From the moment the cannibals started throwing rocks to the moment the fifth-dan cannibal warriors pulled off their ambush, less than half an hour had passed. A reversal that complete in such a short span was almost impossible to imagine.
Wuchang was still staring blankly at the celebrating cannibals when a weak voice came from behind him. "Quick, get out there right now, go grab a land vehicle..."
He turned his head. It was that filthy old man Lane talking — he had woken up from the explosion. The old man seemed to know what Wuchang was about to ask, and answered on his own.
"A shockwave like that doesn't bother me. I've been through far worse than this before — I'm used to it by now."
"This is no time to chat. Get out there and don't let those cannibals wreck the land vehicles — we need those cars to get out alive. There's no time left..."
"No time left? What exactly is going to happen?" Wuchang put his back into it, shoving the rocks for all he was worth, but he still managed to ask.
"Don't ask — there's no time to explain," the old man said, then went and slapped each of the unconscious ones awake, one after another. "Wake up. Wake up, all of you — if you want to live, stop sleeping..."
In no time at all Wuchang had shoved open a gap a person could crawl through. When he scrambled out, he found that across the whole fifty-mu field of broken rock, hundreds of cannibals had already arrived.
"Never mind these cannibals. They're celebrating their victory — those savages won't stop till they've been at it for half a day."
"Will they eat me?" Wuchang asked cautiously.
"How the hell should I know? All I know is if you don't go grab a land vehicle, we'll all be dead in a little while."
Wuchang said nothing more. He looked at the cannibals gathering thicker and thicker around them, gritted his teeth, and bolted flat out for the place where the land vehicles had crashed.
Old Lane's analysis was right: the cannibals really did have a habit of celebrating a victory. They had wiped out an entire squadron of soldiers this time — by cannibal war history that counted as no small win. Hundreds upon hundreds of cannibals crawled out from deep in the Pillar Forest, squeaking and shrieking as they converged on the battlefield.
Wuchang ran on, steeling himself. But unexpectedly, although the cannibals all gave him puzzled looks, not one of them showed the slightest intention of attacking.
Under the eyes of more than a thousand cannibals, Wuchang reached the crash site. He had operated engineering equipment with Boss Pan a few times, so the land vehicle's controls were nothing new to him; the only complicated part was the weapon system.
In his fumbling haste Wuchang got a land vehicle started — but he also opened the firing bays of the Swarm Phalanx. When all eighty-four black holes showed their true faces, the thousand-odd cannibals on the ground went berserk.
The cannibals knew the Swarm Phalanx far too well, and those dense rows of firing bays filled them with instinctive terror. Without thinking, some of them picked up rocks, and it looked like an attack was seconds away.
"Turn it off, turn off that orange button with the skull on it — you idiot, are you trying to get us all killed?" Old Lane's shout carried up from the ground. Only then did Wuchang locate the odd switch.
Once the firing bays were closed, the cannibals on the ground finally settled down.
The squad had six members, so it needed three intact land vehicles. Luckily the cannibals had vented all their fury on the soldiers and had no interest in these iron contraptions, which was how the squad found three relatively undamaged vehicles.
"Start up, let's get out of here, head south, the farther the better..." Lane explained nothing to anybody; he took the lead with Boss Pan and went charging south.
The land vehicle looked a bit like the motorcycles Wuchang knew, except the two wheel wells had been swapped for anti-gravity units, and it was on those that the vehicle hovered above the ground.
But Wuchang had no driving experience at all, so he gave the front seat to Eileen and sat behind her. Eileen let out a weird whoop. "Fuck yeah, I've dreamed my whole life of racing a military land vehicle — today I finally get to have some fun. Sit tight, kid. I'll show you what speed really means..."
Before she even finished the sentence, the land vehicle had shot off like an arrow loosed from a bow. If not for Wuchang's solid waist-and-stance training and the thighs he clamped against the front of the vehicle in time, Eileen would probably have thrown him clean off.
In no time Eileen's vehicle was running neck and neck with Lane's. Behind the two of them, Gopher Pike and Wild Bull were in close pursuit. Wild Bull seemed thoroughly bitter about being left at the back, and kept urging Pike on.
"Move it, you useless piece of trash! Can't even race — shit, you couldn't even eat shit while it's still hot..."
"Shut up. They picked the good vehicles and left us the broken one..."
"Broken my ass. I say it's just your rotten luck."
Wuchang paid the squabbling pair behind him no mind. With his arms wrapped around Eileen's waist, he shouted over the wind at Lane beside him. "Why are we running? What are we hiding from?"
Boss Pan, sitting behind Lane, ducked his head to dodge the gale blasting into his mouth and yelled, "We're dodging ship cannons — the cannons on the orbital warships up in space..."
"Dodging what? Louder, I can't hear you..."
The land vehicle was already doing sixty kilometers an hour, and the wind resistance was enormous — never mind talking, even opening your mouth to breathe was a struggle. Boss Pan still shouted his explanation for Wuchang.
"A planetary orbital warship — it circles a planet like a satellite, the lowest-grade model of space warship. Purely a space-defense vessel. On Huang'e there are only two of them..."
"Ye Tian lost a whole squadron of brothers. He'll be calling in the ship cannons for revenge, guaranteed. Naturally, he has no authority to command the space fleet directly — command of the orbital warships sits with the Governor..."
"But a whole squadron died today. The loss is too heavy for that; the Governor will be furious as well. He won't turn Ye Tian's request down, not for a second — just wait and see. Those few thousand cannibals are dead men walking..."
From Boss Pan's explanation, Wuchang learned that above Huang'e's thick volcanic clouds, in low orbit, two orbital warships had been circling all along. They were the most powerful armed force on Huang'e. A single shot from the light-energy ship cannon up there could level half of Huang'e City, or blast open the shell of a dead volcano and turn it into a live one.
The light-energy ship cannon was limitless in power, but its cost was astronomical — the energy for a single shot alone came to 800 rainbow coins, to say nothing of depreciation, maintenance, and all the rest. Add in labor costs and under-the-table money, and one light-energy shell burned at least 1,600 rainbow coins.
That price was beyond anything a miner dared dream of. 160,000 gold coins equaled 1,600 rainbow coins, which equaled 16 liquid-mithril coins. What? You ask me what a liquid-mithril coin looks like? Fuck, how should I know.
On Huang'e, the liquid-mithril coin was a legendary currency, not something an ordinary miner could even imagine. Even people like Boss Pan and Coyote Seven might not own more than a few.
War really was a money-burning machine. On Earth or in this future world, it was the same: one shell could cost as much as a common laborer's lifetime wages.
"Half an hour. As far as we can get, the farther the safer..." Amid Boss Pan's shouting, the group had already covered close to thirty kilometers. The scenery to the north was blurring, and to the south everyone could faintly hear the sound of the tide.
Just then the light between heaven and earth shuddered. The heavy volcanic cloud that never changed from one year to the next suddenly gave off a strange radiance. The glow flashed and was gone, but old Lane knew perfectly well what it meant.
Who knows what he was thinking, but he actually parked the land vehicle on top of a stone pillar. Gazing off at the northern sky, the old man said softly, "No need to run anymore. Come here, Wuchang. You ought to see this miracle..."
As if playing along with Lane's performance, the volcanic clouds in the north suddenly lit up, and in the blink of an eye a vast hole came churning open in the sky.
Wuchang had no way to describe the size of that hole. From thirty kilometers away, people could still feel how staggering it was — big enough to fit all of Huang'e City inside.
Before Wuchang could even be startled, a holy white pillar of light shot straight down out of the sky. Perhaps because of the angle, or the distance, the pillar seemed to pierce down from space to the ground very, very slowly.
Wuchang knew the slowness was only an illusion. Light-energy weapons move at the speed of light; in truth, the moment the hole had rolled open in the clouds, the explosion had already struck the ground.
In everyone's eyes the tall Pillar Forest was like a reed bed swept by a gale: stone pillars that took four or five people with linked arms to encircle turned to dust in an instant. A gigantic blast crater ten kilometers across appeared, centered on the ambush site; the shockwave destroyed everything within those ten kilometers, and even the rock was melted by the heat into the lava most common on Huang'e.
"Those cannibals must all be dead for sure. There were nearly two thousand of them when we left..." Somehow, a trace of sorrow had crept into Wuchang's words.
He hadn't finished speaking when a fierce wind struck them in the face — the blast wave from thirty kilometers away. It had no killing force left, but people could still feel the power stored inside it.
When the wind had passed, Lane suddenly spoke in an odd tone. "What did you just say? Why do I get the feeling you're a little sorry for the cannibals?"
"Am I? I don't feel that at all." Wuchang denied it at once.
Then Boss Pan spoke up too. "Something's off here. Wuchang, there's definitely something off about you. When you opened the Swarm firing bays just now, those cannibals wanted to throw rocks at you..." He paused there a moment.
"But I saw it perfectly clearly: those higher-class cannibal warriors on the ground held their own people back. It was as if they weren't worried at all that you'd hurt them — as if they were deliberately protecting you..."
"Wuchang, could it be you really are Ghost Wuchang?"
Boss Pan's words reminded everyone there. Even small-brained fellows like Wild Bull and Pike had caught on that something wasn't right: from the moment this squad had run into the cannibals, everything had reeked of strangeness.
"The cannibals don't just not hurt us, they save our lives, and now they're even giving us food? Lane, spare us the livestock-farming talk — when we were running for our lives, they didn't block us at all, did they?" Eileen said, frowning. "I'm afraid there's only one reasonable explanation left: you, Wuchang, are Ghost Wuchang..."
"Right, you're Ghost Wuchang," the squad members said in unison, leaving Wuchang not knowing whether to laugh or cry.