74: Chapter 75 Fiery Warriors, Silence on Scorched Earth

Su Yun pressed the Enter key.

On the holographic screen, the heavy snow covering the Battle of Triangle Hill faded away.

Withered, waist-high wild grass spread out before his eyes.

The temperature rose to twenty-five degrees Celsius. There was no wind.

A blinding, scorching sun hung in the sky, baking the entire plain until it was hot.

A scarlet mission directive popped up on the system panel:

[Battle Node: Assault on Height 391.]

[Current Mission: Infiltration.]

[Mission Rules: A five-hundred-man squad must lie in ambush for twenty-four hours in the withered grass area sixty meters in front of the enemy position. During this period, any sound or movement, even coughing, is strictly forbidden. Violators will result in the entire team being wiped out.]

Jack lay prone in the withered grass full of sharp thorns.

The rough blades scraped against his cheek, drawing tiny cuts.

Sixty meters away were the American barbed wire and bunkers.

It was too close—so close that the sound of the enemy sentry’s leather boots crushing dry branches,

the click of a lighter igniting a Lucky Strike cigarette, and even the curses complaining about the bad canned food in English, were clearly audible.

The air was so thick it felt like it could be wrung out.

Sweat dripped from the tip of Jack’s nose, splashing into the dry earth before him and kicking up a tiny puff of dust.

An ant crawled onto his eyelid and took a bite with its mandibles.

Jack clenched his back molars, not daring to let his eyelid twitch even once.

This was the longest daytime he had ever experienced in his life.

There was no machine-gun fire, no raging artillery, only a deathly silence.

This absolute stillness brought a psychological pressure more suffocating than the hail of bullets and icy peaks of the Battle of Triangle Hill.

Dai Dai was lying about two meters behind and to the left of Jack.

Her originally fair face was smeared with camouflage, her chin resting against the dirt.

As a Medic, the system had not issued her a gun, only a first-aid kit.

Less than half a meter to Dai Dai's right lay a slender NPC soldier.

The system identification displayed his name: Qiu Shaoyun.

Time ticked by, minute by minute. The sun slowly began to set in the west.

Without any warning, a few crisp sounds of mortar tubes firing echoed from the American position.

It wasn't the general offensive; it was the routine probing fire by the Americans to check for ambushes along their front lines.

Several blinding white lights exploded above the ambush zone.

Those were not ordinary high-explosive shells. A large amount of viscous liquid with a pungent smell of burning oil rained down from mid-air.

M47 White Phosphorus Incendiary Shells.

A drop of fire oil the size of a peanut landed precisely on the back of Qiu Shaoyun's cotton uniform.

In just one second, the drop of fire oil caught fire upon hitting the air, and a blue-purple flame shot up with a 'whoosh' sound.

The characteristic of white phosphorus is its extremely strong adhesion and very high burning temperature.

Once it sticks, it cannot be slapped out or smothered until the attached object is burned to ashes.

The fire rapidly spread along the cotton wadding exposed from the uniform,

and in an instant, Qiu Shaoyun's entire back became a blinding ball of fire.

The earthy smell of dry grass in the air was replaced by a nauseating stench of scorched flesh.

The heat wave scorched Dai Dai's cheeks.

She watched helplessly as the ball of fire consumed the comrade beside her.

On the system panel, Qiu Shaoyun's health bar was dropping wildly at a terrifying speed.

The accompanying pain index meter spiked into the red, reaching the absolute upper limit of human physiological endurance.

Dai Dai's heart skipped a beat.

She knew the power of white phosphorus rounds.

Under the game's restored pain feedback,

it was no different from being thrown directly into a steel furnace and roasted alive.

If Qiu Shaoyun had just rolled over,

or thrashed around in the dirt,

or even just let out a scream,

he could have triggered the system's near-death protection mechanism or called for a Medic's rescue.

But he didn't move.

Not even one millimeter.

His flesh and blood turned into a statue of absolute stillness under the two-thousand-degree heat.

His hands were dug fiercely into the dirt beneath him.

The fingernails of all ten fingers were ripped backward and broken, and his fingertips gouged ten deep bloody holes into the hard earth.

The veins on the back of his hands bulged out due to extreme exertion, and the skin itself showed fine cracks.

The flames burned through the cotton uniform, scorched the skin, and began to burn the fat and muscle.

Thick black smoke rose in the grass.

He even forcibly controlled the instinctive muscle spasms that humans exhibit when facing intense pain.

No convulsions, no struggle, even the sound of rapid breathing was swallowed back down his throat.

Because he knew that if he moved even slightly, the grass beside him would shake.

The American machine gunner sixty meters away would pull the trigger, and the five hundred comrades lying in ambush behind him, along with Dai Dai and Jack not far away, would all die on that plain.

For the survival of the collective, he chose the most extreme and cruel death.

Dai Dai's eyes became bloodshot, and tears streamed out.

She truly could not bear the soul-piercing grief and visual shock, and suddenly pushed off the ground with both hands, wanting to rush over and use her own body to smother the flames.

Even if they burned to death together, it would be better than watching a comrade suffer such torture.

A strong, large hand clamped tightly over Dai Dai's mouth and nose from the side, simultaneously pressing her entire body back into the dirt.

It was the Company Commander.

The Company Commander's eyes were also bloodshot, and his jaw was clenched so tightly it made a grinding sound.

The hands pressing down on Dai Dai had bulging veins on the back, applying so much force that they left deep indentations on her shoulders.

He was telling her in this manner: Do not move. This is discipline.

It was also the infiltration earned by their comrade's life.

Tears burst forth. Dai Dai bit down hard on the Company Commander's fingers, and her tears soaked a large patch of the yellow earth beneath her.

A beast-like whimper echoed in her throat, but it was completely muffled under the palm of his hand, not even a faint sound wave escaping into the air.

Jack, lying in front, turned to see this scene.

The superheroes that Westerners worshipped since childhood would howl and writhe when faced with such firepower.

Those comic book characters in spandex suits needed serums, mutations, or armored suits to withstand damage.

But this ordinary Infantryman before him, wearing a ragged cotton uniform, with a carbon-based body suffering from malnutrition,

had used sheer willpower to lock down all instinctive reactions based on physics and biology.

Jack's fingernails dug into his own palm, and blood mixed with the dirt seeped into the cracks in the ground.

All his previous blind self-confidence, his disdain for collectivism, and his worship of individual heroes,

were burned to ashes before this silently burning, raging fire.

The fire burned for a full half hour.

When the last flicker of flame extinguished, only a shrunken, charred skeleton remained there.

Those hands were still held in the posture of fiercely digging into the earth.

No retraction, no surrender.

The formation of five hundred men, five hundred pairs of blood-red eyes.

Rage brewed and fermented under suppression, reaching a critical point capable of destroying everything.

The sun set. The afterglow of dusk spilled over this broken, desolate grassland.

[Infiltration Mission Countdown: 00:00:00]

[Charge, Begin.]

The piercing sound of the bugle suddenly exploded at the front of Height 391.

That was not a background sound set by the system; it was the attack horn the Company Commander blew by suddenly standing up and using his entire lung capacity.

The five hundred mud figures, suppressed for a day and a night, stood up straight from the grass.

No pre-battle mobilization, no tactical maneuvering.

Only a silent and deadly explosion.

Jack raised his rifle and was the first to step over Qiu Shaoyun's remains.

His eyes fixed on the American bunker ahead, his pace fast enough to stir the wind.

Before the American sentry could even sound the alarm, his skull was blown apart by a bullet filled with hatred.

'Kill!'

The earth-shattering shouts of killing tore through the barbed wire.

These soldiers, who had just lain in ambush under the scorching sun for a day, erupted with kinetic energy far exceeding human limits, transforming into a surging flood that shattered the American defenses.

Outside the game, Dai Dai took off her VR helmet and immediately knelt on the floor, covering her face and sobbing uncontrollably.

She didn't rest immediately. With bloodshot eyes, she opened video editing software.

She dragged the first-person footage exported from the backend onto the timeline, frame by frame.

On the screen, the close-up of that frail body remaining motionless in the flames, accompanied by her suppressed whimpers in the voiceover.

No fancy special effects. The most real suppression, the most tragic sacrifice.

Video Title: [They call him the Fiery Vajra. Do you still think our ancestors are not qualified to be called gods?]

Click, Upload. Publish.

Within three minutes, the servers of major video platforms across the entire network were strained.

The top ten on the trending search list were entirely dominated by the same name.

Playback volume soared wildly at a rate of tens of millions.

Hundreds of millions of players and viewers from Dongda collectively reshaped their faith before the image of absolute stillness under two thousand degrees of heat.

On foreign forums, a storm brewed again.

Western netizens, who had just been arguing about the battle case of plugging machine gun barrels with eyes at the Battle of Triangle Hill, fell into a collective system crash for two full hours after seeing this newly transferred video.

'It violates biological common sense! When a person suffers continuous high-temperature burning, the central nervous system will forcibly control muscle contraction; it is absolutely impossible to maintain complete stillness!'

A famous American medical professor wrote a lengthy essay on social media, attempting to use various medical terms to deconstruct the unreasonable aspects of this sequence of shots.

However, the most upvoted reply in the comment section was just a simple sentence.

It was a line typed in fluent English by the once arrogant Xie Dabao:

'To use your meager, self-serving brain capacity to speculate about a race with a five-thousand-year history, willing to burn their souls for their compatriots, is in itself a tragic arrogance.'

The Western cultural filter shattered into a pile of glass shards under this dimensional strike named 'Sacrifice and Discipline.'

Inside the embassy of the Lighthouse Nation.

Smith slammed a stack of briefing papers onto his desk. He stared at the rapidly collapsing public opinion trend online, his face ashen.

'Absurd! This battle case, which defies human physiological common sense, is nothing more than a spiritual fairy tale fabricated by Easterners! Do Chinese soldiers really possess such divine power!'

Smith roared at several accompanying attachés, then used his verified account to post a bold statement on Twitter:

'Using fake AI footage for political propaganda is the greatest disgrace in the gaming world! We will initiate joint sanctions!'

Su Yun sat in front of the display screen in his studio. The progress bar for the ten-billion-level sentiment value had long since exceeded its limit, and the system's reward prompts were flashing continuously.

He looked at Smith's tweet, full of arrogance and prejudice, and placed his palm flat on the desk.

'You think absolute stillness is a fairy tale?'

Su Yun's fingers moved over the keyboard. The crisp clicking sound echoed in the quiet room.

Since the West values strength, tactical proficiency, and so-called super serums and mecha equipment,

then let them see clearly what battle capability reconstruction under physiological limits looks like.

What it means to make the firepower and tactics the invaders prided themselves on a complete joke.

'Then let the crippled soldiers teach you how to behave.'

Code instructions were entered.

[Civilization Reenactment System Maximum Authority Activated.]

[New Battle Material Loading: Defense of Nameless Height.]

[Environment Generation Complete: Scorched earth littered with severed limbs and body parts.]

[Character Lock: Wang Heliang, who has lost sight. Xue Zhigao, who has lost both legs.]

Su Yun pressed Enter, and the preview announcement for the new version was simultaneously pushed to global servers. The red font was as glaring as fresh blood.

[You think sacrifice is the end?]

[Prepare to welcome the counter-charge of the blind and the lame.]

Amidst the roar of American tank tracks crushing gravel, two broken bodies were about to merge into an unyielding war god in a deadlocked situation.

This scorched earth had only just begun to harvest arrogance.