Industrial Cthulhu, starting from the island lord

Chapter 538 The Final Mission
"Captain Hodge Company"

Hodge waved his hand: "I'm just going ahead. The white mist has closed in, and this is the last thing we can do."

The train conductor gritted his teeth and replied in a low voice, "Okay."

The whistle sounded, its long and short notes carrying the message.

Hodge walked toward his men.

"Guys, I have a task, and I need some manpower!"

"Is it dangerous?" a young man asked with a grin, which drew laughter.

Hodge was the highest-ranking officer in the area, but instead of giving orders directly, he came to inquire. Everyone already had a guess about what kind of mission it was.

Hodge laughed too: "It's not dangerous, but you have to be loud. I'm planning to go into the white fog and see if I can find some people to go with me."

"That's good. We thought we were going to help Miss Gwen change her magazine." The soldiers stood up and then looked at each other.

No one retreated, no one hesitated, and Gwen's machine gun fire never stopped. They had been holding their breath for a long time, wanting to prove Castell's courage to this resistance lady.

Hodge looked around and, finding no one objecting, simply started calling out names.

“I’ll go in first and shout out whatever I see. Then Blue, you go in after my voice disappears and continue gathering intelligence. Then Milo, Lawson, and Huff. Oh, and Ash, please cover for us then.”

As they disembarked from the train, they would inevitably face a wave of bones. They were not afraid of death, but they worried that the news would not get out.

“No problem,” Ash said in a deep voice.

Soon, a small squad of expeditionary soldiers stepped off the train, led by Hodge himself, with Ash following at a distance, her eerie eyes occasionally scanning the nearby monsters.

The white fog had already gotten much closer. No matter how dense the bullets were, there were always some skeletons that couldn't be killed in time. The fog was slowly squeezing inward, and before long, they would all perish in the white disaster.

The machine gun on the roof cleared a path for Hodge and his men, and they successfully reached the edge of the white fog. Hodge licked his lips, looked at the white fog not far away, gritted his teeth, and prepared to rush in.

But then he heard the voices of his comrades behind him.

"team leader!"

"what happened?"

"The siren is sounding again. Is it coming from outside? Should we listen to it first?"

Hodge nodded, then hurriedly pulled out his notebook and jotted down the sound of the steam whistle.

The long and short whistles of the steamer transmitted messages in Morse code. Hodge wrote letters stroke by stroke in his notebook and then pieced them together into words.

"Don't go in! Reinforcements are coming right away!"

"Hmm, reinforcements? Reinforcements? What reinforcements? They can't get into the white fog anyway."

"Captain, Captain, look!!!" A soldier's distorted scream came from behind.

Hodge paused for a moment, looked around, and saw nothing unusual. Just as he was about to ask a question, he suddenly felt darkness fall beside him.

A huge shadow blocked out the sun and enveloped the earth. He sensed something, slowly raised his head, and then his body began to tremble.

With its enormous, oval-shaped body, ferocious teeth, and bloodshot eyes brimming with savagery, its very presence serves as a deterrent to any enemy.

But at this moment, the people of the expeditionary force only felt excited.

Airship, it's Castel's airship!
The white fog was like an insurmountable wall, leaving mortals to sigh in despair before it, but the airship soared high in the sky and floated over the white fog!
"Damn it, how could I forget this?" Hodge's eyes lit up with surprise, and Castell's expeditionary force began to cheer.

The attacks of the surrounding skeletal monsters paused for a moment. They all looked up at the sky, then turned to look at the train and launched an incredibly frenzied attack!
The bomb bay doors on the airship opened, and the machine guns below opened fire first.

No orders were needed; Hodge's team knew what to do. They immediately turned and rushed toward the train, while Ash stood up, his six hands firing in all directions to provide cover.

The skeletal monsters' offensive far surpassed any previous one. As if they had also realized that these people wanted to escape, they charged forward recklessly, turning the originally continuous tide of attacks into a tsunami!
“These monsters are definitely being commanded by someone. That shit-eating horse-faced fish, I’ll drag him out of the white fog sooner or later!” Hodge led his soldiers and struggled toward the train.

Three airships entered. One slowly descended while firing machine guns, while the other two dropped bombs from a distance.

Aerial bombs are far more lethal than machine guns, but it is difficult to precisely control the kill range, so bombs can only be dropped from the periphery to reduce the pressure on the expeditionary force.

Soon, the airship reached a distance close to the ground and then dropped a rope ladder down.

The landing of an airship requires a certain hard ground. If there is no hard ground, a safe environment with more cables for securing it would also work, but none of these conditions can be met here.

If the airship were to actually land on the ground, it would block the firing range of the machine guns on the train. They are already struggling to resist the skeletal horde, and if the skeletal horde were to destroy the airship, they would be doomed.

"Quick, get on the airship, quick!"

Hodge directed the soldiers to climb the rope ladders one by one. The rope ladders had a weight limit, and after a group of soldiers climbed up, the people on the airship would pull the rope ladder up while throwing down a new one.

The skeletal horde struggled forward under the roar of machine guns, and soon the dragon breath cannons on the roof of the vehicle began to fire—the effective range of this weapon was within a hundred meters.

Fortunately, most of the soldiers had already been evacuated using rope ladders.

"Gwen, get up there! You're not needed here anymore!"

"No, the skeletons on the right side can't be defended without me. Your machine gun firepower is far inferior to mine, so I have to hold this position!"

"You go up first, you can fire from the airship!"

"No, if I leave for even a moment, the horde of bones will come charging at us!"

With fewer soldiers, the firepower on the train inevitably weakened, and the airship's main attack method was still bombing, with few machine gun positions, so the ground battle began to falter.

Hodge glanced anxiously at Gwen, then looked at the distant mass of bones.

He knew Gwen was right, but his orders before departure were to protect Gwen's safety; any later and they might not be able to get on the airship!
“Gwen, listen to me, there’s still a lot of explosives in the car. Lord Ash just threw them around outside. We’ll detonate them and then take the opportunity to go up!”

Gwen glanced at the skeletons around her and frowned. "It doesn't seem like it will work."

"We have no choice but to give it a shot!"

(End of this chapter)