Chapter Ninety-Four: Rocket Barrage

Rebuilding Civilization Without Pop-Up Windows
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The claw, raised high, gleamed with a cold sheen in the sunlight. Under the stunned gazes of everyone present, it drove brutally into the firing assembly of the light laser tank. Then, with a violent wrench, it tore off a huge section of the turret, built from special composite metal, as though peeling away a brittle shell, and flung it far into the distance. In just a few motions, the entire turret housing of the laser emitter had been torn apart by R3.

Looking at the disabled light laser tank, Yang Xingjun felt as though every bit of strength in his body had been drained away. The ferocity displayed by R3 had shaken him to the core. He had long known how terrifying R3 was, but he had never imagined it could be this terrifying. Even a tank, the military’s high-end weapon, had been destroyed in an instant.

The people who had stood motionless were jolted out of their daze when the tank was torn apart. Screams erupted one after another. Like a school of startled sardines, they scattered in all directions, hastily putting distance between themselves and the source of danger.

"Stop those three monsters..."

In truth, Yang Xingjun did not even need to issue the order. The soldiers on the trucks had already jumped down. As they had been trained to do, they searched the wasteland for whatever cover they could find, all of their muzzles trained on the three R3s still tearing at the tank.

The sight of hundreds of people firing at once was enough to shock anyone. The rain of bullets striking R3 did not bring injury, only a complete and utter fury. The three monsters dropped the wreckage they had been abusing and lunged toward the soldiers.

"No retreat! Keep firing!"

The officers’ roars forced the wavering defense line back into order. But the bullets had lost their aim. Those caught within the path of fire were often struck by stray rounds and fell onto the wasteland, only to be trampled by panicked feet. The soldiers’ only achievement was to add another hundred corpses to the desolate plain.

Yet it was all rather futile. Ordinary bullets could not deal with R3 at all. Beneath the blaze of countless gun muzzles, the three R3s leaped into the mass of soldiers, their claws flashing as they unleashed a frenzy of slaughter.

Yang Xingjun watched all this with a livid face. Faced with monsters beyond the reach of human force, even he felt fear. Grinding his teeth, he shouted, "Rocket vehicles, prepare to the rear. Target the monsters ahead. The rest, fall back. Return to base."

At this point, Yang Xingjun no longer had a choice. With those beasts here, unless everyone abandoned their vehicles and fled among the desperate crowd, the monsters would never ignore such large, obvious targets.

With the front line holding them in place, Yang Xingjun’s armored command vehicle managed to turn around and begin withdrawing toward the base. As for Sun Yinen and the others, their convoy had already started pulling back toward the base the moment R3 tore the tank apart.

In the apocalypse, the rocket vehicle had an attack range as close as two hundred meters. With its ability to strike on a horizontal plane, and after the addition of precision guidance, it had unquestionably become a favorite of the ground forces, one of the most widely equipped weapons. The rockets were loaded automatically. With a diameter of only twenty centimeters and a length of one and a half meters, they could, in theory, deliver uninterrupted fire and saturating bombardment as long as ammunition remained sufficient.

Under Yang Xingjun’s orders, more than a dozen rocket vehicles spread out in place. The launch racks began horizontal calibration. With precision guidance, they locked onto the R3s rampaging among the soldiers.

What did a full salvo mean? It meant sixteen rockets from every vehicle launched at the same time, striking the same target. That was a rocket barrage. And now, with more than a dozen vehicles locking on simultaneously, nearly two hundred rockets would blanket the area. What would that look like? Very few people had ever seen such a thing. After all, in peacetime, there would never be any need to conduct such a test.

Now, in order to eliminate the three R3s, Yang Xingjun could be said to have bet everything he had.

When the hundreds of soldiers serving as a shield had been slaughtered by R3, brilliant flames erupted from the dozen or so rocket vehicles. Sixteen rockets from each launcher fired horizontally. After half a second of acceleration, their speed peaked, and in an instant they laid down a curtain of fire across several hundred meters.

Like a feast of sparks, more than two hundred rockets launched at once and reached the target almost simultaneously. The more than two hundred enormous explosions fused into a single roar. The violent blast seemed to tear space itself apart. Its shrill scream could leave people temporarily deaf even hundreds of meters from the center.

A colossal mushroom cloud rose into the sky. Within the several-hundred-meter zone of saturation bombardment, everything was utterly destroyed.

When Xie Han rushed back near the base, he happened to witness this incomparably shocking scene. At the same time, he too was stunned by the brutality of it. He had never imagined he would one day see such a horrifying spectacle. The mangled bodies, broken beyond recognition, lay strewn across the wild grass, nearly all of it painted red with blood.

As for the people within the rocket strike zone, more than a thousand lives were ended in an instant. Only then did Xie Han truly grasp the cruelty of the apocalypse. It was, at its heart, a world of the strong preying on the weak. Before overwhelming power, the powerless were often nothing more than tools to be used, mere cannon fodder.

At that moment, Xie Han seemed to mature. He was no longer the young man raised on the kindness of modern times, nor the naive fool who knew only how to treat others well. Baptized by blood and death, he learned how to survive in this end of days.

He steadied the anger and helplessness in his heart. He did not know whether he should hate Yang Xingjun for his ruthlessness, or hate this apocalypse for changing the humanity in everyone. But what he felt most was a deep, suffocating helplessness. If he had stood in Yang Xingjun’s position, he was afraid he would have issued the same order. After all, R3’s destructive power was simply too great. Without using this method, not only would they fail to kill it, they would only let it cause even greater destruction and losses.

Sometimes cruelty was the best form of self-preservation.

Watching the smoke slowly disperse and the dust settle from the sky, the people who had been shaken senseless by the tremendous blast finally came to themselves and looked toward the place where a huge crater had been blasted into the ground. Everyone knew that under such terrifying firepower, even a zombie as formidable as R3 could only meet one end, but they still could not resist checking, wanting to confirm whether such a dreadful existence had truly been wiped out.

The enormous crater was more than two meters deep. Inside it was only scorched earth blackened by intense heat; beyond that, there was nothing.

"Ah..." As if venting all at once, the people who had survived R3’s terror burst into cheers. Their cries of triumph even managed to dispel some of the shadow left by the laser tank and the rocket barrage.

After the cheering died down, zombies like R2s were no longer taken seriously by the crowd. Though swift, they could not withstand bullets. The emboldened people turned their weapons on the ten R2s that were still howling. Within Yang Xingjun’s convoy, dozens of beam sniper rifles locked onto the R2s, and any moment of stillness was met with a beam that pierced straight through the skull.

A smile appeared on Yang Xingjun’s face. With the successful destruction of the three R3s, there was no longer any force able to block his withdrawal.

But then his smile froze on his face. A fresh wave of horrifying screams rose once more among the people, who had only just begun to settle. Far on the horizon, as many as five figures were running at terrifying speed.

They were the very R3s that had just unleashed that nightmare frenzy...