218: Chapter 219 The Ship of the Desert

On the PV channel on Penny's wrist, all kinds of player distress calls, team-up requests, and curses were rapidly scrolling by, the notification sounds ringing non-stop.

But Penny seemed as if he couldn't hear any of it.

He sat on the back of the giant bird, silent for a long time.

Then, he wiped his face hard one last time with his mud-covered hands, set his sights on a direction in the inner city, squeezed the bird's flanks, and rode off at a wild gallop.

Before long,

Penny arrived in front of a massive heavy industry arsenal.

It was completely different from the cold, high-tech assembly line factories of other players that only pursued efficiency.

The style of this factory was steeped in a heavy Warhammer flavor.

Inside the factory workshop, automated robotic arms were flailing everywhere.

Yet on these cold mechanical casings, yellow parchment scripture was pasted everywhere, and gears and skull crests representing the Omnissiah were painted all over in red paint.

A strange scent of engine oil mixed with incense filled the air.

The factory's owner was none other than the famous amateur scientist and inventor in the legion—[Rocket Coal-Burner].

At this moment, Rocket Coal-Burner was sitting in front of the console computer with his legs crossed, clacking away as he played a single-player game he had developed himself.

Hearing the heavy footsteps of the giant bird,

Rocket Coal-Burner turned his head and saw Penny dismounting from the bird.

"Yo! Isn't this my wife?"

Rocket Coal-Burner casually joked about Penny's ID,

"What's the occasion? The bugs outside are knocking on our door, so why aren't you at the front lines checking on your precious crops? What are you doing here at my place?"

Penny's face was dark, and he ignored the teasing.

He strode up to the console, slammed both hands onto the desk, and stared intently at Rocket Coal-Burner.

"Cut the crap!"

Penny's voice was hoarse and cold.

"I still have two hundred and fifty thousand cores in my account. Now, I'm transferring them all to you!"

"Today, make me something with massive firepower! Heavy firepower! I want it now, the faster the better!"

Rocket Coal-Burner was taken aback by Penny's fierce and menacing attitude, feeling a bit bewildered.

"Brother, stop joking. I'm not Doraemon."

Rocket Coal-Burner shrugged, looking a bit put on the spot.

"You want heavy firepower right this second, and it has to be a finished product. Where am I supposed to conjure that up from? Processing those high-level blueprints and precision parts takes time. You..."

However, before Rocket Coal-Burner could finish his excuses,

*Beep—!*

A crisp notification sound of a successful transfer suddenly came from the pv terminal on his wrist.

He looked down, and his eyes nearly popped out of his head.

A full two hundred and fifty thousand points! Not a single point short, all received!

"Holy shit! Boss, you're so generous! You're actually serious!"

Rocket Coal-Burner's expression instantly flipped. He shoved his keyboard aside and jumped right out of his chair.

"Go, go, go! Follow me! Straight to the main underground warehouse! Today, even if you want me to hand-craft a nuke, I'll find a way to piece it together for you!"

With a grim face, Penny followed him all the way through a long corridor, arriving at the giant underground warehouse in the deepest part of the factory.

*Click!*

The warehouse searchlights lit up one by one.

When he clearly saw what was stored in the warehouse, Penny's eye couldn't help but twitch.

It was piled high with all kinds of bizarrely shaped weapon barrels and metal wreckage.

As a firm believer in the "I fink" style of amateur science, Rocket Coal-Burner had always built things without caring about scientific blueprints.

His main philosophy was a chimera approach: as long as the caliber was big enough and the firepower was fierce enough, it couldn't go wrong.

Consequently, the items displayed here were incredibly diverse, and absolutely none of them were normal, proper military-grade weapons.

There was a melta stone-cutter disc launcher modified from a mining melta cutter;

a decuple-barrel cannon welded together from ten iron pipes;

a close-defense mortar mounted on a handcart;

and even a plasma rapid-fire cannon with its plasma coils completely exposed.

Looking at this setup, when these things fired, the probability of blowing up the enemy versus blowing up oneself was probably fifty-fifty.

Rocket Coal-Burner led Penny through twists and turns in the junkyard, arriving at an open space.

Parked here was a bizarre tank modified from a tracked transport chassis, topped with three gun barrels of varying lengths.

"Brother, how about this one?"

Rocket Coal-Burner patted the armor plating.

"Three barrels firing at once! Although the accuracy is a bit poor, it definitely packs a punch!"

Penny's face darkened as he shook his head. "I spent over two hundred thousand points, and you're offering me this kind of scrap metal? The firepower is way too weak! No! It's not enough to slaughter them!"

Rocket Coal-Burner scratched his head and pointed to another heavy combat vehicle above, which had a heavy main gun and was covered with multiple rocket launcher pods on its sides.

"What about this then? I made this one by copying a multiple rocket launcher vehicle!"

Penny's face remained as grim as water as he continued to shake his head in dissatisfaction.

His mind was completely filled with that ruined wheat field and those brutally killed workers.

What he wanted now was not conventional weapons, but pure, unreasonable destruction!

Rocket Coal-Burner rubbed his chin and thought.

Suddenly, his eyes lit up, and a crazy, gimmicky idea popped into his head!

"Brother! I've got it! Let's do this!"

Rocket Coal-Burner slapped his thigh.

"In your farm, don't you have that oversized heavy-duty agricultural tracked tractor you bought at a high price?"

"Hurry up and have someone drive that thing over! I'm going all out today—I'll weld every single heavy weapon in this warehouse, whether it's a cannon, plasma, or rocket launcher, right onto that tractor!"

A fanatical light of amateur science flashed in Rocket Coal-Burner's eyes.

"I'll build you a mobile gun tower! This firepower is absolutely guaranteed to satisfy you! How about it?"

Penny thought about that mountain-like giant agricultural tractor, and finally nodded heavily.

"Deal!" Penny raised his only concern. "But I'm alone. With so many turrets, how am I supposed to fire them all at once by myself?"

Rocket Coal-Burner thumped his chest reassuringly.

"Don't worry about that! Fully automatic firepower! You just need to sit in the cab, step on the gas, and drive forward!"

"When you want to fire, just shout 'Fire!' into the console's microphone!"

...

At the same time,

on the wilderness outside City 233.

By now, about ten thousand players from Baby Bus had gathered in scattered groups outside the city.

Holding various weapons, they were locked in a fierce, chaotic battle with the bugs raining down from the sky.

But after all, they were just a bunch of lifestyle players who usually only knew how to forge iron and farm.

When they fought, the scene appeared somewhat stiff and comical.

Backed by the long-range fire support provided from the city walls, they set up scattered defenses in the muddy ground outside.

To put it simply—there were absolutely no tactics!

There was no crossfire network, no sturdy defensive fortifications, and certainly no infantry-artillery coordination.

These players basically fought their own battles, bracing themselves and charging forward with guns in hand.

They relied entirely on their upgraded, superhuman physical attributes and Power Armor to endure the bugs' biting.

Although the battle was extremely difficult and fraught with danger,

fortunately, those landing here were only basic Termagants, Termagants, and flying Gargoyles, with no high-tier bugs appearing.

Thus, the lifestyle players managed to trade blows back and forth with this wave of bugs, leaving the ground piled high with the corpses of both players and bugs.

In the center of the battlefield,

the player Dumpling was piloting a nearly five-meter-tall Gladiator Mech, madly pureeing the bug swarm.

He had spent money to swap out the rotary machine gun on the mech's right arm for a high-powered flamethrower.

Orange-red flames spewed wildly, roasting the approaching Termagants until they crackled.

The massive melta hydraulic claw on the mech's left arm swept through the swarm continuously, ruthlessly harvesting the severed limbs of the bugs.

However, with a nearly four-meter-tall colossus standing on the plain, it predictably became the focus of concentrated fire for all nearby Termagants.

Dense swarms of fleshborer beetles and acid rained down like a tempest on the armor plating of the Gladiator Mech.

By now, the mech's outer shell was covered in dents and corrosion pits left by bio-bullets, and alarms blared continuously inside the cockpit.

"Brothers! I can't hold on! Fall back toward the city walls! I can't take this anymore!"

Dumpling shouted in the channel as he watched his defenses drop rapidly.

On the other side, the player Dog Bro, holding a laser gun, retreated while shooting and shouted back:

"Dumpling! We can't retreat! A lot of brothers outside are still rushing back to the city! If we pull back, the defensive line will break! Hold on a bit longer!"

Dumpling anxiously looked at the ammunition panel:

"No way! My flamethrower's fuel tank has hit rock bottom! Not a single drop left! I have to go back to the city to resupply first before coming back out!"

"Don't leave!"

Dog Bro cried out in anxiety, "This entire section of the defensive line is relying on your single heavy-firepower mech to hold the fort!"

"We lifestyle players barely even have a few decent plasma guns among us.

"If you leave, and a few heavily armored Warrior Bugs pop up, how the hell are we supposed to fight them?!"

Just as several people were facing depleted ammunition,

*Boom! Boom! Boom!*

The ground behind the plain suddenly vibrated with heavy, rhythmic tremors!

It felt as if a mountain of steel was moving toward them!

Immediately following,

a sharp whistling sound pierced the air!

A dense barrage of artillery shells and rockets trailing long exhaust flames whistled right over the heads of Dumpling and the others!

*Rumble—!*

Clusters of shells slammed precisely into the dense swarm of bugs ahead!

The violent explosions whipped up a horrific storm of blood and gore, with severed limbs and green bodily fluids flying everywhere in the shockwaves.

The offensive of the bugs ahead was instantly ground to a halt!

Filled with shock, everyone turned their heads to look behind them.

There, amidst the swirling gunpowder smoke,

a bizarre, scaled-up tank—at least twenty meters long and eight meters high—slowly rolled into everyone's field of vision!

It was the ultimate chimera, modified from Penny's giant agricultural tractor!

On its thick, solid, giant tracked chassis,

layer after layer of various armor plates had been crudely welded on.

And in the gaps between these armor plates,

turrets and gun barrels of every caliber imaginable were densely packed!

155mm gun-howitzers, large-caliber short-barreled mortars, blue-glowing makeshift plasma cannons, multiple rocket launcher pods, and multi-barrel laser close-in weapon systems with spinning barrels spitting sparks!

There was every kind of gun imaginable!

What was even more absurd

was that on the outer armor plates of this chimera tank's tracks, two high-frequency giant circular saw blades—originally used for cutting boulders and now spinning madly—were insanely mounted!

Sitting in his mech, Dumpling stared blankly at this slowly approaching steel behemoth, completely dumbfounded.

"Oh my god..."

Dumpling swallowed hard and muttered to himself,

"This style... Ship of the Desert? Or Rommel's Ghost? Whose subordinate is this guy?! He must be in the late stages of firepower deficiency phobia!"

At this moment,

Penny's hoarse, rage-filled roar suddenly echoed in the guild channel:

"Anyone who ruins my crops... must die!!!"

Along with this deafening roar,

Penny slammed his foot on the gas pedal in the cockpit and screamed "Fire!" into the voice-control microphone.

The moment the words left his mouth,

the dozens of gun barrels of various calibers on the chimera combat vehicle all erupted in a roar at once!

A wild, indiscriminate bombardment!

No tactics, no precise aiming.

Just pure, saturating fire!

Under this round of devastating saturation strikes, a massive swath of the bugs that had just gathered to charge ahead was instantly wiped clean!

What remained on the plain were dense, black-smoke-billowing craters and charred bug corpses covering the ground.

Roaring past Dumpling's mech with its spinning circular saws, the chimera combat vehicle charged straight into the bug swarm ahead!

Dumpling swallowed hard once more.

He looked down at the few stalks of Jinkela No. 1 under his mech's feet, which had already been trampled into mush.

He silently took two steps back and kicked some dirt over to cover up the evidence.

Then, Dumpling lifted his fuel-depleted flamethrower, slammed the barrel directly into a bug in front of him, and shouted to the still-dazed Dog Bro next to him:

"What are you still standing there for?! The farmer has gone mad! Charge with him! Kill the bugs!"