61: Chapter 61 DingTalk Action

Blackstone Town's commando unit set out before dawn.

Locke led the team from the front, which included Duran and thirty hand-picked veterans. A raven reconnaissance drone circled low above their heads, with Marcus reporting coordinates over the comms channel every few moments. Lin Mo walked in the middle of the group, carrying the captured Chaos laser rifle on his back—the only weapon he had taken from his locker before departure that was not manufactured by the Blackstone Town Arsenal.

The commando unit's objective was an abandoned frontline base on the outskirts of the Chaos assembly area. The Ultramarines' evaluation report hadn't come out yet—but Lin Mo wasn't waiting any longer.

They encountered the first wave of resistance as they approached the base perimeter: a Chaos patrol of about a dozen men. Locke used hand signals to deploy for combat: a pincer movement from both sides with a thrust through the middle. The battle didn't last long—it was over in moments. However, while clearing the battlefield, Duran made a discovery. Several pieces of the Chaos patrol's equipment were not standard-issue weapons, and the paintwork didn't match any known Chaos Warband markings. There was a symbol on the paint that Lin Mo had never seen before—it didn't look like a Chaos mark, but more like an ancient Imperial Legion crest that had been intentionally defaced.

He crouched down to examine the weapon. Part of the marking on the barrel had been scraped off, but the forge serial number at the bottom was still clearly visible—it was the old numbering format of the Ultramarines Legion, used before the Horus Heresy.

He rubbed the scraped-off mark with his thumb, his expression remaining unchanged as he stood up. He handed the weapon to Marcus and said, "Find out which supply line this gun came from."

The chaos attention level jumped from seventy to seventy-five. He had gone to pull a nail in the Chaos assembly area—only to find that the nail was a repurposed old Imperial nail. Lin Mo didn't want to guess what this implied, but he had already committed the serial number Marcus mentioned to memory. He crouched down and aimed the barrel of the gun at the sky to check the rifling—the wear was minimal, and the barrel maintenance was better than any produced by the Blackstone Town Arsenal. This pointed to one conclusion: the owner of this gun was not part of some ragtag army with short supplies—its supply line was more complete than they had imagined. He placed it back on the ground and stood up, patting the dust off his hands. This discovery meant the Chaos assembly plan had started earlier than expected—and had been prepared for even earlier.

A Chaos nail repurposed from an old Imperial nail,

driven into the outskirts of the Chaos assembly area.

After the combat of Operation Nail concluded, Locke led the team in clearing the ruins of the abandoned base for an entire day. Ammunition crates, spare parts, several boxes of unopened military rations—though the base was abandoned, the supplies left in the warehouse were more plentiful than expected. While Locke was crouched on the ground counting a crate of ammunition, his finger brushed the edge of a shell casing—the production mark on the casing was not a crude Chaos-style casting, but a neat imprint left by standard Imperial stamping techniques. He flipped the casing over to look at the bottom—the code was clearly legible, and the year was from the minting period before the Horus Heresy. This ammunition had been stored here since before the outbreak of the rebellion and had never been retrieved.

He stood straight in the ruins and looked out the window at the grey-green planet. The supply line for this base had been cut during the rebellion. The garrison hadn't taken the ammunition with them before evacuating, nor had they destroyed it. They had left in a hurry. Locke made a note in his diary: Base ammunition stock year confirmed. The clues were slowly coming together. He knew someone didn't want him to find the end of that thread—but with every ruin he cataloged, he drew one step closer to the answer.

Duran's shout while clearing the battlefield made Locke set aside his current task. He walked through a pile of corpses and saw the wreckage of a Chaos weapon where Duran was crouching. Duran used his gun barrel to flip the wreckage over, revealing the old Imperial numbering format at the bottom of the barrel. Locke crouched before the weapon and used his thumb to wipe away the carbon soot over the serial number to take a look—though the number was partially worn, the forge identification at the bottom was clearly legible. He added a note to his loot inventory: One batch of captured weapons, serial numbers to be verified. After returning to Blackstone Town, he would need to privately ask Marcus to check the origin of those serial numbers.

Locke cleaned the weapon with the worn serial number and placed it separately in an ammunition crate. He didn't need to lock down the source of the number before dawn—but he needed to ensure this evidence wouldn't be lost during transport. He wrapped the weapon in an oilcloth, placed it at the bottom of the crate, and only felt at ease after pressing two crates of ammunition on top of it.

The light at the Medical Station was always the last to go out in Blackstone Town. Lin Mo would sometimes pass by late at night and see the silhouette of a figure working with a bowed head reflected on the oil-paper windows. He never went inside to disturb her—but he would slow his pace, confirm the lamp was still lit, and then continue back to the Intelligence Center. He didn't know if Alice noticed those slowing footsteps outside the window. But he knew that if that light ever went out one day, he would stand before the window for a long time.

As well as how much more force it could withstand before breaking.

The wind outside blew through the treetops, making a faint rustling sound. The light of the torches on the distant watchtower flickered in the wind, like a sentry standing in the darkness refusing to fall. Lin Mo watched for a moment before withdrawing his gaze.

It was already dawn. The first strike of the forge hammer starting up came from the direction of the Arsenal—thump—like a low-pitched horn. Lin Mo knew as soon as he heard that sound that Blackstone Town was already in motion. He put down his pen and stood up.

The power of one person is a spark,

The power of a crowd is a furnace.

—Lin Mo, Blackstone Town Defense System Evaluation Notes

The construction progress of the frontline base was two days behind schedule. The reason wasn't a lack of manpower—it was a layer of hard bedrock underground, and the drill bits Old Tom brought had dulled by the third day. Duran volunteered to go down into the pit to inspect the structure of the bedrock—using his experience as a miner, he determined there was a natural crack about two fingers wide in the bedrock that could be blasted open with directional explosives.

Locke approved Duran's plan. The blasting was carried out that afternoon—the results were better than expected. A gap just wide enough for two people to pass through side-by-side was blasted into the bedrock, and on the other side of the gap was a natural cavern that could be used for storing supplies. When Duran crawled out of the gap, his face was covered in dust, but his expression held the excitement a miner only shows when discovering a new vein.

"Captain, there's an even larger space below," Duran said, patting the dust off himself. "A natural bunker."

Locke looked at the gap and nodded. Sometimes fighting a war didn't depend on weapons—it depended on the terrain. And the way Duran looked at terrain was as accurate as the way a hunter looked at prey.

The natural cavern Duran discovered proved to have value beyond expectations during subsequent exploration. Not only could the cavern serve as a warehouse—one end led to a deeper passage, at the end of which was a natural void large enough to accommodate two hundred people. Locke stood in the center of the void and looked around—the dome was high, the air circulation was good, and the water droplets seeping from cracks in the walls converged into a thin stream. This was a natural sanctuary. If the surface fortifications of the frontline base were breached, this could serve as the final fallback point. He had Duran build a simple stone wall at the entrance of the cavern—it didn't need to be strong, just hidden enough. The best defense isn't a wall—it's the enemy not knowing where you are.

News from Locke's Expeditionary Force finally returned after a six-day interruption. This time the message was much longer than the last—it took Marcus nearly half an hour to record the entire transmission completely.

The content of the message caused everyone in the Intelligence Center to turn pale simultaneously:

"Target confirmed. Main Ork force in Green Sector approximately eight thousand. Among them are about two hundred elite units equipped with power armor. Our currently visible strength: one hundred and twenty men. Requesting further instructions. —Locke."

One hundred and twenty against eight thousand. This ratio was more exaggerated than any "impossible to complete" product launch Lin Mo had ever done before his transmigration. He turned the slip of paper over and over for a long time, then did something he rarely did: he summoned all the core members of Blackstone Town to the Intelligence Center and placed Locke's message in the center of the table.

"Tell me, what should we do?"

This was the first time he had publicly solicited opinions on a major military decision. It wasn't because he didn't know what to choose—it was because he needed to know if the judgment of Blackstone Town's core team was reliable under pressure.

Old Tom was the first to speak: "Can we tell Locke and the others not to fight for now and wait for us to send more people over?"

Yang Shitou was second: "I'm thinking about those two hundred Ork power armor elites... what is their power source? If we could find a way to remotely interfere with that power source..."

Alice was third: "My psychic power can do some things at maximum range. For example... causing chaos in the enemy's communication frequencies. It's not a great feat, but at least it can slow down their coordination."

Lin Mo listened to every opinion and noted them down in his notebook. Then he closed the book and said one sentence:

"We aren't doing a single-choice question. We are doing all three of these things simultaneously."

[A time will come to ride the wind and cleave the waves; I will set my cloud-white sail straight and bridge the deep, blue sea.]

—Li Bai, "Hard is the Way of the World." Memory fragment from the mirror of the emperor