Chapter3

In the basement of the Circuit Breaker Bar, red alarm lights flashed wildly.

Buck's one hand left a trail of afterimages on the keyboard, while the other grabbed a bottle of cheap machine oil and took a fierce gulp to cool down his cybernetic nerves. "Leighton, that madman acted early! He bypassed all tactical simulations and issued a 'Scorched Earth Directive' to the synth battalion in Wasteland Town!"

The holographic screen in mid-air split into two halves.

The left half showed the surveillance radar of the lower city, with two massive blips representing death. Those were the two "Leviathan" class mobile aerial fortresses dispatched by Victor, like two floating islands of steel, piercing through the clouds and descending upon their airspace with a crushing posture.

On the right half, the feed cut to the outskirts of the abandoned Scavenger Town.

This was extremely brutal real-time footage—hundreds of heavy riot mechs painted with the megacorp's crest, like a black metallic tide, had already crushed the barbed wire on the town's perimeter.

Leighton stared dead at the screen, clenching his molars so hard that blood seeped from his gums. The footage before his eyes cruelly overlapped on his retinas with the system playback video Buck had just restored.

That was a system log archive that almost suffocated Leighton.

In the video, on the day Cloud City froze Ilya's account, she stood in front of an ATM, surrounded by mocking passersby; on a night of acid rain, thugs kicked open her slum door, and she was forced to use a rusty screwdriver to pierce the thigh of a man trying to assault her, while being beaten bloody herself. But in the recording, Leighton didn't hear a single cry. Stranded in the wasteland, Ilya took off her blood-stained dress, endured the agonizing pain of a severed arm amputation, and attached a crude mechanical iron hand with exposed wiring, forcing herself to become a mechanic who could repair lethal weapons in the mud.

She did not yield. Even like a wild dog, she had to stay alive and wait for him to return.

And right now, on the real-time screen.

At the bridgehead of Wasteland Town.

All the scavengers and homeless cyber-orphans of the town were crying and running desperately toward the unfinished bomb shelter deep inside the town.

But amidst the chaos and towering flames, that thin, frail figure did not take a single step back.

That was Ilya.

Wrapped in a dirty, torn anti-radiation cloak, wearing half a broken gas mask on her face. Using that inferior iron arm that emitted harsh gear-grinding sounds, she forcibly mounted a heavy anti-armor sniper rifle, almost as tall as she was, onto the concrete pier of the bridge.

Her muzzle pointed at the hundreds of surging steel beasts. This was the only escape route for the town; she didn't run because behind her were unarmed refugees.

"Boom!" A leading megacorp mech directly fired a napalm shell.

The napalm exploded less than thirty meters from Ilya. The terrifying heat instantly melted the scrap cars on the bridge into molten iron, and the flames completely swallowed her line of sight.

"Leighton! No time to watch this damn recording!" Buck roared, pulling out the homemade shotgun from his waist. "The aerial fortress's infrared lock has already covered this block. In three minutes, this place will be bombed into the surface of the moon by heavy air-to-ground missiles! Your wife over there can't hold out much longer either; the temperature of the napalm will roast her alive!"

There were no tears in Leighton's eyes, only black flames that seemed substantive.

He grabbed the fully loaded heavy tactical pack nearby and viciously stabbed a data cable connected to a pacemaker into his spinal interface—he was forcibly raising the threshold of his "neural overclocking," trading his lifespan for inhuman explosive power.

"You're crazy! Pushing the threshold to 150%, your internal organs will be crushed along with the hydraulic pumps!" Buck screamed.

Leighton didn't answer. He stepped out of the bar door and jumped straight into the stolen assault skiff whose engine was still roaring.

"Buck, hold the network. I'm going to smash those two pieces of trash in the sky, along with Victor, to the ground."

The assault skiff spat out blinding exhaust flames. It made no attempt to evade radar locks. Instead, like a frenzied shark stimulated by blood, it charged in an almost suicidal straight trajectory against a sky full of missiles toward the massive shadow high above Cloud City.

...

On the wasteland end, purgatory had arrived.

In the searing heat and flames, the edges of Ilya's gas mask began to melt. The carbonized anti-radiation cloak stuck to her skin, emitting a burnt smell. Sweat mixed with blood flowed into her eyes, but she didn't even blink.

"Number one."

A hoarse and extremely calm female voice came from behind the gas mask. Her crude mechanical left arm began to spark because it couldn't withstand the heavy sniper's recoil—pulling the trigger.

Bang!

An armor-piercing round laced with special depleted uranium, at an extremely tricky angle, pierced straight through the polarized glass of the cockpit of the leading mech. A cloud of blood mist exploded, and the massive mech lost control, crashing down onto its knees on the bridge.

"Number two."

She pulled the boiling hot bolt, her rusty mechanical knuckles grinding her flesh to reveal blood. Bang! Another loud blast, and the knee joint of a second mech trying to cross the obstacle was shattered.

Up in Cloud City, Victor was watching the same live feed. Seeing the mech pilots he had spent a fortune training being shot down like targets by a one-armed woman, he crushed the controller in his hand.

"Stop trying to capture her alive! I don't need a confession! Give me high-pressure saturation bombing! Blow that bridge, and that woman, into ashes—!"

Following the command, the megacorp mech unit collectively raised the 120mm high-explosive scatter-shot launchers hung on their shoulders. On a bridgehead with no cover, this equated to a blanket death sentence.

...

Meanwhile, in the stratosphere thousands of meters above.

Leighton's assault skiff had been locked on by the close-in weapon systems of the two "Leviathan" class fortresses.

A dense rain of red anti-aircraft missiles poured out from the belly of the fortresses, trailing long exhaust flames as they lunged at the skiff. On the radar screen, the red dots representing missiles were so numerous it was despairing.

Leighton's eyes were ice-cold.

His overclocked state brought his adrenaline to a boiling point. He made no tactical evasions; instead, he smashed the skiff's fuel restrictor with one punch while forcibly injecting high-purity liquid oxygen into the combustion chamber. The engine let out a teeth-grinding shriek, and the skiff's speed instantly broke the sound barrier, dragging out a white trail in the air that was almost an afterimage!

Boom boom boom—! Two missiles exploded right against his port side. The violent concussions forcibly ripped off Leighton's collarbone armor, and a piece of shrapnel sliced open his left rib, blood flowing freely.

But he didn't even blink. Enduring the dense net of fire, he piloted the burning assault skiff in a mutually assured destruction posture, viciously crashing through the plasma reactor core gate at the bottom of the first fortress!

"Boom!!!"

An earth-shattering explosion tore through the sky above Cloud City. The first hundred-meter-long aerial fortress suffered a violent chain explosion from its internal core. Massive steel debris fell like burning meteor fragments onto the blocks below.

And in the zero-point-five seconds before the fireball of the explosion completely consumed the assault skiff.

Leighton, like a black mad dragon, kicked through the cockpit canopy with his legs. In the weightless high altitude thousands of meters up, he rode the shockwave of the explosion to board and leap toward the deck of the second mobile fortress hundreds of meters away.

Due to the extreme tearing caused by overclocking, the moment Leighton landed on the deck, not only was his right knee armor completely deformed, but a teeth-grinding friction sound also came from the bones inside.

"Hostile target breached anti-air systems! On the starboard deck!"

The guard troops of the second aerial fortress surged out fiercely. Over thirty elite armored soldiers wearing heavy exoskeletons raised their electromagnetic rifles and closed in on Leighton.

Leighton slowly raised those eyes that were already filled with black-purple bloodshot veins.

No tactics, no evasion. He drew the two-meter-long alien composite metal broadsword from his tactical backpack. Accompanied by the eerie blue light of the neural interface at his spine, Leighton charged into the crowd with a speed that defied physical laws, facing the bullets. This was an unaesthetic, one-sided slaughter of flesh and blood.

Just as Leighton went red-eyed and began his meat-grinder massacre high in the sky.

At the Wasteland bridgehead.

Ilya's heavy sniper rifle finally exploded from overheating. The massive recoil instantly shattered her crude mechanical prosthetic arm on the spot, wires tangling with her flesh and blood, sparks flying.

Countless high-explosive scatter-shots fell like a rainstorm. The bridge surface instantly collapsed and fractured.

Accompanied by a massive roar, Ilya was swept up by hundreds of tons of broken reinforced concrete, crashing heavily into the depths of the muddy ruins. In the second before she completely lost consciousness, she looked at a meteor-like piece of debris falling from the sky due to the explosion.

"Leighton... I can't hold on anymore."