Chapter 54: Exceptional Unlocking of the Type 95 Carrier-Based Aircraft and the P-26 Fighter

Fanned by the wind, the fire at the nose of the aircraft spread with terrifying speed. In a matter of moments, Zhou Zhihan could feel the intense heat rising beneath his feet.

Flames were now licking along the fuel lines in the belly of the plane. Fortunately, when the engine shut down, the fuel supply automatically disconnected from the pipelines—a safety design intended to prevent the fuel tanks from detonating instantly and depriving the pilot of any chance of escape.

Yet, no one could tell exactly how far the fire in the aircraft's belly had spread. If it reached the vicinity of the fuel tanks, the extreme heat would still trigger an inevitable explosion.

That was simply the level of manufacturing quality inherent to World War II aircraft.

Only now did Zhou Zhihan realize that while his flight hours categorized him as a veteran, his real-time crisis experience was virtually nonexistent; he was nothing more than a green novice. If it were a seasoned veteran of countless aerial dogfights in his place, he would have bailed out via parachute long ago, rather than dragging the situation out to this critical juncture.

Under such circumstances, an experienced pilot would have popped the cockpit canopy and prepared to jump the moment smoke first appeared from the nose.

In the sky, the margin between life and death often hung on a single second.

It seemed that merely mastering flight techniques was far from enough. To survive long in the skies of the future battlefield, one needed a combination of skill, experience, and just a tiny dash of luck.

It was not that an emergency landing was entirely impossible in this desolate terrain, but with the fire already blazing fiercely, a forced landing was out of the question.

When an airplane catches fire at an altitude of over two thousand meters, the pilot has only one viable option: bail out.

In truth, people often witnessed stories of successful emergency landings involving ten aircraft and mistakenly assumed that forced landings were not overly difficult.

They failed to see the two hundred other cases where forced landings ended in disaster.

Human nature preferred to witness success while consciously or unconsciously ignoring failure.

Military authorities, in particular, were always eager to publicize triumphs while deliberately covering up defeats.

Zhou Zhihan decided he had to jump immediately. His right hand gripped the control stick in a death grip, while his left hand unlatched the canopy, pushing the window pane backward. Instantly, a heavy, choking stench of burning filled his nostrils.

The fire beneath the wings was growing increasingly ferocious, the licking flames already reaching the sides of the fuselage right up to Zhou Zhihan’s waist. He could feel a blistering heat wave enveloping him. Were it not for the protection of his G-suit and helmet, bailing out now would have been entirely out of the question.

This was why pilots had to decide between bailing out and attempting a forced landing within the very first few seconds of an airborne malfunction.

Those fleeting few seconds invariably sealed a pilot's fate.

With the cockpit window pushed open, Zhou Zhihan released his grip on the control stick, unbuckled his safety harness, and stood up onto the pilot's seat.

Lacking the stabilizing tension of the pilot's hands on the controls, the nose of the plane immediately began to sink.

Zhou Zhihan cast a quick glance at the altimeter.

One thousand two hundred and thirty meters above the ground.

This was still a relatively favorable window for jumping. If one bailed out too close to the ground, the shockwave generated by the eventual crash could collapse the canopy of the parachute, causing the pilot to strike the earth like a cannonball and leave a massive crater in the ground.

Just as Zhou Zhihan prepared to bend his knees and spring upward, his eyes caught sight of something below: fluttering from a cluster of buildings one thousand meters beneath him was an American Stars and Stripes, and he fancied he could faintly hear the sound of a school dismissal bell.

Following that, swarms of figures—smaller than dwarfs, mere specks of children—poured out from among the buildings.

"Damn it!"

Zhou Zhihan’s heart tightened, a curse escaping his lips involuntarily. Surely the kind of cliché plot twist found only in cheesy melodramas and television series wasn't actually playing out right in front of him?

Within the sprawling school complex, countless children were streaming out of the rooms, and the Stars and Stripes fluttering above the compound rippled conspicuously in the sunlight.

Zhou Zhihan felt a pang in his chest, as if struck by lightning.

"Damn it! This is bad!"

Ahead lay a school, without a doubt, and the doomed aircraft was hurtling straight toward it.

Many of the children had spotted the plunging ball of fire in the sky. Filled with childlike curiosity, they tilted their heads upward to watch, apparently shouting happily and beckoning to classmates who had yet to emerge from the classrooms to come outside and look at the giant fireball in the sky.

Zhou Zhihan’s heart plummeted into an icy abyss while a cold sweat broke out all over his body.

He had very little time to deliberate.

The aircraft’s altitude above the ground was now one thousand one hundred and fifty meters.

If this plane crashed into the ground, the fuel tanks would undoubtedly detonate instantly. The sheer downward momentum of the aircraft combined with the explosive force of the fuel would be more than enough to raze the school to the ground.

After barely a single second of hesitation, Zhou Zhihan spread his legs and dropped back down into the cockpit. He threw his arms around the control stick, stiffened his legs, engaged his core muscles, and hauled back on the stick with all his might.

It was impossibly heavy.

The plane's descent was accelerating wildly, and the control stick felt as heavy as ten thousand jun.

At that moment, Zhou Zhihan understood profoundly why one of the fundamental prerequisites for becoming a military pilot was possessing a robust physique. World War II-era fighters lacked power steering; every rapid pull-up required the pilot to expend every ounce of physical strength.

"Pull up!"

He exerted every ounce of his power.

Zhou Zhihan could feel his heartbeat coming to a near standstill. Holding his breath until the veins on his temples bulged fiercely, he channeled his entire body's strength into the pull.

"Up... ah..."

He could feel the blood vessels on his forehead on the verge of rupturing. The extreme negative G-forces generated by the rapid descent subjected his skeleton to three times the pressure of his normal body weight.

During a dive, a pilot was subjected to both gravitational pull and the compressive force of the seat. Under this dual squeeze, the pilot had to endure three times the burden on his body while simultaneously fighting to yank back the heavy control stick.

This was why candidates with a history of head injuries were categorically rejected during pilot selection.

When a fighter dove, the excessive G-force pressure caused blood to rush downward. A healed wound on a pilot's head could potentially rip open again under such stress, causing blood to flood out like a torrent and tearing the wound further open.

Zhou Zhihan could feel his eyes swelling from the blood pressure surging against them.

"Pull up!"

Straining every sinew, he managed to haul the wings upward. The nose of the plane gradually rose, but the powerless aircraft continued its unstoppable plunge forward.

Aided by the wind and the volatility of the leaking fuel, the fire at the nose grew increasingly violent, emitting a crackling series of popping sounds as the metallic components warped and deformed under the searing heat.

The sides of the fuselage were lined with treated, resilient wooden panels. Judging by the spread of the flames, the fire had already consumed the lower wings. If the steel wire bracing connections burned through, the wings would lose all structural integrity, sending the plane into an irrecoverable nosedive.

There was no time to worry about that now. Zhou Zhihan could only maintain a death grip on the control stick while intermittently tapping the right rudder pedal to nudge the aircraft toward the outer edge of the school grounds.

One thousand and sixty meters.

As the angle of the wings increased, the nose lifted slightly higher, pointing directly toward the perimeter of the school grounds and narrowly avoiding a direct collision with the buildings themselves.

Zhou Zhihan could see the school grounds below densely packed with children. They remained captivated by the sudden fiery apparition in the sky, completely oblivious to the fact that the Grim Reaper was hovering just a thousand meters above them, ready to pounce at any second and flatten them alongside their school.

Controlling the aircraft with white knuckles, Zhou Zhihan took a ragged breath and scanned the terrain ahead for a suitable bailing point.

"Damn..."

A curse of despair escaped his lips. Less than five hundred meters past the outer perimeter of the school lay a sprawling, unbroken chain of rugged mountains stretching endlessly from south to north.

If he bailed out right now, the nose of the plane would immediately drop, plunging directly into the heart of the school.

If he kept pulling back on the stick to clear the school, he might not have enough altitude to clear the mountain range ahead, crashing straight into the peaks and shattering into pieces. He could not visually estimate the exact height of the ridgeline looming ahead at an oblique angle.

He had no way of knowing whether the plane, having cleared the school, could successfully surmount this unbroken chain of mountains.

Although the local peaks were not particularly towering, he had no margin for error and no confidence of success.

Nor did he have the luxury of time to carefully measure and assess the situation.

Once he cleared the school, he would no longer have the time to bail out.

Two seconds to choose.

He closed the cockpit canopy, sealing out the majority of the thick smoke. Otherwise, even with the protection of his flight helmet, the toxic fumes would suffocate him.

He had no choice but to gamble with his life.

If he bailed out now, the aircraft was bound to crash into the campus, and he would spend the rest of his life consumed by profound remorse—a broken man living in perpetual self-condemnation.

That was not the life he wanted.

Even in death, he had to die for a cause; he refused to drag out a wretched existence in a world of guilt.

He was responsible for his aircraft, and he had to pilot it safely away from the school.

Roll the dice.

Bet his life on it.

The entire nose of the plane was engulfed in roaring flames. Fueled by the gasoline and driven by the wind, the fire spread with terrifying speed. Within mere seconds, it had swept past the sides of the fuselage, rising above his head. Were it not for the nose-down attitude of the plane, which blew the flames backward, even his G-suit would not have saved him from catching fire.

The temperature inside the cockpit had reached at least eighty degrees Celsius, and he could feel the control stick burning his hand like a white-hot iron rod.

He could see several teachers running about the school grounds in a panic, shouting at the children to take cover, yet utterly clueless as to where they should lead them for safety.

Whoosh!

The aircraft streaked over the schoolyard. Zhou Zhihan no longer had the time to jettison the canopy and bail out; he could only throw his remaining strength into hauling the nose upward.

The endless mountain range loomed before Zhou Zhihan’s eyes like a malevolent, baring monster.

Eight hundred and fifty meters.

"Up!"

Blood spurted from Zhou Zhihan’s nostrils. He considered himself fortunate that the G-force pressure drove the blood out through his nose rather than pooling inside his eyes and brain.

The nose of the plane lifted fractionally once more, grazing the treetop canopy along the mountain ridge with a deafening series of snaps and impacts that violently battered Zhou Zhihan inside the cockpit.

"Whoosh!"

"Crack!"

"Screech—crunch—"

The Tachikawa Ki-95c trainer aircraft resembled a burning phoenix as it skimmed across the mountain crest. Its wings sheared off completely, and the wreckage tipped sideways, plunging toward the ground.

Zhou Zhihan suddenly felt the resistance vanish from his hands as the control stick went limp. He rapidly unlatched the cockpit, scrambled up onto the seat, sprang upward with all his might, and shouted into his wristwatch, "Deploy parachute!"

"Pop!"

The sound of the canopy deploying echoed in his ears. His body jerked violently as he hung suspended in mid-air, while the burning aircraft slammed into the terrain ahead like a falling fireball.

A few seconds later,

"Boom!"

The aircraft detonated.

A massive shockwave of fire erupted into the sky, and even from a distance, Zhou Zhihan could feel the powerful blast wave buffeting his parachute and sending him drifting backward.

"Ugh—"

Damn it, he was caught in a tree.

"Ding-dong! The host has saved a school and all of its children. As an exception, the system unlocks intermediate maneuver techniques for fighter aircraft, the Type 95 carrier-based aircraft, and the P-26 toy pistol for the host. More rewards await the host to claim."

(End of Chapter)