46: Chapter 46: The Attack!

"A speed of 240 km/h is indeed too slow to catch up."

Zhou An looked at the coordinates on the screen. Although the Cloud Top Fortress, this heavy aerial fortress, couldn't keep up, it didn't mean he didn't have other means.

"EVA, prepare to launch the A70 carrier-based fighter."

Zhou An stood up, and the liquid metal combat suit instantly flowed and covered his body as if it were alive.

"Going out to play? I'm going too!"

Hearing the commotion, Luo Ning immediately poked her head out of the laboratory, holding an exaggeratedly modified pulse gun.

"How could a surprise attack spanning hundreds of miles be complete without me? Boss, my hands have been itching for action for a long time!"

Zhou An glanced at her. With Luo Ning's current Tier 3 combat power, combined with those bizarre potions and explosive weapons, she was indeed a formidable asset.

"Fine, come with me. Muzi, you stay behind to guard the fortress; EVA will assist you with the operations. We will maintain real-time communication via the system."

"Boss, Luo Ning, please be careful."

Li Muzi nodded heavily, her eyes filled with concern.

Zhou An took Luo Ning and walked quickly toward the elevator, heading straight for the third-level top deck that had just been expanded on the fortress. As the heavy airlock doors slid open to both sides, a cold, mechanical aura rushed toward them.

In the spacious hangar, rows of deep blue guide lights illuminated.

A jet-black ghost fighter with sharp, blade-like body lines, as if it had come from a futuristic sci-fi battlefield, was silently hovering on the electromagnetic launch rack.

After the Cloud Top Fortress upgraded to a LV4 vehicle plugin, this three-seater A70 had its frame completely reshaped. The plasma engines at the rear faintly flickered with violent electric light, exuding a heart-pounding, fierce beauty.

The cockpit hatch opened upward, and the two of them nimbly vaulted into the cockpit.

"Sit tight!"

Zhou An pulled the control stick, and EVA's cold voice sounded in the cockpit: "Hypersonic cruise mode initiated, flight path locked, opening top sortie hatch."

The thick armor on the top layer of the fortress split to both sides, and the cold polar night wind howled, but it was firmly blocked by the fighter's energy shield.

"BOOM!!!"

Accompanied by a piercing sonic boom that tore through the sky, the A70 turned into a streak of light cutting through the darkness of the polar night, breaking the sound barrier in less than ten seconds!

For a heavy fighter capable of reaching several times the speed of sound, a distance of eight hundred miles in this polar night, ravaged by gale-force winds, was nothing more than a short trip of less than an hour.

...

Meanwhile, at coordinates (102, 45).

This was the "Black Iron Guild" fleet, forcibly pieced together from three dilapidated LV2 medium merchant ships and hundreds of worn-out aircraft.

Although it bore the name of a guild, the atmosphere here was suffocatingly oppressive.

On the factory ship in the center of the fleet, the harsh sounds of metal friction and cutting never ceased, day or night.

This massive machine, named [Waste Processing Assembly Line], was the core ability awakened by the leader of the Black Iron Guild.

Although it sounded very practical, capable of converting all scrap metal and broken wood into usable materials, the actual conversion efficiency was appallingly low.

"Hurry up! Stop playing dead!"

A burly personnel manager with a face full of fat, holding an electrified whip in his hand, lashed out fiercely at the back of a worker who was exhausted and moving slowly.

Accompanied by electric sparks and a shrill scream, the person collapsed directly onto the cold deck.

"There is still a shortage of two thousand units of Tier 3 materials! The leader said that if the target is not met, everyone's fuel ration for tonight will be halved! If you want to freeze into icicles in this polar night, then keep slacking off!"

More than three hundred survivors were working numbly beside the conveyor belt like walking dead.

The vast majority of their LV1 or even LV0 small aircraft had long since been ruthlessly dismantled into parts when they first joined the guild seeking protection, completely reduced to the leader's "raw materials."

In a narrow and cramped utility room on the lower deck, the cold seemed to be able to pierce through the bone marrow.

Zhang Ming, who had just finished several hours of high-intensity cooking work in the galley, rubbed his purple-frozen hands and carefully pushed open the iron door.

He was covered in oil and grime, and in his arms, he tightly guarded a thermal lunch box wrapped in layers of rags.

The door opened, and a young woman with a haggard expression, her hands covered in frostbite and welts, came up to greet him.

She was Zhang Ming's wife, Lin Qing.

"Wife, hurry, eat something while it's hot."

Zhang Ming quickly opened the lunch box and served a bowl of steaming, mushy rice porridge.

Although this porridge was simple, thanks to his [Cooking Mastery] talent, he had managed to boil out a hint of rich rice aroma, and it even contained a few pieces of meat he had secretly scraped off, risking having his hands chopped off by the foreman.

Holding the warm bowl of porridge, Lin Qing's eyes reddened, and her voice was hoarse and tearful: "A-Ming, the supervisor increased the quota again today... I heard that those people who had their ships dismantled and were too sick to do heavy work froze to death last night, two more of them. Can we... can we really survive this polar night?"

The two of them were only twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old this year. They had just received their marriage certificate on Earth and were planning a wonderful honeymoon trip, but the moment they opened their eyes, they had fallen into this hellish world.

Zhang Ming squatted beside his wife, looked around vigilantly, and after confirming there was no movement outside the door, he leaned into her ear and lowered his voice: "Qingqing, listen to me. I just contacted a... real big shot through the system channel."

He spoke extremely fast, quickly recounting the recruitment by Li Muzi just now, as well as the incredibly generous conditions.

After listening, a flash of desire for life crossed Lin Qing's pale face, but it was immediately replaced by heavy hesitation and fear: "A-Ming, what if... what if the other party is even more ruthless than this Black Iron Guild? What if it's a trap, if space pirates want to lure us over to kill us, or treat us as cheap labor and dismantle us..."

"Qingqing, if we stay here, we won't live much longer!"

Zhang Ming gripped his wife's cold hand tightly, a look of desperate determination flashing in his eyes.

"That leader doesn't treat us like humans at all. His assembly line efficiency is getting lower and lower. Once we 'waste' have no output, he will stuff us into the machine as fuel without hesitation!"

Zhang Ming looked at his wife's chapped lips, tears welling up in his eyes, and gritted his teeth: "Either way, it's death. Rather than slowly dying of despair and freezing to death here, it's better to take a gamble! Since that boss can hire a chef when supplies are so scarce, and can even provide food and lodging, it means his supplies are extremely abundant and his strength is absolutely unfathomable. This is the last chance of our lives!"

"I sent them the coordinates. If they can really catch up... even if there's only a one in ten thousand chance, I still want to take you away!"

Looking into her husband's bloodshot but incomparably firm eyes, and feeling the tremor in his palm, tears streamed down Lin Qing's face. She gripped his hand tightly in return.