PATH OF THE STAR HUNTER

487 Chapter 487 Premature End

With a pale face and zero alternative courses of action, the poor communications officer had no choice but to deliver more bad news to his superior. “Colonel, we have another team missing in sector B-3.”

With nine of the ten squads located in sector B-3 gone, there was no way the colonel in charge wouldn’t be furious. “Can someone tell me what the fuck is going on here? I thought our spies had ensured that neither Commander Rundert nor his henchmen were in the area today.”

Another hapless communications officer stepped forward and answered. “Sir, I just called to check; our spies in the city are not responding.”

Although the bad news that constantly arrived had worsened the countenance of the colonel in charge of this operations center, his spy’s disappearance made his face pale. Rundert might be a violent, misogynistic asshole, but his strength was a real threat C Country took very seriously. Not being able to corroborate his position was the worst kind of news the colonel could receive at the moment.

Everyone in the room could see the fear in the eyes of their officer in command, a fear that began to spread among the people present. Over time, as the Esper became more powerful, existences like Rundert’s were treated as nearly invincible gods of war; Unless another esper of equal caliber showed up, the scenario was pretty grim.

Fortunately, the colonel still had a decent head on his shoulders. “No, wait, if Rundert was here, he would have annihilated our men three or four times faster. If it really was Rundert attacking us, we should already be dead. Keep our main forces away from sector B-3; send in some of our worst squads as decoys to keep whoever is wreaking havoc in that sector busy.”

Although the colonel’s logic was quite solid, his orders were cruel, using his own men as bait; however, no one in the room seemed bothered.

There was only one small problem with the colonel’s strategy: Desmond was no longer interested in hunting small fry; the people sent by the colonel were destined to be ignored by Desmond.

Ironically enough, even after being ignored by Desmond, the squads sent out as decoys still met their end at other people’s hands, but that was a story for another time.

.....

Completely unaware that his plans were destined to fail, the colonel sat down to rest, although, having received no more reports of bad news, a small smile still found its way to his lips despite how exhausted he was.

There’s a saying that heaven and hell are just a step away; well, the unbelievably unlucky colonel in charge of this scouting mission was about to experience it for himself.

Given the importance of this operation that would start the armed conflict between country C and country F, soldiers and weapons were not lacking on the attacking side. Even for the small temporary operations center set up in the middle of a few wooded hills, security was pretty tight.

The number of Espers with some tracking or detection ability in the patrol forces was a top secret, but the number would certainly not be small; even Revna would find it impossible to sneak into this place.

In what can only be described as a cruel joke, all that security was useless against the devastating power that fell on the operations center. At the end of the day, these security measures only served to stop those trying to rely on stealth or deception to get into the operations center.

For Desmond, who was going to use brute force, all the security measures meant nothing; only high-caliber weapons and other high-level espers were a threat to him.

Always keeping in mind the firm belief that victory loves the prepared, Desmond didn’t get caught up in the moment’s excitement upon finding the enemy’s base of operations. Instead, he scanned his surroundings for a few minutes before moving.

It took him a couple of minutes to do it quietly. Still, eventually, Desmond managed to kill all the hidden snipers, their primitive means of stealth being nothing more than cheap tricks against the visor scanning features Desmond was using.

Since Desmond had no counter-surveillance or communication-interruption device of any kind, it was only a matter of time before the disappearance of the snipers drew attention.

With the time he had at his disposal, Desmond fully exploited his visor’s analysis abilities to calculate some possible trajectories and scenarios; In the end, Desmond took out eight incendiary grenades.

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Revealing the arsonist within him, Desmond removed the safety pin from each grenade before waiting for different time intervals and launching them in a long arc towards the enemy base of operations.

Before the grenades fell, Desmond had already drawn his assault rifle and got into a shooting position on the ground. A second after Desmond lay facedown on the ground, the grenades exploded in eight locations in the enemy camp.

It was a ruthless massacre; dozens of people were immediately covered in flames, dying in a world of pain and fire, while others near the blast took their decent amount of damage.

But Desmond hadn’t thrown the grenades just to hit random soldiers; he had purposely thrown them in very specific locations. The first thing that happened after the initial explosion of the grenades was another set of explosions, three groups of explosions, to be exact.

The first thing to explode were the two defensive turrets around the camp, along with the ammunition boxes in the place. After the explosion of the turrets, the third series of explosions occurred with a little delay. This time the explosions came from the area where all the vehicles were parked.

The explosion of the first military truck started a chain reaction that gradually destroyed whatever means of escape remained for the few survivors. Even then, it wasn’t as if many people were going to be left alive, for as a fiery inferno raged over the land, Desmond hadn’t stopped harvesting lives with his assault rifle.

With an accuracy that would make sniper rifles cry and a rate of fire that far exceeds that of such long-range weapons, Desmond used his highly modified assault rifle to fire without mercy or respite.

The speed with which the number of dead people in the camp was increasing was, for lack of better words, unreal. As an operations center, the number of tactical personnel was quite significant. Although the entire combat forces were not present as they had been deployed, the remaining soldiers that stayed behind as security were still a hundred.

By the time Desmond stopped firing from a distance, the explosions and fires had already killed just over twenty people, while Desmond had claimed the lives of just over forty people.

It was a brutal carnage where the survivors could only hide in an attempt to survive. Not that the remaining forces didn’t want to fight, but with a sniper like Desmond, it was suicide. With Desmond keeping an eye on them, the poor visibility due to the smoke and fire, there wasn’t much opportunity to do anything.

In fact, Desmond’s murder rate was so high, and it all happened so fast that the few survivors assumed they were being ambushed by an entire army; they would never have believed it was all Desmond’s doing.

In the current era, there were people capable of wiping out such many armed men in such a short amount of time, but those people would use powerful and devastating esper abilities. Seeing a person use modern weapons to perform such a massacre was something out of the ordinary.

It was slow, but little by little, the sniper’s rate of fire dropped; it couldn’t be helped; in essence, there was no one in sight to shoot anymore. Not necessarily frustrated but not satisfied with it either, Desmond left his place and headed to the enemy camp to finish things.

Needless to even narrate what happened next, Desmond basically emptied the magazines of his pistols on anyone he saw alive. There was more than one Esper among the original survivors, but Desmond had already blown their brains out before they managed to show any use for their abilities.

There was only one exception to such a thing, one that occurred when Desmond entered the command center. As Desmond mercilessly shot all the intelligence and communications officers in his line of sight, a powerful Aura user attacked him. Desmond deduced from the color and the insignia that it was a colonel, quite a valuable target.

Ignorant of his opponent’s intentions, the aura user tried to fight with his full power in close combat. The colonel hoped that a skilled marksman like Desmond would not have excellent combat ability in that area; that was the last mistake that man made in his life.

The result of the fight was...disappointing. After exchanging attacks for a few seconds, Desmond tried to shoot with his pistols as a feint to land a counterattack. To Desmond’s surprise, the colonel’s reaction was too slow, and instead of dodging the shot, as he was supposed to do, the man ended up with a fist-sized hole in the middle of his chest.

It was an incredibly anticlimactic and disappointing ending for Desmond, who thought he might finally have a good fight.