140. Three Idiot Musketeers

Black smoke and dust suddenly burst apart, and a violent explosion rang out. The haze should have scattered and settled then, but the next shell screaming in showed no sign of stopping. So an even more powerful blast erupted, the ground trembled, and the storm of smoke and dust surged up once more.

"Rally on the left side of the trench! Push forward! Drive those sons of bitches back!"

The commissar was shouting himself hoarse over the comms channel. His microphone probably had built-in noise cancellation, but in this kind of environment, he had to roar at the top of his lungs for the surviving Astra Militarum soldiers to hear him clearly.

Clutching his M35 Lasgun, Kori huddled motionless in the trench.

Judging by appearances alone, someone might have thought he was already dead—after all, he was covered in black smoke and dust from the explosions, along with dried blood.

Only half a minute later did he begin to move.

But this so-called movement was not in response to the commissar's call. Instead, he kept hugging his gun and crawling through the trench, climbing over the corpses of his comrades. His nostrils were filled with every kind of foul smell, and a bead of sweat rolled straight down from his filthy forehead and fell to the ground.

There was nothing he could do. The heavy firepower unit on the other side was simply too experienced.

Kori figured they definitely had some new kind of equipment. Otherwise, the remote-sensing mappers had to all be Psionic users; there was no other way to explain such absurdly accurate shells.

The position Kori was in had not even had time to set up its machine guns before artillery fire dropped from the sky and blasted clean through it, causing heavy casualties.

If this had