Chapter 841 - The mysterious snipers (1/2)

Translator: Legge

The front line at Mt. Dashi was not where the front was. To be precise, it was north of the front line at Mt. Dashi that the Pyro Company would soon engage in total war with the northern tribe.

There was a mountain path that lay within Mt. Dashi that acted as the Pyro Company’s supply line to the north, which was also known as the lifeline.

As the main forces of the Pyro Company were deployed to the North a little late, the northern defensive line was established in a hurry. No one knew when an enemy force of nearly a 1,000 troops had infiltrated.

The barbarians from the North had been hiding in Mt. Dashi for several days already. It wasn’t until the main forces of the Pyro Company started deploying north that they began intercepting the Pyro Company troops in the mountains and hindering the transportation of their supplies.

It was these nearly a 1,000 barbarians that made the Pyro Company suffer heavy casualties here.

It was not that the Pyro Company had bad combat effectiveness but that there were too many complex factors that led to the current situation.

On one hand, the Wang Consortium did not share the intel they had received beforehand with the Pyro Company, leading to the Pyro Company’s main forces being concentrated in the South. They were not expecting there to still be enemies coming from the North.

By the time they found out, it was a little late.

On the other hand, the Pyro Company had not really fought their opponent before this, so they did not know what kind of battle strategies to expect.

The northern barbarians relied on their strong physical fitness to easily finish off the Pyro Company troops in the mountains.

The terrain in the mountains was complicated, but the northern barbarians seemed to have already figured it out and knew this place better than the Pyro Company did.

It seemed the Pyro Company had never expected such an intense war to break out in the North, so they never placed much emphasis on the northern lifeline that was Mt. Dashi.

On second thought, no one ever expected there to be so many enemies in the North! Not even the nomads had expected it!

During the battle on Mt. Dashi, the Pyro Company even felt like it was not their home field they were fighting on but the enemy’s.

After a few days, the Pyro Company had more or less figured out the situation. Almost all of the northern barbarians had the physical fitness of a T3 combatant, and some were even occasionally comparable to the T4s. This made them extremely difficult to deal with.

Even though the Pyro Company had been operating in this territory for a long time, the bulk of their main forces were made up of T1 and T2 combatants. The majority of their officers were also mostly T3-ranked combatants.

It was not that the Pyro Company was so poor they could not afford to produce enough of the genetic modification serum, but it was as they had admitted in the past. Whether you ended up as a T1 or T5 combatant, the ceiling was written in your genes at birth. As such, their combatants’ fates were decided long ago.

Genetic serums were not omnipotent. It was just that most people could only be enhanced into a T1 or T2 combatant. Furthermore, there was a price to pay for it.

There was a secret in the Pyro Company—genetically modified super soldiers had their lifespans slightly shortened. The higher their T-ranks, the more it was so.

Until now, no one had ever seen a T5 that lived to the age of 40. Most of them had died of cancer before that.

This was probably the imperfection P5092 had mentioned to Ren Xiaosu.

How did cancer come about? Cancer stems from genetic mutations in human cells.

Cells in the human body divided and replicated at all times. In the process of mitosis, errors could occur. When the human body’s immune recognition function was normal, the body would rectify the error and naturally eliminate the cancer cells. However, there was a chance there might be a faulty immune response that led to the immune system being unable to identify the cells that have replicated wrong, and over time, a tumor would form.

Due to genetic modification, a T5’s immune system would become unable to identify the faulty cells in the body, so it made it extremely easy for cancer to occur.

And the reason why the Pyro Company wanted to locate the No. 001 Experimental was that it was the most perfect specimen of a cancer patient who had been cured.

The T1s roughly had a physical fitness that was 1.5 times that of the average adult. According to Ren Xiaosu’s palace, the average adult was a 3, so a T1 was a 4.5, a T2 a 6, a T3 a 9, a T4 a 15, and a T5 a 21.