228: Chapter 229 This thing is destined for me

At this moment, Liver Emperor, also wearing a set of gene-enhanced Power Armor, walked over.

He moved his steel arms somewhat clumsily:

"Hey Flame Fist, how do you actually operate this gene-enhanced Power Armor? I spent a fortune to buy it and have been wearing it for a few days, but I've only ever used it to tank damage. I haven't figured out how to use its enhancement system at all."

"That's simple!"

Flame Fist instructed skillfully, "After you put on your helmet, in the bottom right corner of your field of view, besides the standard fire control crosshair, there's a red virtual slider. Just move your hand to that position and swipe with your mind, and you'll see. That's the power overload mode."

After guiding the novice, Flame Fist turned to look at Ming Shen and asked in a low voice, "By the way, with the boss gathering us all for a boarding operation this time, is there any different tactical arrangement?"

Ming Shen pondered for a moment and analyzed calmly, "I don't know the specific supreme tactical orders, but I have a rough guess."

"Our previous attempts to board the Hive Mother Ship failed, mostly because it was firmly protected by layers upon layers of massive cruisers, making it impossible to squeeze in."

"But now, the boss has ordered The Guardian, that artillery pyramid, to push forward at full speed while tanking the fire. This is likely to flush out the snake! Using absolute frontal heavy firepower to forcibly compel and mobilize those Zerg frigates and cruisers that are guarding the Hive Mother Ship to the death!"

A glint flashed in Ming Shen's eyes, "Whether those bugs are circling around to avoid the Mass-Energy Conversion Cannon, or are forced to rush up to protect the Hive Mother Ship, as long as they move on a large scale, their previously iron-clad formation will inevitably develop blind spots and loopholes! After all, their outer frigates have already suffered heavy losses from your Brotherhood's bombing."

Flame Fist understood and clapped his hands hard, "I get it! Then, once they expose a gap, we elites will open the boarding pods, thread the needle, follow the dark path in, and strike straight at the heart?!"

"That should be the tactical intent." Ming Shen nodded, "But once the real fighting starts, it certainly won't be that simple. The royal guard bugs inside the Hive Mother Ship are definitely not pushovers."

Just as the two were discussing tactics, Ming Shen caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of Flame Fist's golden armor belt. Besides the magazines, there were actually a few inconspicuous baseball-sized black metal spheres hanging on it.

"Huh?" Ming Shen pointed at the metal spheres and asked, "What are those? I've never seen you carry them before."

Hearing this, Flame Fist stiffened and instinctively reached out to cover his belt.

"Ahem... nothing, it's nothing, just some ordinary fragmentation grenades." Flame Fist said, laughing evasively with shifty eyes.

"Grenades?" Wanna Sleep with Slaanesh, who had been silent on the side, heard this and immediately leaned his sleazy head over.

"Let me see what kind of new grenades these are?"

Before Wanna Sleep with Slaanesh could finish his sentence, his hand, ghost-like, had already skillfully reached toward Flame Fist's belt.

"Smack!"

Flame Fist was quick-witted and hurriedly slapped his thieving hand away.

"Get your dirty hands off!"

Flame Fist shielded his belt and sneered, "You want them? If you do, go mold a face like Lin Chi-ling, change your gender, and sleep with me for a night, and I'll give you the recipe!"

"Screw off! My sexual orientation is perfectly normal!" Wanna Sleep with Slaanesh gave him the middle finger.

Ming Shen frowned, wanting to continue asking what secrets those black grenades were hiding, when

"Beep—!"

The PV devices on the wrists of all the players present suddenly emitted a harsh, forced-top-priority notification sound!

Players from different guilds received completely different assembly orders!

Ming Shen looked down and saw that the Scourge Legion had received: All personnel are to immediately proceed to the Sector 5 Spaceport and board the sea breeze no. 9 armed assault ship!

As for the other legions and solo players, they were assigned to different areas and ordered to immediately board the densely packed rocket boarding pods!

Clearly, this boarding battle was about to begin.

Furthermore, what made everyone hold their breath was that, in addition to the standard boarding orders, a line of additional wartime "die-hard" commands was marked at the very bottom of everyone's system panel:

[All clone players participating in the assault! After dying in the boarding battle and returning to the incubation pod to respawn! There is no need to organize your equipment! You must return to the docking port of The Guardian to assemble at the first moment, at the fastest possible speed!]

Seeing this, Ming Shen and Flame Fist exchanged glances, both seeing the gravity in each other's eyes.

Extreme words like "immediately," "at once," and "at all costs" rarely appeared in this game system, which had always prided itself on high freedom.

This meant that for whatever reason, the battle situation had already become so tense and desperate that they couldn't afford to lose even a single second of respawn "garbage time"!

"Let's go!" Ming Shen waved his hand, "Board the ship!"

On the sea breeze no. 9 armed assault ship, the three hundred or so core high-level players of the Scourge Legion had finished boarding and began skillfully checking their firearms and reloading ammunition in the spacious preparation cabin.

Accompanied by a slight sense of weightlessness, sea breeze no. 9 detached from the docking port and followed closely behind the massive The Guardian, sailing into deep space.

The player Flash did not go to clean his gun, but instead clung to the cold porthole, staring wide-eyed at the universe outside.

In the boundless space, dense amounts of various debris and corpses were floating.

There were players wearing tattered Power Armor, incomplete Zerg limbs, Orks frozen into ice sculptures, but more than anything, there were countless remnants of completely torn-apart metal warships. This was a veritable space graveyard.

Although the main engines of The Guardian and sea breeze no. 9 were constantly spewing blue flames and accelerating frantically, and the distance to the main Zerg fleet should have closed significantly, in the pitch-black deep space, the naked eye still couldn't see anything, only endless depth.

Flash felt oppressed after looking for too long, so he had to withdraw his gaze and turned to run toward the holographic tactical sand table in the center of the cabin.

When passing by Wanna Sleep with Slaanesh's seat, Flash glanced over unintentionally and suddenly stopped his steps.

He saw that Wanna Sleep with Slaanesh was leaning back in his seat, tossing a baseball-sized black metal sphere up and down in his hand.

"Huh?" Flash widened his eyes and pointed at the metal sphere, "Isn't that... the grenade that the muscular hunk Flame Fist was hanging on his belt earlier?! How did it end up with you? Where did you get it?"

Wanna Sleep with Slaanesh caught the metal sphere steadily and raised an eyebrow: "Of course I picked it up on the way!"

"Bullshit!" Flash's face was full of disbelief as he directly exposed him, "It was something hanging on his armor buckle. Could this thing grow legs and fall off that show-off's waist on its own?"

"Hey! Talk about a coincidence!" Wanna Sleep with Slaanesh lowered his voice and bullshitted with a serious face, "Just now when boarding the ship, I happened to pass by that kid. This metal sphere was like it recognized its master—whoosh, it just jumped into my hand on its own! Isn't that magical?"

Wanna Sleep with Slaanesh stuffed the metal sphere into his pocket and patted it, "So, this thing is destined to be with me!"

"?????" Flash had black lines all over his head. Destined to be with you, my ass. To be able to talk about stealing things so refreshingly and refinedly—it's just like you.

Flash couldn't be bothered to continue bickering with him, so he quickly walked to the side of the Legion Commander, Ming Shen, and looked at the holographic sand table in the center together.

The tactical sand table on sea breeze no. 9 had high precision, and through data link sharing, it basically perfectly restored the macro situation of the entire interstellar battlefield.

At this moment, the huge green cursor on the sand table representing The Guardian was approaching the dense cluster of red cursors in the distance with an unstoppable momentum.

Although The Guardian's movement speed was slow, everyone knew that once this massive pyramid pushed into the effective range of its main cannons, its terrifying composite firepower network would fire continuously, tearing everything in front of it into shreds.

Ming Shen supported himself on the edge of the sand table with both hands, staring intently at the micro-movement trajectories of those red dots. He muttered data to himself, seemingly calculating something rapidly.

"It's coming." Ming Shen suddenly said in a low voice.

Almost at the next moment! The dense, iron-clad cluster of red dots on the sand table moved suddenly!

A large number of red dots on the periphery quickly broke away from the main formation, turning into two surging dark red torrents.

They traced two huge arcs, bypassing the frontal firepower coverage of The Guardian, and moved at high speed toward the two sides of the defensive line!

Obviously! The Zerg Commander had also noticed the movement of The Guardian. Since it couldn't break this hard nut, the Hive Mother Ship immediately made the fastest tactical response!

The target of those two split torrents was undoubtedly the habitable planets behind The Guardian, which were full of billions of fresh biomass! They were attempting to base-trade!

However, facing the Zerg's detour and splitting of forces, this time, no orders were given for The Guardian to intercept on the sides!

The green cursor was like a heavy but deadly hammer. Completely ignoring the bugs slipping toward the rear, it locked onto the core position of the Zerg fleet—charging directly toward that massive Hive Mother Ship!

As the distance between the two sides continued to close, the remaining cluster of core red dots in the center of the Zerg fleet finally couldn't hold back and began to move!

Just as Ming Shen had guessed before, after witnessing the one-shot kill power of the Mass-Energy Conversion Cannon, the bugs indeed did not choose to engage in a head-on confrontation with the full-speed advancing The Guardian. The entire core fleet began to collectively move and retreat slowly to the other side of the sector.

"What exactly is the boss doing?" Flash looked at the green cursor on the sand table that had missed its target and scratched his head, "The Guardian flies so slowly, just charging straight up like this, it can't catch up to them at all. It can't even touch them, isn't this a waste of effort?"

Everyone knew clearly. Because the Zerg had evolved light cyst bugs as meat shields specifically to resist annihilation particles, if The Guardian wanted to cause substantial damage to those large warships, or even the mother ship, it had to first rush into the effective range of the Macro Cannon and high-frequency laser cannons, and use conventional firepower to sweep away those cyst shields before the Mass-Energy Conversion Cannon could complete a one-shot kill.

The bugs, of course, wouldn't be stupid enough to stop in place and let you comfortably complete this combo of output.

"Do you think the boss really wants to catch up to them?" Ming Shen stared at the sand table, his eyes flashing with wisdom, "This is called an open conspiracy! This is using absolute firepower deterrence to forcibly force the Zerg swarm to reveal flaws!"

"The Hive Mother Ship is too large. If it wants to relocate, the frigates and cruisers protecting it around it must move and adjust their formation together! As long as the ships are moving on a large scale, the originally tight and seamless defensive formation will definitely have positioning errors and gaps!"

Ming Shen tapped the table, "After all, those biological warships are only connected by tentacles and a psychic network; they aren't welded together with steel plates! As long as they move, our chance will come!"

As if to verify Ming Shen's precise guess, the moment his voice fell!

Outside the front porthole of sea breeze no. 9, a dense burst of blinding fire suddenly erupted!

"Look!" A player shouted. In the space in front of sea breeze no. 9, the massive bottom armor plate of The Guardian suddenly opened with a boom! It revealed thousands of honeycomb-shaped launch tubes inside!

"Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!" Thousands of specially made rocket pods used for executing boarding battles were launched in an orderly fashion, row by row, from the bottom of the fortress like a floodgate opening!

These rocket pods quickly adjusted their direction in space. The nuclear fusion engines at the rear simultaneously spewed blinding, deep-blue propellant exhaust flames! They turned into a brilliant blue meteor shower, immediately began to accelerate, and along the fleeting gaps in the formation created when the Zerg fleet moved, they fiercely thrust into the depths of the Zerg defensive line!

This scene was spectacular to the extreme, making all the players looking out the window feel their blood boil!

"Holy shit! That's so cool! Has the boarding battle started already?!" Flash excitedly slapped the window, then turned back, puzzled, "Wait, that's not right! Since the main force has already launched the charge! Then why are we, these three hundred high-level players, still just stupidly hanging out on sea breeze no. 9? Why don't they let us follow them in the rocket pods and charge up to hack the bugs?!"

Ming Shen looked at him speechlessly and rolled his eyes as if looking at an idiot.

"You don't know jack shit."

Ming Shen gave an analogy irritably, "When you play cards with others, do you just throw out your trump card immediately without looking at anything?"

Flash puffed out his chest righteously: "I do! When I play Darius in LoL, whenever I see someone, regardless of anything, I just pop my ultimate, jump up, and slash them first!"

Ming Shen listened to this brain-aneurysm-level answer, and the corners of his eyes twitched wildly.

"...Get lost!!"

"What do you know? Stacking Hemorrhage right away also closes the distance. It's a huge profit, okay!"