Chapter 55: Operation Furious Dragon (Part 20)

The response of the building's garrison was remarkably swift. Almost simultaneously with the blare of the "enemy attack" alarm, a barrage of bullets came sweeping toward the speeding engineering vehicle. Dense rain poured from all directions, striking the body of the vehicle with a clattering din.

Wuyun lowered his head and slammed the accelerator all the way down. Roaring amidst the hail of bullets, the engineering vehicle surged up the steps in front of the grand building, smashing directly into the lobby and blocking the outer torrent of lead behind the doors. Taking advantage of a momentary lull in the defenders' firepower, Leidong and Wuyun swiftly flung open the doors, dashed behind a massive marble pillar, and began delivering precise, controlled single shots outward.

This series of attacks drew increasingly heavy fire. From the rooftop fortifications on the other side of the massive building, a variety of light and heavy weapons began raining fire downward.

"Execute!" Leidong roared.

Song Jinggang and Luo Haoran, who had glided in from above after shutting off their engines, had already pinpointed the enemy firing positions through the flashes of gunfire. With swift knife strokes, they severed two canopy cords, causing the lift of their paragliders to plummet drastically. Like a pair of meteors, the two men hurtled down from the sky.

Maintaining a distance of forty meters from each other in mid-air, at a height of eighty meters above the rooftop, their hands flickered continuously. They accurately hurled satchel charges—each containing fifty grams of high explosives and wrapped with eight hundred steel balls one millimeter in diameter—directly into every firing position, dense array of antennas, and radar station, immediately pressing the remote detonators afterward.

"Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—"

A continuous chain of explosions that blurred together turned the rooftop firing positions into a sea of fire. Tens of thousands of steel balls emitted a chilling, howling windstorm sound, sweeping across the rooftop with a density far exceeding a torrential rainstorm, instantly plunging the area into a chorus of miserable shrieks.

Before the explosions had completely ceased, Song Jinggang and Luo Haoran violently slapped their chests to release their parachute harnesses. The canopies billowed upward with a rush of wind, and their bodies effectively dived straight onto the rooftop. The type-32 rifles in their hands, equipped with flash suppressants, emitted continuous faint glows as the surviving enemy soldiers were struck one by one, letting out desperate death screams.

"Whoosh—" A drone that had been circling in the sky for a long time dropped a forty-kilogram bomb from an altitude of two thousand meters. Whistling through the air, it grazed past Song Jinggang's body, spinning rapidly and drilling straight down onto the rooftop.

"Damn it, are you trying to murder me?!" Amidst Song Jinggang's angry shout, the high-explosive bomb detonated with a heaven-shaking roar. A huge hole was instantly blown open in the rooftop, and the immense sound wave and shockwave made the entire building seem to sway.

Song Jinggang yelled excitedly, "Shoddy construction!" and tossed two flash-bang grenades into the hole.

With two deafening "boom" echoes, a chorus of screams erupted from deep within the building, and Song Jinggang and Luo Haoran leaped blindly into the hole.

The massive commotion on the rooftop finally made the garrison realize that, apart from the two individuals on the ground, they were also facing an assault from the skies.

"Thump, thump, thump," three illumination flares soared into mid-air, bathing the pitch-black, rain-drenched sky in a blinding white glare. Soon, the defenders spotted the two drifting, dark-colored canopies in the air. Frantic anti-air fire swept wildly toward the two canopies, forming a lethal barrage of bullets that instantly riddled the silk with holes.

However, such an attack had clearly lost its actual target; its only effect was to completely expose the locations of the anti-air firing positions. One kilometer away, Bei Shiliang stood on the rooftop of a certain building, a cold sneer playing at the corner of his mouth. Operating a military-grade laptop, he rapidly piloted the drone down to an altitude of two hundred meters. The miniature rocket pod beneath the drone's belly unleashed a trail of bright red fire-whips, instantly engulfing the anti-air positions. Twin-barrel 12.7mm heavy anti-aircraft machine guns and 25mm chain cannons were blasted into a sea of flame, and the anti-air warning radar was smashed to pieces in the furious strafing, dancing wildly in the air alongside severed limbs and body parts that kept flying upward, before crashing like raindrops onto the ground.

"Bang!" Lang Tianyu's 12.7mm sniper rifle barked. A defending soldier—who, having lost the guidance of his anti-air radar, was forced to rely on the vehicle-mounted radar of a surface-to-air missile launcher to search for targets—was struck in the head by a bullet fired from an extremely bizarre angle. His entire head burst apart, and under the massive intracranial pressure, bright red blood and grayish-white brain matter splattered in all directions.

Bei Shiliang sharply captured the position of the missile launcher. The drone whistled forward, and its second and final forty-kilogram high-explosive bomb was dropped with pinpoint accuracy. The quadruple-barrel missile launcher was blown to smithereens, and the missile warheads subsequently sympathized and detonated, creating a heaven-shaking explosion that leveled the surrounding hundreds of meters into a flat wasteland.

Bei Shiliang had no time to observe the battle results. With a hint of reluctance, he pressed a remote detonator. With an initial "boom," the drone was blown apart by internally rigged explosives into a massive fireball, disintegrating mid-air and falling toward the ground in a scattered shower of tiny fragments.

"Damn it, such a waste!" Bei Shiliang clicked his tongue. Even though it was a Minian Federal-standard "Dark Sword," destroying it just like that still made his heart ache.

However, Bei Shiliang had no time to dwell on this. Next, he needed to secure an escape route for the entire squad. To ensure foolproof success and guarantee that the squad would not be detected by enemy reinforcements, the combat plan formulated by Leidong stipulated that the battle must conclude within ten minutes of opening fire, with a retreat executed along the designated route!

Although the garrison defending the building consisted of ordinary troops rather than strictly trained elite main forces, they were still regular soldiers after all. Following the initial panic, they quickly regained their composure. Under the command of their officers, the remaining soldiers rapidly initiated a counterattack.

Two 21-caliber heavy machine guns mounted in the fortifications swung their barrels around, programmed according to emergency protocols, and spat fierce tongues of fire toward the upper elevations of the surrounding buildings. The rapidly sweeping barrage formed a web of fire in mid-air, suppressing any potential snipers and safeguarding the advance of the supporting troops. Individual combat teams deployed their skirmish lines and, employing a "Hellfire" method, fired uninterruptedly into the building, their overwhelming firepower blanketing the entire lobby.

Behind them, two general-purpose machine guns executed rolling barrage suppression, the points of impact creeping forward step by step to cover the advancing troops. Grenade operators planted their grenade launchers on the ground to deliver plunging fire, pumping thirty-five-millimeter grenades into the lobby one after another as if ammunition were free.

"Not bad!" Whether it was the sound offensive formation, the effective deployment of firepower, the officers' command, or the soldiers' coordination, everything had a fluid, effortless feel that drew a nod of genuine admiration from Leidong. If the enemy weren't clearly holding back out of concern for the building's structural integrity—fearing excessive damage or friendly fire casualties within the structure, and thus daring not to use heavy artillery—it really would have been somewhat troublesome.

Yet Leidong had no intention of clashing head-on with these soldiers. The squad's mission was destruction—frantic destruction. "Today, let me show you what true special operations look like!"