Waiting for the Pig

Rolling red sand churned across the horizon. Through the howling dust, the faint silhouette of a dead city emerged. A towering skyscraper was snapped clean in half, its midsection embedded with the wreckage of what looked like a space elevator. The remnants of a glass curtain wall feebly reflected the harsh light through the grit, illuminating the empty, desolate alleys below. Unknown perils lurked behind shattered storefronts, while mutant hyenas with razor-sharp jaws prowled beneath rusted billboards. A cloaked woman stood atop a nearby dune, peering through a pair of binoculars toward the skyscraper. Moments later, a brown-feathered, mottled mutant eagle-owl fluttered down through the wind and landed upon her shoulder. She met its sharp gaze for a beat, reached out to stroke its feathers, and tossed it back into the sky. "Skree—!" The owl let out a piercing cry and vanished into the churning dust. The cloaked woman, too, slipped away from the crest of the dune. Within moments, the blowing sand smoothed over her tracks, leaving no trace that anyone had ever been there. This was the Great Desert. If Sunset Province was a forbidden zone for life, then this place was a forbidden zone for civilization. No one could leave a lasting mark here. No one remembered the names of these streets or city districts, and even if someone did, it held no meaning. The nomadic tribes were not the only things that drifted with the wind—the towering dunes shifted constantly as well. A landmark visible aboveground today might become the entrance to the "underground world" tomorrow. A high-rise standing tall yesterday might collapse into rubble just a few days later. The only thing capable of pinning down a location in this wasteland was a string of coordinates containing latitude and longitude. Though they lacked orbital satellite navigation, the people of the wasteland always found alternatives. [G1178, A2249] Dark green floating-point digits blinked on the off-road vehicle's center console, swaying in rhythm with the jolting chassis. The man behind the wheel double-checked the coordinates. Slamming on the brakes, he grabbed the assault rifle mounted inside the door, shoved the heavy door open, and stepped out. Steel plating covered his body from neck to toe, his heavy armor stamping two deep hollows into the sand. "All units, heads up. We've reached the coordinate zone... Proceed as planned." "Copy." The moment he dismounted, a convoy of desert-camo off-road vehicles pulled into their respective positions. Doors banged open, and heavily armed figures poured out in rapid succession. They wore desert-camo exoskeletons, gripped streamlined assault rifles, and sported identification patches on their sleeves: a sharp-tailed scorpion with the insignia of the Enlightenment Society stamped across its back. Their name was the Desert Scorpions. They were the keen blade in the Enlightenment Society's hand, and a name that struck terror into countless wastelanders throughout the desert. After all, this was a forbidden zone for civilization—a basement beneath the cellar floor. The wastelanders scraping by in this region could barely scrape together a few decent rifles, let alone exoskeletons, and their only protective gear consisted of piecemeal, unpowered armor. In contrast, the Enlightenment Society not only possessed black-box-manufactured exoskeletons and both light and heavy weaponry, but had recently integrated the Southern Legion's military technology and tactical doctrine. That kind of hardware was far more reliable than mere awakening. Whether facing legitimate wastelanders or rogue mutant organizations, these soldiers tore through their opposition with ease. Perhaps sensing the lethal chill veiled beneath the dust, even the mutants lurking in the ruins pulled their heads in and warily tucked away their claws as they watched the heavily armed soldiers. Roughly a hundred and twenty troops divided into three routes, silently surrounding the half-collapsed skyscraper in the city center. Moving in alternating bounds, they systematically drew their net tighter. Standing on a nearby dune, Captain Malik of the Desert Scorpions held a pair of binoculars, his face expressionless as he gazed toward the sheared-off tower, quietly waiting for something. Before long, a subordinate's voice came through the comms channel. "...Signal transmitter located. Top of the ruins, approximately one hundred meters above ground level." Showing no surprise at the report, Malik replied coolly, "Enter the ruins." "Sir!" The squad leader piloting the reconnaissance drone acknowledged the order, turning to the crouching soldiers beside him and thrusting a clenched right fist crisply forward. Ten exoskeleton-clad soldiers moved out immediately, hugging the base of the walls in a rapid advance under covering fire. At the same time, two combat drones mounted with gun barrels silently flanked the squad, accompanying them as they breached the skyscraper's ruins. Reflections of lethal, armor-clad figures flickered across the dust-caked glass curtain wall. A bearded man walked up beside Malik, hooking a forefinger into his collar to loosen his scarf, his eyes narrowing as he gazed at the skeletal tower. "A radio signal detected in a no-man's-land, carrying encrypted coordinates that decode right back to the transmitter's location... What kind of idiot goes through the trouble of pulling a pointless stunt like this?" His name was Valen, vice captain of the Desert Scorpions and Malik's longtime partner. "No idea," Malik replied offhandedly, keeping his eyes on the distant high-rise. "If I had to guess, someone's trying to make contact with our rivals. Which means the sender probably isn't the Alliance directly, but more likely a dog they keep on a leash." While the Eastern Empire was also capable of meddling, those Wilantes never cared much about the Enlightenment Society's business. Compared to a distant future or grand civilizational interests, their tyrant emperor cared far more about immediate practical gain. Only the Alliance wanted its hands on everything. In any case, only a handful of factions held sway near the Great Desert. A simple process of elimination was all it took. Valen raised an eyebrow. "Who do you think the dog is?" Malik sneered. "An old friend, I'd bet. Someone who knows how we operate, at the very least. But who can say for sure?" The Alliance was far from the Enlightenment Society's only adversary; in fact, the entire world seemed to be their enemy. In that predicament, it was entirely logical for an outside power to sponsor a clandestine opposition group within the Great Desert. A group calling themselves the 'Watchers' had cropped up over the past two years, constantly opposing them and ruining their operations. Malik's gut told him the beacon was almost certainly the Watchers' doing. If not them, then someone connected to them. A cruel smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. It was time to settle a few old scores. In less than a minute, the ten-man vanguard secured the tower's entrance. Under the cover of two drones, they locked down the fire escape and began pushing up the stairwell. Soon, the squad leader's voice crackled through the channel. "Team One here. We have secured the transmitter... The setup is powered by a portable generator. No sign of the operator!" "Fucking rats!" Valen cursed beside Malik. Malik's expression darkened, though he wasn't particularly surprised. Portable power supplies and remote activation were standard tradecraft. He would have done the exact same thing in their shoes. "Look on the bright side. The transmitter and battery are still here, which means the rendezvous hasn't happened yet." Pausing, Malik added, "At least we beat the Alliance to the punch. We might as well use this chance to teach them a lesson." Valen's face broke into a sinister grin. "Not a bad idea!" When the Alliance arrived chasing the breadcrumbs, they would walk straight into an ambush. It would hand the Alliance a bitter loss and might even drive a wedge between them and their desert lapdogs. Malik offered a faint, unapologetic smile, immediately shifting gears to coordinate their deployment. He reorganized the force of roughly a hundred and twenty men into twelve squads across three tactical elements. While dispatching three squads to reinforce the tower, he ordered the remaining two groups to take up concealed, radio-silent positions on the east and west flanks of the target building, ready to provide fire support at a moment's notice. An inescapable snare was laid in silence, waiting for the prey to walk in. As for the radio terminal, Malik decided against tampering with it to avoid alerting the enemy. He simply tasked an off-road vehicle carrying electronic surveillance gear to monitor its transmissions in case anything changed. With all preparations complete, Malik and Valen returned to their vehicle, driving it into the abandoned city blocks and concealing it behind the broken display window of a street-side shop. Now came the waiting. Malik was confident that given the Alliance's relentless obsession with the Enlightenment Society, they would never let this lead slip. Once the bait was cast, a catch was guaranteed—the only question was whether it would be a big fish or a small one. He was more than willing to wait several days if that was what it took. As long as something took the hook, it would all be worth it. Shutting off the engine, Malik climbed out of the vehicle just as a deafening roar tore through the sky overhead. "Aircraft! South to north—probably flew in from the Ravanka Industrial Zone!" Valen poked his head past the storefront window, his face showing a mix of surprise and relief. They had beaten the Alliance to the punch, but not by much. Still, a step ahead was all that mattered. Their men were already hidden deep within the ruins; the plane couldn't have spotted anything. "Probably scouting the area... Their ground units must be close behind." Pulling back from the broken window, Valen glanced over at Malik. Malik nodded grimly, his index finger tapping the side of his helmet. "...All units, heads up. The Alliance is almost here. Stay hidden and don't give away your positions! Wait until the prey is fully inside the cage before you spring the trap!" Having delivered the crisp command, Malik waited for acknowledgment. Yet the comms channel remained eerily silent, save for a faint hiss of static. His brow furrowed, a sudden sense of foreboding knotting in his stomach. While wireless communications were notoriously unstable across the Great Desert with frequent signal drops, such total blackout over this short distance made no sense. "...Malik to all units. Do you copy? Acknowledge! Repeat, acknowledge..." Still nothing. The lingering unease spiked into outright alarm. In that very instant, a sharp crackle of gunfire erupted, followed immediately by a deafening blast. "It's coming from the tower!" Crouching beside the window, Valen looked back at Malik with panic flitting across his eyes. Malik rushed to the opening, but instead of looking toward the skyscraper, he squinted against the blinding glare toward the sky. There, drifting almost invisibly across the cloudless blue, was a faint speck of white. A small parachute. And hanging beneath it was a payload. Staring through his visor at that white speck, Malik's pupils constricted, and he roared in fury, "Electromagnetic jamming! Damn it, they've already spotted us!" No— Wait! A sudden realization struck Malik like a physical blow. He whipped his gaze toward the skyscraper where heavy fighting raged, the fury in his eyes curdling into shock and horror. A cold drop of sweat rolled down his forehead and slipped inside his collar. Those bastards had been there the entire time... It wasn't that the Alliance had stumbled onto them. Those bastards had been waiting for them here from the very start, watching them take the bait! There was no time to hesitate. Malik grabbed Valen by the shoulder, his bloodshot eyes glaring into his partner's bewildered face. "It's an ambush! Quick! Fire a flare! Order the men in the ruins to fall back!" "Right, right... Wait, what?! Fall back?!" Loading a cartridge into the flare gun, Valen froze, staring at his superior in sheer disbelief. He couldn't fathom what Malik was doing. Besides— What did he mean, an ambush? Weren't they the ones ambushing the Alliance? With no time to explain, Malik snatched the flare gun from his grip, loaded a green cartridge, and discharged it skyward without hesitation. A streak of green smoke shot into the air, bursting into a brilliant emerald flare. Without waiting to see if anyone caught the signal, Malik dashed back to the vehicle and threw himself into the passenger seat. Though completely bewildered by his boss's sudden panic, Valen scrambled into the driver's seat after him. Quickly turning the ignition, he opened his mouth to ask what was going on, but Malik barked before he could utter a word: "Drive! Now!" Valen gripped the steering wheel tightly, his voice stammering. "Wh-where to?" Malik's face was dark as thunder, teeth clenched in a low growl. "Anywhere! Just get us out of here!" The gunfire outside grew frantic. Sensing the gravity of the situation, Valen shoved the gas pedal to the floor without further argument. The engine let out a beast-like roar as the spinning tires hurled the vehicle out through the shattered shopfront. He whipped the wheel hard to the left, trying to retrace their route out of the city blocks, when a sharp crack rang out. It was the sound of a bullet punching through glass—and the last sound he would ever hear. A hypersonic kinetic round smashed clean through his helmet in a split second, pulverizing half the seat behind him. Red and white erupted across the cabin, his head bursting like a crushed watermelon over the dashboard and seats. The out-of-control vehicle violently slammed into the curb. With warm blood splashing across his face, Malik felt his heart seize, his entire body going cold. Running on pure instinct, he threw his shoulder against the door, tumbled out, and scrambled on all fours into an adjoining shopfront before a second shot could find him. Desperately, he screamed into his comms, "Sniper!" The jamming remained absolute. Naturally, not a soul heard his cry. Eight hundred meters away on a sand ridge, beneath a desert-camo ghillie net, the player [Desert Eagle] lay prone behind a massive, elongated Gauss sniper rifle. The punch of that weapon was enough to make even power armor steer clear—no matter an Awakened's level, one round would bring them to their knees. "What a coward." Watching his target scramble into the street-side shops, he clicked his tongue and casually toggled off the charging capacitor with his forefinger. That guy probably wouldn't dare poke his head out anytime soon. Not that it mattered. The surrounding area was crawling with Desert Corps players. The man had nowhere to run. Back inside the ruins of the skyscraper, the brutal slaughter raged on. Streaks of tracer fire crisscrossed the corridors, punctuated by deafening detonations. Soldiers bearing the scorpion emblem on their exoskeletons wore looks of utter terror. They fired wildly into the pitch-black shadows ahead while dragging wounded comrades toward the exits. The scene was pure pandemonium. Echoing through the dark was not just gunfire and explosives, but desperate shouts and curses. "Team One here! We're under attack by unidentified hostiles!" "It's the Alliance!!" "Damn it! Our comms are completely jammed!" "A flare! It's a flare!" "The captain's ordering a retreat!" "Retreat?! Are you out of your mind?! They've already surrounded us! Without reinforcements, we're all dead!" Terror was etched into every face. Every dark doorway frayed the Enlightenment Society soldiers' nerves to the snapping point. Cut off and forced to fight isolated, they had no idea how many enemies they faced, or how many of their own men were still alive. The vanguard team that had breached the tower was the first to take catastrophic casualties. When the Alliance aircraft swept over to clear the airspace, the vanguard had been fanning out across the top floor to search and set up defensive perimeters, completely unaware that Alliance soldiers were lying in wait right under their noses. The moment they heard the roar of the fighter jet, the hidden Alliance troops activated the luminescent IFF strips on their exoskeletons and unsheathed their weapons from the dark. Led by [Taran Raider], roughly thirty players from the Desert Corps launched a vicious ambush. Exploiting the radio jamming and their prior knowledge of the layout, they operated in three-man cells, systematically eliminating the nearly forty Enlightenment Society soldiers scattered across the floors. By the time the first gunshot broke the silence, the top-floor squad had already lost half its strength. Thanks to the communications blackout, the rest of the unit hadn't suspected a thing until the firing started. "I'll take you bastards with me! Aaagh!" A lone Desert Scorpion soldier finally snapped under the terror. With a desperate roar, he leaned out from behind cover and sprayed his rifle down the fire-lit corridor. His finger was glued to the trigger, sending a storm of bullets toward a silhouette moving so fast it was barely a blur. Tracer rounds danced and sparked across the faceted armor plating. Moving like the wind, the figure cut right through the tempest of lead and closed the distance in an eye-blink. The soldier's pupils shrank to pinpricks, his panic-addled mind managing only one thought: *Too fast!* He had barely registered the opponent's movement before the figure was right in his face. And it didn't stop there. A gleaming blade slashed down toward his visage like a bolt of lightning. In sheer reflex, he jerked his rifle up to parry. *Clang!* The colossal impact nearly shattered the bones in his hands. In that split second of pause, he finally caught sight of the cold edge shearing through steel. It was an outward-curving blade, shaped exactly like the scythe of a praying mantis. Terror filled his eyes. Before he could react, the razor-sharp edge cleaved through his helmet without losing momentum, punching through his skull with a dull crunch. "Three." Having dispatched the troublesome "super minion" with ease, the player in power armor silently tallied the kill, kicking the lifeless corpse aside. Witnessing the gory spectacle, the Enlightenment Society soldiers crouching behind nearby cover lost their nerve entirely. Terrified of meeting the same fate, they trained every weapon they had on the demonic figure, firing desperately. The barrage of tracer rounds bounced off the power armor like scratches, with only the occasional anti-tank rocket posing any real threat. But dodging rockets in straight hallways and corridors was child's play. "That all you got?" Facing the oncoming storm of fire, the veteran player grinned ferociously. Shaking the blood from his mantis blade, he charged forward without bothering to evade. Across from him, the remaining scorpions were scared out of their wits. Their crumbling morale shattered completely, and they broke into a frantic, disorderly rout. The bloody slaughter pressed on. It was the same outside the building. The Desert Scorpions lying in wait on the east and west flanks never got the chance to ambush their prey. Instead, they found themselves trapped like turtles in a jar. Under the Desert Corps' ferocious offensive, they were cut down or scattered into headlong flight. Over a dozen off-road vehicles bolted like startled birds toward the open desert, only to be obliterated by pursuing anti-armor missiles the moment they reached the outskirts of the ruins. Seeing no hope of escape amid mounting casualties, the abandoned soldiers threw down their weapons in despair and raised their hands. A unit that had never tasted defeat in close-quarters combat had kicked a steel wall this day. Meanwhile, a certain second- or third-tier corps that had spent the entire "Southern Barbarian Invasion" expansion pack twiddling its thumbs had finally seized its moment of glory. Though the victory owed much to the assistance of several solo high-tier players, the bulk of the fighting had been carried out by the corps' own members. Looking at the more than thirty prisoners stripped of gear and crouching by the wall with their hands behind their heads, [Taran Raider] wore a wide, satisfied grin. "Haha! Goddamn, that felt good!" After riding the bench for so long, it was finally his turn to flex.