Chapter 44: When Giants Collide

Amidst the smoke and dust, Xiang Shan came to a halt. The dust kicked up by the heavy, fallen wreckage of the outer armor rapidly expanded like a storm.

Within a range of hundreds of meters, he had no need to worry about being "sniped." The fine dust particles could block or scatter electromagnetic waves across most frequency bands.

Judging from the trajectory captured by his vision just a moment ago, the opponent could not possibly be at sniper points A or D among the four locations.

Only sniper points B and C remained.

However, he could not afford to choose the wrong one. Those two sniper points did not lie on a straight line with him. If he made the wrong choice, it would cost him about ten more seconds.

He had to take a risk and "measure" the bullet with greater precision.

When his vision was obscured, Xiang Shan inevitably fell into a panic. This was a surviving instinct of the biological brain. For primitive organisms reliant on sight, losing vision meant losing the ability to acquire food and evade predators.

—Do not panic...

Xiang Shan understood how perilous his next move would be. If his luck was bad, he would lose his hard-earned prosthetic body. If his luck was even worse, he would take a bullet straight to the head.

—Trust the martial arts algorithm...

Martial arts was the crystallization of human wisdom. It existed within metal filaments and semiconductors. It was transmitted at the speed of light.

His limbs also received signals at the speed of light.

Compared to the speed of light, the speed of a bullet was not worth mentioning.

The reason humans could not swat a fly was that a fly was small enough for nerve signals to travel from sensory organs to signal-processing structures and then to motor terminals in an extremely short time. In reality, the transmission speed of arthropod nerve signals was very slow, reaching at most one meter per second.

If a fly were scaled up to the size of one meter, and you touched its hind leg, it would only feel it a second or more later.

Vertebrates, on the other hand, possessed myelin sheaths formed of lipids wrapping their nerves, allowing electrical signals within the nerves to travel at hundreds of meters per second—a hundred times faster than insects.

Even in the Carboniferous period, when Earth's oxygen concentration was at its highest, the size of insects hovered between one and two meters. The oxygen content of the Cretaceous period was a full ten percent lower than that of the Carboniferous, yet dinosaurs easily broke this size limit, charging toward extremes of thirty to forty meters. This was because the nerve conduction speed of arthropods was far too low; once their body size exceeded one meter, their reactions became sluggish.

Pterosaurs of the same era could use their overwhelming physical strength and reaction speed to drive giant insects to extinction.

And now, a martial artist's reactions were controlled by electrical signals darting through metal-based nerves. This speed was even faster than the nerves of myelinated chordates.

—I can see it... I can do it...

—If that gunman fires a bullet the moment I land, that bullet will arrive here at a fixed time. Even if I cannot be certain which of the two sniper points it comes from, the bullet will still arrive within a "window" lasting several milliseconds...

Within this window of several milliseconds, there must exist a microsecond of time that would allow the bullet to fall right between his two fingers.

Perhaps caught between life and death, Xiang Shan once again recalled everything he had learned in the past...

The internal lenses of his prosthetic eyes expanded, switching to infrared and far-infrared vision.

Discard all stray thoughts, discard all desires, discard all instincts...

Within his field of vision, a glowing red "dot" suddenly appeared!

Here it comes!

Xiang Shan pushed off the ground with both legs, leaping backward while using two fingers to pinch that "red, super-heated object."

Scorching metal flowed between his fingers. The speed of this bullet was unquestionably far greater than the ablation rate of the bullet's material. The heat generated by air friction could not be completely dissipated through contact with the air. Xiang Shan retreated at a speed slightly lower than that of the bullet, using the high-frequency oscillating vocalizer on his fingertips and the pressure-sensitive elements on his wrists to sense the force of the projectile.

—Trajectory... precise trajectory... The stronghold is at C!

Fury poured into his engines. Xiang Shan burst forth in a wild dash!

Bullet after bullet landed before Xiang Shan. He stepped as though traversing an avenue paved with heavenly fire.

First was the four-hundred-meter stretch obscured by dust, free of any sniping.

Then came the three-hundred-meter stretch where the opponent had yet to readjust.

Next was the four-hundred-meter stretch of calibrated fire.

A full thousand meters were thus crossed safely.

Four kilometers away, Gilliard clenched his teeth. He realized something was wrong. That fellow was also an expert. He had not merely just acquired a martial arts algorithm; he was immensely familiar with martial arts algorithms and equally familiar with gunnery. He knew what kind of strategic combinations gunnery tactics would employ.

For gunnery, "distance" was "advantage." Of course, "distance" and "advantage" were not always directly proportional.

At the "extreme range" of seven to five kilometers, the advantage of gunnery was immeasurable. But beyond four kilometers, as the distance closed, gunnery martial artists would gradually lose this advantage, because at this close range, high-precision prosthetic eyes could directly observe the muzzle of his gun.

The enemy did not need to be faster than the bullet, nor did he even need to move faster than the muzzle, because at this range, it took at least several seconds for a bullet to leave the barrel and reach its target. Yet light projected that information onto prosthetic eyes in less than a ten-thousandth of a second. For a cyber-martial artist, this process was no more difficult than a rhythm game or parkour game.

As the distance closed, the opponent would only see clearer and clearer.

Only within a hundred meters would the gunnery martial artist reclaim the advantage. Although simple electrical signals could travel at the speed of light, the biological brain's nerve signals, the calculation process, and the physical response of the prosthetic hardware all required time. By then, the reaction time left to the melee martial artist was practically zero.

Close-quarters combat skills could only reclaim an "absolute advantage" within the range of one meter.

The moment their gazes collided, Gilliard understood that the opponent had entered a relative safety zone. The ground no longer obstructed his line of sight, and the light refraction caused by uneven atmosphere had reached a point where computers could correct it.

Gilliard continued to fire bullets one after another, creating a "suppressive" effect to limit the enemy's advance speed. At the same time, a two-meter-tall iron box standing behind him popped open, releasing hundreds of drones less than ten centimeters thick, swarming out like a dense cloud of bees.

The drones that had already gone far away were too late to be recalled. Drones of this construction simply could not keep up with the running speed of a martial artist. To a high-speed moving martial artist, they were virtually standing still.

The next battlefield for the decisive showdown would be at the "Golden Hundred Meters."

So, time to redeploy the drones...

Xiang Shan observed his enemy. From afar, he watched the countless drones scatter in all directions and saw a tank leap down from a mountain of metal.

That truly was a tank, yet it was a tank with an exceptionally tall turret. The lower half of that gunnery martial artist had been replaced by a pair of caterpillar tracks with seven pairs of road wheels, while his upper half resembled a turret, completely covered by heavy armor plates. His shoulders rose far higher than his head, and the arms extending from his shoulders had been replaced with a multi-barreled rotary machine gun and a cannon... No, wait, upon closer inspection, on the outer sides of the gun barrel and cannon barrel, a pair of heavily modified "arms" could still be seen. They looked more like the working arms of construction machinery, complete with shields and fully transformed into heavy armor to counter close-quarters attacks from melee experts.

Xiang Shan had read Leif's memories.

"Chain-Missile" Gilliard, leader of the Greenwood stronghold "Organization Z," ranked 98th on the Greenwood Tiger Roll, the "Earth Wicked Star"...

This was a man who killed without blinking.

—He is actively closing the distance... Of course. For a cyber-martial artist, climbing vertically sheer walls with bare hands is not difficult. And his prosthetic structure dictates that he cannot effectively fire upon enemies on the wall below him. Given the heavy armor he wears, the probability of him concurrently practicing Tank Dao or Chariot Fist within military martial arts is extremely high. On an elevated platform, those martial arts styles have no room to display their might...

Xiang Shan thought as he dodged oncoming bullets with the grace of a dancer.

Gilliard's objective was to seize the "final hundred meters"... the hundred meters where gunnery held the greatest advantage over close-quarters combat!

He wanted those "hundred meters" to take place in the terrain most suited for him to perform.

—The distance right now is... two thousand meters...

Never mind, accelerate.

Although for every ten meters he advanced, Xiang Shan would lose several microseconds of reaction time—after a bullet left the barrel, the light of the event would strike Xiang Shan's prosthetic eyes first, and less than a second later, the bullet would appear before him.

The closer he got, the shorter the gap between light and the bullet would become, and the more perilous it would be.

It was just like a rhythm game where the markers fell faster and faster.

And in this "game," the price of a "Miss" was "death."

Yet, there was no other choice. Xiang Shan was not equipped with long-range weapons; to defeat this enemy, he had to enter the range where close-quarters combat skills could take effect.

When narrow roads meet, the brave prevail!

Facing this accelerating enemy, a grim smile squeezed out from beneath Gilliard's mask as he raised a cannon barrel he had yet to use. Like a man hoisting a banner, he lifted the cannon barrel diagonally upward.

Gilliard felt the only blood vessels he possessed expanding. This sensation hadn't occurred for quite some time.

Because he could not acquire the energy core of a fission reactor, he could not compress and ionize air to fire it, nor could he use laser weapons; he was restricted to solid artillery shells. And such shells naturally had a limit on ammunition capacity. Gilliard could only carry ten artillery shells.

Yet a martial artist was not facing a "war." In a one-on-one duel, ten shells were more than enough.

Under prosthetic bodies of equivalent specifications, no one could withstand a single artillery shell.

A gleaming golden metal shell roared out through the air. The moment the shell left the barrel, Xiang Shan violently altered his course to the left, carving a 120-degree arc across the ground to distance himself from the shell as much as possible. Yet at that exact instant, Gilliard fired the second artillery shell he had just reloaded.

The two shells slammed into the mountains of garbage. Immediately followed a violent explosion. Flames carrying massive amounts of unburnable wreckage surged into the sky. Two shockwaves erupted simultaneously from both the left and right sides.