Chapter 755.1: Fight Fire With Fire, Weehuu with Yiwu

As time passed, the fungal mutants' offensive grew increasingly ferocious. Before long, entirely new breeds began appearing, ones that had never been seen on the Guardian Manor Plains.

The monsters seemed inexhaustible, pouring endlessly out of the gray-green mist, and each successive wave was stronger than the last.

However, instead of feeling fear, the New Alliance players only became more excited. Since a mandatory three day spectator lockout after death was unavoidable anyway, they might as well go out in a blaze of glory!

With that mindset, the players' morale became just as inexhaustible as the enemy itself. No matter how many casualties they suffered, not a single one showed fear or hesitation.

Leading his squad while fighting and constantly shifting positions, Lawless Madman kept his men locked in a stalemate against the ceaseless tide of fungal mutants through sheer firepower and ample ammunition.

Everyone knew that the Kingdom of Heaven's territory was controlled by psychic interference devices. Hidden somewhere within that domain were research facilities, and inside those facilities were the Torch Church's Apostles.

Whether to conceal themselves or preserve their strength, those lurking in the shadows could never allow the players to keep draining their forces indefinitely.

As corpses piled higher and higher across the wasteland, perhaps unable to endure the mounting losses, or perhaps wanting to teach the New Alliance a lesson, the gray mist gradually revealed several extraordinary evolved types.

With an earth-shaking roar, one of the front-line machine-gun emplacements suddenly flew into the sky.

"Ahhh!"

"AWCK!"

Watching two players scream as they crashed back to the ground, surprise flashed across Lawless Madman's face.

At that moment, heavy footsteps rumbled through the thick fog, and an enormous horn emerged from the haze. The creature resembled nothing found on Earth. If anything, it looked somewhat like a prehistoric ceratopsian.

Rotting flesh had been stitched together by dark green fungal fibers, while layer upon layer of chitin-like armor formed a shell as hard as plate armor. Its horn alone stretched as long as a one-story building, and its body towered three stories high.

It was like a walking mountain!

It was impossible to imagine how something this massive had emerged from underground, or perhaps it had been hiding somewhere beyond the drones' line of sight all along.

Whatever it was, that hardly mattered anymore. The important thing was that the towering strategic-class bioweapon was clearly beyond what infantry weapons could handle... Even bringing in a tank probably wouldn't be enough.

Lawless Madman couldn't help but imagine that if the creature charged at full speed, even Boulder Town’s massive reinforced concrete walls would probably end up with a corner smashed clean off.

"Holy crap... did a world boss just spawn?" the player beside him muttered, swallowing hard.

"So here's the question. What the hell do we call this thing?"

"According to tradition, whoever discovers it gets to name it. If nobody does, the system auto-generates one..."

"How about a Siege Beast?"

Even at a moment like that, the newcomers still had the bandwidth to argue over naming the monster. The only veteran player present, meanwhile, had practically accepted his fate.

"We're so damn screwed this time..." Lawless Madman laughed bitterly as he loaded an incendiary shell into his shotgun, then shouted for everyone around him to pull out their RPG launchers and dump everything they had into the creature's head.

Reality quickly proved the effort was futile. The shotgun's incendiary blast did little more than leave a scorched mark on its armored hide. The RPG's shaped-charge warhead could penetrate its defenses, but the tiny jet of molten metal was nowhere near enough to kill it.

Fundamentally, it wasn't a living organism in the conventional sense. It was even more absurd than the Mutant Humans that could regenerate after decapitation. It didn't even possess a central nervous system. What controlled its movements were the Na Fruit fungal threads, which themselves were directed by the psychic interference devices.

The consciousness of the Kingdom of Heaven controlled every puppet within its domain! That was the true nature of the Kingdom of Heaven envisioned by the Torch Church.

It was also its greatest, and most terrifying, strength.

Perhaps enraged by the scorching flames, the Siege Beast let out a deep, thunderous bellow before charging straight toward the players' position on its massive limbs. Its grotesquely twisted horn carved a horrifying trench through the black earth, splitting the players' defensive line cleanly in two.

Two more machine-gun nests were forced into silence. At last, a gap appeared in the once-impenetrable wall of fire, allowing the endless stream of Zombies and Corpse Hounds to exploit the opening and break through the players' final defensive line.

Pinned to the ground beneath a swarm of Zombies, Quality Ingredient, having fired his last bullet, used the last of his strength to shout toward Lawless Madman, who was covered in blood. "Captain...! See you... in three days!"

Wiping the blood obscuring his left eye, Lawless Madman flashed him a grin. "Yeah. See you in three days!"

The moment he finished speaking, he raised his shotgun and fired an incendiary shell. Blazing white phosphorus engulfed both the rookie player and the Zombies piled on top of him.

Not long afterward, surrounded by Zombies, he detonated the explosives strapped to his body, disappearing into a rain of blood amid the blast.

At the very same time, the artillery coordinates were transmitted to Lai Peak over a dozen kilometers away.

The battle continued for a full hour before the last player finally fell. By then, they had exterminated over 3,000 fungal mutants.

On average, every player had scored more than 100 kills.

For the Beta 0.7 newcomers, who had only just completed the Passing the Torch mission and officially stepped into the wasteland with their VMs, it was an outstanding performance.

Facing the devastated battlefield, the fungal mutants, now without targets, turned their attention toward the corpses beneath their feet. Their biological activity required nutrients. Not even the smallest bit of organic matter could be wasted, whether it belonged to friend or foe.

Dark green fluid flowing beneath the earth began converging on the area. Fine tendrils branched off from thick fungal trunks, wrapping themselves around the corpses one by one. They resembled blood vessels, extracting every usable nutrient from the dead.

Although the corpses carried some foul-smelling contaminants, all they had to do was deactivate that portion first before digesting the rest.

And it wasn't just the corpses. The Zombies, Corpse Hounds, even the Siege Beast, and every other fungal mutant all lowered themselves to the ground, allowing dark green vines to crawl over their bodies.

The merciful Kingdom of Heaven did not devour its own children. Instead, after linking itself to them, it slowly pulled them beneath the earth.

Material conversion always incurred losses. The more complex the synthesis pathway, the greater the loss. If every fungal mutant were simply broken back down into raw materials after each use, the Kingdom of Heaven's nutrient reserves would soon be exhausted. Like a slime mold, it would eventually expand to its limit before collapsing under its own weight.

As such, they had chosen a far more efficient method of recycling. They buried organs they no longer needed underground for the time being.

But just as they were about to do so, a shrill scream suddenly tore through the sky. The sound was like Death itself whispering in their ears as it descended upon them in an instant.

The Siege Beast had only just raised its cumbersome head and opened its eyes when a blinding white flash stole its vision. In its fading consciousness, it seemed to glimpse a mushroom cloud rising into the heavens, followed by a scorching shockwave sweeping across the earth. The deafening roar dwarfed even its own thunderous bellow, collapsing the ground beneath its feet.

Before it could react, the searing blast wave tore its body apart...

...

Far away, a thin white smoke trail stretched from the main cannon of the Loyalty into the clouds.

A rocket-assisted shell fired from its 400mm main gun delivered a fuel-air explosive warhead, powered by solid rocket fuel, onto the target battlefield.

That was the final step of the operation, clearing the battlefield after the fighting had already ended.

Their activation also meant one thing. There was no surviving friendlies left in the target area.

"Impact confirmed."

"Target successfully hit."

On the summit of Lai Peak, The Wislander soldiers directing the bombardment from the rear reported the strike's results to the airship. After ending the transmission, all of them fell silent. Several minutes earlier, just as planned, they had received the artillery coordinates from their allied forces.

Although they didn't know what the supreme command's intentions had been, they understood exactly what those coordinates meant.

Even for a people who had war written into their genes and flowing through their veins, they would never willingly undertake a mission with no chance of survival, nor would their commanders ever issue such an order.

Even though they were fighting on opposing sides, the soldiers couldn't help but feel a measure of respect.

Silently, they rendered a soldier's salute toward those who had fallen.

Those bastards... They’re the real deal.

...

On the other side, Human Emperor stared at the burning battlefield in stunned silence. A moment later, his expression returned to calm as he murmured to himself thoughtfully. "... So you're trying to wage a war of attrition against me?"

Even with perfectly preserved corpses, nutrient recovery efficiency was never 100%. Achieving 50% recovery was already considered exceptionally efficient.

That was especially true for the highly mutated evolved forms. Breaking their bodies down required enormous amounts of nutrients, leaving a net recovery of less than 10%. By comparison, the smaller offspring were much easier to recycle.

Those were the very creatures the coalition soldiers called fungal mutants.

Even so, their conversion efficiency was only around 30% to 40%. It took roughly three corpses to synthesize one new fungal mutant.

If the coalition forces intended to fight a war of attrition, it was indeed a reasonable strategy. After all, he couldn't simply ignore enemy troops wandering freely through his territory, searching for the psychic interference devices and hidden research facilities buried underground.

The latter were indispensable components for completing their final plan. The former determined their control over this domain of the Kingdom of Heaven.

It was an enormous and extraordinarily complex system, one they had spent more than a decade perfecting into its current astonishing form.

"An interesting idea..." Seeing through the administrator's strategy, the Human Emperor clicked his tongue softly, a meaningful smile slowly spreading across his lips. "I admit that you are an exceptionally capable opponent. But what if my pieces number in the billions? How do you intend to deal with that?"

3,000 fungal mutants were nothing more than a speck of dandruff atop the head of the giant that was his dominion.

In his eyes, the New Alliance had to sacrifice 40 elite soldiers just to remove that tiny speck he had sent them! By that exchange, even losing a single evolved form alongside them was barely worth mentioning. To him, it was an insignificant loss.

Using mortal flesh to fight a natural calamity... What an absurd idea.

Very well, if that was what they wanted, he would grant them their wish. They would soon find out which side truly was the endless tide.

...