Chapter 755: I Am the Wave!

Chapter 755: I Am the Wave!

In the gray-green dense fog, a ten-man squad, armed to the teeth, was advancing slowly.

They wore fully protective exoskeletons, some holding compact G9 assault rifles, others wielding Gauss rifles with extended magnetic rails, and a few carrying two short, thick portable rocket launchers on their backs.

At the center of the formation, a three-meter-wide unmanned tracked vehicle followed, its remote weapon station welded to the roof bristling with a menacing 20mm cannon, beneath which hung a 60mm short grenade launcher fed by a belt of ammunition.

The silver-white paint job clashed starkly with the surrounding atmosphere, yet no one dared doubt the squad’s firepower.

Just a few days ago, the council finally approved a batch of new equipment procurement projects, buying up the long-stored inventory of the Changge Corporation.

Perhaps shaken by the brutal frontline conditions, no one on the council was still spouting stupid lines like, “Against a bunch of guys without exoskeletons, we don’t need Gauss rifles; our soldiers just need to tell the planes where to bomb.”

Thanks to this, Tang Feng finally got his hands on the “sniper” he had been longing for.

But now, he had lost interest in the thing. All those messy parameters were just clouds; what mattered most was that the tool for survival was easy to use.

“…Where are we now?”

“Haiya.”

“Haiya… This is Haiya? I thought it was Mars.”

The machine gunner, carrying a light machine gun, glanced at the yellowed, torn travel poster in his hand, then at the broken two-section elevated bridge ahead, and the rusted highway sign lying crooked among a pile of concrete debris—

[Laishan City, 5km ahead]

Ahead was Laishan City, their first stop upon stepping into Haiya Province.

But there was no city here; as far as the eye could see, there was only visible decay and desolation.

This land seemed not to belong to Earth, but to another dead planet.

Beneath the pitch-black soil flowed a dark green slurry, like magma splitting the hellscape, the corrosion of the Naguo permeating every inch of the earth.

No living tree could be seen, not even a blade of grass.

The withered trees standing in the ground were like bones weathered for years, their nutrients completely stripped away to feed the master of this land—the Naguo.

The situation here was worse than the Weifu Wasteland.

Or rather, the hell they had seen in the Weifu Wasteland was merely the tip of this true hell’s iceberg.

He twitched the corner of his mouth and tossed aside the poster he had picked up from somewhere.

Not far from him, a soldier holding a rifle bent down, took a test tube from the sample box at his waist, and routinely collected a soil sample rich in Naguo mycelium.

This was one of the tasks entrusted to them by the frontline research institute—collect a soil sample every 100 meters after entering Haiya Province.

As for the main task, it was to “reconnoiter the edge of the city ruins in the ‘North No. 1 Combat Zone’ and confirm the enemy’s position.”

This sounded like a job for drones, but unfortunately, the drones had flown two rounds here earlier and seen not a single human figure, not even a living creature.

A reasonable analysis was that the Torch Church had likely slaughtered this land, covering nearly 670,000 square kilometers.

Of course, another possibility couldn’t be ruled out—that those bastards had hidden the people.

After all, breeding mutants required people, and the experiments for the Gestalt lifeforms also needed people.

Although clones could solve part of the problem, considering factors like scale and cost, naturally produced humans were cheaper.

After all, this land had turned into such a mess, unlike the Great Desert teeming with all sorts of bizarre equipment from the Prosperous Era. You couldn’t expect a large-scale power station, a crowd of skilled workers, and a cloning factory full of high-tech equipment to still be here.

If that were the case, it would be easy to solve.

Just one missile with a nuclear warhead could wipe the Torch off this land.

But unfortunately, those monsters didn’t need “industry.” They needed neither electricity nor consumer goods, at most some discrete processing workshops to modify weapons suited to themselves.

The Coalition staff analyzed that the Torch Church probably controlled a few shelters as research bases and likely held a batch of black boxes with special functions.

This would explain why, despite lacking large-scale processing centers, they could produce equipment with technical specifications far beyond Haiya Province’s actual conditions.

“…I heard Laishan City has a famous hot spring.” A soldier picked up the poster the machine gunner had thrown away, looked at it, and said with a smile, “It’s in the suburbs… seems to be near us.”

The soldier beside him whistled and teased.

“You going for a soak?”

“I heard the guys infected in Yongdong City are still lying in the research institute at Yunjian University.”

“Haha… I’ll pass.”

The group was bantering in the comm channel when Tang Feng, standing on the squad’s flank, suddenly frowned with alertness.

The dark green slurry flowing beneath the soil seemed to be surging and gathering toward them.

Though the movement was slight, the bionic implant on his iris recorded the motion parameters; the visible numerical changes couldn’t be mistaken.

He flicked off the safety on his rifle, the muzzle pointing slightly toward a ruin shrouded in gray mist.

“Something’s up.”

The chatter in the comm channel cut off instantly.

The soldiers immediately went on alert, spreading out into a defensive formation.

A heavy infantryman quickly deployed the folding shield from his back, slamming it firmly into the ground like a fan-shaped barrier.

The machine gunner rushed over, setting his light machine gun on the firing port at the shield’s center, and shouted to the teammates behind.

“Machine gun position ready!”

Another soldier, a drone operator with a backpack, crouched down, and two thuds came from his pack.

Two folded quadcopter drones launched into the air, tumbled a few times, stabilized, then shot into the fog like arrows from a bow.

“Drones airborne! Searching the area… No moving objects detected!”

The sniper, holding a Gauss rifle, stared at the empty thermal imaging screen, a hint of confusion on his face as he looked at Tang Feng, who had first noticed the anomaly.

“Are you sure you saw something?”

“On the ground!” Tang Feng took a deep breath, his tone firm. “Those dark green slimes… they’re gathering toward us. I have a bad feeling something’s about to happen.”

The squad leader walked over to the drone operator and patted him on the shoulder.

The operator immediately understood and shared one drone’s feed with the leader.

Donning a pair of glasses-like visualization device on his helmet, the leader circled the drone around, carefully examining the dark green slurry covering the entire ground through its view, and soon frowned.

Indeed, as his team member had said, the dark green slurry was pulsing at a steady frequency, as if channeling some unknown force to a spot beneath their feet.

From above, the pattern was even more obvious and spectacular.

The drone’s footage was synced to all team members’ tactical visors. A rifleman couldn’t help swallowing and muttered under his breath.

“I heard some organs don’t get used normally, only when needed do they engorge… Damn, I’m starting to get a bad feeling too.”

The leader’s Adam’s apple bobbed, his expression growing graver. He immediately reported the frontline situation to command, then shouted into the comm channel.

“Mission aborted! Prepare to withdraw—”

Almost at the same moment his words fell, a rustling sound pierced through the dense fog.

Like the sudden chirping of an autumn cicada.

Catching a fleeting figure, Tang Feng reflexively raised his muzzle and pulled the trigger without hesitation.

"Rat-tat-tat-tat—!"

The muzzle spat orange-yellow flames, and streaks of tracer fire instantly pierced the dark shapes darting out of the thick fog.

It was a creature half-human, half-dog, its body gaunt as a sausage, its bald face and head looking as if scorched by fire.

Hit several times in the chest, it let out a shrill howl, blackish-green blood spilling from its wounds onto the ground. Yet even so, the thing did not stop moving, charging on all fours toward the corporate squad's position.

At that moment, an electromagnetically accelerated mass round punched straight through its skull and out between its legs.

The creature seemed to be caught in a meat grinder, its entire body ripped apart by the immense kinetic force, instantly exploding into a cloud of black-green blood mist.

Limbs and severed parts tumbled to the ground, while the black-green mist slowly merged into the fog.

"It's a fungoid!" the drone operator confirmed the creature's identity, reporting over the comm channel.

So-called fungoids were the general term for sub-entities born from Nago corrosion, used to distinguish them from the sub-entities of mutant slime molds.

Depending on the variety, the fungoid category had several subclasses, such as the common "walkers" and "corpse hounds."

As for the one they had just encountered, it somewhat resembled the crawlers produced by the slime mold sub-entities in Clearspring City, only smaller in size, strength, and speed.

Lowering his rifle, the designated marksman gripping the Gauss rifle couldn't help but curse under his breath.

"Damn it, didn't the drone already sweep this area? How did this thing still pop out?"

Tang Feng stared through his scope, aiming at the direction from which the monster had emerged.

"Probably the same as the Wasteland of the Guard—crawling up from underground—"

"Shit! Below!"

A startled cry from the comm channel cut him off. He instinctively glanced behind him and saw a withered hand reaching out from the soil, grabbing the calf of a comrade not far away.

The hand's strength wasn't great, at least not enough to penetrate the exoskeleton's leg guard.

Still, the rifleman was startled, hurriedly drawing his sidearm and firing a few shots downward.

The arm that had just emerged from the soil was instantly blown to pieces, but the ricocheting fragments nearly scraped his own chest armor.

Seeing what had happened to their comrade, a flicker of panic rose in everyone's eyes.

They hadn't expected the danger to come not only from all around but also from directly beneath their feet.

Just then, shrill cries erupted from every direction, and the sound of running feet surged like a tide.

"Three o'clock! Machine gunner, suppress!"

"Roger!"

The squad leader bellowed the attack order. The machine gunner, crouched behind cover, clenched his jaw, his index finger practically welded to the trigger.

As the roaring machine gun fire tore through the silence, the dense fog over the wasteland was ripped apart along with it.

"Roar—!"

Corpse hounds, flailing their limbs, charged forward howling, followed by a horde of walkers.

The riflemen scattered around immediately opened fire, gunning down the surging fungoids.

At the same time, the tracked vehicle parked at the center of the formation entered combat mode. The 20mm autocannon on its remote weapon station spat a long, thick tongue of flame, guided by the designated marksman's laser, pouring fierce firepower into the densest clusters of walkers.

Yet even though the mechanized squad's firepower was already ferocious—the vicious fungoids could barely hold out for two seconds before them—the soldiers still felt a noticeable strain against the relentless assault.

There were too many of them!

These creatures were like pus squeezed from the soil; aside from what was visible, who knew how many more were still buried underground, waiting to emerge?

Watching the fungoids grow thicker, the machine gunner, crouched behind a mobile shield, shouted while changing his magazine.

"How long until the extraction plane gets here?"

The squad leader, still firing, yelled into the comm.

"Already on the way! It'll be here within twenty minutes!"

"Twenty minutes?!"

"Damn... are they planning to come collect our corpses?!"

Curses filled the comm channel. The squad leader couldn't help but shout again.

"Shut the hell up! Keep your eyes on your targets! And watch your feet—"

The enemy's attack came not only from all sides but also from beneath.

Arms kept bursting out of the soil like sprouts breaking ground.

Though dealing with them wasn't hard—a knife or rifle butt could smash them—they just kept coming wave after wave.

Even though they had brought three times the standard ammunition load, they still couldn't hold out against such density.

Ten minutes left—

Gripping his last magazine, Tang Feng gritted his teeth and slammed it into his rifle.

If the extraction plane didn't arrive soon, they'd have to fight these twisted things hand-to-hand.

Just then, the squad leader's excited voice came through the comm.

"Cloud Dragonflies! It's our air force! They're here!"

Tang Feng instinctively looked up, but the gray haze blocked the sky; he could see nothing.

But at that moment, a voice crackling with static cut into their channel.

"This is 'Raccoon.' We are above your position. Please deploy attack beacons for guidance."

No reminder was needed; the squad's designated marksman had already acted, firing a flare into the densest concentration of fungoids beneath the elevated viaduct.

The reassuring voice continued over the comm.

"Beacon confirmed. Maintain safe distance... 3, 2, 1—"

As the countdown ended, a storm of tracer rounds rained down from the sky, instantly grinding the fungoids sprinting over the concrete rubble into a pulp.

A dozen rockets followed, and the sudden explosion of flames cleared a vacuum zone right in the center of the fungoid tide.

In the heart of the fire, a walker missing half its body shrieked horribly, but soon fell silent.

Blocked by the surging heat, the horde of walkers jostled for a while, none daring to advance, eventually flowing around the burning sea of fire.

"Nice shot!"

The designated marksman cheered excitedly, then fired a second and third beacon.

Based on the triangle marked by the beacons, the six Cloud Dragonfly ornithopters on station confirmed the friendly positions and cut loose completely, pouring 20mm cannon fire while emptying their rocket pods.

Walls of raging fire separated the surging fungoids from the soldiers within.

At the same moment, about a dozen wooden gliders suddenly broke through the smoke above the blazing flames, crashing heavily onto the rocky wasteland.

Some forty to fifty soldiers leaped out of those gliders.

They carried LD-47 assault rifles with bayonets fixed under the muzzles, all wore gas masks, and had entrenching tools hanging from their belts.

Clearly, they were from the Alliance.

And judging by the insignia on their uniforms, they were the infamous Death Corps.

But for some reason, these people weren't wearing exoskeletons, only carrying a few crude pieces of gear.

Those people were shouting and yelling, saying things he couldn't understand, and he had no idea what they were hollering about...

"Damn! This piece of junk is supposed to be a plane?"

"My ass is about to split!"

Watching that noisy bunch of rookies, the Outlaw couldn't help but think back to himself a year ago.

Back then in the Falling Sunset Province, when they charged at the battlefield veterans, they were just as rowdy.

But it was precisely thanks to that "live-fire training" that in less than a month, they'd grown from clueless newbies into qualified soldiers.

Now he'd finally joined the ranks of the "veterans," becoming a core member of the Death Corps.

And this mission was personally entrusted to him by the corps commander, Edge-Skimmer, to lead these rookies to their deaths—pfft, to be baptized by the fire of battle!

"Anyway, they're disposable... quit your damn complaining and get that machine gun off! This thing can still be used!"

Holding a shotgun, the Outlaw strolled to the front line, shouting nonchalantly at the greenhorns, and lifted his foot to stomp the hand that had burst from the soil and reached for his ankle.

The player still dawdling by the glider had just found his rifle and yelled back at him.

"Captain, what about the ammo boxes? Drag them out too?"

The Outlaw rolled his eyes.

"No shit! Do you even need to ask?"

His words had barely fallen when another player shouted.

"Captain! If this plane's busted, how do we get back?"

Seeing the questions getting dumber and dumber, the Outlaw snapped back impatiently.

"When did I ever say we were going back?"

Come on, this plane didn't even have an engine installed—how could it possibly fly back?

But when the rookies heard that, they froze on the spot.

I'll Be the Head: "Holy shit!"

Premium Ingredients: "This is a goddamn black-market ride!"

Die from All-Nighters: "I'm crying! Captain, is it too late to get off now?"

The Short Guy Retreating: "Can't log in for three days... that kind of thing, nooo!"

Watching the rookies wail and howl, the Outlaw couldn't help but snort and roared.

"Didn't you read the rules before joining the corps? Snap out of it, all of you!"

"Use your bullets, bayonets, rifle butts, entrenching tools, fists, even your teeth—use every method you can think of, every tool you can find, to smash the enemy's skulls until either they or you stop breathing!"

"The Death Corps has no cowards who retreat. No matter what the enemy is, we only have one bugle call: forward! And forward again—!"

"Release your safeties, chamber your rifles! Let me see where your limits are!"

That roar did ignite the blood of some, and the noise finally died down.

But he still wanted to say, these newbies had too many issues—each batch was worse than the last!

The Outlaw grumbled to himself, yet he'd already forgotten his own foolishness when he first entered the game.

Realizing it was too late to get off even if they wanted to, the rookies had no choice but to settle down.

If only to live a few more minutes, if only to earn that hefty mission reward, they had to show some real skill.

But perhaps because they already knew their fate, these first-timers on the battlefield actually felt less nervous than when they'd first gotten off the plane. One by one, they even started looking forward to the coming fight.

Watching two soldiers drag ammo boxes out of the glider's cabin, as if preparing to hold the line, Tang Feng, leaning against a concrete wall, was taken aback and shouted at them.

"Hey! What are you doing here?"

The Outlaw laughed and yelled back.

"Here to help!"

"Help? We're about to pull out!" Tang Feng replied, utterly bewildered.

The Outlaw grinned. "We're here to cover your retreat!"

Hearing this, Tang Feng was even more confused. When he snapped out of it, he felt both moved and ashamed.

What moved him was the allies' care for them—solid as iron, no words needed.

It was the same when they'd attacked Fushan Hill; without their help, who knows how many more would have died on that ridge.

And what shamed him was that to save just ten of them, they'd sent out nearly a third of a company...

Truly a bunch of selfless, good people!

He wasn't the only one feeling this way; most of the soldiers present shared the sentiment.

Filled with gratitude and guilt, they rallied once more.

With the arrival of reinforcements, the tide of battle momentarily turned.

But even so, lingering here would bring no benefit. They'd already collected the samples they needed, confirmed the local situation through this initial skirmish, and now it was time to take their spoils and go home.

Twenty minutes was just right. A Killer Whale transport plane materialized in the sky, its two azure plasma plumes stabbing like spears into the soft soil.

Dust billowed, the rear ramp slammed onto the ground, and a soldier in an exoskeleton stood at the hatch, gripping a rotary machine gun fixed inside the cabin.

"Retreat!"

The corporate squad leader shouted over the comm channel, calling his teammates to fall back toward the open hatch.

Including the tracked vehicle with a remote weapon station welded to its roof, the ten-man squad all withdrew into the cabin. Though exhaustion was etched on every face, they were lucky to have zero casualties.

Standing at the hatch, Tang Feng yelled at the allied soldiers still outside.

"We're taking off! Hurry up!"

But to his surprise, the man just laughed and replied.

"No need! Safe travels!"

With that, the cabin door slowly closed upward.

Tang Feng's eyes widened as he watched that figure disappear beyond the edge of the hatch.

"Wait, why are you pulling out?"

Incredulity written on his face, he strode over to the crew member and grabbed his shoulders, shouting, "Our allies aren't on board yet—"

"That's their mission!"

A voice from behind cut him off.

The squad leader, helmet tucked under his arm, walked up beside him, his expression heavy as he placed a hand on Tang Feng's shoulder.

"Their mission is to test the limits of 'The Wave.' They'll fight there until the end, until the 'real enemy' emerges from there... That's the Battlefield Research Institute's hypothesis. The Nests have no hive mother, but there should be similar incubation organs. They need to fully study the entire process."

Besides that, they'd been implanted with biological prosthetics carrying a "Type B Strain Plug-in."

But how effective that thing would be remained to be seen.

“……Let us continue forward with reverence for them. This war is not over yet; it is still too early to grieve.”

Looking at Tang Feng, whose eyes were wide with shock, the squad leader let out a soft sigh, patted him on the shoulder, said nothing, and returned to his seat.

Though his words carried little weight, he could not help but sometimes think that those of them living in Utopia might indeed owe much to the people of the wasteland.

Their ancestors had accomplished feats that bordered on miracles; they were far nobler than those wastelanders. Yet even so, that should not be a reason for them to enjoy everything with ease.

When a portion of humanity sacrifices their lives for a shared catastrophe, the survivors ought to shoulder responsibilities and obligations commensurate with the weight of that loss, rather than treating survival and wealth as inborn privileges.

The reason they survived was that others died in their place…

Just as it was now.

While these young men from Utopia were weighed down with heavy hearts, the players left behind on the battlefield grew ever more exhilarated.

The onslaught of the mutant blight was intensifying!

Utterly unlike the hesitation of moments before!

Perhaps, seeing that some had retreated, the creatures thought themselves capable once more, confident they could finish off those who remained.

At first, only low-level threats like walking corpses or corpse hounds—danger rating 1—appeared, but soon more and more monsters of danger ratings 2 to 3 emerged.

After all, those present were newcomers, and casualties had already begun to mount.

Watching the surging “tide,” the Outlaw’s face twisted into a sinister grin.

Come on!

It had been too long since he’d had this much fun!

Wiping the slime and blood from his arm, he chambered a round in his shotgun and let out a final roar.

“Brothers! Show those cowards who only hide behind the scenes and scheme! Let them see who the real tide is!!!”

In response came a chorus of excited howls.

“Oooh oooh!”

Seeing his ragtag crew’s high morale, a smile slowly crept across his lips.

These rookies…

Can’t even shout in unison—how damn embarrassing!

But still—

It seemed they were gradually coming to understand the joy of the Death Brigade.

This life was worth it!