Counterfeit Hero

When Langman jumped up from the sofa, Reinhardt just sat there quietly, holding his coffee, lazily stirring the spoon, watching those streaks of milky white slowly melt into the spinning dark brown vortex.

The rich aroma of Bella Star’s famous Triangle Coffee curled out and diffused in all directions, drifting strand by strand past the noses of the Su Jie Alliance Army staff officers whose faces were all dark with gloom.

In the command hall, hundreds of various instruments either flashed lights, or flickered screens, or beeped incessantly. The hurried footsteps and the never-ending noisy clamor from the frontline Command Room had, at this moment, completely vanished.

"General Reinhardt..." After receiving the frontline intel, Langman turned his head to look at Reinhardt almost by reflex.

Sunset Mountain had held out against repeated assaults, with the troops taking heavy losses. Now there came bad news that the forward attack positions had been hit and battlefield intelligence was under enemy control. Unconsciously, he had already started treating Reinhardt as the linchpin.

"Judging from the enemy’s strike targets and our unit losses, their strength is no more than an Armored Group," Reinhardt put down his coffee cup, gazed at the SkyNet screen that had just shifted as the intel data was entered, and drawled, "If I were you, General Langman, I’d have my troops teach them a little lesson..."

He took a sip of coffee. "If the frontline units can’t hold them, I’ll be interested in having a bout with them myself!"

"Order all forward attack positions to immediately sweep their front sectors," Langman made his decision at once, roaring at the staff officer beside him, "Delay the general offensive until we’ve fully seized battlefield initiative. Tell them, no matter the cost, within two hours drive those rats back up Sunset Mountain for me!"

"Courtesy demands a return visit." In his ears was Langman’s belligerent bellow; Reinhardt checked the time and muttered under his breath, "You fight your fight, I fight mine."

*******************************************************************************

Outside the shaking porthole of the Command Mecha, clumps of red light suddenly flared atop the distant ridges. The violent explosions slammed into the valley again and again, deafening.

"Fatty," Bonnie grabbed the handrail hard with one hand to keep her balance, while with the other she held the communicator and switched to the command channel: "1st Division, 2nd Group is two kilometers out from Saint John Town."

"That dog Rashid runs pretty damn fast." Fatty was piloting Logic, trotting along right beside the Command Mecha, looking exactly like a flunky jogging beside a sedan chair. Or like a beggar trailing a tycoon, hand out for alms. Sitting in the cockpit, he scratched his head and ears. "Bonnie, how about I go up front and take a look?"

"Not allowed!" Bonnie flatly vetoed Fatty’s suggestion.

This Fatty was born timid and afraid of death, yet he was precisely the kind of bastard who loved to show off. He lived for bullying the weak; whenever he spotted an easy advantage, he absolutely had to take a bite.

With five hundred Super Mecha Warriors piloting Second Generation Rampage Mechas trailing along as bodyguards and enforcers, Fatty’s ego had already inflated to the extreme. He walked with his nostrils pointed at the sky, wearing a whole "I’m number one, heaven’s number two" expression. Afraid the world wasn’t chaotic enough, he saw a single rabbit and wanted to chase it for three miles just to swagger and flaunt the Fatty General’s current all‑around prestige.

Keeping him off the front line, besides worrying about his safety, Bonnie honestly couldn’t afford the embarrassment either. Every time this guy piloted that wreck of a Mecha and gleefully went "Monkey Stealing Peach, Child Bowing to Guanyin" in the Mecha Group, she had no idea how to face those Feiyang and Chuckna officers’ astonished, peculiar looks.

Even worse, people had already more than once seen him piloting that wreck Mecha to tackle an enemy, then, in a frenzy of bluster and arrogance, extend a long "thing" from between the enemy’s legs and churn up a storm of flying parts.

The sight was just like a braying jackass in full rut!

With his proposal shot down, Fatty fell into gloom. Among the several women, Bonnie was tough on the outside but soft inside; her temperament was actually very gentle. She’d grown up with traditional Gazalin education, and after following him, you could say she’d abet him in everything—murder and arson alike. But once she dug her heels in, he couldn’t out‑stubborn her. If she said he couldn’t go, then he absolutely couldn’t go.

Battle was about to start, and he had a whole bunch of super bruisers with him yet couldn’t go up and strut. It was suffocating. Fatty sighed and moaned, his guts twisting in knots; after scratching his little brother for ages, he still couldn’t scratch out a solution.

After wiping out the Western Alliance reinforcement units northwest of Frenso Town, the bandit army’s two Armored Divisions merged into one column and, together with another column formed by the Feiyang 33rd Army and Chuckna Forces, formed two attack arrows thrusting straight at the defensive sector of Saint John Town, forty kilometers northwest of Frenso Town.

Saint John Town sat in a mountainous area at over two hundred meters altitude, backed by mountains and fronted by a river, a position easy to defend and hard to attack. Because the Resk Main Army had deployed a full Chuckna Armored Division and two Mechanical Infantry Groups here, with tight defenses, Bellif bypassed this closer location and chose relatively easier‑to‑take Frenso Town as the flank diversion battlefield.

Even so, in order to pin down the Fei Alliance garrison in this sector, Bellif still added another two Armored Groups and one Mechanical Infantry Group on top of the original five Armored Groups and one Mechanical Infantry deployed in this war zone.

When the Frenso Town campaign broke out, the Western Alliance Army also launched an assault on Saint John Town at the same time.

For more than a month already, the fighting at Saint John Town had been exceptionally brutal. This time, to pin the defenders of Saint John Town firmly in place, the Western Alliance Army attacking frontally was hammering the defensive line almost without pause. From the SkyNet Information transmitted by Pipi, this sector was pure close‑quarters, hand‑to‑hand slaughter.