Chapter 31: Chapter 29: Teaming Up!

Ceres was dismayed at the lack of weapons and armour the three of them were carrying. It seems like they had been on the run for quite a while and haven’t really been able to scavenge.

The only useful thing he had was a map that Adrian had drawn methodically, enabling Ceres to head to Adrian’s starting point if he wanted to.

“Hmm, I should build on this map to find some form of electronic shop or some form of communication so I can link up with Erik and Braton.” Ceres decided to continue scavenging the apartment building he was in for more supplies to make the trip to Adrian’s starting point, which was in a commercial district that had much more potential for useful items, despite the abysmal loadouts that his three now-dead assailants had.

He wasn’t particularly shocked that he had killed three people just like that – he did it everyday when training in the Shattered Empire VR game. Ceres found it to be true that violent games like that do really train one’s ability to handle such killings. “Don’t think I will be able to handle it in real life though.”

He found a good amount of snacks and water that could tide him over for a day, along with various pieces of fabric cut from leftover clothes. This include good jacket plus a camouflage pants paired with boots. Wearing them under his light armour plate, he tightened them with the leftover fabric so as to not lose them during high-speed combat.

It’s been close to 20 hours since Ceres started this test here, which he used as reference to estimate that the trip to Adrian’s starting point will take about 7 hours assuming they both started at the same time.

“I still have no idea what the conditions for clearing the second stage is, and how to get bonus points, but I believe so far the basic scenario for the event is a slovesa-raided planet, and it’s a test on how well we can survive, defend or even beat back the invasion wave,” Ceres thought to himself.

Slovesa attacks were common in the frontier of the Loeric Empire, where planets, habitable moons and even asteroid colonies were continuously under threat of being invaded or raided.

Due to the expansive length of the frontier with slovesa controlled territory, the military on a whole couldn’t respond fast enough nor deploy enough troops to prevent the raid. Citizens were expected to survive on their own with pre-installed safety points and their own weapons.

The Strathon system used to suffer from multiple incursions over the last century, but the imperial military had been pushing back hard, allowing the star system time to rebuild and fortify its defences.

Now, the system serves as one of the major civilized “gateway” before heading out nearer the border towards both the Beyond and slovesa-controlled space, where planets were still under the process of being colonized or terraformed.

“There must be an objective for the basic scenario, but based on the three possible goals of surviving, rescuing or beating back the invasion wave, I’ll say that beating back the invasion wave will net me the highest points as it covers the previous two goals as well. It’s not impossible that I beat the invasion wave back myself, so I must ally with other players and establish a proper base of operations before targeting the slovesa ships.”

One of the tricky things about slovesa’ incursion is that they used certain classes of warships also known as ‘spawners’, which acts like a mobile base that refines all the metals and rocks that the crew brings to it.

In turn, it can produce continuous amounts of small non-sentient rock-like drones that have terrible combat strength, mobility and defence, but they can overwhelm human towns and districts with their sheer amounts.

The drones can be telepathically controlled by middle-class slovesa and above and could be considered to be like rock puppets without a core.

This was a major stress point for the military, because if they didn’t respond fast enough, they’ll be forced to resort to orbital bombardment in order to clear cities of the slovesa, rendering the place unhabitable for a good few years.

 It was unreasonable to deploy millions of ground troops to just save one border city, unless they had very good reason to.

The slovesa wanted to control the planet and gain human slaves, not a barren rock so they played by the unspoken rules, keeping the damage to infrastructure low so as to not push the Loeric Empire’s military to the brink.

This forced humans into a swampy prolonged war of attrition on the ground!

For Ceres, this fact alone made the slovesa ‘spawner’ as the main objective. He would have to form a strike team to try to take out the spawner. But he had to be careful of other players who may think that the objective of the second stage is to eliminate every other player they came across, which was not wrong as well!

As long as the number of players dropped to a level that the examiners wanted, the second stage should automatically end!

He had no clue as to what the third stage was, but for now that was his short-term objective. Killing a hundred thousand players spread across the city would be too hard but destroying a single slovesa spawner should put him up in terms of ranking!

Ceres’ goal was not to crush the qualifiers, but to win the main competition!

Wrapping his additional vibra-spears on his back with a fabric sling and slotting a dormant vibra knife in his camouflage pants belt, Ceres slipped out of his metal spike encampment with the packets in his jackets filled with food and water for the trip.

He held on to a vibra-spear with his two hands as his main weapon navigating empty buildings and open streets. He looked like a spearmaster scavenger with four vibra-spears upright on his back, while his amber eyes scanned the surroundings like a hawk.

Over the next four hours, he made good progress along the way, even coming across a few slovesa which he dispatched with easily. His total kill count was now 27 slovesa soldiers and 3 human players, but he had no way to know if that was a good score or not.

“This scenario is too realistic, I should stop focusing on kill counts or scores and what not, and just think of how I would act in a real scenario of a slovesa invasion. What would be the win condition?”

Ceres finally made it to the commercial district where Adrian spawned. It was about 4 to 6 blocks long and wide, dotted with shopping malls plus a few high street areas.

In the distance he could see a large swarm of slovesa drones floating, small rocks the size of a soccer ball that were just hovering in place, leading him to assume that there must be a good amount of middle-class slovesa there, nothing like the low-class foot soldiers that he had been killing so far.

He was about to swing around into a building in order to find a better vantage point, when he suddenly heard a large bang and sounds of fighting!

It was the swarm right in front of him, and Ceres tried to get closer to the fight to see what they were fighting. The distance made it hard to determine who was invovled!

However, as he got closer, a few of the drones broke off their formation and swarmed towards him like angry bees.

The smaller floating drones that were the size of a boulder primarily used themselves as projectiles, while larger floating drones that were the size of a vending machine could be equipped with ranged heat lasers that could boil through skin in less than three seconds.

Ceres dashed into an open convenience store, away  from the open main street, creating a narrow area where the drones had to squeeze through the doorway. This allowed Ceres to finally utilize his peak NEIR level to perform rapid reactionary thrusts to the drones with his vibra-spear.

A single low-strength spear-thrust would easily destroy the weak smaller drones, but Ceres had to perform a least a dozen thrusts per seconds to stem the flow through the door as there was close to a hundred of them coming.

As he cleared the doorway of smaller drones, he noticed that the edges of the doorway and the room was starting to heat up, with the frame of the door starting to glow red hot.

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Three larger drones were heating up their lasers outside the doorway, using the smaller drones’ sacrifice to buy time!

Ceres inwardly cursed as his jacket started to smoke, forcing him to run to the back of the store where the freezer was, assuming that he could use the cold to buy himself some time. If it wasn’t for the fact that the power had been knocked out ages ago, he would have succeeded too.

His senses were all heightened, with the blood thumping in his ears and every fluctuation in temperature ‘visible’ to him. Before he reached the back of the store however, his skin could feel the rise in air temperature!

He instinctively ducked as unseen thermal heat lasers swept the store, burning a line into the various shelves in each aisle. Having no choice, he decided to finally unwrap the vibra-spears on his back but not before throwing his current vibra-spear with a strong force towards the nearest large drone’s lower body.

The vibra-spear lodged onto the bottom of the drone, causing its current method of levitation to be broken. It falter and failed keep upright, falling backwards as its thermal heat lasers were still active, forming a burning scar upwards through the ceiling.

Before he could pick up another vibra-spear and attempt to finish off the fallen large drone, the two drones immediately moved over to its fallen comrade and defended it, forcing Ceres to back off.

Ceres grabbed all his four vibra-spear with his two arms, cuddling it and running across the store, placing vibra-spears at different locations to serve as alternate attack points at different corners of the store.

The two larger drones slowly inched forward to Ceres’ position that was hiding behind a solid wall, guided by their ability to sense heat signatures. Ceres had nothing on him that could simulate a human’s heat signature, so as soon as the first drone got near, he popped out beyond the corner and immediately threw the spear with pinpoint accuracy, knocking the first drone out.

However, he didn’t expect the second drone to be directly behind the first one, leaving him exposed for two seconds to the heat laser. His right thigh had a large burnt patch that was smoking with the smell of burning fabric, while he rapidly tried to cool it down with the water as he ran away.

His increased NEIR level caused him to feel extreme pain due to the burning of his nerves on his thigh, but he gritted his teeth and moved to the second attack point.

Using the same method, he waited behind another wall, perking his ears to listen for the distinct humming of the large drone while he held a water bottle to his right thigh, his other hand gripping the vibra-spear, ready to launch at a moment’s notice.

It took 3 minutes for Ceres to realized that something wasn’t right, as he did not hear the humming tone of the large drone, but rather he heard human footsteps coming towards him!

Ceres stayed in the same position, except with two hands on the vibra-spear now, ready to launch if needed. The footsteps stopped right beyond the corner, making Ceres tense up, his muscles bulging as he was crouched like a hunter waiting for its prey.

“Don’t attack! We’re friendly!” A shout came from the group, making Ceres scoff. Would people be so naïve as to immediately drop their weapon and hug the strangers in such a situation?

A continued silence filled the atmosphere, as the footsteps suddenly continued, getting closer! Just as Ceres was about to launch an attack, the next sentence stopped him dead in his tracks.

“Mrs Qiu’s dumplings are much better than Lisa!”

That same sentence might have stunned any other participant, but instead Ceres immediately dropped his weapons and went out to give the stranger a hug. “Thank god I found you guys here and you remembered the secret code sentence we discussed.”

“See, Erik? At least Ceres remembered what we agreed on.” Braton smirked at Erik, who cursed under his breath. Braton laughed upon seeing that. “This fucker Erik still tried to stab me even though I said that. Maybe he really thinks Lisa is better! Haha!”

Ceres chuckled, but immediately sobered up. He noticed there was a new girl with the two of them that he recognized at the orphanage but never really hung out together with, despite being the same age.

At 1.7 meters tall, she had short black hair and was lean, giving her a sort of athletic vibe, while having the same tanned skin as them. Her face didn’t give a particular impression, but she had a homely sort of feeling, although she was leaning more towards the aloof or “I don’t care” outlook.

She didn’t seem to recognize Ceres either, kicking a few of the dead smaller slovesa drones around with her foot.

“Sorry, but who’s she?” Ceres asked, not being able to remember her name. She didn’t reply, instead just stared down at her feet, completely uninterested to respond.

Ceres didn’t know there could be anyone like her in the orphanage. He was surprised he never actually talked to her once, despite having military drills and seeing her on other teams. Trissa stared back him, before turning away with an obvious face showing she thought Ceres was dumb.

“She’s Trissa, a ranged weapon specialist. Her true speciality is at aerial combat, but there’s no way to show that off when there’s no exosuits around here. She’s cool.” Erik suddenly stood up, answering for her.

Ceres looked suspiciously at Braton, who gave back a knowing look. “Wow, I can already play the whole love story in my head,” Ceres thought to himself.

“Ah I see, so have you guys found the spawner yet?” Ceres asked. The three of them looked at each other, not knowing what Ceres just asked.

He began to explain his assumptions and strategy to win the second stage, causing Erik’s and Braton’s face to brighten, while Trissa looked absolutely shell-shocked about Ceres’ understanding of the second-stage. Her attitude towards Ceres became a lot more attentive, her prior expression of disgust gone.

“So, the plan is simple. We team up here as a group of four, get better equipment, find more reliable allies and blow up the spawner. And we should hopefully do it fast in the next few days!”

Erik and Braton nodded, sticking their hands out on top of each other, with Ceres putting their hands in the middle of their group huddle. Trissa just stared at them awkwardly, while Erik continually signalled with his head to join.

She finally sighed and placed her hands in the middle, still not saying a word. “Don’t worry, she knows all the strats we know, we’re from the same military orphanage! We had worse randoms before remember?” Erik tried to reason his way out, but Ceres and Braton just smiled.

He wasn’t wrong though, they had way worse teammates in Shattered Empire before, so this would be a breeze in teamwork.

“Wait do we have a team name?” Erik asked

“Do we really need one? We always named teams by their leader names during the military drills” Ceres groaned.

Braton shouted: “I don’t care what you all are saying, but from now on we are Zone 17 Military Orphanage Team Dumplings!”

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