83 Comes to Lend a Hand

Dogtown, 9:01 a.m.

The silence was utterly shattered.

After long preparations, the moment the attack began, New America's elite agents plunged into the Barghest's contracted defensive line like scalpels, precise and vicious.

Hansen had anticipated that these people who had infiltrated Dogtown would launch their attack somewhere beyond the Barghest's core areas of control. But their targets had taken him by surprise.

The New America personnel who had infiltrated Dogtown today had not chosen to storm the stadium or Gemini Sapphire Tower, the two core zones heavily guarded by the Barghest. Instead, they struck at multiple points along the edge of that "circle," steadily advancing inward.

Though they were on the smaller side in terms of numbers, they had still chosen this course of action. New America's purpose was obvious.

They would never let Hansen go, nor would they give him any chance to escape.

The circle was like a net gradually tightening, and Hansen's fate was to be trapped within it.

Whether he chose Gemini Blue or the stadium as the site of his final stand, the nuclear bomb would deliver the final blow.

What was the cruelest meat grinder of war?

For a World War I veteran, perhaps it was endless trench warfare amid the mud; for soldiers deep in the jungle, perhaps it was that green labyrinth they could never see through.

But no matter how people argued, there was one kind of battlefield that would never be absent from the list—

Urban street fighting.

Close-quarters combat, a brutal struggle born of the need to seize ground without destroying an entire city.

New America's assault teams were divided into groups of six. Through hacking, they had crippled the area's surveillance systems and automated turrets in advance. Equipped with military-grade Subdermal Armor and Smart Weapons, they moved through