Codegease: Air and Land Warfare 1946

“I didn’t expect them to actually follow the painting one by one.” Harrington looked up and followed Philip to see the white paint on the geisha’s face. “Like a clown, they just stick their heads into a bucket of white paint, and that’s how the makeup is done.”

“Hey, who do you think you are, bro? I’ve worked in a circus before.” Hearing this, Philip got excited. “Do you know how meticulous the work is every time I finish painting my face white and then use a black pen to draw my eyes and lips in front of the mirror? I’m not some witch who deserves to be burned at the stake!”

"Come on, let's see who should be burned at the stake and settle this with a fight." Several dishes had already been served while they were arguing. Davis held the knives and forks in their fists and presented them to the two men.

……

"Not too bad. The Japanese soldiers I saw in the Philippines only had plain white rice and vegetable scraps in their mess boxes. It seems the Japanese here are living quite well." Harrington finally smiled a little as he put a few bites of rice balls with seaweed and eel into his mouth with his fork. Indeed, good food is the best way to heal the soul.

"Worse than the Germans?" Garcia had seen Hans' milk and canned food that was even worse than Spam luncheon meat during the Sicilian airborne operation and Operation Market Garden. "So the ones who bombed Pearl Harbor five years ago were just a bunch of starving ghosts who were still eating white rice and vegetables?"

Of course, this was the only knowledge that frontline soldiers had about the Japanese army's food. Garcia didn't know, nor did Harrington, as a land-based airman, know that the Japanese army had a mobile hotel full of big fish and meat, which was sunk by an American aircraft carrier on its way to Okinawa in the last year of the war.

“Oh right, that’s not the worst of it. Do you know what it was like when we took Guadalcanal?” Harrington continued. “We left no survivors. In the end, it was those starving, skin-and-bones Japanese who ate wild fruits and swallowed frogs who built a small mountain of their own corpses. Hahaha.”

Seeing Harrington's increasingly relaxed expression, Davis breathed a sigh of relief—what could be better than helping those tormented by the nightmare of war escape it? What Harrington could do, Taylor could do someday too.

At this moment, the restaurant brought them two small plates of sashimi. Davis flipped through the comic book and, following the details drawn in it, dipped a piece of raw chicken in the soy sauce, put it in his mouth with a fork, but couldn't help spitting it out.

"Hahahaha! Come on, let me try!" Seeing Davis make a fool of himself, Philip rolled up his sleeves and came to take the challenge. This time he chose sashimi from another plate, but as soon as he put it in his mouth, he cried out in pain, "Dad!"

However, while everyone was laughing and joking around the sashimi and getting drunk, Harrington's expression grew increasingly grim.

"What's this thing called, boss?"

"Sashimi. It's when you slaughter a cow, chicken, or fish, and then eat the meat raw without cooking it over a fire," Philip told him, pulling the comic book over to look at it.

“Freshly killed… eaten raw?…” At this point, Harrington’s hands suddenly trembled, and the knife and fork fell from his fingers and clattered onto the plate.

"What's wrong? Do you mean the Japanese in the Pacific don't eat meat?" Garcia asked, noticing his strange expression.

“Of course we have to eat meat…” Amidst the astonished gazes of the crowd, Harrington stood up uneasily, a look of fear and bewilderment on his face. “But on Guadalcanal, there are no animals to eat besides people…”

In an instant, Harrington convulsed as if electrocuted, vomited a mouthful of sour paste, and collapsed to the floor, staring blankly at the plate of sashimi. The entire restaurant was horrified by this sight.

The soldiers rushed over to check. Could the food be poisoned? This was terrible!

The shopkeeper was terrified to see Imperial soldiers in trouble there. He kept bowing and apologizing while hurriedly dialing the emergency number. It shouldn't be anything serious, right? At least Harrington could barely say a few "yes" and "no"s when he was lifted into the ambulance. But just as they were about to rush back to the hospital, Schreiber, who had been quietly observing from the shadows, rushed out with several special operations team members.

While threatening the paramedics with a gun, he searched all of Harrington's pockets and finally stripped him of his coat before letting the ambulance go. Davis and the other two were also detained on the spot.

"Hey, you like taking off men's clothes so much, why hasn't the Führer sent you, this SS member who's dragging us down, to the crematorium yet?" It was the Germans again coming to cause trouble. Philipp immediately took off his clothes one by one, and even prepared to unbuckle his belt, throw off his pants, and then come back up for a passionate kiss.

"Scheisse!" Schreiber kicked him to the ground and pointed the gun at Davis.

"I don't care whether the special operations team received a job from Lord Suzaku, nor do I care whether Princess Marybell assigned you any tasks, but today, we're really here to eat."

Schreiber flipped through the comic book Davis had thrown at him, then angrily ran to the store's trash can and carefully searched through Harrington's vomit, only stopping when he was sure they weren't up to any tricks.

……

After a long, stressful day, he returned empty-handed, and he was incredibly annoyed. As night fell, Schreiber and a few of his thugs grabbed a passing District 11 man by the guardrail of a highway on a hillside and beat him up to vent their anger.

At that moment, he suddenly received a call from the entire Tokyo Concession—just two minutes earlier, the naval ammunition depot in the Osaka Concession had exploded, and in the past, the Special Operations Team had never sent the Black Heaven Messenger to that city to cause trouble.

"Americans! And British!" Schreiber, unable to find any clues from the agents, angrily relayed the message to his fellow special forces members. Meanwhile, Karlstadt was having a friendly conversation with Suzaku and Nunnally, Gunther was indulging in his womanly compassion amidst the laughter of children in a German civilian neighborhood, and Henrik? He was serving as the warden of the remote West Ice Cave.

"Useless! A bunch of useless trash!" In utter disappointment, Schreiber stomped on the face of the dying Japanese man on the ground a few more times with the sole of his shoe, and then threw him off the cliff.

"If you won't do it, I'll do it myself!" Composing himself, he grinned maliciously at his henchmen, pointing his thumb down at the waterworks that connected the entire Tokyo concession. "You should know where the Americans and British are hiding, right? You also understand that it's better to kill a thousand innocent people than let one guilty person go free, right?"

Chapter 400 Beyond the Sky of Pendraken I: Ancient Times - Cataclysm

Dr. Ron is the head of the 45th District portal system and a high-ranking official in its governing body, the "Eternal Protocol." He is also the person in this organization who is closest to the 45th District Expeditionary Force and is the most trusted by the soldiers.

Of course, he had a lot of previous experimental records. As someone who loved listening to old stories, Elizabeth naturally went to him: after all, District 45 was the first other world that the Empire had decided to send troops to, and before that, there must have been many abandoned proposals.

“I know it’s difficult for you to open the door to the right world.” Dr. Ron said with a respectful smile as he wrote at his desk, watching the princess accept the large stack of documents he handed her.

"Oh, so before this you didn't even have a world you could normally enter..." According to the records here, every time the door was opened, the team on site encountered thunderstorms, high temperatures, floods, or freezing cold from another world. The harsh environment even directly destroyed the activation device of the portal.

“Those who tinker with explosives in the workshop, those who study viruses in the microbiology lab, are just like us. You never know when they might kick the bucket.” The doctor gave a strained smile, tinged with bitter tears. “They’re sacrificing themselves for science.”

"Then you, like my soldiers, are among the most beloved people in the empire." The princess chuckled, but also felt a pang of pity, so she simply jumped directly into the world they had successfully sent people into for the first time.

……

It was midday in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, Britannia. Amidst the cheers of the Eternal Protocol team, the hundred-square-meter area in front of the portal was finally free from the ravages of natural disasters.

Then came the first guinea pig—person A, equipped with a pistol, an oxygen tube, and a communication cable, and dressed in what looked like a red spacesuit. Amidst everyone's tense prayers, he successfully crossed into another world.

This is the most dangerous position in the R&D team because no one knows what exactly is on the other side of the world. In order to save the team money on manufacturing remote-controlled robots, this position was initially filled by serious criminals or desperate beggars.

"Calling Red A to report the status on the other side of the portal. Over."

"Oh, reporting to Your Excellency." The man in red on the other end of the radio was both excited and incredulous—he had stepped into the desert of another world. Apart from the lizards the size of crocodiles slowly crawling around, shimmering with cold light, the land under the sunlight was a dull gray-white like the Gobi Desert—the golden portal behind him was even more radiant than the setting sun.

Picking up the binoculars, the world seemed even stranger. Every now and then, clusters of bronze-colored crystals would be stuck in small sand dunes, while in the distance, brown tornadoes ripped across the ground, and dry, hot air currents lingered in front of him.

No! What made up that tornado didn't seem to be sand and dust, but rather a bunch of insects flapping their wings? They were huddled together, next to an old-fashioned village, on a sand dune that towered like a lighthouse.

"Red A! Red A! Red A experimenter Fallon!" He didn't even have time to catch his name being called over the radio; he vaguely sensed that something was wrong with the ground beyond the portal...

Looking back with his binoculars in hand, he saw an insect larger than a camel fluttering its wings, descending from mid-air and cautiously circling around him.

When Faron saw the insect's fist-sized compound eyes and the long, thin stingers on its rear end, he was so frightened that he sat down on the ground. He even had to keep his gaze on the curious but murderous giant insect... because behind the giant insect was a giant insect nest the size of two or three football fields.

On the sandy surface, there were a few insect segments hanging in the air like arched bridges. What was most terrifying was that those segments were actually moving! Just now, I stretched my neck and peeked inside. The tunnel under the insect nest was as wide as a road, and there were insects the same size as the one in front of me, coming and going in an endless stream.

At the mouth of a valley far from the insect hive, he saw a thick city wall, adorned with bronze-colored crystals. Beyond the wall lay a somber capital—mysterious in shape, dark in color. Ominousness and fear, like ants, crawled out from within the walls, burrowing into his mind, where he could no longer stand.

At this moment, several soldiers emerged from the portal—the person in charge had sensed something was wrong and sent men to investigate, but even the soldiers were startled by the enormous insects. By then, there were about a dozen giant insects surrounding them.

"Run! Close the door!" The guard helped Faron up and turned to run away. The nearby insects immediately chased after them—luckily, they arrived in time. When they returned, only about twenty insects were chattering and rushing onto the test field.

There were quite a few soldiers guarding this place, but fortunately there weren't many insects, and they weren't invulnerable to bullets or blades. The infantry's assault rifles could cripple them in less than half a magazine. The shattered shells and severed limbs, mixed with disgusting bodily fluids, made the testing ground a stinking mess.

Faron was lucky to be alive—he was pinned down by an insect and fought desperately with his pistol and limbs. Fortunately, the scythe-like, iron-bar-like limbs didn't hurt him, but the giant insect's piercing-sucking mouthparts were pressed against his forehead.

When the soldiers dragged him out of the swarm of insects, he was already convulsing and unconscious.

Unlike the soldiers who were stung and poisoned, Fallon lay in bed for several days, waking up from nightmares every now and then. According to the nurses' and doctors' records, in his dreams he returned to the strange and eerie image that the insect had implanted in his mind—beneath the city behind the desert wall, in that deep underground labyrinth.

As the giant insects came and went, a monster whispered to him—on a fleshy base made of tentacles and eyeballs, a grotesque eyeball, like the moon on a night of slaughter, stared intently into his eyes.

"This world will inevitably be destroyed; the day of Twilight Judgment will surely come..."

……

This amazing desert journey did not make the scientists give up on this world—after all, it was a "peaceful" place that they had finally found. On the other hand, dealing with those insects was a piece of cake. They couldn't talk, and the world wouldn't be full of sand and insects, with no place to live, right?

During Fallon's recovery period, the second advance into this world began. The person in position A was replaced by a murderer named Hall, and his pistol was replaced by an assault rifle; as for the army guarding the testing ground, there were also many more KMFs.

This time, the portal was sent to another part of the world. Hall almost fainted from the heat as he passed through it—compared to the previous desert, the heat here was so intense that he didn't even have time to adjust his lab coat.

The mountains and ridges are filled with charcoal-black sand and gravel, shrouded in smog, and fissures everywhere spew forth the color of lava. In the distance, a towering volcano can be seen, its scorching lava flowing down from its top that pierces the sky, painting its surface with violent and furious streaks. At the foot of the mountain, a turbulent pool of lava flows around it.

Beneath the volcano stands a gate made of steel and stone, with a stone bridge spanning the lava moat leading into it—could there be a city within this volcano? What kind of place, teeming with demons and monsters, must it be?

There was no time for Hall to think. The portal behind him opened halfway up a hill, below which was a chaotic convoy of cars. The two factions locked in a bloody battle were all looking at him at the same time.

On one side were orcs clad in armor, their skin as dirty and dull as coal dust. They surrounded several strange figures—human bodies attached to lizard-like forms, but heads resembling dragons.

On the other side were dwarves with even darker skin, full beards, and crimson, dark eyes. They wore either armor with a hammer and shield or a staff with a robe. Behind them was a giant slime made of flames, holding fire in both hands, like the dwarves' master.

They were few in number, and it seemed to be just a small skirmish. Confident Hall took the initiative and used an assault rifle to blow the heads off two orcs. He then called on the soldiers on the test field to come and help.

This is getting interesting. The melee orc and dwarven infantry were quickly overwhelmed, and the heavily armored dragon warriors were also knocked down by a rocket launcher. The dragon and dwarven mages were also taken down by a hail of bullets after hitting a few soldiers.

The fire creature alone was not easily defeated. With a wave of its hand, it stirred up a wave of fire, instantly burning several soldiers into scarecrows. Sunderland arrived from the other end of the portal and took the lead. With everyone's combined efforts—the explosion of the rocket launcher and the heavy blow of the KMF—the fire elemental left a large patch of black carbon on the mechanical arm before dissipating, leaving only a pair of brass wrist guards inlaid with amber on the ground.

"Mission complete... Wait, there's something in the sky!" Just as everyone was about to high-five each other, a dragon suddenly swooped down from the sky.

The pilot ordered Hall and the other personnel on foot to retreat back to the test site, and the researchers waited for KMF to return so they could close the portal. Unexpectedly, the black dragon suddenly emerged from the portal at low altitude, carrying KMF on all fours, and threw the seven- or eight-ton mech onto the ground. It landed on an open area, panting heavily, and looked around warily.

It looks just like those evil dragons from legends—excluding its wings and long tail, its body size is about the size of a bus. Compared to the description in the book, it seems it will be quite a while before it becomes an adult.

The young dragon's skin was blackish-red, its belly was beige, and its neck, nape, and the base of its wings were covered with amber-like scales.

After inspecting it for a while, it first attacked the infantry fighting vehicle at the test site. Before the machine gun could even aim at it, the flames spewed from its mouth instantly cooked the steel structure.

Just as it turned its head, intending to pounce on the researchers, a Sunderland man wielding a spear rushed over, leaped into the air, and plunged it deep into the black dragon's throat.

Before the black dragon had even breathed its last, it was already on top of KMF, stretching its long neck to tear at the steel's shoulders and head. KMF raised its outstretched fist and delivered a powerful punch to the black dragon's lower body.

The black dragon staggered backward, and the pilot rushed forward. Before the surrounding infantry could open fire, he grabbed the dragon's neck and twisted its head off.

"Oh my God." Dr. Ron was there with General Wood, who was in charge of defense. He even forgot about the burning equipment next to him. After reading so many novels and comics, who wouldn't be amazed and delighted to see a dragon and a hero fighting it alone for the first time?

"What's your name?" the doctor asked the pilot.

“Lütjens, Your Excellency,” a girl’s voice came from inside. “Lilizia Lütjens.”

"He's one of yours, isn't he, General? He seems quite talented. I heard they're forming a knightly order and recruiting soon. How about I introduce you and her to him?"

He looked at the dead dragon and decided to give it to the girl.

"No need, sir. But could you please have it made into a specimen? I'd like to donate it and this spear as a gift to an orphanage, to the next generation who, like me, have lost their parents but have a brighter future..."

……

"We've fought off Zerg, dragons, and orcs. This world doesn't seem so bad after all. Let's all work a little harder; surely there's a place in this world where we can settle the civilians."

The two experiments did not seem to shake the team's confidence. During this period, they conducted many more experiments, and the Britannian soldiers dealt with all the threats, big and small, one by one. Unfortunately, none of them were safe places, and some soldiers returned with some inexplicable mental abnormalities.

By this time, it was probably the umpteenth time they had tried it. Hall pulled the recovered Fallon along and set off with several other A-class personnel carrying assault rifles.

"Oh, I'm freezing..." It was still the same world, but this time, the welcoming gift was the biting polar wind. They stepped onto a glacier nestled among dark mountains, the clouds overhead gleaming with a cold, bluish-green light, and through the gaps, they could see the vast starry sky.

Compared to the cloudless desert and the dust-filled Black Charcoal Canyon, this starry sky inexplicably has a kind of emptiness that allows one to abandon all fantasies and empty one's mind.

Even the crowd forgot to observe that in the glacial valley in front of the hillside, there was a fortress made of dark blue-green steel, stretching endlessly like the Great Wall, leading to the end of this black and white mountain range.

They keenly noticed that the things that had stood like statues on the walls of the fortress were beginning to move, their human-like bodies flapping their bat-like wings as they flew down.

The monsters' screams echoed through the glaciers like battle alarms. Instinctively, everyone raised their guns and shot them down, only to find that these monsters struggled to their feet again under the protection of magic.

What followed was a stampede that swept across the mountains and fields like an avalanche. Terrified, they fled back to the front of the test site, desperately shouting for the portal to be shut down, but suddenly news came that the switch had malfunctioned.

It was over. Before Fallon and Hall could even describe what they had seen and heard to everyone, they were crushed to pieces by the dark mass of figures rushing out of the portal—zombies, skeletons, huge bones, and deformed monsters.

They were coming from every corner of that glacier, rushing madly into the portal. Fortunately, the portal was not large enough to stop the dragons that were lingering in the sky—one of which was dozens of times more massive than the one Hall had seen last time, with no intact skin tissue on its body, and its skull and skeleton exuding a chilling, murderous mist.

……

"Fire at will!" The soldiers inside and outside the test site were terrified by the undead creatures scattered all over the ground. Although the zombies and skeletons were a piece of shoddy construction that could be easily taken down, they were outnumbered and the infantrymen fell one after another in front of the monsters wielding swords and even being killed by their bare hands.

KMF was quickly spotted by the big guys in the undead army—they looked like short-legged, three-armed fat men stitched together from a bunch of corpses, with strangely colored, rotting intestines that even split open from the middle of their stomachs, and their single eye on their heads and foul-smelling, rotten mouths were even more terrifying.

Each of them had a huge iron chain on its right hand, from which hung a large, blood-stained iron hook. They threw it over and hooked the KMF's hands, which were holding machine guns, with the ease of a strong man walking a Chihuahua. Sunderland, who had been caught, was quickly dragged in front of them, and the sickle held by his left arm and the large hand behind his back were smashed to pieces in the flying sparks.

Although Gloucester could still put up a fight with them, if he didn't retreat in time, he would be crushed by the zombie skeletons that formed a human wall and climbed up, and then trampled to pieces by the arriving stitched monster.

The number of undead killed was countless, but the soldiers on the ground, who were outnumbered, could not hold out. Several armed helicopters carrying rockets rushed to the scene and destroyed the portal and related equipment. Together with the steel reinforcements, they closed the gate and beat the undead, and the raging flood of undead finally subsided.

……

"Fortunately, neither General Wood nor I were at the testing ground that day." Dr. Ron recalled with lingering fear, and he didn't even dare to look again at the devastation that followed the undead incident.

Fully armed soldiers completely sealed off the testing site. Squads in hazmat suits used flamethrowers to incinerate everything within the area—whether it was the undead that might rise again, or the dead soldiers and massacred researchers. In the Nevada desert, the stench of carbonized corpses filled the air like a sandstorm.

"Since then, we have strictly regulated the rules of the test site, including pre-planting explosives in the portals for detonation at any time, and requiring the test site to be heavily guarded."

“That sounds like a really scary story…” Elizabeth also felt goosebumps on her face. “Speaking of which, I don’t know when it started, but adults in Las Vegas and Salt Lake City started using things like ‘If you don’t behave and sleep well, walking corpses and bones will steal your toys’ to scare children. Could it have started after this incident?”

……

Meanwhile, in that dark glacier, a group of paladins clad in silver armor came to investigate after seeing a towering "holy light" appear.

"Strange, where are the undead? Where did the large group of undead from the Tomb of Sindragosa go? They've all disappeared!"

"What's with these footprints? Never mind, let's go back and tell the Grand Lord first. Maybe the completion of the arena will be much easier this time."

Chapter 421 Beyond the Sky of Pendraken II: Return to Azeroth

The story Dr. Ron told last time clearly didn't fill in all the plot holes—the Eternal Protocol Department, funded by Prince Schneizel, was developing a portal to another world, certainly not to provide adventure stories for children or commoners.

If you calm down and think about it, you'll realize that if you invest a little more troops in maintaining stability, aside from the inexplicably large undead army, the Zerg, Orcs, and Black Dragons aren't any particularly troublesome opponents—at least compared to the US and Soviet armies that are currently giving you a hard time.

"My brother has finally discovered a world, but I don't think he'll give up so easily just because of a bunch of skeletons running around everywhere, right?"