Chapter 69: Chapter 66: Shock and Awe

Geran cursed at the hot air of the desert arena. “Fuck, I should’ve chosen an exosuit pilot to take over instead of me!” He was the no-name boy that Ceres was to duel.

Though he said that, he didn’t actually want to get another random no-name pilot to use his exosuit. Building an exosuit tailored to someone else would be extremely hard and he didn’t know enough about how to completely modify an exosuit to fit the fighting style of another person.

Also, choosing the exosuit pilot would be hard as well, as many of the able-bodied participants who were already knocked out of the melee and ranged category were either cowards or weaklings.

Every other viable good potential pilot was either in a coma or in the hospital, having lost limbs or being severely injured courtesy of the competition’s brutality. This made the choice quite obvious: that Geran was on his own and could only rely on himself.

It would be fine though, as usually exosuit repairers were generally weak in terms of their body but mentally proficient, able to reach a high NEIR level when paired with an exosuit.

However, without being combat proficient without an exosuit, they could never hope to translate any useful combat techniques and as such wouldn’t be as good as a melee or ranged expert who also had an equally high NEIR level.

Geran had never been good at combat without an exosuit, which was partly the reason why he gravitated towards the exosuit repair category. One might say he got lucky in the competition so far, with the favourites in his group stage both eliminating each other while he swooped in from the side to claim the rewards.

He also never ran into Ceres or Chad when they were rampaging through the third stage of the qualifiers.

Naturally, he considered himself to be good instead of just lucky! “I’m one of the top 16 in the exosuit refiners, how could my achievements be solely based on luck? I must be competent enough, on the same level as Ceres and Chad! I could even win the whole competition!”

Despite his insane delusions, he did indeed have great confidence in himself and gave it his all in the three hours!

His missile-packed exosuit was a siege-type, a medium-weight intended at pummeling heavy armour units, destroying groups of infantry, or even demolishing small buildings.

His helmet was a perfect circular dome that looked like a radome, while his arms and legs were blocky in design, with deployable drills on his feet to lock himself down into the packed sand and withstand the recoil.

Two missile launchers sat on his shoulders, full of smaller missiles that were able to home in on heat signatures, not that effective in such a high heat environment. However, it packed a punch, being able to fire up to three hundred and fifty small pen-size missiles that could inflict pinpoint damage, serving as area denial or distraction if needed.

A larger deployable object was stowed on his back, taking up most of the space in his back storage. The exosuit had zero thrusters, intended to be a fairly stationary missile launcher that could continuously bombard a given location. The surface of his exosuit had pressurized nozzles however, intended to blast any sand or dust that got into critical locations.

This was the best loadout he could achieve against the brawler exosuit!

Based on the videos he saw of Ceres, he was confident that he could handle his brawler exosuit easily.

Regardless of how fast Ceres ran, his horde of small homing missiles would easily finish him off from a safe distance, while Geran also had a backup laser rifle that could pelter the enemy with high power energy beams at more than three hundred meters. “He can’t run from my missiles, and even if he manages to survive five of them, how can he survive the next three hundred of them?”

Geran also had his secret deployable object that hasn’t been shown yet on any of his matches, his true trump card! He needed this especially to take down one of the favorites in the tournament with certainty!

“If the three hundred and fifty missiles can’t kill you, then this will!” He grinned to himself.

A timer started, showing up on the internal display of the helmet. Geran double-checked his systems and missile loadout, confirming the number of missiles and his laser rifle operations. “I’m going to blow up the whole place in an instant!”

The duel started, and in a split moment, Geran immediately launched five missiles up into the air from his starting position, with his legs drilled down into the ground for stability!

The homing missile would lock onto the largest heat signature in the area, comparing it to the background heat of the desert arena. Obviously, it wouldn’t target its own owner, who’s heat signature and shape was already categorized in the tiny memory registers of each missile.

The five missiles shrieked across the arena, the white plums of smoke trailing behind. Geran smiled as he hid behind one of the sand dunes, covering him from where Ceres’ starting position is supposed to be. He could already picture in his head that Ceres would be scrambling for cover somewhere from the missiles, but it would be futile because it was the open desert! How could the missiles coming in from above be blocked?

As the missiles managed to lock onto their target, a series of explosions soon occurred on the other side of the playing field, while Geran sat and waited for the end of the duel to be announced. The crowd cheered as the explosions echoed through part of the arena.

The absolute confidence he had in his initial salvo was staggering. He decided not to launch another salvo, fully assured that the explosions must have killed Ceres.

However, after a good three minutes of crouching behind the sand dune, no notification of the end of the duel came to Geran. The crowd still seemed to be going wild, so Geran began double-checking his data.

“Impossible? His brawler exosuit shouldn’t be able to handle the missiles! It’s a medium exosuit, what kind of defensive plates has he modified into it?”

Geran got up and assumed the same firing stance, launching twenty-five missiles into the sky. Lines of smoke streaked across the barren desert arena as they zoomed towards the other side, all rushing at their locked-on target.

“This time for sure!” Geran thought to himself, but a sense of doubt started niggling away at the back of his mind.

True enough, even after all the missiles had exploded, no end of the duel was in sight. Geran was more than frustrated. He angrily took out the large deployable object, setting it up while still under cover from the sand dune.

As he was finished, the object started to float in mid-air, before finally ascending straight up into the sky. It was a drone.

Geran’s vision was now amplified, with the drone providing multiple layers of imagery, both visual, infrared and x-ray. However, the high heat reflection of the desert surface made x-ray quite hard to use, forcing Geran to purely rely on infrared and visual.

He scanned the area, especially the area where the missiles had locked on to. The area, which was Ceres’s starting point, had a few pieces of debris there, but it wasn’t enough to constitute the entire exosuit.

Geran cursed, knowing that Ceres somehow managed to decieve the missile lock-on system!

He quickly updated the missile data system, placing that area as a no-go zone, forcing the algorithm in the missiles to search other areas instead. He also linked the missiles to the drone, allowing them to share information before homing in on the target. Launching another hundred missiles into the air, Geran was sure this time.

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Geran strained his NEIR level to the limit, filtering the noise from the drone’s data and feeding it directly to the missiles. Geran used his exosuit to serve as the central network node, using the drone’s vision to steer the missiles manually if needed.

Despite the change in the algorithm, the missiles still couldn’t find anything. According to the drone, everything looked like the desert to them.

“Fuck, he must be using some sort of cloaking device!” Geran immediately ordered the hundred missiles to hit random locations in the area, while using the drone’s visual camera to watch closely for any irregularities in how the wind was blowing over certain areas in the desert.

For all he knew, Ceres’s exosuit could be camouflaging by replicating the same heat signature as the background, rendering infrared vision to be useless.

While he was focusing hard on the missiles, a loud ‘BANG’ echoed through the desert as a projectile shot out and shredded through the drone. The drone immediately broke apart into pieces while Geran was left stunned.

He didn’t know where exactly the shot came from, but from the direction with which his drone was falling down, he knew the general area.

He launched yet another salvo, this time a hundred missiles, carpet bombing the area. The pen-sized missiles caused mini-explosions all across the surface of the desert arena.

“No way he fucking survives that!” Geran swore, deciding to release yet another 100 missiles to carpet bomb the same area. He had finally caught on to the rule of ‘double-tap’ to ensure the opponent’s death!

An amazing show of ‘fireworks’ lit up the entire area, blowing up a huge dust cloud that was a combination of all the mini-explosions. The crowd roared in response as they watched the amazing firework display.

Geran held his laser rifle at the ready, being forced to peek with his own head now due to the loss of his drone. He didn’t have a lot of missiles left, only about thirty.

But just as he was about to stick his head out to check the aftermath, another loud ‘BANG’ sounded out, with a projectile penetrating straight through the sand dune that he was hiding behind!

The projectile lodged itself into his exosuit’s lower body near his waist, stopped by his defensive plates.

He gingerly looked at the projectile, and as his eyes finally recognized what it was, he let out a scream as th.exosuit was electrocuted from within. It was a bunker-buster, except the payload was electrical!

The high voltage charred many of the volatile internals, causing the exosuit to smoke. The smoke trail created a large sign in the sky, which might as well have spelt out ‘HIT ME HERE’. Before Geran could remove the first projectile, it was immediately followed by another series of three loud BANGs, with his exosuit being hit by multiple impacts. Ceres had locked onto him!

Geran couldn’t operate, the sudden electrocution had disabled many of the systems, making him run on pure mechanical strength. The exosuit had a backup where it wouldn’t be controlled by the nerval jack or the processor anymore, instead just being a simple mechanical exoskeleton.

Despite the slow movement, Geren desperately tried to change location, but the smoking electronics inside his exosuit was a large tell-tale sign of where he was.

As he was hit by yet another projectile from god knows where, ripping off his shoulder missile launcher, Geran finally decided to surrender. The duel was over!

Geran wasn’t willing to lose a limb or suffer a full body burn like other ‘brave’ participants, immediately detaching himself from the exosuit while lying on the desert sand, still slightly twitching from the electrocution.

Before Geran could become sober, he saw what looked like a solitary sand monster walk towards him, holding a large sniper rifle that had a barrel the size of a human arm.

It was Ceres! His ranger exosuit was converted into a sniper! Geran had already figured out that he wasn’t fighting against a brawler halfway through the duel but seeing it in person versus what he remembered seeing during the repair shocked him a little.

“Where were you hiding, and why couldn’t the missiles hit you?” Geran had to ask, as the reality of losing the competition finally hit him.

“In the sand dune opposite yours” Ceres nonchalantly replied, heading to the edge of the arena that had already delivered the next two participants. He had been hiding in the sand dune, covering his exosuit with sand.

When he had repaired it, he created an air pressure system that circulated air within the exosuit, creating a sort of positive pressure strong enough to push out the sand particles that were constantly trying to get in.

He also fooled the missiles by throwing an unused battery pack and activating it, serving as the fake heat source while he covered himself in a sandy thermal blanket, making him blend into the surroundings as he dived into the sand dune.

As he dug deeper, the sand dune naturally formed a protective layer around him, such that the missiles couldn’t hurt him directly, with the armour of the exosuit dispersing any residual explosions or shock. If anything, the launch of the missiles gave away where Geran was.

Geran was shocked at the sheer amount of planning, but couldn’t say anything as Ceres walked past him, the words stuck in his mouth. So many things could have gone wrong, but because Ceres repaired his original exosuit so fast, he had more than enough time to prepare all of this.

Ceres even accounted for the fact that sand and dust would have gotten into some of the nooks and crannies of the exosuit. To that end, he made the exosuit airtight, along with a life support system to enable breathing.

He finally knew that he was not on the same level as Ceres. Ceres had shown him that he was also proficient at ranged combat, not necessarily relying on bombs or running. But before Ceres continued walking, he stopped dead in his tracks, recognizing one of the participants. It was Maddy Seras.

“Ah Ceres, I never got to thank you for whooping Adrian, my cousin, in the qualifiers! It would be an absolute shame to get my own hands dirty in order to clean up the family, so your assistance is much appreciated. Some people just don’t deserve to be one of the five families, don’t they?” Maddy smiled at Ceres as they crossed each other.

Ceres vaguely recalled eliminating Adrian Seras, but he didn’t know that Maddy would even thank him for that!

Shouldn’t family stick together? However, that was only a fraction of his thoughts, with the larger portion dominated by what Maddy did to Erik.

Maddy laughed again at the furious gaze of Ceres as he walked away. “Why are all you outers the same? I did everything according to the rules, and nobody died! I’m even arranging for them to be taken care of in the best Seras hospital on the planet. If anything, you should be thanking me! I cleared the wimps out of your group for you!”

Ceres grimaced as he left the desert arena under the cheers of the arena. “Then looks like it’s my turn to clear you out of the competition!”