Chapter 114: D24 Sniper Position

“The bodies of mutant rats you bring down can be taken to the camp’s exchange office to trade for mission points and supply stock. Remember to gather them up then.”

As Lofi spoke, she and Drumstick hauled out one equipment case after another and handed them around to everyone. “I’ve already collected the combat gear. Familiarize yourselves with it!”

Because mutant rats were small and the mountain forests were such a tangled, hostile environment, even though a single mutant rat had a danger rating of only around F0.1, augmented fighters still found them extremely hard to kill efficiently.

So LDH had provided a large quantity of overlimit gear for the extraordinary personnel taking part in the joint operation.

When Bai Yuxi opened his equipment case, he found nothing but standardized military tactical sniper crossbows.

Each came with ten full loads: one hundred and twenty special bolts, plus one thousand two hundred steel pellets made from regenerative material.

Though limited by the materials available, this mass-produced overlimit equipment was not very powerful, and was almost useless against mutant creatures above F1 level. But against the huge numbers of low-level mutant beings, weak as individuals yet overwhelming in quantity, it was precisely the right tool.

Bai Yuxi had never handled anything like this controlled weapon before. At most, he had played with a slingshot when he was a child.

But with the nerve responses and bodily ability of an extraordinary person, a few test shots were enough for him to pick it up quickly, to say nothing of someone like him, whose brain had been enhanced.

Firebird’s main combat squad and the three trainee squads had already set out for their assigned areas.

The Seventh Squad did not dare dawdle either, and after taking their gear, followed the map navigation sent from the LDH command center to D24, the sector assigned to them.

After threading through the mountains and woods for half a day, they discovered that they had been assigned to an outlying fringe of an outlying fringe, on the edge of a cliff beside a mountain peak.

The logistics staff from LDH had built a crude temporary combat platform from planks lashed to several large trees.

They only needed to stay up there and use their sniper crossbows to pick off the stragglers that slipped out from the inner barrier.

Mutant rats were very low on the danger scale.

Aside from their exceptionally sharp teeth, they were simply several times larger than ordinary rats. On a quick glance they looked almost like rabbits, but otherwise they were little different from normal rodents.

Mutant creatures were dangerous to extraordinary personnel, of course.

But a relatively safe joint operation like this was also a rare chance for lower-rank people to improve their strength.

Even so, being assigned to such a remote spot made it clear how little they were valued.

With the detection radar on their personal terminals, the so-called extermination mission had almost no difficulty at all.

Everyone sprawled idly on the combat platform.

They spent the whole afternoon with their sniper crossbows in hand, and the seven of them had only managed to kill six mutant rats in total.

“I swear! It’s only October, so why is it this cold? I’m freezing to death!” As night fell and the mountain air grew colder, Bai Yuxi, who had nearly dozed off, heard Willy complaining over the headset.

“Who told you to have such a weak body with only 1.6 constitution?” Xia Youyou’s gleeful voice came through the earpiece.

Bai Yuxi smiled.

Thanks to the Nightmare Seventh-Generation armor he was wearing, he did not feel the cold very much. That was probably also because his constitution was far higher than the black foreigner’s.

For some reason, though he was wearing the 64K ultra-high-definition data visor, his vision kept growing blurrier.

Bai Yuxi instinctively wiped the visor, thinking it had run out of power or broken.

It was only when he lifted it off that he realized a thick, cottony fog had formed at some point in the pitch-black mountain forest, completely obscuring their view.

That left Bai Yuxi a little dumbfounded.

The forest was already dark; once the fog rolled in, the world beyond the platform became utterly invisible.

However impressive the data visor’s ultra-high-definition vision was, or however advanced its high-brightness light-adjustment functions might be, they still required clear sightlines to work.

So he could only rely on the detection radar and infrared function to sense whether any mutant rats were moving nearby.

Since he had not heard anyone else complaining about it in the team channel, Bai Yuxi had no choice but to lie back down and keep watch. Compared with the excitement and peril of the previous operation, this mission really was rather dull.

And the fog seemed to muffle sound as well, leaving the silence so complete that Bai Yuxi could hear only his own breathing and heartbeat.

Crack.

Bai Yuxi fired a steel pellet and took down a mutant rat that had darted out from the bushes.

With a pitiful squeal, the rat, as big as a housecat, sprang up and toppled over. After rolling a few times, the heat source marking it as a living creature rapidly faded from his view.

Though the fog had robbed him of sight entirely, his data visor had an environmental simulation function, allowing it to reconstruct scenes it had once seen before.

Combined with the radar’s positioning, it kept him from being as blind as a man with his eyes gouged out, firing wild shots because he could not determine the rat’s location.

Bai Yuxi tapped his earpiece lightly and said in the team channel, a little puzzled, “Don’t you think it’s unusually quiet?”

Bored out of their minds, the others chatting in the team voice channel all fell silent at once.

“It does seem too quiet. Why aren’t there any insects chirping?” After listening for a moment, Xia Youyou said in confusion, “Could it be the cold? Did the frost kill them all?”

Bai Yuxi subconsciously glanced toward Xia Youyou’s position.

As the team’s only ranged fighter, she was naturally guarding the most important point.

Unfortunately, each of them was stationed more than fifty meters apart.

In this deep night and heavy fog, of course they could see nothing at all, and could only use infrared to make out a shifting patch of heat.

Even if mountain temperatures fluctuate sharply between day and night in October, it should not be cold enough to freeze insects to death, should it?

“Could it be that those mutant rats have eaten all the insects in the mountains?” Willy asked in confusion. “Uh, do rats even eat insects?”

“There is something off here,” Lofi warned. “Everyone stay alert!”

Crack.

After taking down another mutant rat, Bai Yuxi worked the sniper crossbow’s winding mechanism.

Once the steel pellet had been loaded and he was about to say something else, another red shape suddenly burst out and entered his firing range.

“Huh? Another one! No, two!”

Bai Yuxi reloaded rapidly and squeezed the trigger again and again, with no time left to keep chatting.

“Xiao Bai, are there really that many rats on your side?”

“How come it sounds like you’ve been firing nonstop? You’re not just bored and shooting leaves, are you?”

Hearing the constant pops of firing and the sharp clicks of reloading coming from Bai Yuxi’s side, Willy asked curiously, “Steel pellets made from regenerative material may be cheap, but they still cost E-crystals to buy!”