Chapter 125: Total War
defense line.
With the appearance of the colossal monster, total war erupted in the most savage manner possible.
As far as the members could see, there was nothing but the boundless and the malformed monsters surging out of it.
The roar of the rapid-fire turrets never ceased. Spent casings piled up like mountains across the position, and the red-hot gun barrels gave off a burnt smell, yet none of it could stop the deep-crimson "tide" from inching forward.
What was even more maddening were the bizarre syllables echoing through the air. The sound seemed to ring out directly inside the skull—shrill, chaotic, as if it could dredge up the most primal terror and bloodlust hidden in the depths of people's hearts.
Fortunately, a gentle white light soon rose from behind the defense line and swept silently across the whole line.
Wherever the light reached, the infuriating noise was smoothed away in an instant, and the wild agitation melted like ice and snow.
The soldiers felt as if a basin of cold water had been poured over their heads, and they all instantly recovered their composure.
Everyone instinctively looked back and saw that, inside the defense line, several silver-white spires as tall as fifty meters had risen from the ground at some point.
The towers had an elegant spiral form, their surfaces carved with intricate blue energy circuits. At the top of each, a slowly rotating crystal was emitting pulsing white light at a fixed frequency.
The towers were evenly distributed along the defense line, enveloping every unit within their shielding range.
[All purification towers have been fully activated. All personnel are in a normal mental state.]
's voice sounded over the communications channel, as steady as ever.
"Whew!" let out a relieved breath and raised his again. "All units, keep firing!"
Even as the main battlefield was plunged into a frenzied slaughter, in the forested mountains of northern City, ...
watched the pylon under the belly of the last drone before him click tight, then took a deep breath.
"Report! Ammunition loading complete!"
[Received.]
The next second, the engines of all ten Lightning-Chasing Shadows ignited simultaneously. Their dark gray fuselages trembled slightly in the air currents, then shot skyward like ten arrows loosed from a bow.
The glow of the plasma exhausts quickly vanished into the scarlet horizon, leaving behind only ten wispy contrails.
After watching them disappear into the distance, turned to face the fully equipped members behind him, his voice steady and forceful.
"Everyone, attention!"
"We're going back to !"
...
The formation, flying at full speed, soon arrived above the battlefield.
Seen from high above, City looked like a festering wound.
With at its center, the blood-colored sea of flowers spread out in every direction, covering nearly half the field of view.
And at the center of the flower sea, the colossal monster—three hundred and twenty meters tall—was advancing slowly toward like a moving mountain of flesh.
But had no time for further reflection. The laser emitters of the escort drones lit up in an instant.
The high-energy lasers easily tore a huge gap in the aerial defense line formed by the monstrous flesh birds. The escort formation immediately fanned out, suppressing the airborne monsters on both sides that were trying to close in.
Meanwhile, the protected at the very center descended at a steady pace.
The bomb bay doors opened.
Then a gray missile separated from the pylon and began accelerating downward under gravity.
The missile free-fell for three seconds before the small rocket booster at its tail ignited, accelerating it to supersonic speed.
Its target was the colossal flesh monster moving slowly below—the one over three hundred meters tall.
On the defense line, all combat personnel, who had long since been notified, had withdrawn into the reinforced shelters behind the .
The 's power was temporarily pushed to maximum, its hexagonal energy grid flashing bright blue in the air.
The next second—light.
A radiance bright enough to dye the entire night sky pure white burst into being at the center of .
A sun rose from the ground less than eight kilometers from the defense line, its terrifying light and heat raging outward in every direction.
Within a few hundredths of a second, the thermal radiation vaporized every bit of flesh-and-blood matter within a two-kilometer radius into plasma.
Immediately afterward, the terrifying shockwave expanded outward at supersonic speed, ripping up the sea of flowers by the roots, churning the soil into dust walls dozens of meters high, and shredding the flesh giants further back—themselves dozens of meters tall—like paper.
Planting a "mushroom" on your own doorstep—anyone who heard about it would think had lost his mind.
But at this moment, only wanted to say: when the monster in question is nearly 320 meters tall, if it were you, you probably wouldn't have planted one any slower than he did.
From the moment this thunderous behemoth appeared, even 's lead-cooled reactor had been brought to the brink of boiling.
[Seriously, over two hundred meters was already ridiculous enough! What are you trying to do at three hundred and twenty?!]
[What about physics? What about biology? Somebody save them!]
The mushroom cloud of the blast rose to an altitude of ten thousand meters, tearing a huge hole in the scarlet cloud layer overhead.
The shockwave raised dense ripples of energy across the 's surface, but unexpectedly, the actual energy impact wasn't that great.
Good news: the thing on the other side took that megaton-yield nuclear strike dead on, absorbing every bit of it.
Bad news: it really did tank all that damage!
When the smoke and dust cleared, a massive vitrified crater over two hundred meters in diameter lay at the center of the blast.
A cavity more than sixty meters across had been ripped clean through the front of the colossal monster. Half of its "face" was gone, exposing the intricate dark-red tubular structures inside.
Nearly half of its dozens of tentacles had been vaporized outright, and a third of the surface of the had been charred to cinder.
At the same time, the sea of flowers within the blast radius was vaporized entirely, exposing a stretch of scorched earth several kilometers in diameter. The flesh giants dozens of meters tall standing further back were likewise reduced to ashes.
And yet, in the few seconds spent observing, new blood-red flowers were already pushing up through the scorched earth.
Inside the monster's exposed cavity, vivid red flesh was writhing, filling, and regrowing at a terrifying pace.
New flesh giants also stepped out of the viscous crimson mist, swiftly replenishing the attacking ranks.
At this moment, 's ceiling was genuinely tingling.
The next second, several more identical gray missiles howled down from high above.
This time, however, the monster was prepared.
Several flesh tentacles over a hundred meters long snapped up and lashed at the sky with terrifying speed.
Three warheads were struck directly by tentacles in midair and detonated.
In an instant, three suns appeared in the night sky over .
Three orange-white fireballs bloomed at different altitudes at the same time, and the light of the blasts bleached the entire scarlet sky into a ghastly pale white.
The shockwaves poured down from the air, like an invisible giant hand slamming hard against the earth.
Almost every unit in the aerial battlefield at that moment was wiped clear—whether drones or flesh monsters, all were as fragile as dust before a shock of this level.
The scarlet cloud layer was torn to shreds by the shockwaves, revealing the gray-white real sky behind it.
As for the colossal monster closest to the blast center, this time a third of its entire right side was blown off.
Dark-red tissue fluid cascaded down from the wound like a waterfall, pooling on the ground into a winding river.
And near that "river," even more horrifying monsters spawned in a frenzy.
But it was still advancing.
Its remaining tentacles writhed wildly, and the flesh at the wound proliferated and regenerated at a nearly insane speed.
This attack seemed to have thoroughly enraged it.
Its pace suddenly quickened. The flesh giants dozens of meters tall ahead of it abandoned their slow strides entirely and broke into a full charge!
Their massive bodies erupted with speed completely at odds with their size. In the blink of an eye, they had reached the defense line, crossing the ordinary fortifications—more than ten meters tall—as easily as stepping over low walls.
The ground let out a continuous series of dull thuds beneath their feet, each step kicking up tons of rubble and blood-soaked mud.
"Boom!"
Soon, the first 's fist, wrapped in overwhelming force, slammed hard into the .
Inside the power station control room, the value representing the shield's load spiked sharply in an instant.
"Concentrate fire! Prioritize destroying these giants one by one!"
On the front line, , clad in , let out a sky-shaking roar.
For a moment, dozens of plasma cannons on the defense line's —just now finished cooling—swung their barrels around and ran at full power, frantically draining energy from the power grid.
Hundreds of deadly blue-white meteors poured down on a single like a torrential rain, blasting and vaporizing its entire upper body in an instant.
But before the soldiers could catch their breath, their vision was swallowed whole by a crimson glare.
A high-density sphere of blood-red energy, over thirty meters in diameter, was launched from the exact center of the hundred-meter beneath the colossal monster.
In that instant, it was as if a deep-red sun had crashed down onto the . The entire shield let out a shriek like glass on the verge of shattering.
The violent light plunged many soldiers who had been too slow to close their eyes into instant blindness, leaving nothing in their vision but deep red.
Only thanks to the automatic dimming of their faceplates and the emergency injection of did they barely manage to recover.
But what happened next was even more horrifying.
Right beside the behemoth, dozens of giant flesh flowers over thirty meters in diameter burst out of the ground, all facing the shield.
And at the center of each flower heart, a somewhat smaller mass of crimson light was condensing into shape.
The next second, the breath of every member on the defense line inevitably hitched for an instant.
Before them, hundreds of "crimson suns" one size smaller were trailing long streaks of light as they hurtled down toward the shield.