94: Chapter 94 Dawn Gunshots, What Emerges from the Fog Is Not Human

Daybreak was nearly an hour later than usual. It wasn't that the sun had risen late; it was the fog.

The thick fog rolling in from the swamp had condensed into a solid, grey-white curtain during the coldest hour before dawn, wrapping the entire length of the East Wall from the foundation to the battlements in an airtight shroud.

Standing behind the battlements and looking down, the base of the wall was invisible; reaching out, by the time the arm was two-thirds extended, the fingertips had already vanished into the fog, leaving not even a silhouette behind.

Half an hour before dawn, Rock woke everyone on the wall who had been on night watch.

He didn't blow a whistle; he simply walked from the south end of the East Wall to the north, and at every sentry post, he tapped the sandbags three times with the handle of his axe.

One, two, three.

The rhythm was exactly the same as the one he had tapped for Vian under the wall last night—he himself hadn't realized this coincidence.

He only knew that this force and rhythm could pull someone directly from a light sleep into a combat-ready state without alerting whatever was unknown in the fog.

When he reached the fifth sentry post, a recruit who had just turned seventeen sprang up from behind the sandbags, gripping the handle of his laser rifle, his muzzle already aimed in the correct direction outside the wall before his eyes were even fully open.

Rock glanced at him: "The direction is right, but the safety is still on."

He reached out and disengaged the safety on the recruit's rifle; the movement wasn't light, but it wasn't fast, allowing the youth to see the trajectory of his finger on the safety catch.

"Firing in the fog, you cannot shoot blindly if you can't see the target. Wait for orders before pulling the trigger; if there are no orders, keep the muzzle aimed at the fog. The fog won't rush you, but the things inside it will."

The recruit nodded, his Adam's apple bobbing. It wasn't out of fear, but to carve every word into his heart.

Rock continued walking north and stopped when he reached the middle section of the East Wall.

On the wall base that Old Tom had repaired last night, five wall-locking springs had already been embedded.

Before the sky was fully bright, Old Tom had personally carried a sledgehammer up to the wall, wedging the springs one by one into the interface between the new foundation and the old wall structure.

Every time he embedded one, he would measure the width of the gap with calipers—not because he didn't trust the tempering he had done last night, but to confirm whether the displacement of the wall's interface had exceeded 0.01 millimeters after the temperature changes overnight.

After all five springs were embedded, he pulled out a piece of charcoal and drew a very short horizontal line on the wall next to each spring.

This was his inspection mark. No circle, no checkmark, just a horizontal line.

According to him, a horizontal line meant "Until this spring shatters, it will never back out by even a fraction."

Lin Mo stood on the roof of the armory, at the observation post beside Vian, holding the latest signal briefing that Yang Shitou had just delivered.

The content was even shorter than last night: the pulse interval of Echo X, as of the last recording at 4:07 AM, had shortened to four and a half minutes.

Four and a half minutes—it meant that the source of the transmission had, in all likelihood, already entered the atmosphere of Hope Star.

On the last line of the briefing, Yang Shitou had written a note in bold using a piece of charcoal he never usually used:

At 4:09 AM, Echo X stopped sending pulses. It wasn't signal loss; it was a manual shutdown.

Comparing it with the underground pulse data that Zhao Laonian brought back yesterday, the final location before the shutdown overlapped with the position of the chaos beacon relay station in the Salt Flats with an error of less than two hundred meters. They had rendezvoused.

Lin Mo folded the briefing and tucked it into his jacket pocket.

Beside him, Vian was holding a rangefinding telescope, scanning the hard-soil plains outside the East Wall.

The fog was too heavy, and a layer of water droplets had condensed on the lenses; she had to wipe the eyepiece with her sleeve every half minute.

When she wiped it for the fourth time, her hand paused.

"Outside the East Wall, about three hundred meters away, something is moving." Her voice was very low but steady, "It's not shrubs. Shrubs don't walk against the wind. The speed is about twenty meters per minute, heading straight for the middle section of the East Wall."

Lin Mo took the telescope. Inside the lens, there was only churning grey-white; the fog layer was too thick, and he could only see a few blurry silhouettes slowly advancing.

He counted them one by one along the crosshairs: six.

The height was similar to an ordinary person, but the way they walked exuded an indescribable sense of dissonance.

It wasn't a marching step—the rhythm of a march is uniform, but these six silhouettes were inconsistent in speed, like a group of refugees stumbling along.

But refugees would never walk against the wind. The wind was blowing from the East Wall outward; refugees coming from the swamp should have been walking with the wind.

Walking against the wind meant either they were lost, or, they were intentionally letting the wind suppress the scent on their bodies.

"Vian, wind direction?"

"East wind, pushing outward from the wall."

"Those six are against the wind."

Vian took back the telescope and re-aimed it at the six silhouettes.

After looking for only five seconds, she set the telescope back on the sandbags, spread her right hand with her fingertips facing forward, and a pale blue psionic shimmer silently lit up at her fingertips.

"They aren't living people." Her fingers trembled slightly in the air; it was a physiological reaction to her psionic perception capturing abnormal energy, "They have body heat; psionics can read the heat, but the psionic imprint is twisted.

It's not the imprint of Blackstone Town residents—everyone's imprint is like a fingerprint, unique. These six are all copies. Six people, sharing one template."

"Chaos disguise." Lin Mo put down the telescope and grabbed the laser pistol from the sandbags, "They killed six refugees, or captured them, and a chaos sorcerer used psionics to strip the skin from the dead. The shell on the outside is from dead people, but what's inside is something of chaos."

"Alice—" Vian turned her head; Lin Mo had already picked up the communicator.

"Alice, three hundred meters outside the East Wall, six targets, directly facing the middle section. They aren't refugees; they are chaos infiltrators wearing human skin.

Their target is—" He paused, "The five wall-locking springs Old Tom just embedded. Chaos knows we can't see in the fog, but it also knows we can perceive psionics. Sending infiltrators isn't to break the defense, but to sneak to the wall base and dismantle the springs. Once the springs are removed, the interface between the new and old wall sections will be exposed; if the Bishop's artillery hits the gap, a single shell could blow down an entire section."

"Psionic barrier coverage." Alice's voice came through the communicator, calm and precise, a completely different person from when she spoke on the wall last night, though deep in her tone there was still warmth.

On the battlefield, she had switched back to the mode of an Astral Knights intelligence officer, only this time, her precision was no longer for the Empire's designations, but for the people of Blackstone Town. "Front of the East Wall middle section, double-layer barrier, can block six psionic impacts. But the fog is too thick; the water vapor is scattering my psionic perception—"

"I'll calibrate for you." Vian didn't wait for her to finish before interjecting.

She spread both hands simultaneously, the shimmer at her fingertips turning from pale blue to pale gold—that was a skill she had trained while doing geological exploration: compressing the range of perception into an extremely narrow sector, sacrificing breadth for extreme resolution.

"Outside the East Wall, seven degrees east of south, distance three hundred to three hundred twenty meters. Six targets, speed twenty meters per minute, arriving at the wall base in six minutes. I will mark their psionic imprints for you."

Her right index finger drew an arc in the air, the golden light at her fingertip pulling a faint yet extremely steady trail through the fog. To an ordinary person, it was just a flash of light passing through the fog, but in a psionicist's perception network, it was a set of spatial coordinates accurate to the centimeter.

"Received." Alice paused for a beat, then added a sentence that wasn't in the Astral Knights' tactical communication format, "Vian, your hand is much steadier than before."

On the wall, Rock had already heard Lin Mo's order. He didn't rely on the communicator—separated by half a wall, he had heard the conversation between Lin Mo and Alice clearly.

He immediately turned around and roared at everyone on the wall: "Six of them, wearing human skin, sneaking toward the wall base. Don't shoot the body; what's under the human skin isn't something flesh and blood can withstand. Aim for the joints; if they can't move, they can't dismantle the springs."

The recruits rested their rifles on the battlements. The fog was absurdly thick; targets that could be hit with a single shot from six hundred meters on the training ground were now invisible, not even a shadow to be seen.

But Rock didn't let them look at the fog; he made them look at Alice.

Alice stood at the highest point of the middle section of the East Wall, her long silver hair blown apart by the wind in the thick fog, and she didn't bother to gather it.

Her eyes were closed, not to give up observation, but to sink all her perception into the feedback of the psionic network.

The pale gold trajectory marked by Vian turned into a bright coordinate line in her perception; the six targets' psionic imprints were like six moving red pulses, approaching step by step, treading to the same heartbeat rhythm that didn't belong to them.

"Two hundred meters." Alice announced the first distance. Her voice wasn't loud, but everyone on the wall heard it clearly.

It wasn't shouted; the psionic barrier she had set up came with an extremely thin resonance layer that could transmit sound evenly to every corner covered by the barrier.

"One hundred and fifty meters. They are accelerating, increasing from twenty meters per minute to thirty. They know they've been discovered."

"One hundred meters. Rock, the third from the left, its psionic imprint is an order of magnitude brighter than the others; it's the leader. It might be carrying micro-explosives."

Rock switched on the energy module of his laser axe, the axe blade bursting with a blue-white arc of light, carving a foot-long path of light in the thick fog.

He didn't stand behind the battlements; instead, he walked down the stone steps inside the wall and circled to the foundation section where Old Tom had embedded the springs. He then turned around, back against the five springs, facing the thick fog.

"Lin Mo," Rock pressed the communicator, "I'm between the wall base and the springs."

"If those six want to dismantle the springs, they have to get past you first."

"Correct." Rock held the axe horizontally in front of him; the blue and white light on the axe blade in the thick fog looked like a frozen bolt of lightning.

Everyone on the wall heard this word "Correct". It wasn't fierce, it wasn't loud, but it was heavier than a roar; it was the tone of someone who had spent twenty years on the battlefield.

The recruits lay behind the battlements, their muzzles pointing in the direction of the approach in the fog, fingers hooked on the trigger guards—not touching the triggers.

Rock had said: if you don't see the target, fingers are not allowed inside the trigger guard. If you see it, shoot the joints.

"Seventy meters." Alice's voice penetrated the thick fog for the second time.

"Fifty meters. They are dispersing; two to the left, two to the right, two straight for the middle section. The leader is in the middle; the psionic imprint is continuously strengthening; it should be charging up. The micro-explosives are psionically detonated; the imprint will expand rapidly in an instant before detonation, and I will report it in advance."

"Thirty meters."

At the observation post, Vian's psionic perception simultaneously marked new coordinates; the four targets deviating in direction were each marked with different colors.

The four colors could only be seen by psionicists; after Alice received them, she added extremely concise command labels next to each target: Left deviation—Rock intercept front-left; Right deviation—wall crossfire; Middle section—barrier main defense zone.

"Twenty meters."

Rock straightened up from the wall base. He saw the first outline emerge from the fog—not a silhouette, but a deeper color squeezed out of the fog by the moving object.

That color slowly condensed into a human shape: a middle-aged man wearing tattered cloth clothes, his face covered in mud, his eyes unfocused, walking forward with a limp.

Looking at his appearance alone, he was just a survivor who had been hiding in the swamp for three days and was too hungry to stand steadily.

But there were no footprints under his feet. The wet soil in the fog was soft; a normal person would sink at least half an inch when stepping on it.

Where he walked, the soil surface only had a layer of flattened white frost. It wasn't from stepping; it was more like a reverse force field formed by psionic repulsion.

This force field was extremely thin in the fog, but it would expose the imprint of the chaos infiltrator.

"Ten meters." Alice's voice rang in Rock's ear; she had opened a very narrow channel on the resonance layer that only he could hear.

She immediately reported the coordinates, "The leader, directly in front, nine meters, zero-degree deviation. Psionic imprint expanding rapidly; detonation in three seconds. It's not a micro-explosive; it's a suicide blast."

Rock didn't retreat.

At the same moment Alice announced "suicide blast," he took a step forward, shifting his center of gravity from his heels to the balls of his feet; his right hand changed the laser axe from a horizontal grip to a swinging slash, the axe blade carving an arc from lower left to upper right in the thick fog.

This angle was not the angle for hacking. On the battlefield, hacking people was from top to bottom, and striking joints was a side horizontal cut.

What he was aiming for was the center of the psionic expansion that Alice had reported—the position above the opponent's abdominal cavity and below the chest cavity.

The Infiltrator's psionic charging before self-destruction has a fatal weakness: in the final second before detonation, all psionic energy compresses into a tiny point in the center of its chest.

At this moment, any external energy interference will delay the detonation.

Rock doesn't need to shatter its skin; as long as the axe blade cuts a slit just deep enough to touch the psionic core, the electromagnetic field of the axe's plasma blade can disrupt the psionic compression process of the self-destruction.

The axe blade cleaved through the fog, and then through the Infiltrator's outer layer of human skin.

The skin curled back along the fissure, revealing its true form underneath—no flesh, no bones, more like a churning mass of dark purple chaos tumor, writhing madly in the fog. The surface of the tumor constantly split and healed, and dense, gear-like fangs could be seen at the fissures.

Without the human skin disguise, it simply abandoned its human form. The tumor mass squeezed out from the fissure, unable to stand steady as it turned over, yet it continued to writhe toward the five springs.

Being cleaved by Rock only delayed it by half a second; it was still intent on crawling toward the wall base.

It didn't care if it was shattered, as long as it was close enough to the springs when it exploded.

Rock didn't give it a chance.

The second axe strike came down from the upper right; it wasn't a chop, but rather, he wedged the axe blade horizontally into the gap between the tumor mass and the wall base, then pried it outward.

The moment the tumor mass was pried off the ground, its volume suddenly expanded threefold, its dark purple skin stretched until it became translucent, and then it exploded in mid-air.

The shockwave of the explosion was steadily caught by the double-layered psionic barrier Alice had set up below.

The impact force traveled up along the bottom layer of the barrier, and the recruits on the city wall only felt the stone slabs beneath their feet vibrate, as if someone in the distance had punched the ground.

Lime powder from the sandbags fell in showers, but not a single fragment penetrated the barrier.

The five springs remained motionless. The horizontal acceptance marks next to each one were covered in a layer of dust, and the dark blue oxide film on the springs themselves didn't even have an extra scratch.

"Five left," Alice's voice sounded simultaneously in all the sentries' communicators. "They know their self-destruction was intercepted, so they've changed tactics.

Two are circling left, trying to avoid the wall base and climb up from the side wall; two are going right; one is still rushing the center, but its signature is retreating—not a retreat, but covering the other four."

"The ones circling left, leave them to me." Vian's voice came down from the observation post, her tone wrapped in a layer of pale golden echo—that was the sign that she had pushed her sensory precision to the limit.

Her right index finger traced two intersecting arcs in the air, marking the interception points for the Infiltrators circling left in the psionic network.

It wasn't coordinates, but a pre-calculated interception route.

The way she did this was exactly the same as when she used to mark ore vein trends in the Imperial Mineral Manual: first mark the known points, then calculate the optimal interception window for the next position based on speed and terrain.

Two veterans on the wall stood up in response. It wasn't an order from Lin Mo, but the interception points Vian marked fell exactly into their firing windows.

The two men each held a laser rifle calibrated by Old Tom, their stocks braced against the sandbags, the front handguards locked into the crenelation grooves, and their fingers on the triggers.

The targets couldn't be seen in the fog at all, but Alice marked projection lines for them on the psionic barrier.

Invisible to the naked eye, in psionic perception, they were two straight golden dashed lines extending from the muzzles to the targets' joints.

Relying on the feel of two years of target practice on the wall, the two veterans aimed their sights at the ends of the dashed lines.

Two gunshots exploded almost simultaneously.

They weren't the sounds of ordinary laser rifles.

With the rifles calibrated by Old Tom, the barrel resonance frequency during firing perfectly cancelled out the energy pulse of the bullet leaving the chamber, making the gunshot 30% quieter than standard Imperial rifles.

But in the fog, this dampened sound would be reflected by the moisture, forming a secondary diffusion.

Every gunshot sounded like a primary note nearby, followed half a second later by a layer of echoes from afar.

The recruits lay behind the crenelations, their ears buzzing from the layered sounds, but no one dared to lose focus.

Before the echoes had dissipated, two heavy, inhuman thuds came from the fog.

It wasn't a scream; Infiltrators don't scream.

It was the sound of the entire body slamming into the wet mud after the tumor mass lost its joint support.

"Left-circling targets, eliminated." Alice paused. "Two circling right, forty meters from the north section of the wall, still accelerating, thirty-five meters per minute. Rock—"

"I'm already at the north section." Rock's voice came from the north end of the East Wall.

After cleaving the first suicide bomber, he didn't return to the wall but ran directly from south to north along the wall base, the blue-white light on the axe blade trailing into a fast-moving horizontal lightning bolt in the thick fog.

When he reached the north section, he happened to run into the two Infiltrators circling right.

They had completely shed their human skin, the dark purple tumor masses exposed in the fog, their skin simultaneously splitting into a dozen long, narrow fissures, with dense, gear-like fangs extending from each one.

They didn't look human at all, but rather like a group of moist, viscous creatures that had been stifled by human skin for too long, using amorphous limbs to crawl rapidly toward the north section foundation.

Rock swung his third axe strike.

Not a chop, but a sweep.

The axe blade went from left to right, at exactly the height of human knees.

He had figured out the pattern from the structure of the first Infiltrator: the joint distribution of these tumor masses was completely different from humans, but to climb a wall, they had to press their bodies against the wall surface.

The part pressing against the wall had to bear the weight of their entire body, which made it the stress point.

By cutting a slit at the stress point, it would slide right off the wall.

He didn't need to know where the joints were; he only knew that no matter what wanted to climb the wall, it had to stick to the wall first.

As the axe blade swept across, both tumor masses slid off the wall simultaneously, falling into the mud at the wall base, their dark purple skin writhing madly, attempting to reassemble into a crawling or jumping form.

Rock didn't give them time to reassemble; he switched the axe to his left hand, drew the laser pistol from his waist with his right hand, and pressed the muzzle against the core of the nearest tumor mass.

That position was marked in his field of view by Alice using psionic perception.

An ordinary person couldn't see the core of the tumor mass—it was translucent, and the core density was less than one percent higher than the surrounding tissue.

But Alice's perception could mark that slight density difference as a red flashing point, then project it into Rock's field of view.

Rock pulled the trigger.

The laser beam pierced through the core of the tumor mass at point-blank range; the moment the core shattered, the dozen fissures on the surface of the entire tumor mass stopped writhing simultaneously.

It was dead.

The second tumor mass tried to spring up while its counterpart was being executed, but the axe blade in Rock's left hand had already flipped over.

The back of the axe, not the blade, slammed solidly into its core position, flattening the entire tumor mass into the mud.

Using the back of the axe wasn't to keep it alive, but because the contact area of the back was larger; while shattering the core, it could control the splash range of the fragments to within one meter, so they wouldn't splash onto the springs at the wall base.

"All cleared."

Rock lifted the axe from the mud, the dark purple slime on the back of the axe flowing slowly in the fog, scorched into a layer of charred black scars by the residual heat of the axe face.

He wiped the back of the axe with his cuff—not out of obsessive cleanliness, but because he didn't want the chaos residue to solidify on it.

Once solidified, it would corrode the heat sink fins of the plasma module. This axe had been with him for six years, and he had polished every dent in the heat sink fins by hand.

The gunfire in the fog had just stopped, and the city wall suddenly fell into a brief, abnormal silence.

It wasn't the relaxation of the battle ending; it was that no next wave of movement could be heard in the fog, yet everyone knew this was far from over.

Rock stood in the mud at the wall base, leaning on his axe. The blue-white light of the axe blade in the thick fog looked like a beacon floating in mid-air.

On the city wall, the recruits' fingers were still resting on the trigger guards, with two or three people having unknowingly slid onto the triggers, only to be pushed back by the veterans beside them.

Lin Mo came down from the roof of the armory and walked quickly up the city wall along the stone steps.

Vian followed behind him, the range-finding binoculars still hanging around her neck, but she wasn't looking through them anymore—she had her eyes closed, using psionic perception to sweep over all signatures within three hundred meters outside the East Wall.

Her brows furrowed slightly; it wasn't from fatigue, but from capturing a vast, dense group of psionic signatures.

"Too many." She opened her eyes. "Three hundred meters out, towards the swamp, an entire psionic array.

The spacing is uniform, at least fifty per row, and I counted at least ten rows at the limit of my perception.

They are forming ranks in the fog."

"Forming ranks, not charging?" Lin Mo asked.

"Not charging. Waiting." Alice walked over from the middle section of the East Wall, the psionic barrier still erected, its double-layered structure shimmering with pale golden ripples in the fog that were invisible to the naked eye.

She walked to Lin Mo's side, adjusted her perception frequency to synchronize with Vian's, and then also frowned.

It wasn't because of the numbers—she had seen the formation patterns of organized chaos raiding fleets in the archives of the Astral Knights.

She frowned because the formation in front of them was wrong.

The charging formation of Khorne followers typically has heavy armor in front and light troops in the back, laid out in a trapezoidal charging slope.

But these ten rows of formations before them were reversed.

Light troops in front, heavy armor in the back.

This wasn't a charging formation; it was an attrition formation.

"The bishop isn't in the front row." She looked up at Lin Mo. "Putting the light troops in the very front isn't because they are the main force; they are bait.

Rushing up to exhaust our ammunition and psionic energy, he wants the city wall's firepower to be depleted by at least forty percent in the first wave.

Then the heavy armor will push directly from the back rows to the wall base, using the psionic blasts of chaos sorcerers to dismantle the wall.

He's not in a hurry; he's waiting for us to fire the first shot."

Lin Mo raised his laser pistol to the crenelation.

The outline of the formation in the fog was already vaguely visible—not individual figures, but the entire array coalescing into a moving gray shadow in the fog, like a gray tide slowly pushing in from the direction of the swamp.

The distance was about four hundred meters.

The fifty light chaos troops in the front row were advancing at a constant speed of thirty meters per minute—not rushing, but walking.

One step at a time, the rhythm was exactly the same as when Zhao Laonian first saw the orc raiding party outside Blackstone Village years ago.

It wasn't just traveling; it was applying pressure.

They wanted the people on the city wall to watch them become clearer and clearer in the fog, closer and closer, until they were close enough to see their faces without binoculars.

Lin Mo didn't immediately order them to open fire.

He had Alice use psionic perception to mark the signature of every chaos soldier in the fog, then transmit the coordinates to the ears of the twenty shooters on the East Wall.

The shooters held their breath behind the crenelations.

The gray shadows in the fog walked into three hundred and fifty meters, three hundred meters—this distance was within the effective range of the rifles calibrated by Old Tom.

But looking at targets in the fog was like looking at fish swimming in milk; there were outlines, but no boundaries.

Firing at the outlines, the hit rate would be thirty percent at best.

"Closer," Lin Mo said.

The voice wasn't loud, but everyone on the city wall could hear it clearly.

The tone was like when he used to be a product manager, making trend judgments at competitive analysis meetings—not waiting for complete data, but having already confirmed that the trend was irreversible; what needed to be done now wasn't to rush to act, but to wait until the moment of action to maximize the recovery rate.

"Closer. They are set up in an attrition formation, light troops in front, heavy armor in back.

If we fire now, the light troops will retreat, and the heavy armor will press forward.

With the heavy armor advancing in the fog, our hit rate won't even be ten percent.

Let them walk, walk until the light troops in the front think the fog can hide them forever, walk until they mess up their own formation rhythm—that's the moment to strike."

The city wall fell silent.

There was only the low whistling of the wind through the fog layers, and the slight metallic friction sound of Rock, leaning on his axe at the wall base, occasionally adjusting his grip.

Vian's psionic perception captured a subtle change in the array three hundred meters away: the advancement rhythm of the light troops in the front row began to fall out of sync.

This was formation fatigue.

Without a charge order, constantly maintaining the same pace, walking into an increasingly clear fire coverage zone, the speed of the front-row soldiers would subconsciously slow down, while the back rows, unable to see the deceleration of the front, maintained their original speed.

For every minute this lack of synchronization continued, the overall impact force of the formation would decay by one percentage point.

"They are starting to get scared," Vian said in a low voice. "Not scared of us, but scared of their bishop.

The light troops standing in the very front row, the closer they walk, the less they know when they will be treated as cannon fodder.

This formation isn't meant to win; it's meant to exhaust our ammunition—they know it themselves.

Only when the ones in front die will the ones in the back charge."

"If those in front know, why do they keep walking forward?" Xiao Zhou had crouched on the steps on the inner side of the wall at some point, holding a newly tempered spring in his hands—Old Tom had asked him to bring it up, but upon arriving, he didn't dare move. Hearing Vian's words, the boy, wearing a look of bewilderment unseen in his three years of blacksmithing, asked in a hushed voice.

"Because the Chaos Bishop is behind them." Lin Mo did not turn around. "Those who retreat die even more miserably than those who die first." He disengaged the safety on his laser pistol, rested the muzzle on the stone of the crenellation, and slid his finger into the trigger guard, waiting for that moment. "Those in front aren't brave; they have no choice. This is Chaos—it doesn't care if those in front die; it only cares if the ones at the back can step over the corpses in front to get through."

The mirror of the emperor lit up at the edge of his vision for an instant. It wasn't a warning, but a line of tiny, faint golden text, like an annotation only he could see: No way forward, no door back—the third path is not under the feet of Chaos, but on this wall.

The grey shadows in the front row had reached two hundred and fifty meters. At this distance, even through the fog, the shooters on the wall could see their gait clearly. They weren't walking fast, but the look in each person's eyes was different: some looked down at the white frost beneath their feet, some stared fixedly at the torchlight on the crenellations, and some walked with their left hands pressed against the octagram pendant on their chests.

The action was exactly the same as people instinctively touching a cross in a desperate situation, only they weren't touching for salvation, but for a faith watered by fear.

"Two hundred meters." Alice reported the final distance line. The Psyker barrier tightened slightly in her hands; the upper layer of the dual-structure shifted slowly from defense mode to interception readiness mode. She had to ensure that the light-armored Psyker projections from the front row—even the most basic Psyker bolts—could not penetrate the barrier and hit the shooters at the crenellations.

"Aim for the joints." Lin Mo's voice exploded in all the communicators simultaneously. It wasn't a roar, but the texture of every word being precisely nailed into the combat channel after half an hour of silence. "Don't shoot for the head, don't shoot for the chest; shoot for the knees and elbows. Cripple the front row; when the back row pushes up, they will be tripped up by their own remnants. The gap caused by them being tripped is the window where the heavy armor accelerates and the light armor's retreat path disappears—that window, shoot the heavy armor."

The muzzles of twenty laser rifles aimed simultaneously at the grey shadows approaching in the fog. No one pulled the trigger early; everyone was waiting for Lin Mo's next order.

The fog slowed everything down, slow enough to clearly count the rhythm of every Chaos light-armored soldier lifting and setting down their feet. One step, two steps, three steps, four steps—getting closer and closer.

Lin Mo's finger slid from the outside of the trigger guard to the inside. He didn't shout "Fire," he only said three words.

Those were the three words he would say every time his team released a major update before he transmigrated. But tonight on this wall, the meaning of these three words had nothing to do with business anymore:

"Hit the joints."

The first volley exploded from the wall.

Twenty laser beams drew twenty parallel orange-red light trails in the thick fog; the light trails pierced the fog layer, evaporating the mist into fleeting wisps of white smoke. At the end of the beams, the knees and elbow joints of twenty Chaos light-armored soldiers were hit almost simultaneously.

There was no gore. When the laser hit the body, there was only a tiny cauterized hole, the surrounding tissue instantly carbonized, forming a dark brown charred ring. But hitting the joints was different—once the functional structure was burned through, the entire body would uncontrollably twist and collapse under gravity, crashing to the ground.

The dozen or so Chaos soldiers at the very front fell to their knees almost simultaneously. Their legs could still support their bodies, but after their knee joints were shot through, every step forward was broken bone scraping against the marrow cavity.

This excruciating pain left only a momentary stiffness on the faces of the Chaos light-armored soldiers. It wasn't that they could endure it; it was that the heat, exceeding the limits of tolerance, rushed directly from the nerve endings into the spinal cord. They wouldn't scream; the militarized training of Chaos suppressed the conditioned reflex of screaming to the minimum.

But in the posture of their fall, something more real than a scream was hidden: their hands.

Every person whose knees shattered and who fell forward, the moment they lost their balance, would subconsciously reach out to grab something to support themselves. Then they realized, there was no wall in front, no stones, nothing at all. Only the vast, white fog, just like the white frost beneath their feet.

Their hands passed through the fog, grabbing only more fog. Then their fingers dug into the mud, using their broken legs and palms to crawl forward in the mud.

It wasn't that they still wanted to charge; it was that the order to stop hadn't arrived, and as long as they crawled forward, they were still alive.

"The second row is still walking, stepping over the bodies of the front row." Alice's voice pierced the thick fog within the lingering sound of the gunshots.

The speed of the second row of Chaos light-armored soldiers increased. It wasn't because they had gathered courage; it was fear. Seeing the posture of the front row falling, the instinctive reaction of their knees and elbows was to accelerate. It wasn't to charge faster, but to lengthen the stride of each step, wanting to cross this distance where they could be shot down as quickly as possible.

But they didn't know how many people were on the wall, didn't know how long it took for each rifle to empty a magazine, and even less did they know that Luo Ke had buried an extra set of tripwire mines thirty steps outside the wall base last night. Not in the direction of the swamp, but right next to the wall, thirty steps away. The fuse of the tripwire mine was set to trigger by stepping, not by weight. The tripwire was hidden in the fog, almost completely invisible.

The first to step on the tripwire mine was the light-armored soldier on the far left of the third row wearing dark armor. The moment the tripwire was stepped on, the soil beneath his feet along with the white frost lifted less than an inch, and then came the crisp metallic sound of a spring releasing.

This sound was extremely faint on the battlefield, dozens of times quieter than the gunshots, but it meant the spring contact had already struck the detonator's primer cap. 0.3 seconds later, the detonator exploded, and the explosive blasted a shallow pit with a diameter of one meter.

The pit wasn't big, but it flipped this soldier and the two others in the same row in front and behind him to the ground simultaneously. His leg was severed into three pieces from below the knee by shrapnel, the cuts clean, the three pieces of the leg scattered in the mud at normal anatomical intervals.

After the tripwire mine exploded, the first sound wasn't a scream, but a roar from the heavy-armored soldiers in the back row. It wasn't fear; it was an order.

That roar pierced the fog layer, its frequency so low it approached infrasound, shaking the torches on the wall, causing them all to dip by half an inch.

Immediately after, the back rows of the grey shadow formation in the fog—the fifth to the tenth rows—began to accelerate as a whole. The heavy armor was pushing up.

They didn't care that the light-armored soldiers in the front were still crawling, didn't care that three corpses with severed legs lay in the shallow pit blasted by the tripwire mine. The rhythm of the heavy armor's advance was the sound of heavy boots stomping the ground, uniform, heavy, every step like beating a drum.

The sound of the drums traveled from the depths of the fog all the way to the base of the wall, and then, following the resonance of the wall structure, traveled up to the stone slabs of every crenellation.

Lin Mo looked at Vian. Vian's Psyker perception had already marked eight Psyker anomaly points in the direction of the heavy-armored formation; the distance between every two was exactly the standard interval for a Chaos Warlock squad.

Eight Psyker points were charging simultaneously; in the perception field, the imprints burned from red to a color approaching white-hot.

They weren't trying to dismantle the springs. They were going to use Psyker blasts to simultaneously blow open eight cracks on the outer wall surface of the wall. Once the eight cracks connected into a net, no matter how thick the wall was, it would be cut into fragments.

Alice didn't wait for Lin Mo to speak.

Her Psyker barrier changed from two layers to three—the third layer was embedded between the two, a very thin reflective layer specifically used to absorb and convert Psyker impacts. This structure wasn't in any Astral Knights combat manual; it was something she had figured out herself. She combined Vian's geological exploration precision with her own barrier layering ability to create a structure that could not only block impacts but also divert the impact force to the left and right sides.

For the direction of the diversion, she chose both ends of the wall. Both ends were positions where Luo Ke had reinforced with sandbags; when the Psyker impact was diverted there, the sandbags would absorb the remaining shockwaves.

The eight Psyker points in the fog exploded simultaneously with dark purple light. Beams of light fired from the hands of the Chaos Warlocks, like eight twisting snakes burrowing through the fog, with all targets concentrated on the middle section of the wall.

The people on the wall could instinctively feel that light—it didn't hurt people by brightness, but by frequency. That frequency almost completely overlapped with the α-wave band of the human brain; before the light even hit their bodies, their brains felt a burning pain before their flesh did.

The new recruits covered their heads, the veterans closed their eyes.

But they were not hit.

Because between the dark purple light and the wall, the three-layered golden barrier expanded to its limit.

The moment the Psyker impact hit the barrier, there was no explosion. The impact force followed the diversion path designed by Alice, rapidly spreading to both sides, finally exploding into two muffled grey-white clouds of dust on the sandbags at both ends of the wall.

The wall in the middle section didn't budge at all. The shockwaves absorbed by the sandbags only caused a layer of fine dust to fall on the stone steps. The acceptance marks next to Old Tom's five springs—those extremely short horizontal lines—not a single one was wiped away, and every single one lay clearly in the grey fog.

Alice stood at the highest point of the middle section of the wall.

In the peak of the Psyker release, her hair completely turned pale gold. Unlike the color that flashed by under the moonlight last night, this time it wasn't for an instant; it was a brightness spreading from the roots to the tips. In those few seconds when she held off the eight Psyker impacts, her long hair seemed to be plated with the texture of light by a twilight that did not belong to this world.

Vian on the observation post saw this scene and didn't speak. Her range-finding binoculars were aimed directly at the follow-up formation in the direction of the swamp.

Behind the heavy armor there was a second wave, and behind the second wave there was a third. And after the third wave, at the edge of the swamp's fog curtain, appeared a dark red light spot ten times larger than all the other Psyker imprints combined.

That light spot was walking forward step by step. Every step landed on the heavy beat of the drums. Every step caused the torches on the wall to dip by half an inch.

The Chaos Bishop had come in person.

Not in the command post, not on the fleet. He had walked to the edge of the swamp in person, nailing his dark red imprint, which was brighter than all the Psyker points combined, step by step onto the fog curtain.

Luo Ke looked up and saw that light spot. He didn't understand Psyker imprints, but he understood that rhythm.

That kind of pace, deliberately slowed down, with every step wearing down the opponent's psychological defense line—twenty years ago, when he fought his first battle in the border star region, the enemy Commander opposite him had walked over just like that. Walking not fast, but every step was telling you—he had never thought of retreating.

Luo Ke pulled his axe out of the mud. The blue and white light on the axe blade was brighter at this moment, as the Chaos Bishop walked toward the swamp, than on any other night. It wasn't that the energy had changed; it was that he was gripping it tighter.

He turned back to look at Lin Mo on the wall. Sixty steps of wall separated the two, separated by a layer of gradually dispersing grey-white fog. No need for a communicator; sixty steps, it wasn't necessary.

Luo Ke turned his head to the side and tapped the base of the wall with the axe handle once.

Once.

No second time, no third time.

The meaning of "once" was: I'm here.

The fog covered the swamp, but it couldn't cover the eight streaks of dark purple that had been diverted to both ends.

The smoke and dust exploded on the sandbags hadn't yet dissipated, and another light spot appeared on the edge of the fog curtain.

The drums had been beating in the fog for six years; Luo Ke could tell the distance between every step.

On the other end of the battlefield, he tapped the wall with the back of his axe once. Once.

I'm here.

This was the lightest sound on the East Wall tonight, yet it was heavier than the sound of the drums.