After a full day of brutal training, the players had successfully mastered parachuting from thousands of meters high and landing steadily within a hundred-meter error margin of their target. As for whether the successful landing was a hard or soft one, and whether they would survive… that was entirely up to luck.
At this moment, this squad of airborne players was inside a Valkyrie assault transport aircraft. The cabin was narrow and dim, the metal skin cold and hard, and the air was filled with a composite smell of oil, sweat, and gunpowder.
Even within this thick armor, one could hear the sharp whistling of bullets or energy beams occasionally passing by outside, or the 'bang bang' of impacts, and the crackling friction of energy streams.
Each sound was accompanied by a slight jolt of the aircraft, as the pilot, Archer, dodged sporadic ground fire with extremely precise and fluid movements.
However, the players in the cabin seemed oblivious; they were chatting and laughing, completely devoid of the tension of being in a battlefield. Some leaned against the cabin wall, idly picking at their nails, while others enthusiastically shared interesting stories from last night, with relaxed smiles on their faces.
A player extended a finger and lightly tapped the arm of Darius Top Laner beside him with his knuckle, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, his tone a bit teasing: "Whether this operation succeeds or not depends on you, Obesetron."
"Go to hell!" Darius snapped, swatting away the hand. His face, slightly swollen from years of staying up late, was etched with annoyance. "Damn it, who the hell gave me the nickname Obesetron?!"
The other players burst into laughter at his words, some even bending over with mirth, pointing at him and joking: "Who told you to voluntarily implant a tactical nuclear bomb in your body?"
"Just say whether it's fitting or not, a fat guy plus a little boy," another added, prompting another round of laughter in the cabin, filling the air with cheer.
Just then, Archer's voice, with a hint of static, came through the intercom in the cabin: "Get ready, we're almost at the destination."
Then, a barely perceptible hint of amusement entered his voice: "Especially Darius, don't make a mistake and accidentally activate the tactical nuclear bomb early, turning into an aerial firework."
Laughter in the cabin immediately grew louder, with some players even slapping their thighs, tears almost streaming down their faces from laughing. Darius' face, however, flushed with anger.
He slammed his hand against the cabin wall and loudly protested: "I told you I'd inject myself with Ice Point Solution beforehand, can you guys stop laughing?!"
"Cabin attention, I'm opening the hatch. 3, 2, 1..." Archer's voice came again.
With a violent whoosh, the hatch slowly opened to both sides, instantly tearing through the dim light in the cabin. A cold and wild gust of air rushed in, bringing with it the biting chill unique to high altitudes. All the players' hair and clothes were blown backward. Through the hatch, they saw the pitch-black night sky outside and the blurred outline of the city lights below.
As players on their first combat mission, no matter how playful they had been before, they couldn't help but take a deep breath now, trying to alleviate the tension welling up inside them.
Darius, even more so, unhesitatingly pulled out a syringe containing a light blue liquid, which shimmered under the cold cabin lights, and then directly injected it into his left arm. His muscles tensed instantly but quickly relaxed.
"How does it feel to have your veins full of sedatives?" another player's voice came.
"Very good, I'm very calm now," Darius' voice became low and steady, as if devoid of any emotional fluctuation. He felt all his emotions, including tension, anger, and even the previous playful banter, recede like a tide, disappearing without a trace, leaving only a mechanical-like mindset focused on how to complete the mission.
"Why is your head pointy?"
"Get lost!"
"You can jump!" Archer's command came, and the players unhesitatingly leaped out of the hatch, their bodies tracing arcs in the air like meteors, plummeting rapidly towards the ground.
The whistling wind immediately drowned out all other sounds. The genestealer cult on the ground had evidently spotted them, and sporadic anti-aircraft fire began to shoot upwards.
However, the anti-aircraft methods of the genestealers were pitifully few, consisting only of some live ammunition or energy beams, which appeared sparse and weak in the vast night sky. Unless their luck was exceptionally bad, no one would be hit.
Everyone watched the ground nervously, eyes unblinking, silently calculating the distance, ready to deploy their gravity parachutes at any moment. Their bodies were taut, muscles poised for action.
Just then, a laser beam streaked past, and an earth-shattering explosion immediately erupted next to the players. The orange-red flames instantly illuminated the surrounding night sky, accompanied by a scorching blast of air. Everyone was startled, their hearts sinking: Had Darius been hit, and the nuclear bomb detonated too early?!
The players immediately looked in Darius' direction, only to find him completely unharmed, descending in a standard posture. Darius also looked towards the source of the sound, only to see a rapidly dissipating cloud of smoke in that direction; that brother had already turned into a scattered shower of sparks in the air.
"Who pulled the gravity parachute cord so fast?!" Archer's exasperated voice, tinged with a helpless sigh, echoed in everyone's minds through the communicator. "See, you got picked off by a sharpshooter, didn't you? How many times have I emphasized this problem? I thought none of you would make that mistake again you noobs!"
However, the players had no time to respond, as they had already reached the distance where they had to deploy their gravity parachutes. Almost simultaneously, everyone seized the moment and decisively pulled their cords.
The gravity parachutes deployed in the air, and the immense buffering force made their bodies jolt violently, but this time there were no issues; everyone successfully stabilized themselves in the air, and their descent speed abruptly slowed.
Just as everyone had breathed a sigh of relief, a piercing scream came from the side. They looked over to see a player with a bowl-sized charred hole in his waist, evidently just struck by a laser weapon, the wound still emitting an nauseating black smoke.
"I forgot to turn off my gun's safety..." That player left only this desperate last word before his gravity parachute, having lost control, swayed violently and crashed towards the ground like a plummeting weight.
"...My goodness, how can there be such a gem?" Archer, aboard the Valkyrie, naturally also received this message.
Fortunately, there were no further errors. Although the closer they got to the ground, the denser and more frantic the genestealer cult's anti-aircraft fire became, with energy beams and live ammunition weaving into a net, attempting to intercept these enemies descending from the sky, the players consciously controlled their gravity parachutes.
In a tacit understanding, they gathered around Darius, acting as human shields, blocking most of the firepower for him.
Thus, even though players were constantly hit during the process, losing control of their gravity parachutes or having their bodies directly torn apart, plummeting like broken kites, Darius remained unharmed. He was tightly protected in the center by his teammates, watching everything with an expressionless face.
When they were only five hundred meters from the ground, the last player covering Darius was hit by a thick energy beam.
His body trembled violently in the air, and half of his body instantly carbonized. However, with his last ounce of strength, he laboriously waved his other intact arm towards Darius, who was still descending, and shouted with all his might: "Go, Fat boye!"
Then, he fell to the ground. From a height of just a few thousand meters, only Darius remained of the dozen airborne players, descending alone in the sky.
And Darius, under the influence of the Ice Point Solution, remained absolutely calm. His eyes showed no fluctuation, only coldly watching the ground rapidly approaching him, and the vaguely visible genestealers positions squirming in the lights below.
Finally, he saw his target—a magnificent hall constructed of marble-like material, glowing with an eerie light in the night, the core of the genestealer cult's nest. Darius seemed to also see several unusually large units, which, realizing the danger, were frantically trying to crawl out of the hall's cracks, attempting to escape.
But Darius didn't pay them any mind. He knew that at this distance, they would absolutely not escape the explosion radius of the tactical nuclear bomb.
With a thought, he activated the tactical nuclear bomb embedded within his body.