Chapter 845 - 715: Smog

With each hand holding a disassembled greatsword, Blood Lion Roar twisted and spun, using the weight of the mecha to cleave through the surrounding BETA bodies.

Two Assault Levels flanked on the left and right, seizing the moment when the mecha paused its rotation, when the old force had faded and the new force was yet to come. They simultaneously clamped the greatswords with their pincers, attempting to control the Infinite Justice Mecha.

Inside the cockpit, Blood Lion Roar released the control stick, fingers flying swiftly across the densely packed dashboard buttons,

The mecha’s hands released the sword grips, its body leaning back, hands supporting the ground, assuming a head-down, feet-up posture, legs toward the sky,

The thrusters on its back, legs, and feet simultaneously erupted with scorching flames,

Like a Thomas spin in breakdancing, the heavy legs swung horizontally forward and backward, shattering the head-like organs at the rear of the Assault Levels’ bodies,

Then pushing off the ground with its hands, it rolled agilely backward, magnetic force bursting from its palms, regaining grip on the two greatswords.

The entire set of movements flowed seamlessly, drawing a burst of applause from the audience seats.

Gray Rain rubbed her chin thoughtfully. Li Cheng saw her eyes glimmering with calculations and said, "Don’t even think about it, buying one or building one yourself, you wouldn’t be able to operate it."

"Who says? As a noble nanomachine, how could I not operate a mecha?"

Li Cheng rolled his eyes, "The control panel and buttons in an excavator’s cockpit are about 15-25.

The number of buttons/knobs/toggle switches in the cockpits of the Boeing 787, Airbus A350, and C919 is 340-440.

The technical prowess of [Mechanical War Thunder] is inferior to the Earth Federation in animations, unable to let pilots easily maneuver mechas with just a joystick, pedals, and a few buttons,

Hence, the number of buttons and knobs in the cockpit reaches over eight hundred.

Each button corresponds to different pre-programmed actions, multiple button combinations achieve more complex actions. The operation manual is thicker than a dictionary."

"Huh?" Gray Rain was stunned, "Can’t they use a brain-computer interface, brainwave helmet, or motion capture?"

"The degrees of freedom of a mecha’s joints are higher than a human’s, using motion capture would actually lower the upper limits. As for the brain-computer interface, due to certain technical hurdles, the pain from mecha damage would feedback to the pilot, also affecting the driving."

Li Cheng explained that the Star-casting Anvil and the Special Affairs Bureau have an interstellar immigration cooperation project. According to him, the Special Affairs Bureau is actively developing [large manned mechanicals in outer space environments] for mining, engineering construction, and equipment maintenance.

It seems that civil engineers, even in the era of outer space, still need to handle Gray despite piloting a Gundam.

Gray Rain thought for a moment and said, "Don’t we have Merciful Soul? We can implant a soul into the mecha, and I can sit in the cockpit while the mecha fights on its own."

"Then there’s no need for a pilot, right? What’s the cockpit for, first-person movie viewing?"

Li Cheng’s eye twitched, shattering Gray Rain’s romantic vision, "It’s just like Ultraman is played by actors in suits,

Gundam, after all, is a work of science fiction, with a vast gap between it and real-world realization. To achieve it, some less romantic compromises must be made."

"What? Ultraman is fake?!"

"???"

As the two bantered, in the Beast Fighting Arena, several mechas broke through wave after wave of BETA assaults.

The Late Bell Mecha transformed into a turret, wreaking havoc with bombardments from both sides, efficiently reaping monster lives.

Only a few BETA managed to penetrate the fireblockade, only to be ground underfoot by the Pineapple Battle Treasure and Ingram, two melee-type mechas, wielding longswords and electric batons.

The Pineapple Battle Treasure, notable for its exceptionally agile low profile, kicked and rolled close to the ground, efficiently striking down foes with its knife.

Although Ingram is a police mecha and lacks heavy firepower, its explosion-proof shield is robust and hefty, thrusting forcefully into the mouth of a Tank Level trying to bite, bursting its lower jaw,

and driving an electric baton fully into its spine, the surging current completely charring the central nervous system.

Overall, it’s too difficult for the BETA to breach the defense line — this is also reasonable, as, after all, the original work categorized BETA as merely automated miners,

still belonging to the category of carbon-based life forms. When faced with heavy firepower clusters, especially curved shellfire and strategic bombers, they only stand to be massacred.

The reason they can engage in attrition warfare with humans, persistently besieging and capturing territories, is mainly due to their numbers, fearless nature, digging ability, and most importantly, special species...

"They’re coming!"

From within the 19-meter-tall F-35 Lightning II Tactical Mech came Grant’s booming exclamation.

At the edge of the arena, dozens of bizarre creatures slowly formed, standing upright on two legs, with massive eyeballs on their heads, and flagella on their bodies.

The surface of the eyeballs gathered intense light, converging into a beam, shooting towards the ground-hovering Infinite Justice Mecha with a "zzzz" sound.

Blood Lion Roar, vigilant from all directions, grabbed an Assault Level as a shield in front. Yet the latter’s sturdy armor, upon which it depended for survival, couldn’t hold for even two seconds before being shredded and pierced by the searing beam.

Light Beam Level, the true strategic weapon of BETA, requires the consumption of a special substance called G Element to produce.

During combat, it uses a spherical focus air duct to emit high-power lasers, destroying aircraft, tanks, missiles, and even curved shelling through irradiation.

The Blood Lion Roar decisively drops the corpse of the Assault Level exuding a roasted smell and descends to the ground.

The data for the Light Beam Level is set extremely exaggerated, initiating irradiation every 12 seconds, with each 5-second irradiation sufficient to destroy the anti-laser evaporation coated armor,

and even more unscientific is its ridiculously strong battlefield perception ability, capable of detecting, locking on, and continuously tracking and striking flying units 380 kilometers away at an altitude of 10,000 meters.

It is precisely due to the existence of the Light Beam Level and the even more powerful Heavy Light Level that in the original work, the human modern army is blocked from the sky, forced into a brutal ground war of exhaustion.

Step!

The F-35 tactical unit, which had been idling and waiting, rushes out of the line, its super carbon blade stirring up a storm of blood and gore.

The tactical unit was specifically created in the world of "Muv-Luv" as a weapon to counter the Light Beam Level. It uses Earth’s curvature to fly at low or close to ground level, thus avoiding laser lock-on, until it closes in to launch a decapitation strike on high-value BETA units.

Engaged in home turf combat, facing a familiar hostile organism, the 19-meter tall F-35 tactical unit flattens lower-level BETA like a heavy truck, joining forces with the Blood Lion Roar to charge towards the Light Beam Level cluster.

The surrounding BETA swarm forward, not attempting to attack, but to use their body weight to pin down the mecha.

The distant Light Beam Level cluster, caring not for ally forces, begins to charge up its laser.

The audience gasps, Gray Rain’s eyes widening, "Oh hell! Won’t they screw this up?"

[Netherworld Purgatory] comes with resurrection, players who die can return to the surface, but repairing damaged mechas is truly troublesome.

"That’s underestimating Blood Lion Roar too much."

Li Cheng curled his lips, and in the next instant, the BETA-piled mountain suddenly burst apart,

the Infinite Justice Mecha astonishingly transformed back into that hundred-ton king truck, taking advantage of its inertia to topple over BETA along the way, carrying the F-35 tactical unit clinging to the truck bed, narrowly avoiding the laser blast.

Logic dictates that Tank Level BETA is 2.8 meters high, Intercept Level is 12 meters, Assault Level is 16 meters, nowhere near as light as an ordinary heavy truck, shouldn’t easily tip over.

However, the Blood Lion Roar’s hundred-ton king is just an imaginary number, 999 tons is also a hundred-ton king, and before becoming a player, he was an experienced long-haul truck driver.

The most common saying heard was "Hey, Adasi friend, the sky is the limit, load more~"

"Hey, friend, load more, the red notes flow into the pocket like the Tarim River~"

The scene of an overloaded heavy truck ramming through the BETA swarm is incredibly impactful, especially with dirty blood splashing all over the titanium alloy crash bar and aluminum alloy rims.

At the critical moment, several Assault Level BETA use their pincers to lift up the Light Beam Level, raising it high overhead.

With a clear line of sight and open firing area, the Light Beam Level and Heavy Light Level begin charging again, aiming at the truck.

The distant Late Bell Mecha attempts to fire rockets to cover its allies, but all missiles flying in the air are swept and destroyed by a beam with an uncanny shimmering trajectory.

There’s no longer any obstruction between the Light Beam Level and the truck, and just as the laser charge is completed, the Blood Lion Roar in the driver’s seat grins, his thumb casually flipping open the plastic cover beside the dashboard to reveal the toggle switch.

Click.

The switch is turned on, the plastic sheet behind the truck unfolds on its own, revealing a densely packed multi-tube rocket launch nest.

Boom boom boom boom!

The launch nest fires rockets in all directions, detonating at low altitudes, scattering countless metal-glossed particles, forming an aerosol cloud.

The zinc, nickel, copper, and silver metallic particles in the cloud already have good absorption efficiency for lasers, and without cost concerns, they underwent a surface multi-pulse femtosecond ablation process at the micro-nano level,

engraving complex pores invisible to the naked eye on the particle surface.

When hit by a laser, the light undergoes multiple reflections within the particles, greatly converting into heat energy. The residual laser is also significantly reduced in power, leaving black scorch marks on the truck’s surface, unable to burn through.

A certain unnamed War Deception Bureau director once said, "Haze defends against lasers, seaweed entangles submarines," and in a sense, they weren’t wrong.

The aerosol cloud rockets loaded with metal particles prepared by Blood Lion Roar are precisely to defend against various forms of energy attacks.

The laser ablation generates hot winds, rapidly expanding the metallic haze, covering nearly half the Beast Fighting Arena.

The Light Beam Level standing atop the Assault Level has no time for a second charge, as the truck already breaks through the fog, crashing into and pulverizing the flesh of the Assault Level,

while the F-35 tactical unit clinging to the truck bed leaps forward, buzzing with its super carbon blade, slaughtering all the wide-eyed cute Light Beam Levels, with eyes rolling down like Gollum.