Chapter 582: 'Walking into the Trap'

Chapter 582: "Walking into the Trap"

The interference of the mental interference device on long-distance communication was equally effective for both sides, and as the output power of the mental interference field reached its peak, the entire estate seemed to turn into a quagmire, with all information trapped within.

Only at very close range did communication devices barely function.

However, this interference was no big deal for the players; those who had fallen earlier had already brought the situation to the official website, and after logging off, Fang Chang quickly learned from the mission page that reinforcements were on the way.

Yet at this moment, the executioner squad inside the estate had no idea that the Alliance's Steel Heart was en route to Jinchuan Province, nor did they know that the apostles of this settlement had already contracted it out to the mutants for cleanup.

Otherwise, these executioners would surely be cursing.

Trying to make bloodthirsty mutants distinguish friend from foe was harder than teaching a pig to talk; sharing a trench with those beasts was an extremely dangerous affair.

So even though the Torch Church had allied with the Odd Tribe, they rarely acted together, usually handling their own battlefields.

Watching the transport plane leave the villa, a flicker of annoyance passed through Li Jie's eyes, but just then, a crimson flare suddenly rose from the direction of the annex, hanging in the center of the pitch-black sky.

"It's from the annex direction," murmured an executioner standing not far behind Li Jie, staring at the crimson flare. "Wu Zhe is probably in trouble!"

Hearing this, the executioners exchanged surprised glances.

It was just dealing with a little mouse that had slipped into the lab...

Given Wu Zhe's skills and the gear on that guy, they couldn't think of any reason something might go wrong.

Just then, the Alliance transport plane that had been heading out of the settlement suddenly changed course, banking in the sky and flying toward the annex.

Seeing the plane turn back, Li Jie's face first showed surprise, then a cold smirk curled at the corner of his mouth.

"Looking for death!"

He tapped the side of his helmet with his index finger and spoke in an icy tone.

"All units, attention. Our enemy is advancing toward the annex. Team A is responsible for taking down that plane. Teams B, C, D, and E, attack the annex with me. Do whatever it takes to keep them here!"

Amid the crackling static, garbled replies came through.

"Roger!"

With the battle order given, the executioner squad lurking in the forest moved swiftly.

A total of twenty-five soldiers in exoskeletons, divided into five teams, carrying light and heavy weapons, advanced toward the annex from three directions.

The first team reached the garden in front of the annex's main gate, far ahead of the transport plane.

The square annex was like a prison, with open lawns outside its four gates, and the fountain garden to the north was the nearest cover.

But there was still a hundred meters to the gate.

However, this was no problem for the executioner squad equipped with optical camouflage.

The optical camouflage modules on their exoskeletons could capture image data of the surrounding environment and adjust the color and brightness of the armor coating to blend perfectly with the surroundings.

When stationary, they could even achieve complete invisibility.

"Team B is in position."

"Ready to enter."

The squad leader, crouching by the garden fountain with his rifle, gave a hand signal, then, like a chameleon, he and the four soldiers behind him merged into the environment.

The five executioners left cover and charged toward the annex ahead. The dark muzzles of their guns exuded a chilling murderous intent, like five invisible daggers slowly closing in on the prey's throat.

According to the intelligence from His Eminence, there was only one enemy.

They didn't know how Wu Zhe had gotten into trouble.

But five against one—

There was no way they could lose!

Just then, the squad leader at the front suddenly heard a sharp whistling sound, like a cold wind blowing from far away.

He had no time to think about where it came from.

The next moment, a searing pain pierced through the frontal bone of his skull, brutally severing his consciousness. Before he could even let out a grunt, he fell backward like a kite with a broken string.

"Bang—!"

By the time the others heard the gunshot, the second man was already down.

"Two."

On the roof of the annex.

Ye Shi lay prone by the railing, a sniper rifle braced before him, his index finger on the trigger, his right eye pressed to the scope, already aiming at the next target.

The flare he had fired earlier wasn't a call for help; it was to lure Wu Zhe's accomplices here.

Rather than playing mind games with enemies hidden in the dark, he preferred to be the one pulling the trigger from the shadows.

He could lock onto the killing intent in the darkness.

As long as he knew the general direction of that intent, finding the hidden target wasn't hard.

Optical camouflage wasn't absolute.

Especially when moving...

In the blink of an eye, two teammates were killed. The remaining three executioners were startled. Seeing that their optical camouflage had been seen through, they abandoned stealth and scattered, charging toward the villa.

With the aid of exoskeletons, a hundred meters could be crossed in an instant.

But now, that hundred meters of open ground before them seemed like an insurmountable chasm.

The optical camouflage deactivated under the violent movement.

Then the third and fourth gunshots rang out in quick succession. One was shot through the chest, another had his head blown off. The five-man team was reduced to just one.

He was about to reach the door.

A flash of ecstasy at surviving crossed the executioner's face, but just as his front foot crossed the northern gate of the annex, a faint touch came from the front of his boot.

As if—

He had stepped on a tripwire.

"Boom—!"

Before he could react, a hail of plastic pellets the size of glass marbles rushed at him, then burst into a crackling blaze of fire like firecrackers.

Standard fragmentation mines were ineffective against soldiers in exoskeletons and mutants, but this plastic explosive, a blend of X-4 fiber and N10 azide compound, worked wonders.

Each sub-munition had the equivalent of 100 grams of TNT. The dense detonation of fifty such sub-munitions in a confined space would be enough to give even a power-armored soldier a hard time.

This high-yield tripwire mine was originally meant for mutants.

Using it on humans was still a bit cruel.

When the dust from the explosion cleared, the executioner lay on the ground like a tattered rag, his armor and flesh fused together, barely recognizable as human.

Watching the smoke billow from the northern gate below, Ye Shi on the roof clicked his tongue, silently mourning the unlucky bastard for half a second, then quickly evacuated the roof and retreated to a room downstairs.

Meanwhile, on the lawn before the northern gate, the unanswered communication channel crackled with static.

"Team B! Please respond! Repeat, please respond!"

"Damn it!"

After a long silence with no response, Li Jie cursed angrily, cut the communication, and stared at the nearby villa with murderous eyes.

Squad B was beyond saving.

From the first gunshot, he sensed something was wrong, and the final explosion plunged his heart into the abyss.

The enemy had spotted them too quickly!

It was as if that person had been waiting for them ahead, waiting for them to walk right into the trap.

Dark windows with drawn curtains hid the interior from view; the sniper's position could roughly be judged from the gunfire's direction, but now the rooftop was empty.

Though their scouts were equipped with thermal imagers, those were of limited use against targets in exoskeletons—many sophisticated exoskeletons had their heat-dissipation units in the lower limbs or even soles, leaving the upper body with almost no thermal difference from the surroundings.

The game of cat and mouse seemed to have turned into hunter versus wolf pack.

With one squad lost after a single engagement, Li Jie had to be cautious. He ordered the drone operator to deploy the reconnaissance drones.

Two disc-shaped drones shot up from the large drone backpack and drifted toward the villa.

But due to the disturbance of the mental interference field, as soon as the two drones neared the villa, they became sluggish, like dazed flies, and the control terminal screens flickered with static.

"The electromagnetic interference ahead is too strong; we can't get any closer..." The drone operator, crouching nearby, looked at the grim-faced captain and spoke with sweat pouring down his face.

Li Jie gritted his teeth and waved his right hand forward.

"Smoke screen cover!"

"Roger!"

At the same moment the order was received, the support soldiers waiting in the forest deployed the supports on their "Destroyer I" exoskeletons, bracing their hands on the ground while raising the 120mm heavy mortars on their backs.

The four Executioner squads, lying prone behind the cover at the edge of the lawn, were ready for the assault.

Then, three short, sharp bangs rang out in the distance, followed by plumes of smoke descending from the sky, bursting into a white smoke wall across the empty lawn.

Another round of mortar fire followed, and the smoke wall had already closed in on the villa's edge.

"Damn, they're even using mortars?!"

Seeing the thick smoke, Night Ten, hiding in a room on the third floor, clicked his tongue and couldn't help but break out in a cold sweat.

From three to five hundred meters away, especially without a clear line of sight, his perception of killing intent had become blurred, but he could still sense at least a dozen people hiding in that forest.

At the same time, another team was flanking him from the side.

Under these circumstances, the sniper rifle was useless.

Setting the sniper rifle aside, Night Ten took a deep breath, chambered a round in his LD-50 carbine, and prepared for close-quarters combat with the group outside.

Just then, a familiar voice suddenly came through his earpiece.

"...Night Ten, can you hear me?"

The voice was faint, accompanied by a noise like sandpaper scraping against a wall, but it was still barely discernible. Night Ten's face lit up with surprise.

"Fang Chang?!"

"It's me... We've evacuated from the main building and are nearby. I need to confirm your position."

Before Fang Chang could finish, Night Ten quickly said, "Wait, listen first... The Torch Church has a lab hidden in the villa's basement, and the mental interference device is in there! That's what's driving the survivors mad!"

A crackling static filled the communication channel.

Night Ten wasn't sure if Fang Chang had heard him, but just as he was about to repeat himself, Fang Chang's voice came through again.

"...Basically what I guessed. Is there any way to shut it down or blow it up?"

Night Ten swallowed and spoke rapidly. "No use. I read the experiment logs. The mental interference device has already completed its brainwashing of the survivors in this settlement. The current output is just maintaining their 'trance' state. If we shut it down, they won't wake up all at once—they'll gradually regain consciousness within 24 hours, and then have irregular episodes..."

Fang Chang: "Tsk, tough. Does the log mention a solution?"

Night Ten immediately replied, "Yes... Just input a different signal to overwrite the device's brainwashing of the local survivors. But I've run into trouble—a group has already gotten close to me, and their gear is pretty insane."

Hearing this, a hearty laugh came through the channel.

"Perfect timing, then?"

That was Old Bai's voice.

And not just Old Bai—others too.

"Brothers, let's loot their gold!"

"Oorah!"

...

At the same time that CDE Team entered the villa, A Team, lying in ambush outside, finally saw the Alliance transport plane circling the perimeter come into view.

"Enemy aircraft in range."

"Fire!"

An Executioner stepped forward, knelt on one knee, and shouldered a rocket launcher. The translucent lens locked onto the arc light flickering in the night sky. After confirming the lock, he pulled the trigger.

"Boom—!"

A missile trailing flames shot out, racing toward the plane.

Just as the missile seemed about to catch the Alliance plane's tail, something unexpected happened.

For some reason, the missile suddenly seemed blinded, veering past the plane and exploding into a fireball in the air a hundred meters away.

Witnessing this unbelievable scene, the Executioner with the rocket launcher stared wide-eyed, completely baffled.

On the other side, Fang Chang, crouching at the edge of the cabin, lowered his "Dawn" longbow.

Seeing the fireball in the distance, Jie Yan, crouching nearby, also stared wide-eyed.

"Awesome... How the hell did that work?!"

Beside him, Luo Yu was equally stunned.

"Damn... An arrow shooting down a missile?!"

How absurd was that?!

"Impossible..." Fang Chang laughed at Luo Yu's astonishment. "That thing is just an EMP arrow with a proximity fuse, and the warhead is modified from an EMP grenade."

It was mainly used against drones.

But it worked surprisingly well against missiles too.

After all, no one would design a dedicated EMP protection system for a shoulder-fired missile with a range of just two to three kilometers. That arrow directly disabled the missile's tracking equipment.

A momentary failure was enough for the missile to miss the plane.

And that was all it took!

The pilot in the cockpit was drenched in cold sweat. When he saw the missile locking on, he thought he was done for, but to his surprise, he survived!

Without time to catch his breath, he reduced engine thrust and shouted back at the others.

"How do we get down? Land on the roof, or the lawn outside—"

Tapping his helmet with a finger, Old Bai, who had just finished communicating with Night Ten, said at once.

"Drop down through the atrium!"

The pilot froze.

"The, the atrium?!"

Without hesitation, Old Bai replied.

"That's right! The atrium in the center of the villa! We'll land directly inside the villa!"

Seeing the man wasn't joking, the pilot's eyes went wide as he blurted out.

"Are you insane?! This is a transport, not a tank!"

"Trust me!"

Old Bai placed a hand on the back of the pilot's seat, staring into his eyes with earnest conviction. "The atrium is wide enough for us to land... even for two aircraft!"

"We don't know how many anti-air missiles they have left; we can't count on luck every time. Using the villa's walls as cover is the safest bet!"

The pilot gritted his teeth and, steeling himself, pushed the control stick forward.

These lunatics!

He swore this would be the last time he went along with their madness.

Next time, no matter what, he wouldn't take this job!

...

Just as the Alliance's "Viper" transport veered toward the top of the villa, fifteen fully armed executioners had already entered through the north gate.

With the lesson from before fresh in their minds, the group moved with extra caution, meticulously checking every corner that might hide a trap, not daring to be careless.

They soon reached the atrium.

The ground was a mess, littered with severed limbs and corpses.

A battle had erupted here before their arrival; the entire villa had been butchered clean, sticky blood plasma making the place look like hell itself.

His gaze sweeping to one side of the atrium, Li Jie immediately spotted Wu Zhe tied to a pillar.

Covered in blood from head to toe, he looked like a blood-soaked figure, his hands and feet bound tightly, a bloodstained cloth hood over his head, hiding his face.

As if hearing the footsteps approaching from outside, Wu Zhe, bound to the pillar, suddenly struggled violently, letting out muffled whimpers.

Seeing his comrade in such a wretched state, a surge of rage shot through Li Jie's mind. Thinking of the five brothers who had fallen earlier, he wished he could chop the sniper hiding in this building into pieces and feed them to the dogs.

"Go untie him..."

"Roger!"

An executioner crept cautiously toward him, carefully checking for any booby traps nearby before reaching out to remove the cloth covering Wu Zhe's head.

But the moment he pulled it off, he froze completely.

Wu Zhe's mouth was gagged, and around his neck hung a ring of black blocks, linked together by a loop of wire.

The instant he saw himself, those bloodshot pupils held not a trace of relief at being rescued, but instead were etched with deep despair.

Though he couldn't identify what hung around his brother's neck—no labels marked it—instinct told him it was nothing good.

Before he could react, he faintly heard a "click," and then a flash of white light severed his consciousness.

"Boom—!"

A deafening roar spread outward, the blast wave sweeping across the entire atrium.

The two at the epicenter of the explosion died instantly, flung away along with the surrounding corpses.

A scorching blast, carrying dust, charred flesh, and debris, surged like a rampaging beast toward the other executioners, forcing them to raise their arms and retreat in disarray.

The whole atrium seemed to rain blood!

Even the dust reeked of blood.

"I'll kill you!!"

Li Jie roared hoarsely.

He was certain the sniper was hiding somewhere in this building, calmly watching them walk into the trap before detonating the explosives strapped to Wu Zhe.

He gnashed his teeth in fury, nearly grinding them to dust.

But just then, a hot wind suddenly blew over their heads.

Two blazing arcs of fire emerged at the edge of the smoke, like twin swords piercing the night. Before the group could make out what the flames were, the broad fuselage of an aircraft came into view.

Li Jie's pupils contracted instantly.

An Alliance plane!

But how—

Before he could ponder how the aircraft had bypassed Team A's shoulder-fired missiles, streams of orange tracer fire began pouring from the side hatch.

Along with the hail of bullets raining down on the executioners came an excited shout.

"Hahaha! Die!"

Gripping the mounted machine gun, Good Dog held down the trigger, spraying wildly with a relentless rattle. His face, twisted with excitement, was lit red by the muzzle flash.

The executioners, still reeling from the earlier explosion, were caught off guard by this sudden storm of bullets, suffering immediate casualties.

Several soldiers in exoskeletons jumped from the other side of the hatch, splitting into two directions to surround the executioners pinned down in a corner of the atrium.

Like a pair of flaming tongs clamping down on a red-hot iron!

One executioner raised his rifle to return fire, only to meet a descending axe.

Panicked, he instinctively lifted his rifle to block, but a searing spark sliced through it without question, cleaving it in two, then driving the blunt axe head into his face.

"Thud—!"

The sensation of a shattered helmet traveled up the axe handle. Old Bai retracted his thermal cutting axe, smoothly switched to his rifle, and continued firing at the cover where the executioners were hiding.

On the final blow to that man's helmet, he hadn't activated the charge; instead, he used the unsharpened blade to knock him unconscious.

The prisoner Night Ten had caught was already dead.

They needed to capture two more!

Fortunately, there were plenty of men here—enough to go around.

These bastards had confidently emerged from the darkness; if they hadn't come out on their own, wiping them all out would have been trickier.

As the dust settled in the atrium, the battle inside the villa was largely over.

Of the fifteen executioners, eleven were killed, three severely wounded, and one lightly injured surrendered. There should still be a squad outside the villa, but they were some distance away.

If they dared to come, that would be ideal.

But Old Bai figured they probably wouldn't have the nerve to keep feeding themselves.

Hearing the gunfire outside cease, the pilot huddled in the cockpit let out a sigh of relief.

He sat up straight from the reclining chair, opened the side window of the cockpit, and shouted at the group of army brothers cleaning up the battlefield outside.

"Hey, are you still retreating?"

Old Bai turned to look at him and said with a smile.

"Forgot to tell you, the plan has changed. The Administrator wants us to find the mental interference device hidden in the manor. If we find it, we'll hold the position and wait for reinforcements."

"The Steel Heart is on its way, and soon a batch of reinforcements will arrive here by glider... Maybe you should go back for supplies first, and bring a few more brothers along, plus more ammunition."

The pilot was stunned, and Ye Shi, who had just come down from upstairs, was also stunned, blurting out a question.

"Ah... is that so?"

Fang Chang nodded.

"If you go offline and check the quest panel, you'll know."

Logically, being in a communication-blocked zone, they shouldn't have been able to receive the mission change message, but besides the VM, players could also check the quest panel on the official website.

But come to think of it, this should be considered exploiting a game bug, right?

Thinking of this, Fang Chang couldn't help but wonder whether the NPC that issued their mission was aware that they could exploit game bugs.

If they were aware, that would be interesting.

The pilot couldn't understand their conversation, nor did he know how they received the Administrator's orders, so he could only complain and start the engine.

"Tell me earlier next time!"

Old Bai smiled apologetically, looked at him, and said.

"I will."