Chapter 113: We Are This Ruthless
At the same time, the players went online collectively again.
Only the last 200 kilometers of the journey remained.
All five fighter jets and the spaceplane had rotated 180 degrees, their main engines pointed forward, decelerating at maximum power.
This was a point that felt "counter-intuitive" to most players.
Real spacecraft don't gradually stop just because their engines stop "spitting fire," like in most sci-fi movies or games. When arriving at a destination, they always face backward to decelerate.
Inside the spaceplane's cargo bay, the screen displayed a clear aerial view of the mining site.
Around a cluster of buildings, seven or eight mining vehicles were working. They looked somewhat like oversized combine harvesters, capable of excavating large amounts of surface lunar soil, and then refining Helium-3 from this soil.
Currently, over 1000 square kilometers of surrounding lunar soil had been excavated, its color noticeably darker, and leaving behind textures similar to tilled farmland.
"This alien mining doesn't look very high-tech," Guo Li Cheng complained. "In essence, it's just tilling the ground."
"This is a good thing. It means we can quickly absorb this technology and then make improvements," Black Smoke said.
"Alright, alright, let's get serious."
Caoyuan stood up and came to the center of the spaceplane's cargo bay.
"The mission countdown starts in 5 minutes, everyone brace yourselves!"
"Understood!"
At this point, the formation's relative speed compared to the Moon's surface had decreased to 700 meters per second.
"Prepare for bombardment!"
The five fighter jets shut down their main engines and turned again in the air, facing forward.
The core area of the mining site was a structurally complex composite building, looking like a fortress.
Chang Kong quickly found the hangars. They were scattered around the building's periphery, 14 in total. According to intelligence, 4 of them should be empty, but it was hard to distinguish now.
"Loulan, let's take out the defenses first."
"Okay, I'll follow your lead!"
He assigned targets with the other four pilots: three aimed at the hangars, two aimed at the anti-aircraft missiles, and simultaneously pressed fire. Five infrared pulse laser cannons fired a salvo.
"Boom!"
The anti-aircraft missiles were obliterated in a brilliant explosion, but the hangar airtight doors were clearly reinforced. The first round of shooting only barely burned through and certainly couldn't damage the aircraft inside.
But it didn't matter.
The five fighter jets continued their dive, their main cannons recharging and powering up, preparing to launch a second assault.
It wasn't until then that the alarm blared throughout the mining site.
"Manager! Wake up! We're under attack!"
The Overseer on duty quickly woke up the person in charge of the mining site. He looked completely bewildered, his mind blank.
"What nonsense are you talking?! What attack? Are you crazy?!"
Because it was so sudden, the person in charge's first reaction was to refuse to believe it.
"We are under attack! The anti-aircraft missiles have been destroyed!"
"...A riot? Where's the security team? Go tell them to suppress it!"
"It's not a riot!" The Overseer was shouting himself hoarse. "The enemy is from the air! The air!"
"Huh?!"
That's impossible...
Our wormhole station guards the only entrance to the star system. If anyone enters, it will definitely trigger an alarm. No matter how fast the enemy flies, they can't exceed the speed of light!
As for warp drives, that technology is completely lost in the Stellar Union!
Could the enemy be from the deep space black region? Then, then there's no fighting back... The Manager started scaring himself, the more he thought about it, the more horrified he became.
"What should we do, Manager?!"
"Open fire and fight back first!"
He didn't have time to get dressed and stumbled into the mining site's main control room.
"What are you two still sitting here for?!" The Manager, wearing slippers, roared at Anton and Lao Yu in the control room. "Hurry up and get weapons, join the defense!"
"Oh, yes sir—"
The two scurried away sheepishly. Halfway there, Lao Yu grabbed Anton by the collar.
"Are you stupid! Are you really going?! Let's quickly find a safe place to hide!"
About seven or eight powered security guards reacted quickly, climbed onto the building's rooftop, and launched a large number of small smart missiles from their backpacks, swarming towards the five fighter jets in the sky like a beehive.
Chang Kong accelerated forward: "I'll draw the missiles away, you guys keep working!"
Loulan: "Are you trying to die?!"
Generally speaking, if it were within the atmosphere, Chang Kong's action would be pure suicide.
Because a fighter jet's agility and maximum overload are far less than a missile's, it's very difficult to shake off the latter.
But this is the Moon. There's no atmosphere, so missiles can't use fins to perform acrobatic aerial maneuvers using aerodynamics. Therefore, the aircraft's maneuverability isn't necessarily worse than the missile's!
Chang Kong realized this point before actual air force pilots.
He quickly adjusted the aircraft's attitude, rolling the fuselage 90 degrees.
Then, just as he was about to be hit by the missiles, he throttled the main engine to maximum power.
The hydrogen-oxygen rocket engine sprayed out a long blue flame.
This type of engine generally has limited endurance but a very high thrust-to-weight ratio, about 7 times higher than the spaceplane's variable cycle jet engine. After ignition, it immediately erupted with over 200 tons of thrust, allowing Chang Kong to perform an extremely exaggerated aerial right-angle turn at nearly 15G overload!
This was an action that severely challenged human limits.
The Apollo smart missiles could only follow their pre-programmed procedures, emergency activating miniature nozzles located on the sides of the missile body to adjust their interception trajectory. These miniature nozzles could only work for 1.2 seconds, completely unable to keep up with Chang Kong's overload maneuver.
Cangyuan had long obtained the technical blueprints for this type of missile and knew its performance inside out. Chang Kong had even studied it meticulously.
It was precisely because of this that he had the confidence to toy with his opponents!
This was not a reckless act.
After the side thrust nozzles ran out of fuel, the missiles could only use the vectoring gas rudder behind the main engine to adjust direction, and the missile's maneuverability provided by this mechanism was far worse than before.
After a series of maneuvers, the missile swarm and Chang Kong engaged in a circling chase in the air. The missiles were always in the larger outer circle, in a disadvantageous position, unable to successfully complete the interception.
As a relatively old internal test player, Chang Kong's character had now leveled up to 3. His physique was robust, his overload resistance far surpassed ordinary people, allowing him to fully utilize the aircraft's potential and perform cooler maneuvers than Loulan and the others.
8 seconds later, the smart missiles' main engines ran out of solid fuel. At this point, they became powerless chunks of iron, no longer having enough flight energy to shoot down Chang Kong, and slowly descended under the Moon's gravitational pull.
Loulan witnessed Chang Kong's display of skill throughout: "This guy—he really has some tricks up his sleeve! Let's go, brothers, we can't be outdone!"
Chang Kong performed a stylish inverted loop, rejoined the formation, and came back killing towards the Apollo hangars below.
He had performed this maneuver countless times in flight simulation games and was completely familiar with it.
"A—Ace! Our missiles are depleted, the opponent is an ace pilot! We are evacuating!"
The security guards on the rooftop reported incoherently to the main control room, making the Manager curse angrily.
Trying to escape?
The spaceplane hovered in the air, its rear cargo bay door opening.
For this operation, the Engineer players modified the spaceplane in the vacuum of space outside the industrial ship, replacing the original four jet engines with rocket engines so it could take off and land normally on the vacuum Moon surface.
Inside the cargo bay, Caoyuan held a two-meter-long individual electromagnetic cannon, aiming at the security guards who were starting to run on the rooftop, one by one.
Swish!
A blue light flashed, and a tungsten carbide warhead was fired at a speed of nearly 4 kilometers per second, accurately hitting the back of one of the security personnel.
Under such high-speed impact, the tungsten carbide needle easily pierced the titanium alloy armor. Simultaneously, under intense impact and friction, it rapidly heated and melted into a red-hot solid-liquid mixture, scattering in an umbrella shape and exploding inside the power armor's inner cavity, tearing and burning all the soft tissues along the way.
Regardless of whether a vital spot was directly hit, being struck by this attack left the occupant inside with no possibility of survival.
The person instantly went into shock and cardiac arrest, a thick plume of smoke gushed from his mouth and nose, and he fell straight down.
Caoyuan fired again, this time accurately hitting the battery backpack. A dazzling blue fireball erupted on the victim's back.
Although the free hydrogen released from the battery couldn't burn for long due to the lack of oxygen, it also caused the power armor to lose power and leak air.
The person hit could only crawl with difficulty on the ground, slowly being tortured to death by the vacuum.
It was truly quite horrific.
After these two shots, Caoyuan was forced to slide back nearly a meter on the floor. The power and recoil of the individual electromagnetic cannon were commensurate. Even with Caoyuan's build and power armor, he still felt the strain.
After clearing the high-threat targets, the spaceplane subsequently landed.
At this moment, the Apollo mining site Manager, standing in the main control room at the highest point, witnessed a terrifying scene.
Ten spider-like robots poured out from the enemy aircraft's cargo bay and ran directly towards the location of the Apollo dormitory area.