95: Chapter 95 Chaos Fearless Mech, Locke Holds the Gap

After the first wave of light infantry was crippled by the volley, the fog thinned briefly—not due to natural dissipation, but because of the thermal convection stirred up by the laser searing the moisture, forcibly tearing a gap in the fog barrier.

The gap only lasted forty seconds, but it was enough for those on the city wall to see the movement in the direction of the swamp.

Three Chaos Dreadnoughts were slowly rising from behind the heavy armor formation.

They hadn't tunneled up from underground; they had been crouching deep in the thick fog at the end of the formation, their four-meter-tall bodies curled into balls, looking like three craggy boulders from a distance.

As they stood up, the exhaust expelled when their hydraulic joints extended bloomed into three clouds of gray-black smoke in the fog—mixed with the psychic corrosive agent injected by the Chaos sorcerers; wherever it passed, the white frost on the ground was dyed a sickly dark green.

The Dreadnoughts themselves were exposed in the gap in the fog for less than half a minute, but it was enough for everyone to burn that hideous silhouette into their minds: broad shoulders, short necks, and highly asymmetrical arms—the left arm was a heavy power fist, with each mechanical finger having a diameter exceeding an adult's waist; the right arm didn't have a hand at all, but a cannon thick enough to fit a curled-up adult.

The muzzle was in a preheating state, and the psychic rifling rotating inside revealed rings of dark red pulse light in the fog.

On the frontal armor of each of the three Dreadnoughts was engraved a massive chaos eight-pointed star—not simply spray-painted, but grooves burned inch by inch into the ceramic composite armor using high-temperature tools.

The grooves were filled with a slowly flowing dark purple liquid; it was the blood of Chaos cultists liquefied by psychic energy.

With every cycle of the blood, the Dreadnought's core reactor emitted a dull thud, each one heavier than the last.

"It's a Dreadnought." Alice's voice broke the stagnant silence on the city wall. "Three of them. None are modified from Imperial wreckage; they are native models from a Chaos Arsenal."

"The frontal armor has at least five layers of composite ceramic plates, and the grip strength of the power fist—" She paused, digging through the corresponding files in her memory, "—can crush the turret ring of an Imperial Leman Russ Tank."

"Weakness?" Lin Mo asked, his voice as flat as if he were reviewing competitor specs, though his speaking speed was twice as fast as usual.

"The legs. The back of the Dreadnought's knee joint is a concentrated area for hydraulic lines, and the armor on the heat dissipation grille is over seventy percent thinner than the front. Imperial Astartes Dreadnoughts have extra armor casing behind the knees, but Chaos replicas likely skipped this step."

Alice pushed her psychic perception to the limit. In her field of vision, the three Dreadnoughts were stepping forward through the fog, each step causing the ground to tremor slightly. "I'm confirming—whether their rear knee heat grilles are directly exposed."

"Conclusion."

"The first one on the left. The armor behind its right knee is incomplete; they must have skimped on materials during casting."

Alice quickly drew a short line on the stone surface of the battlement, corresponding to a spot one hundred meters north of the East Wall on the map—exactly the depression Old Tom had filled in last year. "When its right leg steps into the depression, the knee joint will depress, just enough to expose the heat grille to the shooters on the north section."

Lin Mo immediately relayed the coordinates to the three veterans on the north section of the city wall.

Laser rifles had already been set up behind the battlements. The fog reduced the effective range, but the three Dreadnoughts were such large targets—so large that one didn't need to see the knee joints clearly; one only needed to aim at the three moving giant shadows in the fog, and the moment they stepped into the depression, simply lower the muzzle fifteen degrees from a level shot.

"Wait." Vian's voice cut in from the observation post. Her psychic perception was simultaneously locked onto the core psychic signatures of the three Dreadnoughts. "Their advance rhythm is different. Two are in front, the second one is taking the middle path, and the third is leaning right. But the psychic signature of the first one on the left is weakening—not from damage, but it's actively lowering its reactor output. It's using the other two as cover."

"What does it want to do?"

"Decelerate. Let the other two rush ahead to draw all the fire, while it hugs the wall from the side with minimal energy consumption."

Vian's fingers spun the focusing wheel of the rangefinder telescope rapidly. "The direction is north-leaning. The target isn't the middle section of the city wall, but the north side of the depression Old Tom filled in—the corner junction of the East Wall and the North Wall. There are no wall-locking springs installed in the foundation there."

Lin Mo instantly followed her line of thought: "It wants to break through from the corner. The corner foundation is the oldest section, built nearly three years ago, and the bedrock underneath has long been eroded by groundwater. Smashing the corner with a power fist doesn't require removing springs; it can just dig up the foundation directly."

The corner of the East Wall and the North Wall was the seam between the old city wall and the new city wall. Three years ago, when Blackstone Town was expanded, Old Tom led people to extend the old North Wall foundation one hundred and twenty paces to the east to connect with the new East Wall.

The connecting surface used sedimentary rock mined from the edge of the swamp, which was two levels lower in hardness than the igneous rock in other sections of the East Wall.

Back then, Old Tom poured three extra layers of lime mortar at the seam, but didn't embed any wall-locking springs—that design hadn't been invented yet. It wasn't until the new East Wall foundation was loosened that Old Tom quenched the thirteenth thick spring in the workshop, and the concept of the wall-locking spring was born.

"Locke." Lin Mo pressed the communicator. "Abandon the middle section, go to the corner seam at the north end, the wall section Old Tom connected with sedimentary rock."

"How much softer is sedimentary rock than igneous rock?"

"Two hardness levels. A power fist takes three hits to break igneous rock, but for sedimentary rock, one hit is enough to crack it."

Locke had already been sprinting from south to north along the base of the city wall; the sound of his combat boots hitting the muddy ground was so dense it blended into a single continuous noise, each step launching his body nearly a meter forward.

His left hand kept his laser pistol pointed toward the direction of the Dreadnought in the fog, while his right hand dragged his power axe, leaving a blue-white arc of light at his side.

He paused for two seconds before reaching the corner, leaning on his axe and looking back at the pile of spare crushed stone stacked at the foot of the wall—it was what Aunt Zhang had led people to move up yesterday to patch wall cracks, and it hadn't been used yet.

Locke pried open the top layer of crushed stone, pulled out the two heaviest pieces, each weighing about forty catties, and moved them to the outside of the corner wall base to build a very low cover.

This cover couldn't stop the Dreadnought; forty catties of stone were no different from paper in front of a power fist.

He was leaving a visual reference for the shooters on the city wall—the fog would only get thicker once the fighting started; with these two stones, the veterans could accurately lock onto the position of the corner of the wall without accidentally hitting their own people.

After finishing all this, he turned around, leaned his back against the sedimentary rock wall base, and held his power axe horizontally in front of him.

In the thick fog to his front left, the Dreadnought that had circled around was already eighty meters away.

The blurry shadow gradually solidified into a clear entity: four thick hydraulic legs, and hanging upside down on the broad shoulder armor were a dozen skulls strung on iron chains—not decorations; each one was a Psyker personally slain by the Chaos Bishop, with dark purple psychic residual fluid seeping from the eye sockets, used to continuously provide energy and buffs to the reactor.

The left arm's power fist slowly opened, and as the five mechanical fingers spread, it emitted the low roar of hydraulic cylinders compressing.

Locke looked up at this metal monster that was nearly three times taller than him; the dark purple mucus stuck to his beard had already dried and hardened into a crust.

His gaze didn't linger on the muzzle, nor did it fall on the power fist; he only stared at its knee joint—or more accurately, the seven-centimeter-wide heat dissipation grille behind the right knee.

The position was exactly as Alice had marked: in the phase of the step, when the knee joint bent to its maximum angle, the armor covering the grille would reveal a gap less than two fingers wide.

Behind the gap was the core hydraulic tubing bundle, and the high-pressure psychic oil inside supported the operation of all the Dreadnought's power joints.

"Three." Lin Mo's voice came through the communication channel, not as a question, but as a confirmation.

"Three." Alice's psychic perception simultaneously marked shooting windows for the three veterans: when the first Dreadnought on the left stepped into the depression, the knee joint would be exposed for 0.8 seconds; the second one in the middle had its heat grille half-blocked by the armor skirt, and they would have to wait for it to turn to align with the gap; the third one on the far right was also veering north, forming a pincer movement with the first to flank the corner.

"Hit the back of the knees." Lin Mo commanded. As the three words fell, twenty guns fired in unison, and three laser beams converged precisely on the same target.

The first Dreadnought's right leg stepped into the depression, the knee joint depressed to its limit, and the armor gap behind the heat grille opened completely.

The three laser beams from the north section of the city wall pierced into the gap simultaneously within the 0.8-second window, burning three pin-sized holes into the high-pressure psychic oil lines inside.

The holes were less than half an inch in diameter, but the oil in the high-pressure tubing bundle gushed out under pressure, colliding with the high-temperature exhaust expelled by the reactor, and instantly ignited.

A ball of dark orange flame erupted from inside the Dreadnought's right knee joint—not a violent explosion, but a continuous burning.

The temperature of the psychic oil flame was sufficient to soften the inner structure of the ceramic armor, and the right leg instantly lost hydraulic support below the knee joint, causing the entire Dreadnought to tilt to the right.

The power fist instinctively pressed against the ground, but the weight of the fist itself ended up crushing the remaining support structure of the right leg.

It didn't fall, but it could no longer move forward. The left leg was still shuffling forward, while the right leg dragged on the muddy ground, plowing an increasingly deep trench.

"One disabled." Alice immediately reported the battle situation. "The second one is accelerating in the middle, trying to fill the first one's position."

The second Dreadnought's speed of advance suddenly surged, and its left power fist was raised to its chest—not to charge a punch, but to use the fist as a shield, protecting the reactor core in its chest.

The muzzle of the right arm became increasingly bright in the fog, the dark red psychic rifling rotating at high speed, and the energy density turned from dark red to a blinding purple-white within a second.

"Muzzle charging!" Vian's voice rose by a half-step in the observation post. "Targeting the lower section of the city wall... It's aiming for the spring! It knows the location of the spring!"

The Chaos Bishop at the edge of the swamp had psychic perception precision no less than Alice's, capable of accurately locating all psychic objects in the fog.

But the wall-locking spring was a purely mechanical creation; the quenching, tempering, and cold working processes had no psychic enhancement throughout, so it should have been impossible to lock onto it directly via psychic perception.

But the Bishop didn't need to find the spring; he only needed to find Old Tom.

Old Tom was not a Psyker, but the wall-locking springs he embedded into the wall had all been touched by his Imperial Arsenal calipers, which he had used for thirty years.

The trace metal powder remaining on the surface of the calipers carried the metal elements from the countless spring steels he had quenched with his own hands—among them, the rare earth residue from a special quenching salt would produce an extremely faint abnormal echo on the psychic perception frequency band.

This echo was so faint that the vast majority of Psykers couldn't detect it, but it was no match for a Level 6 psychic Bishop, who had spent nearly an hour scanning the psychic spectrum of the East Wall inch by inch.

What he was looking for was this faint physical mark that didn't belong to the category of psychic energy, yet could be captured by it.

He found it—it was the trace of rare earth left in the spring steel lattice during quenching by hands that had served in the Imperial Arsenal for fifty years.

The mark was so faint that even Old Tom's own vernier calipers couldn't measure it, yet it couldn't escape the perception of a Level 6 Psyker.

The muzzle roared, and a solid projectile wrapped in a high-speed rotating psychic core burst out, tracing a low, flat arc in the fog, its landing point aimed precisely at the lowest layer of the middle section of the East Wall—the location where Old Tom embedded the first wall-locking spring.

Before the projectile arrived, Alice's psychic barrier popped out an additional interception layer.

This wasn't a standard flat barrier, but a concave structure she had compressed into a bowl shape, just enough to catch the impact force of the projectile and deflect it upward.

She had interception experience—when she was with the Astral Knights, she had seen psychic projectiles from Chaos Dreadnoughts. But this projectile was different from all the models in the archives.

The moment the projectile touched the barrier, it didn't explode immediately; it first released a layer of pre-detonation psychic pulse, pushing the concave structure of the barrier outward by less than an inch, and then it detonated with a roar.

The center of the explosion was less than half a meter from the outer surface of the barrier, and the shockwave slammed hard against the outermost layer of the three-layer barrier, causing visible cracks to crawl across the pale golden light wall instantly.

The cracks spread too fast, and Alice didn't have time to repair them one by one; she could only prioritize reinforcing the area directly in front of the spring. As for the other locations, if they cracked, they cracked.

All the shooters on the city wall were forced to take a step back by the shockwave, and the lime powder accumulated on the sandbags was shaken into the air, choking up a cloud of white dust in the fog.

The new recruits were blinded by the dust and couldn't open their eyes, but the veterans squinted and steadied their guns again, waiting for the dust to dissipate slightly before locking onto the moving Dreadnought silhouette in the fog once more.

"How many more shots can the barrier take?" Lin Mo's voice was hoarse from the shockwave.

"It can take a second shot." Alice's tone remained precise, but her fingertips pressed five deep white marks into the stone of the battlement—this wasn't fear, but the backlash from pushing her psychic output to her physiological limit in a short time. "But after three more shots, the barrier directly in front of the spring will completely shatter. Someone needs to knock its muzzle off-target; it doesn't need to be penetrated, just deflect the cannon's depression angle."

The second Dreadnought had already begun recharging; the psychic rifling inside the muzzle turned from dark red to purple-white again, and the charging time was nearly half shorter than the first shot.

It adjusted its depression angle, and this time it was no longer aiming for the barrier, but aiming lower, pointing directly at the base of the city wall.

It wanted to fire the projectile directly into the foundation—the lime mortar Old Tom filled in would collapse before the wall under the impact of the ammunition; once the mortar seam cracked, the wall foundation stones would fall apart.

Just at this moment, Locke walked out from the corner of the wall base.

He didn't rush toward the front of the second Dreadnought, but walked along the base of the city wall toward the middle section, dragging his laser axe behind him, the axe blade cutting a long, thin trail of blue light in the mud.

As he walked, he calculated one thing in his mind: what was the minimum depression angle of the Dreadnought's muzzle.

The minimum depression angle of an Imperial Astartes Dreadnought's muzzle was negative five degrees, limited by the power fist in front of the chest.

The Chaos replica's structure might be different, but there was one commonality: the right arm's cannon barrel was mounted below the shoulder joint, and when the muzzle was pressed to near the minimum depression angle, the right armpit—the connection gap between the shoulder joint and the chest armor—would be exposed.

There was no ceramic composite armor there, only a layer of dust-proof flexible sealing bushing, which couldn't stop a laser axe.

Locke stopped when he reached the middle section, standing directly in front of the second Dreadnought, less than forty meters away.

The thick fog separated the two into two incomplete shadows; he could only see the lower half of the Dreadnought, while everything above the waist was hidden in the fog.

But he didn't need to look at the muzzle; he only needed to stare at the right shoulder joint—before each charging cycle ended, the shoulder joint would shrug upward slightly due to the recoil pre-push.

After this shrug, the projectile would be fired.

Vian at the observation post captured Locke's movements; she didn't ask what he was going to do—she saw that the speed at which Locke was dragging his battle axe and walking forward had not changed in the slightest since he left the corner.

He wasn't hesitating; he was walking toward an answer he had already calculated.

Vian focused her psychic perception, marking the precise location of the Dreadnought's right shoulder joint for Locke.

Locke couldn't see the pale golden marker line, but in his communicator earpiece came Vian's extremely low voice: "Right shoulder, twenty more steps forward. It's charging, less than ten seconds left."

Locke switched the dragging battle axe to a two-handed grip and rushed through the final twenty steps.

Every step kicked up mud that splashed up to his chest; when he rushed to a position five steps away from the right side of the Dreadnought, he suddenly bent down—not a simple dodge, but throwing his entire center of gravity into a rotation trajectory from bottom to top.

With both hands swinging the axe, he slashed diagonally from his right waist to the upper left, the axe blade cutting a diagonal line in the fog pointing straight from the ground to the armpit.

The landing point wasn't the center of the shoulder joint, but the gap between the shoulder joint and the chest armor, covered by the sealing bushing.

It took less than 0.1 seconds for the axe blade to cut open the flexible bushing; beneath the bushing was the high-pressure psychic oil line connecting the Dreadnought's main hydraulic pump to the right arm cannon's power supply port.

The oil line here was thinner than the bundle behind the knee, responsible only for muzzle rotation and depression angle adjustment, without needing to support the weight of the entire leg.

The axe blade cut less than half an inch into the pipe wall. But even if a high-pressure oil line is breached by only a single layer of the wall, it will tear apart completely under pressure. The psychic oil gushed out, hit the blue-white plasma on the axe blade, and instantly vaporized. The vaporized oil expanded nearly a thousand times in volume, triggering a small-scale deflagration within the sealed bushing.

The impact of the deflagration couldn't blow open the shoulder armor, but it directly severed the power connection between the shoulder joint and the cannon barrel. The psychic rifling inside the muzzle, a second before reaching peak charge, was completely cut off, and the purple-white light instantly dimmed to a dead gray. The shell failed to fire; it was squeezed in reverse by the unburnt residual psychic energy within the barrel and exploded on its own.

The explosion shattered the cannon barrel from the inside, creating a dozen cracks, and the muzzle burst into metal fragments that flew everywhere. Locke turned sideways, using the widest part of the axe head to block two fragments flying toward his face; the fragments struck the axe head with a sharp ringing sound, like heavy hammers hitting an anvil. The axe blade was stained with oil, and the fire was still burning, so he leaned over, scraped the axe against the muddy ground to wipe off the burning oil, then stood up and retreated two steps.

The second mech's cannon barrel was destroyed, but it didn't stop. It used the ruined right arm's cannon barrel like a club, sweeping it to the right—not as a targeted attack, but to drive Locke back. At the same time, it raised its left arm's power fist high; the target wasn't Locke, but the wall foundation. It didn't need the cannon anymore; it was going to smash it directly with the power fist.

The first punch slammed into the stone of the wall foundation. The lime mortar in the sedimentary rock joints was shaken, ejecting a line of fine dust from the gaps toward the inside of the wall, landing on the ground like a thin layer of snow. The wall didn't crack, but it shifted inward by less than half an inch. This half-inch displacement was an extremely dangerous signal in structural mechanics: the lime mortar in the joints was transitioning from elastic deformation to plastic deformation. Elastic deformation can recover, but plastic deformation is irreversible. Once it enters the plastic stage, the second punch could completely smash the joint open.

Before the second punch could land, three laser rifles on the wall fired simultaneously at the mech's exposed left knee joint. Three laser beams pierced three holes in the left leg's heat dissipation grille, and just like with the first mech, the hydraulic oil lines were ignited, and the left knee joint began to burn from the inside. Yet it still didn't stop; after the left leg was ruined, it pressed its entire weight between the already destroyed right leg and the burning left leg, kneeling down heavily.

But its left arm, that power fist, could still function. The height of its kneeling posture happened to align the power fist with the lowest layer of the wall foundation.

The power fist slowly clenched, and as the knuckle hydraulic cylinders closed, it emitted a sharp metallic shriek. This punch, delivered from a kneeling position, lacked the force of a standing stance, but it allowed for a direct, unbuffered impact between the fist and the wall. Old Tom's lime mortar joints, on the sedimentary rock which was two levels lower in hardness, could not withstand this punch.

Locke watched the descending power fist, its five mechanical fingers slowly closing in the fog. He rushed the last three steps, stepping over the chaos debris scattered on the ground, and changed his grip on the battle-axe for the last time. This time, it wasn't a two-handed grip; he held it with one hand at the very end of the handle, swinging the axe from his side with the largest possible rotation radius. The larger the rotation radius, the higher the linear velocity of the axe blade—he had to cut the hydraulic lines of the power fist before the fist could smash down.

The axe blade carved a blue-white arc nearly two meters long through the fog.

The target wasn't the power fist itself, but the bundle of connecting lines between the power fist and the wrist armor. The five fingers of the power fist were driven by three sets of high-pressure hydraulic lines, and the bundle passed in parallel through the armored casing of the wrist joint. The casing had armored protection, but at the connection between the casing and the power fist, there was a flexible sealing ring that allowed the wrist to rotate. When the power fist clenched, the sealing ring would be stretched, reducing its thickness from two centimeters to less than half a centimeter. Half a centimeter of sealing material was no different from a piece of paper in front of the plasma axe blade.

The axe blade sliced through the sealing ring, severing the first set of hydraulic lines, followed immediately by the second. By the time it cut the third set, the power fist could no longer maintain its grip. The five mechanical fingers suddenly released just before smashing into the wall foundation, and the open fingers scraped powerlessly across the wall surface, only scraping off a layer of stone powder without causing a single crack.

Locke pulled the axe out of the line bundle; the plasma on the axe blade was stained with semi-solidified residual psychic oil, and the blue-white light was half-covered by the oil stains. He wiped it with his sleeve, but couldn't wipe it off, so he stepped back, stood leaning on his axe, and looked up at the mech kneeling motionless before him. Both legs were destroyed, the cannon barrel had burst, and the power fist's fingers hung limp from the wrist, like the talons of a raptor with its tendons cut. Yet its core reactor was still humming, and in the gaps of its chest armor, the dark red psychic rifling still glowed with a faint light.

"Two down, temporarily disabled." Locke said into the communicator, his breath slightly short, though not in distress, as if after swinging his axe three times in succession, he just needed an extra breath to rush to the next battlefield.

"The third one." Lin Mo's voice came immediately, "The third one has been behind you, it changed direction when you were cutting the second one. It didn't go to the corner, it headed for the main gate. That iron gate at the East Wall main gate—"

Locke pulled his axe from the mud; he didn't need to hear the rest to know the consequences. The East Wall main gate was a three-inch-thick iron-cast gate, with an extra layer of iron plating that Old Tom had forged last year wrapped around the outside. An Imperial standard gate could withstand a conventional artillery strike, but this mech's power fist was more lethal than artillery—artillery is a collision, but a power fist is a squeeze, capable of ripping the gate directly off its hinges.

In the thick fog, the massive silhouette of the third mech was moving toward the East Wall main gate, its path of advance a straight line precise to the smallest fraction. The chaos bishop's psychic perception was navigating for it; it was walking on the hardest stretch of road outside the East Wall, every step two beats faster than in the mud. The right arm's muzzle wasn't charging; it didn't need the cannon, its only task was—tear down the gate.

The shooters on the wall fired a dozen shots at it, the laser beams hitting the frontal armor and leaving only charred little pits on the five layers of ceramic plates. The frontal armor was too thick; Old Tom's calibrated laser rifles would need to hit the same spot at least eight times in a row to burn through the first layer of ceramic plates. In the foggy conditions with the mech advancing at high speed, hitting the same point eight times in a row was simply impossible.

"Don't hit the front, hit the joints!" Alice adjusted her aiming direction on the wall, but this time the shooting window was shorter than any before. When the third mech advanced head-on, the bending angle of its knee joints was exactly at the threshold, not exposing the gaps in the heat dissipation grilles—the chaos bishop had already transmitted the footage of the first two mechs being pierced behind the knees to the third mech's pilot via psychic sensing. Every stride it took was precisely controlled, just right to keep the angle from exposing the joint gaps.

"Can't penetrate the joints!" a veteran from the northern section cursed, "It walks like it's stepping on a ruler, the knees aren't bending enough at all!"

"Then don't hit the joints." Lin Mo ordered in a deep voice, "Hit the soles of the feet. Its foot chassis armor isn't as thick as the front; break the ground-contact sensors, and once its pace is disrupted, the joints will naturally be exposed."

The veterans immediately shifted their gun muzzles three feet down from the knees. The mech was approaching the gate at a speed of nearly forty-five meters per minute, with less than a hundred meters remaining between them. Its feet were huge, each one over 1.2 meters long, crushing deep pits into the mud with every step. On the side of the feet was an array of terrain-sensing sensors; the outer shell wasn't ceramic armor, just hardened plastic steel, which couldn't withstand direct fire from laser rifles.

Three laser beams simultaneously struck the side sensor array of the first foot. After the sensors were pierced, that foot lost terrain feedback upon landing, and the mech's cockpit system determined the landing position was abnormal within 0.3 seconds, automatically adjusting the next stride, forcibly enlarging it by a margin. This forced enlargement of the stride made the knee joint bend four degrees more than before—four degrees, that was enough.

"The back of the knee is exposed!" The veterans didn't wait for orders; twenty rifles fired in unison, turning the heat dissipation grille behind the third mech's left knee into a sieve. The hydraulic oil lines were instantly ignited, and flames burst from the knee joint, drawing a horizontal orange-red tongue of fire through the fog. The mech's body tilted to the left; its right leg was still stepping forward, and its left leg dragged in the mud, yet it still didn't stop. Relying on its only remaining leg, combined with the torque from its waist, it forcibly twisted its upper body toward the main gate, then pressed the right arm's cannon barrel against the gate.

It wasn't firing. The cannon barrel had already suffered impacts, the internal pressure system was unstable, and firing again would likely result in a direct barrel explosion. It was using the cannon barrel as a crowbar—the wall thickness of the barrel exceeded one inch, and its limit for lateral thrust was even higher than its internal pressure limit. It pressed all the remaining kinetic energy of its entire body—kneeling, tilting, half-crippled—onto the point where the tip of the cannon barrel pressed against the gate.

The iron gate emitted a harsh metallic screeching sound on its hinges, and of the sixteen fixing bolts on the inner side of the door frame, the top one had already begun to pull out.

Just then, Locke rushed out from the thick fog. He didn't circle to the front of the mech—rushing up from the front would only result in being smashed into pulp by the remaining power fist. He stepped on the ruined left leg from the side and climbed onto the mech's torso. It wasn't a normal climb; he used the axe blade like an ice axe, slamming the axe into the gaps of the ceramic plates on the side armor, and after securing it, he pulled himself upward. With three consecutive axe strikes, using leverage three times, he scrambled onto the mech's shoulder.

The mech's cockpit was directly above the chest, and the hatch cover was a slanted armored plate with four anti-tamper bolts screwed into the outside. Locke inserted the axe blade into the gap between the hatch cover and the chest armor, using the axe handle as a lever to pry it outward. Under the force of his weight plus the leverage, the four bolts were pulled out of the keyholes one by one. The first one popped out and smashed into the muddy ground in the fog, the second flew out and hit the wall, and when the third was halfway out, the mech's right arm suddenly flipped over, and the power fist swung over the shoulder from the other side of the body, heading straight for Locke.

Locke saw the incoming power fist but didn't dodge—dodging would mean losing the leverage point for prying the hatch cover. He used his left hand to hold the axe stuck in the gap, and his right hand drew the laser pistol from his waist, aiming at the sealing ring on the power fist's wrist—the same structure as when he slashed the second one, that sealing ring that would be stretched when clenching a fist. The laser beam pierced the sealing ring at extremely close range, severing the only remaining set of hydraulic lines. The power fist fingers suddenly released, sliding powerlessly from less than half a foot above Locke's head, and slammed onto the mech's chest armor with a heavy, muffled thud.

The fourth bolt was pried away. Locke used his elbow to knock open the hatch cover; inside was the chaos pilot—not a normal human, but a humanoid creature genetically modified with psychic energy by a chaos sorcerer. Its skin was dark red, and there were no eyeballs in its eye sockets, replaced instead by two self-luminous dark purple psychic cores. Its lips were welded together by psychic energy; the chaos bishop didn't allow it to speak, the pilot only needed to execute, not think.

Locke didn't look at its face, his gaze falling on its hands—those hands were directly connected to the mech's control system by metal conduits, and high-pressure psychic oil like that in the hydraulic system flowed through the tubes. Most of the pilot's own blood had been replaced by the oil; it was no longer a person, but a living control component of the mech.

Pull away these hands, and this mech would stop completely.

Locke placed the axe blade on the metal conduit connecting the pilot's left hand to the control system, pausing for half a second. It wasn't hesitation, just the realization that with this axe strike, the psychic oil in the conduit would spray all over the cockpit, and the pilot would be ignited. A creature with its mouth sewn shut, its blood replaced, and welded into a cockpit could not even scream when burning.

But two thousand people on the wall could live. Locke pressed down the axe blade.

The conduit was severed, and the psychic oil sprayed out, hitting the high-temperature reactor exhaust pipe inside the cockpit, instantly detonating. The entire mech exploded from inside its chest with a mass of dark orange flames, tongues of fire gushing out from the pried-open hatch, erecting a fire column nearly three meters high in the fog. Locke leaped down from the mech's shoulder, landing heavily in the mud at the base of the wall, his right shoulder hitting the ground first; he rolled over to lie flat, gasping for air. His face was covered in scorch marks from the black smoke of the burning oil, and his left arm's combat uniform was ripped open from elbow to wrist by the armor edge, the shallow, bleeding scratches on his skin clearly visible.

But he still gripped the axe. The blue-white light of the axe blade still shone in the thick fog and black smoke, not with the intensity of full power, but with the gentle warmth of standby mode. This light in the thick fog didn't look like lightning, but rather like a candle flame that had been blown for a long time on the battlefield, yet never extinguished.

The mirror of the emperor at the edge of his vision flashed; this time it wasn't golden text, but a minimalist symbol: an axe. It was drawn crudely, but the angle of the handle perfectly overlapped with the posture of Locke leaning on the axe as Lin Mo looked down at him from the wall. The system was recording one thing in its own way: mortals, without genetic modification, could also make Astartes-level combat decisions.

The torchlight from the wall shone down through the thick fog, and three mechs stood quietly in the mud: one dragging its right leg, stopped at the edge of a depression, its reactor humming ceaselessly but unable to advance an inch; one kneeling before the wall foundation, the power fist's fingers hanging limp like a raptor with its tendons pulled; one in front of the main gate, burning with raging flames from its chest, the firelight illuminating the dent on the iron plating of the gate pushed out by the cannon barrel—the iron gate was still there, the hinges were still there, four of the sixteen bolts had been pulled out, but the remaining twelve were still firmly locking the door frame.

The sound of drums came again from the fog, denser and more urgent than before. The psychic imprint of the chaos bishop at the edge of the swamp was not retreating, but instead approaching step by step, the interval of each step shorter than the last beat. His heavy infantry array was advancing as a whole; the three mechs were merely the prelude. He didn't care about the loss of these three mechs at all—in the chaos bishop's tactical model, mechs were merely pawns used to consume the opponent's anti-armor firepower. Their collapse meant that the anti-armor means on the wall were exhausted. Now, it was time for him to enter the field personally.

Locke lay in the mud, his left arm wound still oozing blood, yet he used his right hand to prop up the axe. He gripped the handle and slowly raised his upper body; he didn't stand up, but sat up. He sat in the mud at the base of the wall, his back against the gate he had defended, the battle-axe resting across his knees, the axe blade still glowing with the faint light of standby. He looked up toward the top of the wall; the fog was too thick to see Lin Mo's face clearly, but he could see that most familiar silhouette—the position where that person on the wall always stood.

He raised his right hand and tapped the gate lightly with the axe handle. Once. Just like the tap at the base of the wall before leaving the corner, the same rhythm, the same force.

Once.

I am here.

On the muddy ground, three mechs sent up three columns of low smoke.

Every place where a wisp of smoke rose was a dead zone forced out inch by inch by an axe.

What Locke severed was not just the hydraulic lines and the hatch cover,

It was the delusion of the chaos bishop, who was certain that after the three mechs, the gate would automatically open.

The axe blade is still glowing, the gate has not opened.

The moment he fell into the mud, landing on his right shoulder first, was heavier than any punch the three mechs slammed into the wall.

Because when he fell, he could still sit up.

And those steel monsters would never stand up again.