128: Chapter 129 Please Sign for Your Extra-Large Package

Li Cang pressed the black tactical storage drive into the reading slot of the console.

A minimalist document of less than three pages popped up on the holographic screen, filled entirely with terrain cross-sections hand-drawn by Corvin and evasion routes for crossfire, without any redundant pre-battle mobilization nonsense.

He didn't look closely, simply packaging the data and locking it into the combat readiness outbox of the main control frequency.

His gaze shifted back to the thermal scan map densely packed with red dots.

Five hundred gene-enhanced infantry were lying prone in the fissures beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

This group had used the fault lines of the Mariana Trench extension zone as cover, spreading out widely and moving extremely slowly, completely blocking all level ice surfaces suitable for landing or slightly wider canyon mouths.

This wasn't a formation for trench warfare; it was an anti-air net designed to melt targets mid-air.

The simplified blueprints for the individual-grade sub-orbital drop pods clearly stated that the gravity recoil system must be activated to decelerate in the final three seconds before landing.

During those three seconds, the drop pod would hang above the fissure like a sitting duck suspended in mid-air.

Five hundred Plasma Halberds focusing fire simultaneously could burn any metal shell along with the flesh inside to ash within those three seconds.

Li Cang didn't bother trying to calculate an evasion route; with that density of fire, there were no routes to speak of.

He opened the base's bottom-level energy management interface.

Outside the perimeter of Reactor No. 3, the two hundred backup High-Energy Battery arrays used to maintain the base's Energy Shield were originally the final insurance against the Cyber Federation or some wild faction raiding their home.

He pulled the main switch, forcibly stripping those two hundred batteries from the shield system.

The blue translucent dome on the base's outer layer flickered twice and then went out completely.

A ring of alarm lights flashed, then were manually deactivated by Li Cang.

"Load it up," he commanded into the communicator.

On the landing pad, a thickened drop pod shell just dragged out of the smelting furnace was stood upright; the heat-resistant coating hadn't even dried yet, emitting a pungent smell of chemical synthetics.

Eight Servitors stacked the two hundred High-Energy Batteries inside one by one, leaving no cushioning pads and even removing the shock-absorbing springs, stuffing them in raw until full, finally connecting the gravity recoil module's leads directly to the battery cluster's short-circuit interface.

The hatch was welded shut.

Li Cang looked at this twelve-ton iron lump filled with extremely unstable energy and assigned it to drop sequence fourteen.

Ranked first.

Basement level four, Primarch Gene Laboratory.

The one-hundred-and-sixty-six-hour countdown jumped to zero.

Thirteen vertical incubation tanks simultaneously emitted the hiss of pressure release.

The high-concentration green life-support liquid drained through the grates at the bottom, and the bulletproof glass covers of the incubation tanks slowly rose.

Thirteen men, over two hundred and forty centimeters tall with unnaturally wide ribcages, stepped down from the metal bases.

Their skin had a sickly pallor, the veins beneath as thick as green tree roots, and ceramic-matrix bone growths at the joints pushed up a layer of hard callus, making them look less like humans and more like some forcibly assembled war vehicles.

No one helped them, and no one handed them towels.

Mechanical servo-arms from the laboratory ceiling descended, grabbing parts of Mars-upgraded power armor and crudely snapping them onto their bodies.

The firing pins of rivet guns drove armor plates directly into their pre-installed neural interface ports, sparks flying as the moment metal bit into flesh produced a scalp-numbing crunch.

Not a single person made a sound; the thirteen recruits stood in place, not even blinking, allowing those mechanical arms to lock them into these half-ton metal cages.

C-19 stepped out from the shadows of the corridor.

He had changed into a newly polished set of pure black masterwork armor, with no insignia on the pauldrons, and held the Chainsword brought back from Manila Fortress upside down; the shredded meat on the hilt had been cleaned off, replaced with non-slip metal engravings.

He walked to the front of the first row of recruits.

Twenty freshly made electromagnetic-accelerated Bolters were neatly stacked on the weapon rack, their barrels thick enough to fit an adult's fist.

C-19 picked one up, felt its weight, and cocked it with one hand; with a click, the sound of the bolt engaging was crisp and efficient.

He tossed the gun to the recruit nearest him.

The recruit caught it steadily, holding it with both hands and bracing the stock against his shoulder, his movements as standard as if he had practiced them tens of thousands of times on the training grounds.

They didn't need instructors or an adaptation period; the nineteen processes of Astartes transformation included neural imprints of basic tactical instincts.

The tactical storage drive left by Corvin had already been downloaded into each of their helmet visors via the base's main control system the moment they stepped out of the incubation tanks.

"Board the pods," C-19 said only three words as he turned toward the launch silo.

The thirteen tower-like heavy infantry followed behind him, the sound of their boots hitting the metal floor in perfect unison, like a moving wall.

Antarctic Ice Sheet, Mariana Trench extension zone.

The aurora stretched twisted bands of colored light above the ice.

Below the ice surface was a rift valley hundreds of meters wide and bottomless, its walls filled with natural ice caves and rock fault zones.

A captain of the Golden Legion lay prone behind a protruding ice rock.

In the thermal imager of his helmet, the body heat signals of his five hundred subordinates were suppressed to the minimum by the armor's built-in cold-cycle system, merging perfectly with the surroundings.

The energy circuits of the Plasma Halberds were in a preheating state; as long as the trigger was pulled, they could reach temperatures capable of melting heavy armor within half a second.

The captain glanced at the Macro-cannon charging progress bar on his wristwatch.

Twelve hours left.

Three days ago, the intelligence officer told him that a squad of Thunder Warriors might drop here, so he immediately withdrew all outer defense lines into this rift.

He didn't care how the Thunder Warriors found the coordinates; he only knew that anything falling from outside the atmosphere had to decelerate before landing.

As long as they decelerated, these five hundred Plasma Halberds could burn through the sky.

A low rumble suddenly came from above the ice sheet overhead.

It wasn't the spray of an engine, but a high-frequency vibration generated by some heavy object tearing through the air at high speed.

A red signal source popped up on the captain's tactical radar, plunging vertically at a speed exceeding Mach 3.

It was too fast.

This wasn't the descent trajectory of a drop pod at all; a drop pod should start attitude adjustment after entering the stratosphere, but the signal on the radar didn't slow down—it only got faster.

"Prepare to focus fire!" the captain roared over the communication channel.

The tips of five hundred Plasma Halberds lit up with a ghostly blue light simultaneously.

The signal source pierced through the clouds.

A glowing red iron lump, trailing thick black smoke from its tail, smashed directly through the several-hundred-meter-thick ice sheet at the top of the canyon.

The captain looked up and saw the full appearance of that thing through his visor.

There was no deceleration recoil flame, no vector nozzles for attitude adjustment; it was just a crudely made drop pod shell, burnt nearly to melting point, smashing down like a solid meteorite.

Plasma beams from all directions wove into a blue fire net, accurately hitting the iron lump.

The shell of the iron lump was instantly burnt through.

Then, the two hundred short-circuited High-Energy Batteries detonated mid-air.

There was no firelight, only a mass of absolutely blinding pure white.

The captain's retinas were incinerated in an instant; he didn't even feel pain before a massive shockwave, carrying vaporized ice and rock fragments, slapped against both sides of the canyon like a tsunami.

The ambush position of five hundred people was forcibly flattened by a third in that single loud bang.

The shockwave blew those Golden Legion soldiers clinging to the cliff walls away like dust, Plasma Halberds were twisted into pretzels in mid-air, and composite armor was riddled with holes by ice shards.

The pure white light had not yet dissipated.

Fourteen slightly smaller red signal sources, using the explosion as cover, silently pierced through the clouds.

Blue deceleration recoil flames lit up simultaneously less than thirty meters from the ground.

Fourteen scorched-black sub-orbital drop pods, with dull thuds, landed steadily into the still-smoking ruins.

The hatches burst open the moment they landed.

C-19, carrying that thick electromagnetic Bolter, stepped out of the drop pod onto a charred limb.