Chapter 744.2: Closing Arguments

After their resistance proved futile, the North Island Federation Marines ultimately chose to surrender.

Apart from Chalas' personal guards, who remained holed up inside the presidential palace, no resistance remained anywhere on North Island.

Not allowing Mutant Humans onto the island was perhaps the only decent thing Chalas had ever done. Otherwise, the situation would have been far more troublesome.

After consulting with the Southern Sea New Alliance Naval Command, the command headquarters at French Fry Harbor Military Base decided against bombing the presidential palace. Instead, ground forces would be dispatched to capture Chalas and his followers.

After Old White met up with Ample Time who had finally returned, the two quickly formulated a plan for assaulting the presidential palace. They unanimously decided to bring in another transport aircraft filled with troops from French Fry Harbor and allow the corps’ newer members to gain experience storming the building.

Chalas himself might have held considerable significance for the Southern Sea New Alliance, but to the New Alliance and the players, he was largely irrelevant.

By comparison, ensuring the safety of the local survivors and preserving the industrial facilities, especially preventing the Torch Church’s Mutant Human forces from landing, were far more important.

As for the locals’ own affairs, the New Alliance had never made a habit of interfering.

At the same time the Burning Corps occupied North Island, the North Island Federation’s fleet and the Southern Sea New Alliance fleet finally made contact. Signals from both sides appeared on one another’s radar screens, and the situation instantly became tense.

Aboard the Harpoon, Fleet Commander Wu Meng stared coldly at the signals on the radar screen and prepared to issue the order to attack. However, at that moment, a communication request arrived from the command headquarters on Peace Island.

“Can you establish contact with the communications channel of the Ocean Edge?”

Hearing Commander Li Minghui’s voice, Wu Meng paused slightly and frowned. “We can... but is that necessary?”

“Contact them!”

Wu Meng considered it for two seconds before finally nodding. “Very well.”

Once the order was issued, the communications officer began attempting to establish contact with the Ocean Edge.

However, Wu Meng did not waste the precious time merely waiting. He knew exactly what sort of person Wick was. The man was a thoroughgoing warmonger and one of Chalas' most loyal die-hard supporters. The word “surrender” simply did not exist in his dictionary. Expecting him to surrender was even less realistic than expecting Chalas to resign voluntarily.

Unless something unexpected had happened, the electromagnetic cannons on the other side were probably already charging. They might even have been aimed at him.

Wu Meng calmly ordered the fleet to enter maximum combat readiness, placing every vessel’s weapon and defensive systems on standby.

The adjutant beside him looked at him nervously. “You don’t think he’ll surrender?”

“I would actually prefer that he didn’t,” Wu Meng replied indifferently.

“Why?” The adjutant froze and looked at the captain in surprise.

Wu Meng’s expression did not change as he answered simply. “The Southern Seas needs time to recover. We can no longer afford another war. A moderate reduction in our armaments would not be a bad thing for us. On the contrary, it would do more good than harm. Otherwise, we may find ourselves dragged by our allies into another war that does not belong to us, even if their cause is just. If they truly want that thing, they can pay our shipyards to build one. As long as they provide the money and materials, our workers and engineers can construct another ship for them and let the New Alliance’s own people operate it.”

More importantly, Chalas and his followers had to be completely uprooted.

If the New Alliance interfered with their judicial process for strategic reasons, allowing the crew of the Ocean Edge to escape postwar prosecution easily, or even continue serving aboard that battleship, it could plant the seeds of an even greater disaster in the future.

Of course, that was merely his personal judgment. If the senior leadership of the Southern Sea New Alliance had other ideas, he could only keep his regrets to himself.

At the same time, far away at Peace Island Naval Command, Commander Li Minghui paced back and forth before the nautical chart.

Victory was within reach!

His palms were drenched in sweat, half from excitement and half from nervousness.

Chalas could no longer cause any trouble. Only one final naval mine remained to be defused.

That was the North Island Fleet!

Those vessels were the property of the survivors of the Southern Sea New Alliance. They had poured immense effort and sweat into building them. Losing even one would be an enormous waste! If possible, he hoped to avoid the final exchange of fire.

As long as those young men were willing to turn back, everything could still be salvaged.

He needed the Ocean Edge as leverage when dividing the postwar spoils and negotiating with the New Alliance. The residents of the Southern Sea New Alliance needed it as well!

Besides, continuing to fight was now entirely meaningless. Chalas had already lost the decisive battle. That pathetic creature was cowering inside a bunker and trembling in fear!

When contact with the bridge of the Ocean Edge was finally established, Li Minghui immediately walked over to the communications terminal. Bracing both hands against the desk, he stared at the face on the screen.

“Surrender, Wick! The Burning Corps has already landed on North Island. You’ve lost!”

Wick looked at him coldly. There was not the slightest trace of fear in his eyes, only contempt. “Coward. Traitor.”

“Traitor?” Li Minghui froze, then laughed in anger. “You helped Chalas suppress the residents of the islands. You threatened them into following your master with the cannons and shells they built for you. How do you have the nerve to call me a traitor?”

“And what about you?” Wick narrowed his eyes. “How are your actions any different from mine?”

“I have fought for them from beginning to end,” Li Minghui replied without the slightest hint of shame.

Regardless of whether greed had ever stirred within his heart, he could ask his conscience honestly and say that, at least until now, he had never crossed the line.

However, after hearing those words, Wick suddenly burst into laughter as though he had heard an exceptionally amusing joke. “Spare me your grand declarations. How much nobler do you think you are than Chalas? At least he could have brought us a brighter future! You, on the other hand, led the young men of the Southern Seas into becoming puppets of the New Alliance, expanding their territory for them!”

A brighter future? Had he seen what North Island looked like now?

Li Minghui looked at the man who remained hopelessly obsessed and clicked his tongue with pity. “Your definition of being a puppet is refusing to become Chalas' or the Torch Church’s dog? How pathetic. I suppose a dog sees nothing but dogs wherever it looks.”

The moment the words left his mouth, he regretted them. He suddenly remembered that he had come to persuade the man to surrender, not to mock him.

As expected, Wick was completely unmoved by his words. He did not even take them seriously.

Wick gently straightened the cap on his head and said without expression, “Twisting words is the specialty of politicians like you. You can turn white into black and black into white. That is your calling, not mine. There is nothing more to say. Let the battlefield decide who the winner is.”

Li Minghui’s eyes widened in shock. “Are you insane?! Can’t you see that even if you win, it won’t mean anything anymore?”

Wick was the captain of the ship. He should have understood what the current situation meant better than anyone!

“It won’t mean anything?” Wick looked at Li Minghui’s stunned expression and sneered indifferently. “Would reducing all of you to ruins count as meaning?”

As he spoke, his expression suddenly turned savage. He resembled a ferocious beast trapped inside a snare. “Don’t fucking think you can talk me into surrendering! Either we go to heaven together, or every last one of you can go to hell! I would rather destroy the Southern Seas with my own hands than let vermin like you rule it!”

It would merely be an exchange of bases! If he annihilated the Southern Sea New Alliance fleet, drove straight toward Peace Island, and captured Li Minghui and the other officers as hostages, he might still be able to save North Island! At the very least, he could use Li Minghui as a bargaining chip.

The war had reached so far, so the New Alliance could forget about remaining uninvolved. Unless it wanted to watch the settlements around the Baiyue Strait become scorched earth, it had better withdraw from North Island immediately!

Or so he thought.

Expecting him to surrender? Not a chance!

Li Minghui stared at the black screen in complete disbelief. The communications officer seated beside him looked equally stunned, though there was also a trace of speechlessness on his face.

And he thought he was qualified to wage a war of words? He should’ve let me persuade the bastard instead!

Silence filled the command center.

Li Minghui gulped once and it took him a long time to force a sentence from his dry throat. “They’ve gone mad...”

Whether it was Chalas himself or those who followed him, every one of them had gone mad.

He took two steps backward and sat down in the chair before the command table, pinching the space between his eyebrows with his thumb and index finger without speaking. There would probably be no suspense regarding what came next.

Before the operation began, they had rehearsed it countless times on the nautical chart, reducing every possible source of error to a minimum.

Still, the thought of that battleship made Li Minghui’s heart ache.

That was a battleship...

What a terrible waste.

...

A dazzling flash of white light swept across the surface of the sea, crossing layer after layer of waves like a bridge extending from the battleship Ocean Edge to the cruiser Harpoon.

Ballistics was a complicated discipline. It involved far more than simply calculating projectile motion; it required the complete design of a projectile’s entire trajectory.

To understand an electromagnetic cannon as nothing more than brute force hurling a brick would reflect a severe lack of imagination. Even during the classical era before the Prosperity Era, people had known how to equip shells with fins that changed orientation at predetermined times, along with other intelligent guidance components.

Such technology had naturally posed no difficulty during the Prosperity Era.

Bolts installed inside the rear section of a mass projectile could exploit the material’s own memory characteristics to store timing parameters. Once the projectile reached a predetermined altitude, they would release flexible tail fins folded inside the rear section, causing the shell traveling diagonally upward to follow a high-curvature arc through the air. From a macroscopic perspective, it would look as though the projectile had turned a corner in midair.

Even the warhead’s drag-reduction design belonged to the Prosperity Era. Everything from the launching apparatus to the projectile itself was a product of the times back then.

Only another creation of the Prosperity Era could resist it.

The battleship Ocean Edge fired three mass projectiles in succession. A drone flying among the clouds recorded their trajectories and focused its camera on the cruiser Harpoon.

However, the next thing that happened left everyone aboard the Ocean Edge dumbfounded.

The Harpoon did not activate a deflector shield to counter the attack as they had expected. Instead, it absorbed the strike directly with its hull.

They had intended to use the electromagnetic cannon to overload the shield capacitors, but to their surprise, the very first salvo struck cleanly on their target.

Yet incomprehensibly, when the meteor-like projectile hit the bow directly, it did not punch a hole through the cruiser’s broad prow. Instead, it glanced off and plunged into the sea!

A column of water dozens of meters high erupted into the sky. The immense kinetic energy even created an enormous cavity beneath the surface, causing the cruiser to sway violently.

On the bridge, Wu Meng steadied himself against a railing with his right hand and quickly glanced at the display.

The previous hit had depleted only 12% of the Meissner-effect armor capacitor’s energy.

Perhaps because of the armor’s angle, most of the kinetic energy had been redirected into the sea. The system’s battlefield performance appeared even more astonishing than the experimental calculations had suggested. At that rate, he could probably sail the cruiser within visual range of the enemy and remain unharmed. After all, even during the brief moment he spent marveling at the result, the shipboard reactor had already begun slowly recharging the armor capacitors.

The Ocean Edge clearly refused to believe what it had witnessed and fired another three-round salvo.

This time, their luck was unexpectedly good. Two shots struck the cruiser, while only one missed.

Seeing that the enemy was completely unable to harm his ship, Wu Meng finally relaxed.

While the Ocean Edge concentrated its attacks on the Harpoon, an anti-ship missile skimming the crests of the waves slipped through a blind spot in the destroyer Flying Fish’s point-defense system and blasted a large hole through its hull.

A breach immediately appeared in the Federation fleet’s left flank. The remaining destroyer, the Defender, was already struggling to protect itself, much less the Ocean Edge beside it.

The towering steel beast resembled a wounded lion surrounded by snarling hyenas.

The Shark Tooth, which had been lying in ambush nearby, was the first to seize the opportunity. It lunged without hesitation and launched a torpedo carrying a metallic-hydrogen warhead at the once-arrogant maritime beast.

An explosion of fire rose from the sea.

Although the torpedo was prematurely detonated by a decoy, the Shark Tooth quickly launched a second, then a third.

The other two attack nuclear submarines joined in as well.

They had been created for that very moment, and in the end, they did not betray their purpose. They sent the North Island Federation, or rather, the traitors of the Southern Sea New Alliance, to the bottom of the sea.

The sole remaining destroyer, the Defender, sensibly raised a white flag. Wu Meng, captain of the Harpoon, ordered a ceasefire and accepted the surrender of his former comrades.

Watching the ripples gradually vanish from the radar screen while the sonar contacts steadily grew larger, he sighed in relief, removed his cap, and placed it over the display before him.

“It’s finally over.”

Although the war to settle accounts with the Torch Church had not yet ended, at least they would no longer have to face those familiar faces...

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