly state and sighed softly.
"Give it up, Mr. Greg. At least that will spare you some pain."
"It was you..."
Greg glared furiously at Arman, bloodshot eyes burning with wrath and hatred.
He had invited the man to dinner originally intending to treat him to a grand spectacle, never imagining that the other party had called the authorities instead.
Right then, the radio chimed with the seven o'clock evening news, though the broadcast's contents were worlds apart from the Operation Tsunami he knew.
The 100th and 101st Myriads had not landed at Port French Fries; instead, they had gone ashore at the construction site of Port Mantou.
Contractors from Port Youtiao had already prepared construction machinery and concrete-pouring tools well in advance, so these "lucky fellows" were put to hauling freshly molded bricks the second they set foot ashore.
The Guards soldier pinning Greg down wasn't in any hurry to drag him away; instead, with brutal psychological cruelty, he made him listen through the entire radio news report until every last shred of hope was crushed.
Greg gritted his teeth so hard he almost ground them to dust.
"You traitor—"
"Traitor?" Arman looked at him, a flicker of pity suddenly entering his eyes. "Who betrayed whom? Every Wilante in this settlement once placed their absolute trust in you, and how did you repay them? Put your hand on your heart and swear to the Marshal—did you consider the fate of the Wilante people for even a single second?"
Without waiting for Greg to reply, Arman continued:
"I only found out recently myself. That fellow Wyatt told me... West Sail Port was the work of the General Staff..."
Greg's face drained of all color, his trembling lips murmuring:
"He talked..."
Wyatt hadn't actually confessed.
Yet the expression plastered across Greg's face said it all... They truly had a hand in what happened that day.
This bastard...
Upon realizing who the real killers of their own kin were, his first reaction wasn't fury, but panic that the secret had leaked.
Could something like this even be called human?
Arman had thought his heart would ache, yet all he felt was an overwhelming exhaustion.
"Thank you. You've satisfied my curiosity, though I knew from the start... things like the truth don't really matter."
The Guards soldier holding Greg looked over at Arman.
"We're taking him away."
Arman nodded.
Aside from fulfilling his duty as an Alliance citizen, that had been the sole concession he had asked from the Guards Corps:
The truth that had puzzled him for so long.
Now, he had received his reward.
"Mm. He's all yours."
Chapter 921