74: Chapter 74 Arriving Two Kilometers in the Dark! Twelve Grenades Explode the Entire Field

The Polaris had been driving in a northeasterly direction for one hour and forty minutes.

When the terrain ahead, illuminated by the searchlight, changed from flat ice to an uneven ruin zone, Lu Chen reduced the vehicle's speed to fifteen kilometers per hour.

He turned off the searchlight.

The cabin plunged into brief darkness, leaving only the pale blue glow of the holographic panel and the flickering orange flames from the boiler's furnace window.

"City Lord?" Lin Wan's voice came from the planting area.

"The lights are off; we've arrived."

"What do I need to do?"

"Nothing. Sit on the floor of the planting area and hold onto the support poles of the hydroponic rack."

"Okay."

Lin Wan didn't ask further and crawled back into the planting area to sit down.

Lu Chen brought the eyepiece of the periscope sight to his eyes.

Moonlight spilled onto the surface through the thin, rust-colored dust mist; visibility was better than he had expected.

Two kilometers ahead, the wreckage of two cooling towers stood tall on the ice.

Those were the cooling towers of a pre-civilization thermal power plant. The hyperbolic concrete shells were dilapidated after over a hundred years of extreme cold erosion, but their basic shape remained.

The distance between the two towers was three hundred meters, forming a natural semi-enclosed space.

In that space, Lu Chen saw five blurry, blocky outlines.

Five Lv.2 Camp-class combat vehicles.

Their engines were idling, and white steam was rising from the exhaust pipes.

The blood-red skull emblem painted on the vehicle bodies was faintly discernible in the moonlight, and there were indeed gray honeycomb patterns beside it.

Vehicles of the Icebreaker Swarm.

The five vehicles were arranged with their fronts facing outward, forming an irregular circular defensive formation.

This was a standard field defensive formation, indicating that the convoy commander possessed at least basic tactical proficiency.

But the weakness of a circular formation was also very obvious.

The sides were exposed.

Lu Chen parked the Polaris behind the wreckage of a collapsed factory, keeping the engine at idle.

He simulated the scenario in his mind for three seconds.

Five Lv.2 combat vehicles.

The standard configuration was one 75mm smoothbore cannon per vehicle; he had verified this when he encountered the Snow Shard Gang's third squad previously.

A 75mm shell hitting the Polaris's angled bullet-deflecting outer armor would cause complete ballistic deflection and fail to penetrate.

But he still needed to be wary of the density of fire if all five cannons fired simultaneously, in case one shot hit a gap in the armor at a tricky angle.

Therefore, he couldn't let all five of them react at the same time.

He had to be fast.

Lu Chen switched the fire control console to combat mode.

The Heavy Machine Gun turret unlocked and rotated to the front.

The Harpoon Cannon stood by.

The fragmentation grenade launch array stood by.

The Ray Cannon remained on standby, to be used last.

He chose the fragmentation grenades as the first wave of attack.

The five vehicles huddled together in a three-hundred-meter-wide space, the perfect target for the area-of-effect damage of the fragmentation grenades.

One round of twelve, fifty Truth Points.

He confirmed the command for real-time ammunition generation on the holographic panel.

[Fragmentation grenade launch array: Loading confirmed. Consuming 50 Truth Points, ammunition generating.]

Three seconds later.

[Loading complete. Six tubes on each side, a total of 12 fragmentation grenades ready to fire.]

Lu Chen placed his hands on the bidirectional control stick.

His breathing slowed, and only a steady heartbeat remained in his chest.

"Let's do this."

He pushed the engine control lever to the limit.

The Polaris's boiler roared, and the external cylinder of the crude coal-fired supercharger popped open with a clang.

1.5 times the burst power surged into the track transmission system.

The twenty-plus-ton steel monster charged out from behind the factory wreckage, crushing a pile of scrap pipes in its way, and lunged straight for the gap between the two cooling towers.

Distance: two kilometers.

Under supercharged status, the speed soared to fifty-five kilometers per hour.

Two minutes.

Zhou Yuan's voice came through the communicator.

"City Lord Lu Chen, the outpost reports that your vehicle is approaching the target area at high speed."

"Understood."

"Stay safe."

Lu Chen did not answer; all his attention was focused on the eyepiece of the periscope sight.

The distance was closing.

One point five kilometers.

One kilometer.

Five hundred meters.

The outlines of those five combat vehicles became increasingly clear.

The nearest one was parked on the outermost side of the formation, with its front facing southwest, its side completely exposed.

Four hundred meters.

Three hundred meters.

Lu Chen pulled the trigger for the fragmentation grenade launch array.

Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft!

Twelve fragmentation grenades were fired simultaneously from the launch tubes on both sides of the vehicle, their exhaust trails carving twelve orange-red arcs in the night.

The warheads flew for less than two seconds at a distance of three hundred meters.

The proximity fuses detonated collectively ten meters above the targets.

The continuous explosions reverberated in the semi-enclosed space between the two cooling towers, the sound waves deafening.

High-speed metal fragments poured down from the air, covering the entire three-hundred-meter-wide parking area.

The roof armor of the outermost Lv.2 combat vehicle was covered by the rain of fragments, with metal shards embedding into the thinner top armor plates and unreinforced observation windows.

The turret shell on the roof was battered and pitted.

But the Lv.2 armor was not directly penetrated by the fragmentation grenades.

The core function of fragmentation grenades is area-of-effect damage against unarmored and lightly armored targets.

For Lv.2 armor, its effect is to blind and damage external equipment, creating chaos.

The effect was achieved.

The reactions of the five combat vehicles were blown into disarray.

Two of the vehicles' engines ramped up sharply from idle to full power, their tracks spinning wildly in an attempt to break out of the formation.

One vehicle's turret began to rotate in panic, but the direction was wrong, firing at the ruins of the cooling tower.

Bang!

The 75mm shell hit the concrete ruins, blasting out a cloud of rubble and dust.

The other two were hindered by the fragments, the sound of their engines turning intermittent.

Amidst the chaos, Lu Chen slowed the Polaris down to twenty kilometers per hour, the vehicle body cutting into the flank of the target area along the arc of the cooling tower ruins.

The distance to the nearest combat vehicle was one hundred and fifty meters.

The City Lord rotated the Heavy Machine Gun turret to the right.

The crosshairs locked onto the track drive wheel of the combat vehicle that was panicking and trying to turn around.

A thirty-round burst.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch!

The buzzing sound of the rotating barrels was sharp and piercing in the night.

The impact points densely covered the exposed part of the drive wheel.

Sparks flew for five or six seconds, and the drive wheel's bearing was shattered.

The right track of that combat vehicle lost tension and sagged as a section fell off.

The vehicle body made a sharp turn and slammed into the base of the cooling tower, unable to move.

The first one, paralyzed.