Chapter 514
Chapter 514
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 24
Chapter Title: The Greatest Creditor (4)
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“Raptor tanker? Well, Raptors are a society of people too, so there’s bound to be differences in skill.”
“Even a pack-level small-unit support vehicle is like the ace you might find one of in a battalion back in the old army days. Swarm Alpha elite guard level? That’s legendary tanker territory, the kind that can win 1:10 tank battles. And if it’s the Nest tank crew themselves, the core of their main base...”
“Nest tanker, huh. What’s beyond that? Fencing with the main gun?”
“The underlings can handle that stuff too. Just think of them as guys who do everything a tank can possibly do. Firing the cannon like it’s a rifle. Accuracy that puts Simo Häyhä to shame. Jump shots with a tank, hip-fire, trick shots, triple taps, fanning the hammer...”
“M-Me-Metal J-Joe... S-sorry for asking about s-stuff you don’t wanna remember, so quit the b-boring bullshit and f-flip the meat already.”
“This short-tongued bastard’s best shot is that? No, for real! They actually pull that shit off!”
“Oh, I saw a tank like that on TV when I was a kid. What was it? Green Tank something. Shooting beams and all.”
“A green tank? American?”
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Right before leaving Area 47, while agonizing over how to assault the Raptors.
That was Ian’s answer when I asked him about Raptor combat power over a meal.
Back then, I figured he was just brushing off painful memories from the past with a joke. Tanks were slow weapons that invested heavily in armor, after all. No matter how skilled the crew, they couldn’t exceed the machine’s performance.
Thud- Thud- Thud-
But then the relentless barrage shifted to single, rhythmic shots. The indiscriminate shelling that had turned the area to rubble now hammered down with eerie precision right in front of my feet. That’s when his words came back to me.
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“Guys who think you die the second you pop out of the tank. Think of them as living eternally at war inside that hunk of metal.”
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Boom!
The ground exploded right under me.
“Balance...!”
I thrust my foot forward before I could topple, but every inch within arm’s reach had already been shaved away by the bombardment.
Clang! Clang! Grind, scrape!
Dozens of AP rounds slammed into me the instant I lost my footing, pounding my armor from the outside in like fingers flicking bullets.
-Chill!
‘It’s different. The quality of the attacks has changed! If I don’t close in now, the second wave will clamp down even tighter!’
In that instinctive surge of crisis, my foot finally hit the cratered earth. The moment I strained to push forward—
Kwaaaaaang!!!!!
As if this spot was the target, every other tank that had stayed silent unleashed HE rounds into the round crater.
The horrific shock and blast wave blanked my mind for a moment. When my vision cleared, I saw the wreckage of the Triceratops tank—the very one that had started this clash.
It all happened simultaneously. Like a single organism, measured with a ruler, their attack landed solid hits and reset the hard-won distance back to square one.
My guess that the Raptor tanks had marked me as priority one was spot on. But I’d badly misjudged their capabilities.
I charged. They stopped me the same way. While they pinned me, the spare tanks turned their guns on our allies. Already struggling against cyborg numbers far beyond Raptor combat totals, our forces were now taking tank fire and falling into a defensive rout.
Sizzle-
[AT-06, return... unlikely.... Ejecting unused batteries....]
Zzzt!
One of our main force exosuits sparked blue as it discharged, oxidizing along with the cyborgs swarming it like ants. It ejected its spare batteries for another suit to reuse, then overloaded the spent ones for a suicide blast.
[Son of a-! The one that just blew had weird syringes in its gut, uuurk!]
[Medic! Meeeedic! Poisoned patient! They’re using injectables—chemical weapons!]
[Watch for flechettes! Flash bullets! Even a graze turns that spot into a swollen meat blob—biochem rounds!! Damn it, that cursed shit that went extinct decades ago, why do the Raptors have it?!]
The failed experiments Gedroits had personally scrapped in disgust were being revived in the wasteland by his own hand, massacring Dome soldiers on the feeds.
“Huff, huff.”
I hunkered down behind a pile of wrecked heavy tanks to avoid getting pushed back further.
‘Stay calm.’
[Graaaah!]
[I don’t wanna die like this, not looking like thiiiiis—Gurgle-gaaah!! Uh, ugh....]
‘Calm.’
I’d blocked the strike on General Young’s facility. I’d called for close-quarters. That choice ramped up the casualties. Variables always crop up in battle. To keep their deaths from being in vain, I had to flip this disadvantage. That’s what I’m best at here.
[Primary target, Next Space, final aux connector detached. Ready to fire!]
[Shit, five minutes to launch.... No, under three!]
‘...Calm.’
Cyborgs far outnumbering the Raptors’ full combat roster. Including slaves, that’s their entire production population thrown into this fight. Even if Raptors win, Raptor Society is done.
This battle isn’t for victory. They’ve just dumped everything into a massive delaying action.
Their sole goal is still that thing beyond the spaceship—
Sizzle-!
[J! Jo! Ian! Th-these rotten maggot d-druggy bastards, n-no!]
[Captain’s down! Cover him! Foam block spray to blind ‘em first! Ian’s down!!]
‘...’
Twitch, twitch, twitch, twitch, grind!
What do I do? Gedroits foresaw everything. Prepared for it all. Perfect analysis of me, counters, read every ally move ages ago.
What do I do? We die. Not just me—Ian, Vex, everyone here, all of Area 47, every surviving vehicle fleet dies to whatever’s up there. People I know, don’t know, everyone gone. My world crumbles. Nothing left.
What do I do? How?
What. How. How.
How. How.
How.
.
.
.
.
.
...Drip!
‘How.’
...Drip. Drip.
‘How are terminal screams from every allied unit flooding my comms?’
It hit me the moment I’d bitten my lip bloody.
‘Special ops Ian. Main force General Young—comms. And me. When did this three-man channel get so many connections?’
The scientist who designed this world said every action would revolve around ‘me.’
Even with coincidences on the battlefield, the framework built around ‘me’ would allow zero deviation.
‘Raptors run the Noise Pack, a powerhouse EW unit from the start. Jamming, old-school lead foil dumps—they had endless ways to sever our comms. Nothing isolates troops into lone wolves like comms blackout. But Raptors never even tried.’
‘...It’s for me. Made to let me hear it. Me cowering behind cover, unable to move, while dying comrades scream—friends, acquaintances.... Trauma! Pre-sculpting the monster I’ll become!’
‘To Gedroits, Raptors and Dome alike were just tools in his gaze.’
‘He really predicted and set the entire board from the start.’
My heart felt like it would burst. The suspicion piercing the pressure hit truth, but still circled “How?” without landing.
How.
How do you wrest an undesired outcome from someone who’s mapped every possibility? When he’s preempted every answer, where do you find the right one?
.
.
.
.
“...What Gedroits knows but doesn’t.”
“What I know, he knows, but never factored into his stage calculations—not even aware it could be factored.”
-Screeeee!
Crunch!
“Ah.”
My fault for spacing out. I didn’t even notice the Raptors pounding my cover with impossible precision until they’d blasted a hole big enough to rip my arm off.
In the game, a severed left arm regrew fast. But this real body, tough as it was, had no such regen. This wound was permanent.
‘In the game....?’
Could you really call GG a game?
No, it was a simulation. Branched from some point, split into dozens of paths, ending in a ‘virtual’ world fully divorced from reality—one that could’ve been real.
Possibility. The power to turn the divorced unreal into actual. I had it now. No, every survivor had it thrust upon them unwittingly.
‘Variant virus.’
Andrey Gedroits’ creation, born from modern bio-chem knowledge yet spawning impossibilities. Earth never had fire-breathing lineages, yet it birthed bipedal fire-spitting reptile mutants. It fused nearby corpses into abomination hiveminds with compound command structures. It grew Walking Cane-sized horrors nearing skyscrapers. All from infinite [Memories] as the source of change.
Fwoosh-!
Bang-
That alien sound from afar was the signature noise of BDSM’s pro mutant hunters’ mute-tech weapons. Instantly hardening sludge walls or rapid-firing acid grenades—utterly divorced from our ‘reality,’ right?
A miracle, maybe. Or Gedroits’ mistake birthing a butterfly effect. Or his future-prediction sims of branched worlds subtly influencing him without knowing.
Rustle.
I lifted my severed left arm from the shoulder and pressed it to the stump. No magical healing.
‘But it’s still touching the bleeding cut surface.’
The left arm was unequivocally dead flesh detached from my body. Mutated, sure, but fundamentally human-shaped.
The variant virus rebuilds from the dead’s memories. Activated in my living body, it mutates the ‘dead parts.’ That’s how my mutation works.
So. How would this blood-borne ‘variant virus’ treat my severed dead flesh lump?
-Fwoooooosh!
Blood gushed fountain-like from the stump, swallowing the arm in seconds. It turned into pulsing red meat dough, grinding bone and flesh with its own beats.
I gripped the boiling meat mass with my right hand.
‘In the end, it changed based on my memories.’
The mutated flesh looked and moved familiar somehow.
“Memories, strong memories! The strongest memory! The one to grow into a form that overcomes this utter dead-end—recall it now—”
-The final last stand.
-Deceive and seize. That’s our way, right?
.
.
.
.
Damn.
“...Of all things, the one I hate most.”
Most desperate situation. Nothing left to me. Something to overcome it.
In a way, it was inevitable this form was etched in memory.
The left arm’s meat stopped writhing alone, settling under a thin membrane.
Sizzle-
Inside the membrane I clawed open:
Grind-
Click!
Crystals studding it like gems, a massive orange one blazing at the shoulder. Less gun, more cannon.
“Never wanted to see this again in my life.”
To casual fans, an Arcane Shooter.
“Handheld vs. shoulder-mounted feels worlds apart, but...”
Hardcore fans who’d binged Professor’s 220-year archive? They’d scream, “That Shard Knight gun! The Warlord’s!”
I’d toted it nearly 30 years in 4World, but only nightmare murders remained—a manifested trauma. Dead flesh fused to my shoulder gave a bizarre extended scapula feel I hated.
“...No time to be picky hot or cold. It’s not like bad aim misses anyway.”
Our people dying everywhere—no room for luxury.
At least, it was the perfect tool to break this deadlock.
Click.
Simple mana-condense-and-release design. Why Warlord-era me stuck with it to the end—simple meant overwhelming power handling. But this memory-forced version? No mana functions. Same weapon, but this world lacks mana background.
“But it’s brimming with Gedroits-grade universal material: ‘variant virus’-laced blood.”
Gurgle-gurgle-gurgle-
The massive shard that should’ve been orange soaked up the rising blood hue from within.
Loaded muzzle faced hundreds of black-pupil maws.
Trigger finger itched for a line before pulling in this surreal beat, but.
Click.
Final radio chatter echoed in my ear. No hesitation.
Squelch-
Blood in the barrel’s crystals melted in, silence briefly—
-KWAAAAAAAAA!!
The colossal blood-cannon pillar pierced the battlefield in a vivid streak, scoffing at puny metal obstacles.
Reality-virtual boundary. Or rather, reality and could’ve-been-reality boundary—the thick wall even discoverer Gedroits merely observed and knowledge-hoarded—crumbled at this instant.
The worlds I’d seen were sims of other realities branched from possibilities, not fiction.
If events destined to happen do so somehow,
Then what happened there has no law barring it here.
Professor, the one who treated even the creator-abandoned ‘worlds of possibility’ with utmost sincerity, embraced it truly.
A 10-meter-wide blood projectile piercing Raptor tank core and rear supply, grazing the spaceship pad, proved it.
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