Chapter 63: Skeletons Specifically Used for Clearing Mines

"Alright, brothers, another mission is up! Report in if you got the assignment, and let's coordinate how to tackle this next!"

Right after accepting the mission, the players immediately started discussing how to handle it in the chat area. To be honest, most players were still quite unfamiliar with how to fight mages.

After all, mages rarely made an appearance in standard gunfight games.

Although Battlefield already had its fair share of supernatural hackers and all sorts of bizarre, outrageous Easter eggs, the existence of a mage was simply too overpowered.

Some were even discussing and pondering why the game developers had introduced mages into this game in the first place, trying to figure out how this mechanic was balanced.

Watching them discuss this, Andre almost lost his composure.

Seriously, he was also baffled as to why there were mages in this world.

If he could figure out the mages' mechanics, figure out how to balance and counter them, that would be fantastic!

Unfortunately, up until now, the intelligence he had gathered indicated only that the Black Eagle Empire had specialized academies training mages, while the traditional mages of the Cambrian Empire had fled to parts unknown.

So far into the war, all he had seen were enemy spellcasters; he had never once laid eyes on spell support from his own side!

While the players were busy discussing and secretly sneaking off to the rear warehouse serving as a shop to purchase new equipment, the opposing Black Eagle army continued its relentless advance.

Massive waves of skeleton soldiers, led by a small contingent of necromantic troops, pressed forward steadily, setting off landmine after landmine.

Seeing so many mines detonating, Andre wore a look of mild surprise on his face.

It wasn't for any other reason than the fact that he hadn't expected his players to plant so many landmines in such a short amount of time!

Before this, he had been entirely preoccupied with studying the players' trench-digging antics, completely unaware that aside from digging trenches, they had also planted a whole bunch of landmines behind the town.

Considering how casually those players had planted the mines, he couldn't help breaking out in a cold sweat for his fellow allied brothers.

It was purely thanks to the fact that other allied troops passing through hadn't stepped on the mines, or perhaps because the system registered them as allies and spared them from the blasts.

Otherwise, had those been real mines, a careless step by his allies during their previous charge on the bridgehead position would have resulted in heavy casualties.

The attention of the Black Eagle troops was almost entirely captivated by the minefield before them and the scout players occasionally poking their heads out to fire shots.

Consequently, their covering fire never ceased; the prominent buildings on the edge of the town had been practically blasted to pieces by continuous machine-gun and artillery fire.

The Cambrian soldiers defending near those houses had already fallen back. Although they suffered some casualties, their retreat went fairly smoothly thanks to the pre-excavated passages.

The advice Andre had given earlier—telling them to breach the walls connecting the courtyards—was evidently paying off now.

Had they followed standard procedures, they would have had to run out into the street before fleeing backward, at which point they would have been shredded by enemy artillery and machine guns long ago.

As it stood, however, they only needed to let the front houses take the beating, sprint directly to the back, and escape straight through the windows along the courtyards.

One had to admit, the artillery support of these Black Eagle forces was truly rigid.

Although their shells landed with great accuracy, their firepower failed to extend further back. Perhaps they assumed that because no enemies were running out into the streets, the foe must still be hiding inside the houses.

Of course, it was also possible that they only had two cannons left, making their firepower rather insufficient.

Having waded through the minefield all the way, who knew how many of those skeleton soldiers had been blown to smithereens, but the remaining skeletons still swarmed forward like a tidal wave.

At that moment, a player lying prone not far away suddenly activated a device in his hand. Accompanied by a loud roar, two bombs detonated simultaneously on either side of the street, their shockwave instantly sweeping away a whole batch of skeleton soldiers.

"Awesome! The kill count is flying off the charts!"

Glancing at that player's comment, Andre felt a slight urge to remind him that this wave of explosions hadn't actually generated any points at all, because blowing up those skeleton soldiers didn't grant any extra merits.

Don't ask why that was the case—Andre wanted to know himself!

He noticed that these shattered skeletons didn't generate any influence values for him either; it was a total waste of explosives!

Whether it was because these skeletons were already dead and thus defaulted by the system as corpses that couldn't exert influence on the world, he couldn't be sure.

Either way, from what he could see now, when people died in this world, they really didn't rest in peace.

Despite suffering the explosion and having a massive area cleared out instantly, the subsequent skeleton soldiers still swarmed up in droves, pouring into the surrounding houses one after another.

Nobody knew how these skeleton soldiers were controlled, but they actually raised their hands and fired the two pistols clutched tightly in their grips.

Charging blindly forward, the skeleton soldiers' first reaction was to kick open a door and start shooting wildly with both pistols into the room, their actions exceedingly crude and violent.

And these crude, violent skeleton soldiers naturally suffered massive casualties the moment they entered.

Before leaving, the scout players had set up plenty of tripwire-connected improvised explosive devices inside the rooms.

Such little tricks had been popular on battlefields since the First World War, cropped up frequently across various theaters during the Second World War, and proved equally applicable in this otherworld today.

The skeleton soldiers kicking open the doors instantly triggered the tripwires, and the next second, they were blown heavily into the air.

Although these skeletons possessed no flesh or blood, they didn't seem particularly sturdy either; blasted by the explosives, they instantly fell apart into scattered fragments of bone, losing their ability to move again.

Yet as cannon fodder, skeletons had no fear of such losses; as long as they found the opportunity to kill enough people, the Black Eagle army could immediately churn out a fresh batch of skeletons.

Thus, even though skeleton soldiers kept running into traps one after another, the skeletons in the rear continued pouring into those rooms endlessly, showing not the slightest intention of stopping.

"Commander, it looks like the Cambrians have retreated from the frontmost street. They've left a large number of traps here, but everyone has vanished!"

A necromancer soldier ran over to report to the necromancer in the rear.

However, that necromancer frowned.

"That's not right. They just left a few traps and then bolted without a trace? That doesn't sound like the style of the Cambrian military."

"I clearly remember their commanders were all a bunch of stubborn fools who would cling to their positions to the death and refuse to let go?"