39: Chapter 39 Burying "God" Alive

In the ruins of Seoul, the piercing air raid sirens had stopped.

Instead, there were waves of wailing, a sound more akin to a slaughterhouse than a battlefield.

The arrogant Ghost Captain was now pinned to the ground, his limbs twitching at an astonishing frequency.

His health bar was still full, the invincible "100%" glaring in the sunlight like a joke.

After a brief silence, the bullet comments in the live stream exploded with unprecedented density, like a breached dam, completely obscuring the screen.

[Hahahaha! I'm dying of laughter! Didn't you lock your health? Aren't you God? Does God also feel pain?]

[Is this the legendary "Mask of Agony"? Or the 200% amplified version?]

[Su Yun's move is brilliant! Can't kill you, huh? Fine, then don't die, suffer while you're alive!]

[This isn't cheating, this is paying for torture! Locking yourself in a torture device, that's a wild move!]

At the other end of the street, more "super soldiers" began to try and escape.

They finally realized that in this world, where the underlying pain logic had been altered, the so-called "immortal body" was the most vicious curse.

But they couldn't escape.

This was a server with hundreds of millions of players.

The players they had just wantonly slaughtered with laser cannons and miniature nuclear bombs now crawled out of the ruins.

Anger, coupled with the euphoria of discovering the enemy's weakness, turned these "country bumpkins" armed with type 38 rifles and Hanyang 88s into the most terrifying hunters.

"Don't shoot! Don't waste bullets!"

Someone in the crowd shouted,

"Find ropes! Find sacks! If you don't have ropes, use your belts! Capture them alive!"

This scene was filled with a dark, absurd humor.

A group of sci-fi warriors in exoskeletons, capable of flying, were being chased and intercepted by a group of ragged, emaciated Volunteer Army soldiers.

Their high-tech jetpacks were useless in the narrow alleys, and instead, hitting walls caused the users inside their armor to be violently shaken, each impact a real bone-breaking experience.

A hacker codenamed "Freedoms Wing" had just flown into the air when he was hooked by the ankles by a dozen grappling hooks that appeared out of nowhere.

"Get down here!"

A dozen players shouted in unison and yanked hard.

"Freedoms Wing" fell heavily onto the rubble-strewn ground like a shot pheasant.

Although his shield left him unharmed, the kinetic energy caused all his joints to emit an unbearable crunch.

"Ah—! Fuck! My back!"

He was still screaming when several sweat-stained sacks were thrown over his head.

This was followed by a barrage of punches and kicks. The players had a tacit understanding; no one used knives, they specifically used rifle butts, shoe soles, or even bricks, aiming for the soft spots at the armor's joints.

The bullet comments in the live stream flew by:

[This is a dimensionality reduction attack! Exoskeletons, energy shields, all are equal before a brick!]

[This is so satisfying! Where's that arrogance now? Fly again, let me see?]

[Brother upfront, poking his butt with a shoemaker's awl, you're going too far!... But I like it, do it again!]

On a steep slope in Seoul, Brother Bao was directing several players who were busy at work.

They had found several empty US military oil drums that had originally contained napalm.

"Brother Bao, will this thing work?" a player asked, wiping sweat.

"The physics engine doesn't lie," Brother Bao pushed up his glasses, a cold light reflecting from the lenses.

"They don't lose health, right? Then let's see if their vestibular nerves are made of iron too."

They forcibly stuffed a hacker, who was still cursing, into an oil drum.

The guy was wearing heavy armor, and it took a lot of effort to get him in. In the end, he was curled up like a sardine in a can, unable to even move a finger.

"Seal the lid!"

At Brother Bao's command, the lid was welded shut.

Then, Brother Bao walked behind the oil drum and, amidst the hacker's muffled screams of terror, gently pushed it.

Rumble rumble—

The heavy oil drum rolled down Seoul's famous long slope.

The slope was covered in rubble and shell craters, and with each bounce of the oil drum, a dull thud and a scream would emanate from within.

This was no amusement park roller coaster. This was a metal drum without any shock absorption, tumbling through a pile of rocks at sixty miles per hour.

The hacker inside felt like his brains were being shaken into a pulp.

The world spun, the acidic bile in his stomach was forced back down by centrifugal force before he could vomit, and his internal organs were shifting.

The oil drum rolled all the way to the bottom of the slope, stopping only after hitting the track of a scrapped tank.

Thud!

The person inside fell silent.

A moment later, the oil drum shook violently, followed by a gut-wrenching sound of vomiting.

The bullet comments exploded instantly:

[Holy crap! Washing machine drum tactic? Brother Bao is still a tech master!]

[This physics engine is too real, I feel carsick just watching it through the screen.]

[Is this the legendary "fully automatic, no hand washing required"?]

[Is that brother inside okay? Does God also get carsick?]

[God isn't dizzy, God just wants to throw up.]

Meanwhile, in the square in front of the Presidential Palace.

Jack was dragging the hacker whose jaw was already dislocated.

The guy's face was covered in tears, and he was incoherently sputtering words.

"I quit...quit game...please..."

Jack stopped, squatted down, and patted the hacker's cheek with his rusty bayonet.

"Want to quit?" Jack smiled, revealing a mouthful of white teeth that looked particularly stark against his smoke-stained face.

"Sorry, there's no Esc key here."

He pointed to the surrounding ruins, to the buildings still burning, and finally to the dried bloodstain on his chest—left by a laser graze in the previous chapter.

"This is the Korean battlefield." Jack's voice was soft, yet every word was incisive.

"Here, there is only fighting to the death, or victory. There is never an option to 'stop playing'."

Despair filled the hacker's eyes.

He watched Jack raise his old carbine, the buttstock lifted high.

"No! No!"

Crack!

The rifle butt smashed heavily into the hacker's jaw.

The sound of bone cracking was clearly audible.

"Where's that godly arrogance now?"

Jack asked coldly, and struck again.

"This one is for that recruit you just blew to pieces."

Crack!

"This one is for this city."

Crack!

Each blow avoided vital points, and each blow overloaded the pain nerves.

The bullet comments were full of cheers, but some also sighed:

[He's truly ruthless, but it feels so good to watch.]

[This is how you deal with people like him! He didn't think about letting us quit when he was slaughtering us.]

[Jack isn't playing a game, he's been trained in the Asura Path, hasn't he?]

Meanwhile, at a construction site on the other side, the scene was even more chilling.

This was originally an infrastructure project left over from the Japanese occupation period. In several huge concrete mixing pits, unhardened cement slurry emitted a pungent dusty smell.

The Ghost Captain was carried to the edge of the pit by a group of players.

He could no longer scream; his voice had long since gone hoarse.

His expensive exoskeleton armor had become the heaviest shackles, preventing him from even struggling.

"Lower him down."

The leading player gave the order.

The Ghost Captain was thrown vertically into the three-meter deep cement pit.

The gray slurry instantly covered his knees, then his waist.

"No... no..." He looked around in terror.

The slurry was cold and heavy, and the immense oppressive feeling made it hard for him to breathe.

Most terrifyingly, as the cement slowly hardened, he would experience an extreme sense of claustrophobia.

He would become part of this foundation; though he wouldn't die, he would be forever unable to move, spending every second in darkness and suffocation.

Dai Dai stood at the edge of the pit, still holding her small shovel.

She leaned over, looking at the Ghost Captain below, whose head was the only part still exposed.

"Um..." Dai Dai blinked her big eyes and asked the player next to her very seriously,

"Should we leave him a tube to breathe? What if he suffocates?"

The player next to her was stunned: "Sister, he has locked health, he can't suffocate."

"Oh..."

Dai Dai nodded thoughtfully, then considerately scooped a shovel of dirt and covered the Ghost Captain's still-glowing tactical goggles.

"Then let's cover his eyes. It'll hurt a lot if the slurry gets in his eyes."

The Ghost Captain let out a final desperate whimper, then was completely submerged by a wave of mud.

The bullet comments in the live stream reached a climax at this moment:

[Holy crap! Is that something a Medic would say?]

[Dai Dai: I'm very gentle, I'm afraid your eyes will hurt, so I buried you alive.]

[The most venomous woman! Is this the real devil?]

[Don't talk nonsense upfront, our Dai Dai was afraid he'd get psychological trauma from seeing himself being buried, how thoughtful!]

[Physical blinding + permanent sealing, I give this combo full marks!]

Real world.

Su Yun sat in the dark server room, the screens in front of him displaying these "tragedies."

His fingers lightly tapped the table, unmoved by the cruelty of the scenes.

"Cut this signal to the external network," Su Yun ordered into the microphone.

The next second, on Twitch, YouTube, and major Western streaming platforms,

The live streams that had been clamoring about "Chinese players cheating" and "cyberbullying" suddenly flickered.

The signal, which had been cut, reconnected.

Western netizens had their keyboards ready, intending to continue blasting Chinese hackers, but when they saw the screen, everyone froze.

There was no "super soldier rampage" as they had expected.

On the screen were the IDs they had placed high hopes on, representing the pinnacle of Western hacking technology.

Some were stuffed in oil drums and kicked around like balls, some were hung on flagpoles as weather vanes, and some had only their heads sticking out of the cement ground, still futilely rolling their eyes.

In the background, there were the loud military songs of Chinese players, and that clumsy but powerful English phrase, led by who knows whom:

"Welcome to the real war!"

The bullet comment section of the Western live streams fell into a minute-long silence.

The words "God mode" that had been flooding the screen earlier disappeared.

Instead, the screen was filled with disbelief and fear.

[God... was buried?]

[What kind of game is this? Why do they look... like they're really in pain?]

[Damn it! Cut it off! This is public execution!]

[I don't believe it! This is CGI! It's fake! Our Ghost Squad can't lose to a bunch of farmers with shovels!]

Su Yun watched the gradually collapsing comments, a slight smile playing on his lips.

Su Yun took a deep breath, and the frustration that had been building in his chest finally dissipated a little.

He looked at the reveling players on the screen and typed a new line of code on his keyboard.

Above Seoul, the system announcement lit up again.

But this time, it was no longer a red warning, but a golden, dawn-like preview.

All the players stopped what they were doing and looked up at the sky.

As the last hacker was completely sealed in cement, the chaotic data stream was forcibly corrected.

[Server-wide Announcement: Illegal intrusion has been cleared.]

[Seoul Area Control: Volunteer Army (Confirmed).]

[Calculating battle rewards...]

Immediately after, a line of huge, gilded Chinese characters slowly appeared, accompanied by majestic orchestral music, shocking everyone's senses:

[Volume Three Preview: The Confrontation on the 38th Parallel!]

[New Map Loaded: Battle of Chipyong-ni.]

[BOSS Online: Matthew Bunker Ridgway.]

[Warning: This time, no cheats, no bugs. Only steel, and fire.]