A ten-man squad armed to the teeth moved slowly through the gray-green fog.
They wore fully protective exoskeletons and carried compact G9 assault rifles, Gauss rifles fitted with extended magnetic rails, or two short, thick portable rocket launchers slung across their backs.
At the center of the formation rolled a three-meter-wide unmanned tracked vehicle. Its roof-mounted remote weapon station bore a menacing 20mm cannon barrel, with a 60mm short grenade launcher fed by an ammunition belt hanging beneath it.
Its silver-white paint job looked completely out of place amid the surroundings, but no one doubted this squad's firepower.
Just a few days ago, the Council had finally approved a new batch of equipment procurement projects and bought up Changge Group's bottom-of-the-barrel inventory.
Perhaps the Council had been shaken by the brutal fighting on the front lines. No one was still spouting idiotic nonsense like, "You don't need Gauss rifles to deal with a bunch of guys who don't even have exoskeletons. Our soldiers just need to tell the planes where to bomb."
Thanks to that, Tang Feng had finally gotten his hands on the "sniper rifle" he had been longing for.
But he was no longer interested in the thing. All those messy specifications were meaningless. When it came to staying alive, what mattered most was using something that felt right in his hands.
"...Where are we now?"
"Coast's End."
"Coast's End... This is Coast's End? I thought it was Mars."
The machine gunner carrying a light machine gun glanced at the yellowed, damaged travel poster in his hand, then at the elevated highway bridge ahead that had snapped in two, as well as the rusted highway sign lying crooked amid a heap of concrete debris—
Lai Mountain City, 5 km ahead
Lai Mountain City lay ahead, and it was