Chapter 790: Chaotic Fists Beat the Old Madman to Death

Chapter 790: A Flurry of Chaotic Blows Fells the Mad Old Man

The emerald-hued thick broth soaked the land churned by artillery fire, a stench of decay suffocating the air.

Root-like strands of dark green mycelium lay exposed on the soil, like veins forcibly yanked from beneath the skin.

In the distance, the rumble of cannons still roared, burning steel cascading from the sky like an unending rain.

One hundred and twenty "Conqueror" tanks formed the spearhead of the assault, their long, thick barrels and nearly red-hot coaxial machine guns spitting tongues of flame, pouring fierce fire into the gaps of the rear artillery's curved trajectories.

Ten thousand clone infantrymen, clutching their Ripper rifles, charged howling after the streaking tracers, heedlessly rushing toward the shattered fungal mutants, venting their boiling fury with primal cries.

"Ahhh!!!"

"Roooar!!!"

A fungal mutant, scarred and torn by shell fragments, let out a wail that seemed also a roar. Its bloated body swelled like an umbrella, continuously squeezing out clouds of dark green spores.

That cloud of emerald spores was like some miraculous elixir; the mutants it touched moaned in ecstasy, staggering up from craters, their shattered limbs visibly healing before the eye.

Especially the "Wanderers" and "Corpse Hounds"!

Though these cannon fodder were not known for offensive prowess, they possessed tenacious resilience; a single breath of the spores had them writhing back to life.

In an instant, the dark green cloud was sucked dry, while the "Big Mushroom" that had released the spores shrank, wilted as if withered.

Spotting this, the charging clone squad immediately closed in, their rifles firing as they maintained their assault rhythm, pressing forward.

The Big Mushroom took several hits, gasping its last, on the verge of collapse.

But just as the clone squad neared, the Big Mushroom's body convulsed violently, like boiling water, then suddenly split open with a gap nearly a meter wide!

A dozen tendrils burst from the rift, lashing out like whips at the charging clone soldiers!

"Roooar!"

A clone soldier was struck squarely; the creature let out a short, excited shriek, like a frog snatching a fly, dragging the hapless soldier into its maw, pressing his head into its corrosive digestive tract.

But before the Big Mushroom could savor the sweet flesh, a bayonet thrust out from the back of its head.

"Roooar!!!"

A pained howl escaped from its gaping mouth and wound alike.

It writhed as if with a bellyache, its lower tendrils recoiling backward, spitting out the bloody corpse and digestive fluids from its mouth.

Before it could steady itself and assume a defensive stance, another clone soldier was upon it, his crazed, bloodthirsty pupils as blinding as the gleaming bayonet in his hand!

"Ahhh!!!"

He roared, plunging the bayonet into the mutant's body, twisting it violently left and right.

The Big Mushroom, capable of releasing healing spores, soon collapsed, and the nearby Wanderers and Corpse Hounds were also pinned down.

A Crawler lunged forward, biting through a clone soldier's neck, but was instantly blown to pieces by an oncoming tank shell.

The two sides engaged in close-quarters slaughter.

The clone soldiers seemed more like slime molds than the grotesque fungal mutants, especially their bloodshot eyes, which saw killing as life itself!

Their lives were measured in seconds.

They had crossed ten thousand kilometers of desert to reach this alien land, only for this final moment of combustion.

They fell continuously, but none retreated.

Their murky flesh and black mud merged, painting the earth red, pushing the front line forward with the most primal methods—forward, and forward again!

"Charge!"

Half-emerging from the turret splattered with blood and slime, the Vlandian centurion roared his command, urging his men onward.

"Let these filthy, ugly things see what true cruelty is!"

"We'll make them regret ever being born! Dedicate victory to the Marshal! Bring glory back to Triumph City! Bring death to our enemies!"

"Charge!!"

His roar was answered by deafening shouts.

"Ahhh!!!"

Though they couldn't make out what the chief was yelling, rushing toward death was indeed their best release.

Behind them, soldiers in heavy protective suits carried cylindrical metal canisters, holding sanitizing spray nozzles, advancing slowly.

Occasionally, one would stop, bend down, pick up a piece of corpse mixed with mud and blood, and toss it into the canister on his back.

B-type strain could not grow outside the Baiyue Province, but the fruiting bodies produced by the Alliance's bred queens solved that problem.

Besides mass synthesis in incubation chambers, the Alliance's biological research institute had developed "portable sanitization equipment"—the very devices strapped to these Vlandian soldiers' backs.

Each culture tank stored a "fruiting body" inoculated with the B-type strain genome, capable of continuously synthesizing the B-type strain, consuming only one corpse per square kilometer.

The B-type strain, which eroded the soil, could not survive outside Baiyue Province; it would naturally disappear after completing its mission to eradicate the J-type strain.

It was, in short, highly effective.

The Allied forces had already used this equipment to reclaim half of the Haiya Province.

The drone's lens slowly pulled back, rising with the drifting smoke and spore clouds, revealing a dense sea of figures covering the entire wilderness.

It wasn't just a single ten-thousand-man unit launching the attack, but a full ten such units from the Eastern Legion!

More brutal slaughter and death were visible everywhere across the mud-smeared land...

The Alliance wasn't the only one sensing the Torch's decline; the Legion's commanders saw it too.

To gain more leverage when dividing the spoils, they needed to control more territory!

And east of the Legion's front, the fighting on the Alliance-controlled line was even fiercer.

If the Legion's clones merely saw death as release, the Alliance's players were truly unafraid of dying.

Even though the Vlandians never cared about clone casualties, even hoping these ants would die faster so fresher, stronger cannon fodder could be sent from the rear, they dared not let clones be deeply encircled... for then even the most fearless individuals would lose their will to fight and resist.

But players had no such issue.

To squeeze in a few more kills before dying, or to keep allies out of the way, they would actively plunge deep into enemy territory, deliberately letting the Torch's mutants surround them.

This deceptive tactic had cost the Torch dearly in the early stages of the war.

When they tried to encircle and destroy the Alliance's effective strength, they only ended up paying even more in casualties.

Beyond the Alliance-controlled zone, further east, lay the territory held by the Academy's Alpha Task Force and the Free State's Hound Special Forces.

Farther still was the front controlled by the Enterprise.

Besides the 100th Mechanized Mountain Division sent to the front earliest, three infantry divisions and twelve mercenary companies that had crossed the Gallop Province were fighting in this region.

Each faction displayed its prowess on the front, while the Torch was battered and weary from constant evasion.

The broken land was a patchwork of green and purple, like a face bruised and swollen from a beating.

Gazing down at the shattered front, the Human Sovereign, standing in the void, glared with wide eyes, gnashing his teeth, his earlier calm and composure gone.

Too many enemies!

Soldiers with rifles surged to the front like locusts. No sooner had he finished deploying in the east than tens of thousands emerged in the west. By the time he managed both sides, Alliance planes had dropped paratroopers right in his face.

Now the threat comes not only from the front—his rear is also ablaze.

No matter how cunning he might be, he cannot withstand the countless fists raining down upon him from all sides.

"Die... all of you, die!" the Human Sovereign roared in fury, yet no one could hear his cries.

He kept projecting his consciousness onto the evolution bodies on the frontline, personally joining the fray to turn the tide, but in mere moments he lost contact with his mortal shell, trapped in an endless cycle of connection and disconnection.

As if moved by his efforts, or perhaps pitying his futile struggle, a gentle voice came from above his head.

"Enough. You have done all you could."

Hearing the Saint's voice, the madness on his face froze for an instant.

But only for an instant.

"I can still fight..." he gasped, his face still twisted with the frenzy from the death of the last evolution body.

Gazing at that mad visage, the Saint let out a soft sigh.

"The fall of the Celestial Kingdom is inevitable... Our time has come. The others have already departed. You should—"

"Never!"

The Human Sovereign, utterly bloodshot, roared, cutting off that airy sentence.

He was now like a beast cornered against the wall.

Staring fixedly at the burning battlefield below, he spoke each word deliberately.

"I will never retreat! My Celestial Kingdom is right here... I am going nowhere!"

To bring the Celestial Kingdom to this land, to evolve humanity into a higher existence, he had slain at least a million survivors!

After such immense sacrifice, his Celestial Kingdom had finally descended upon the mortal world—every sacrifice had finally borne fruit... No one would take his Celestial Kingdom from him!

He would fight to the end!

So that all this blood would not have been shed in vain!

Silently watching that distorted face, the Saint sighed softly.

"I respect your choice..."

As he spoke, his ethereal eyes took on a hint of madness, like a black hole devouring all things, even space itself.

"...I will witness the final moment of this miracle with you."

...

Low, dark smoke churned in the sky; shattered clouds traced the scars of bullets.

Standing inside the bridge of the Steel Heart, Chu Guang, like the "Human Sovereign" drifting somewhere unknown, also looked down upon the battlefield, plowed over and over by artillery fire.

But his demeanor and emotions were far more composed than that madman of the Torch; his stern expression barely showed any emotional fluctuation.

Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of the bridge, the faint outline of the coastline was already visible.

At the fastest, a week; at the slowest, no more than half a month, and the landing forces would complete their rendezvous with the main northern army.

After that, they would search for and destroy the Torch Church's facilities.

There was nothing noteworthy about the details of the local battle. At that moment, Chu Guang was looking through a holographic screen at the investigation report on Vault 182 sent by Fang Chang.

That vault had been abandoned for a century. The Torch had reactivated it and turned it into a research facility, mainly for projects related to complete lifeforms.

Most of the research and production facilities held by the Torch Church were of this kind.

According to the investigation report provided by Fang Chang, besides discovering some improved production machines and three black boxes on the fourth underground level of Vault 182, they also found 120 cylindrical cultivation tanks for soaking experimental subjects on the fifth underground level, along with a giant glass vat covering 100 square meters, filled with genetically modified raw fluid.

In addition, there was a large cold storage containing over a thousand corpses that had yet to be processed or had research value.

Those corpses hung like meat in a freezer—some with three arms, some with two heads—almost none retaining a basic human form.

According to the confessions of the facility's staff, the Torch's apostles selected suitable candidates from captured survivors who showed no obvious rejection to the genetically modified raw fluid, then threw them into cultivation tanks filled with that fluid for three to seven days, thereby transforming some of them into mutants.

Of course, even after filtering out those with rejection reactions, only a portion ultimately completed the transformation.

After all, "mutants" themselves were an unstable technology that had not been fully researched, carrying enormous risks from a technical standpoint.

Moreover, re-embryonifying a fully developed adult and replacing their genome to force expression was no less difficult than stuffing a person back into the womb to be reborn.

This was far harder than a blood transfusion.

Even though the Torch Church had certain advantages in biological technology, they could only achieve a "yield rate" of 67%.

And even among that 67% of "qualified" subjects, more than half lost their minds entirely during the torture-like process, becoming beings akin to animals.

As for those who did not become animals, their minds were twisted to varying degrees. The most common outcome was schizophrenia—for instance, multiple personalities inhabiting one body, or losing memory and imagining themselves as a chef or some other identity.

All related research was recorded in the experiment logs, every line dripping with horrifying blood.

The Torch seemed to realize that such content was not suitable for public disclosure, so they planned to destroy the originals while backing up the data.

Fortunately, his little players arrived in time and intercepted the apostles who were about to withdraw.

After reading the entire report to the end, Chu Guang let out a soft sigh.

"...Just from the contents of this one investigation report, the crimes of these people are already beyond description."

Standing behind him, Heya, who had been silent for a long time, showed a look of undeserved guilt and lowered her head.

"I'm sorry..."

"You don't need to apologize for crimes you didn't commit," Chu Guang said, raising his index finger and gently swiping it through the air, letting the pale blue light gather at his fingertip before dissipating. He turned to look at her. "Besides, your research has made tremendous contributions to our cause and to humanity. You should be proud. Lift your head."

Heya raised her head, but her complex eyes still wavered.

Those who committed these crimes were her former neighbors; they might have even sat at the same table in the same cafeteria... and some might have been her teachers.

"But they were still residents of Vault 117..."

"Only a part of them. Even if just one person made a different choice, that choice stands apart."

Chu Guang interrupted her, looking into her evasive eyes and continuing.

"Moreover, the Alliance's biological research institute is not without residents from Vault 117. They are all good people—you should know that."

Those Blue Suits were rescued by the Alliance from Vault 401.

Though not many in number, their contributions to the Alliance's biological advancements were significant; the Alliance's prosperity owed something to them as well.

Heya's eyes reddened slightly, and she murmured softly.

"Thank you..."

"No need to thank me. I've said similar things before," Chu Guang said with a faint smile. "I'm not the only one who thinks this way—including Yaya, who pulled you out of that hibernation pod, and the other residents who helped you collect research materials... We all feel the same."

The Alliance did not engage in identity politics; it had always been that way. Besides, not every resident of Vault 117 had joined the Torch, and some had joined only to later regret it.

But speaking of which, there was one thing he had always been curious about.

Various intelligence indicated that the Torch's pioneers numbered only thirteen, and that count included the Saint named Wang Yi.

Yet, according to information gathered by the Praetorian Guard's investigations, the number of residents who left Vault 117 back then was far greater than that.

Where were the others?

Including Heya's mentor, Kallen... where had those Blue Suits who once joined the Torch gone?

It wasn't just him who was perplexed; even Sun Yuechi, the former administrator of Vault 70, had experienced a similar bewilderment.

Vault 70 and Vault 117 had maintained regular contact over the past century or more, exchanging research on mutant slime molds and such... after all, the former was situated right next to a colossal hive, and they were hardly experts in biology.

In Sun Yuechi's impression, the residents of Vault 117 didn't seem like the kind of lunatics capable of such deranged acts, nor did they have the means to pull them off.

Most Bluecoats eked out a miserable existence on the wasteland; the kinder wastelanders ignored them, while the harsher ones simply saw them as easy prey.

Of course, this wasn't meant to excuse Vault 117's mistakes, but he always felt there was an invisible hand pulling the strings from behind... much like how the Alliance indirectly manipulated the situation in the Province of Brahma through the pawn of Baiyue Corporation.

Chu Guang didn't much care for the guy's snide analogy, since the two were entirely different matters, but he had to admit he'd felt something similar himself.

In the ten years since the Torch Church left Jinchuan for Haiya, its trajectory had grown somewhat absurd.

The Iron Tower organization was at least a knockoff version of the Alliance—survivors there had spontaneously organized a self-help coalition, far more unbreakable than Boulder City.

Yet, bafflingly, those whom even Boulder City couldn't handle managed to dismantle the Iron Tower in a very short time and enslave an entire province's survivors.

The black boxes they possessed far exceeded Vault 117's theoretical reserves; they armed one special operations unit after another with equipment that even the Alliance's finest warriors found daunting.

Chu Guang wasn't just curious about where the other Vault 117 residents besides the "Council of Thirteen" had gone; he was even more curious about what had happened in the years after the Torch arrived on this land beneath his feet...

Just then, Lü Bei of the Praetorian Guard stepped through the hatch into the bridge and snapped a crisp salute.

"Respected Administrator, sir... our field operatives have picked up a signal from within the Heavenly Domain..."

Lately, the kid had finally corrected his address from "Your Excellency," and Chu Guang was quite pleased with his progress.

The only thing still unsatisfying was that, though he often parroted what was said, he rarely truly took the words to heart.

Seeing Lü Bei suddenly stop mid-sentence, Heya tactfully began to leave the bridge to give them privacy, but Chu Guang called her back.

"Stay and listen with us."

With that, Chu Guang turned to Lü Bei and continued.

"The Alliance hasn't reached the point where we need to hide our illness from the 'doctor.' I recall saying that all intelligence on the Torch Church gathered by the Praetorian Guard should be transparent to the Alliance Institute of Biology, without needing to consult me first."

Lü Bei lowered his head.

"Yes, sir..."

Knowing the young man meant well, Chu Guang didn't scold him further, only signaling with his eyes for him to go on.

Lü Bei paused, then laid out the intelligence in full.

In short, it wasn't just the Coalition that thought the Torch was finished; even insiders within the Torch believed it was doomed.

Though the Torch Church bore the name "church," its doctrines were merely for fooling the masses; among the high-ranking members, they didn't bother with that nonsense, relying more on science and pragmatism.

While there were no shortage of staunch idealists among them, there were certainly opportunists and "none-of-my-business" types.

Take Yur, now working for the Alliance—he was a textbook example of the latter. That guy didn't even know what he wanted; before the war, he was just a corporate drone at a pharmaceutical company. When fighting broke out, he moved to another place to do research, was coaxed by colleagues into taking a nap, woke up in the Wasteland Era, and when the Torch beckoned, he followed without a second thought.

Other researchers were drawn by the Torch's resources, hoping to continue their pre-war studies with the Torch's backing.

In any case, among the Torch's upper echelons was one such researcher who, seeing that this madly self-destructive tree was ninety percent likely to fall, wanted to surrender to the Coalition of the United Commonwealths with intelligence and research data in exchange for leniency.

And interestingly, according to that senior researcher, the Torch Church's leadership seemed to be planning to escape through a secret device in his facility.

Clearly, he wasn't on that "strategic relocation" list, so he seized the chance to leak the information.

"What's that researcher's name?!" Heya blurted out anxiously before Lü Bei could finish.

Lü Bei hesitated, glancing at Chu Guang, but seeing the Administrator's impassive stare, he finally gave up with a sigh and held nothing back.

"The name he gave us for identification was Kallen... I was surprised too, but I don't think that person is the one you've been looking for."