Translator: Atlas Studios
Editor: Atlas Studios
However, this had nothing to do with Lin Mo. Real combat missions would be given to experienced pilots. Novice pilots like Lin Mo still needed to continue learning flight and combat skills.
The collision between the air forces of two different worlds was something really hard to imagine. Lin Mo’s back was suddenly drenched in sweat. He felt uneasy, as though a rabbit was jumping in his heart. After all, Gold Coin came from the same world as him. It might have always regarded him as a mortal enemy before, finding every chance to kill him. But according to the saying of this world, it was someone from the same place and akin to his relative. This was something unchangeable.
Lin Mo could not predict what would happen between the Chengdu J-10A that Lieutenant Colonel Shen piloted and Gold Coin. He returned to his dormitory full of all sorts of thoughts.
He turned on all the lights in his room and flipped through the channels on the TV without any heart to watch them. The remote was in his hand, but his eyes were out of focus. It was nearly two in the morning, but Lin Mo felt no sense of sleepiness, and his mind was in a mess. He wanted to calm down and condense his battle aura, but he could not concentrate at all.
This irritability made him lose his usual composure. He paced back and forth in his room before finally sitting down on his bed.
After some time, the sky outside of his balcony door became white, and a rumbling sound rolled from afar and drew near. Lin Mo’s heart sank. He could make out that the two Chengdu J-10As returned intact.
Lin Mo rushed to the balcony and looked at the runways. With the faint glimmer of dawn, he could see that the missiles mounted under the wings of both Chengdu J-10As were now empty. They had obviously been fired.
Even though he had urged Gold Coin to be careful, it seemed that it had been futile. His heart sank into a bottomless abyss as a boundless sense of loss enveloped him. He lost one more connection to his old world. He stared at the dragon flute lying quietly on his bed, suddenly rushed over, and held it tightly in his hand. He could not, must not, lose this.
For almost the entire day, Lin Mo had no spirit. He was absent-minded, though the mood on the base was boisterous. Actual combat missions were rare. A gag order of the mission was given to the pilots and ground crew that night. Even Lin Mo was brought in to ask him not to divulge anything. No matter what he saw that night, he had to bring it to the grave unless the base announced the order was lifted.
However, walls had ears, and there was no shortage of people with their ways around gossip. The base was a source of first-hand information, and some vague remarks even reached Lin Mo’s ears. An unidentified flying object had appeared in the night sky. Jet fighters tracked and intercepted it, and even surface-to-air missiles were launched.
A few days later, Lin Mo saw a few threads on the Tianya internet forum. The rumors said that missiles were launched somewhere in central China, and a large number of troops searched the mountains nearby. A group of people in the mountains had nearly peed their pants, thinking that war had erupted. They had filmed the battle in the air with a digital video camera and uploaded it on the internet. In the video, accompanied by the roar of jet fighter engines, light spots flashed from time to time in the blurry, dark sky. The dots of light from the tracer ammunition of the cannons, the fierce missile tail flames, and fireballs erupting in the air obviously hit something. Although what they had hit could not be seen, the aerial battle could be said to be extremely thrilling! Some people said that this video was real, while others said it was fake. Anyway, no matter what, the number of clicks was off the charts.
Missiles and jet fighters?! Gold Coin was born noble and died with glory. Lin Mo held no hope anymore. Gold Coin was obstinate to the end and had never listened to him.
…
After half a month, the chaos the late-night mission brought to the base slowly subsided. The pilots were just waiting for when they could continue to board planes and take off. They were enjoying their short vacation. The mechanics and the manufacturers in the hanger could not escape though. However, the rigorous logistics support system meant that all aircraft on the base underwent a detailed inspection of each assembly component.
Fortunately, the results of the tired mechanics and the factory engineers gave the base leaders and manufacturers a sigh of relief. Except for a few planes that had some small hidden problems, they did not find any aging problems in the parts serious enough to cause a crash, but for insurance, all the parts were updated. The price paid by the Air Force and the manufacturers was not low.
In the end, the most unlucky party was the accessory manufacturer. After deducting the security deposit and losing several million, it was disqualified as a supplier and replaced by another accessory manufacturer with a new alloy formula. In the production pipeline of jet fighter manufacturers, there was usually more than one manufacturer supplying the same component. There would be no situation whereby there was no redundancy.
However, according to rumor, the accident at the base worried Chen Haiqing’s family about this profession, and they were actively preparing to invest in the aircraft manufacturing industry so that Chen Haiqing would be safe. Nothing could be better than something from your own family made. From another angle, this faintly showed that Chen Haiqing was not as simple as an ordinary rich scion. His family actually had enough money to burn to make airplanes.
“Little Chicken to Gold Coin. Climb up to twelve thousand meters in thirty seconds. Fly upside-down for fifteen seconds in the three o’clock direction!” The lead pilot gave Lin Mo, the wingman, new instructions
Since the two-plane attack formation replaced the previous three-plane attack formation, the fierce attack power of high-speed jet fighters had been released without restraint.
‘Gold Coin” was the code name Lin Mo chose for himself. Every official fighter pilot could choose their own code name. First, there was a need to keep the identity of the pilot confidential, and second, it was easy to remember. It was a bit like the old society where people gave children a bad name so that they were easier to bring up. Such names were less prone to call errors when giving orders, which could affect combat. In fact, ‘Gold Coin’ was the code name that Lin Mo prepared to commemorate his time as a Dragon Knight.
One night, a crumbling, shapeless, metallic, and charred ball broke the double-layer vacuum glass door of Lin Mo’s balcony and rolled into his bedroom just in time to shout Lin Mo’s old name ‘Molin’ before crumbling into a mass of weird metal. Lin Mo recognized it as the Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon that he thought had already been torn apart and killed by missiles and cannons. The dying Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon was the original owner of the name ‘Gold Coin’.
It completely lost its once noble golden color and was no longer the egg-shaped dragon core with countless complex rune patterns on the surface. It laid alone at the foot of Lin Mo’s bed. It was gray, dirty, and had an irregular shape, just like a piece of ordinary ore dug out randomly from a mine.
Lin Mo could not imagine how the once arrogant and noble Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon had fallen to such a miserable state.
Such a large lump of metal flying in the air would be detected by the even most rudimentary and primitive radars. The Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon was not made of stealth material that could absorb radar waves. Although it was inherently capable of fusing with metals, and a solid warhead was akin to a good meal, it could not fuse with explosives. It was inevitable that it was killed by the Air Riders of this world.
What an unlucky kid!
Lin Mo thought that this fellow was beyond rescue until he put a coin onto this shapeless lump and realized that it was still able to devour it, even though it was a hundred times slower than before. But in any case, there was still hope.
He did not know what he was thinking, but Lin Mo took the risk of being discovered and collected hundreds of kilograms of metal. He threw the new form of ‘Gold Coin’ into it, and it took over twenty hours to devour what used to take only about ten seconds. Its shape was only restored slightly, and its surface gradually showed traces of incomplete runes.
It was not so easy for Metal-Attribute Giant Dragons, which was almost the peak of metal-attribute creatures, to recover.
It took Lin Mo one month and several tons of copper and iron ore to restore the original shape of Gold Coin’s metal egg incarnation. Mysterious runes also appeared on its surface again, but its surface was still grayish, as though it had been abandoned for hundreds of years. Gold Coin was still non-responsive and asleep.
All his previous efforts were wasted as he was thrown back to the starting point.