Chapter 1608: Falling

The drone group and the Amantir forces were in a fight.

It was a frustrating moment for the Mad Lord minions. They had fought the drones a few times in the past, but their commander still found it hard to deal with the cold, lifeless machines. The festered monsters had been fighting the battlegroup of the guardian giants for thousands of years and were used to long-range warfare, where long-range firepower, flank maneuver and harassment, and massive artillery were used. The emergence of the drones had brought new challenges to them.

The drone fleets did not fight the long-range battle, and they did not carry out long-range weapons. The drones fought close combat and could quickly pop out in front of the enemy’s face with the use of advanced battlefield transition tactics and use their high-energy, rapid-fire guns to blow a hole in your face. If your air defense could shoot them down in time, they would simply self-destruct in your face.

The lifeless machines were as if a swarm of insects. It came up to you and attacked in swarms. Most heavy weapons were useless against them. As soon as the drones got close, the combat effectiveness of giant battleships would be even worse than a mutated beast with tentacles.

The festered battleships with powerful firepower and long-range radar systems were forced to exit the battlefield, leaving only a limited number of warships to fight against the Guardian Legion. Meanwhile, the remaining festered, and the drones were in a stalemate.

“Battle is in a deadlock. The enemy has withdrawn their heavy firepower but doubled the number of high-mobility units. Our drones are barely sufficient,” the MDT said as he looked at the battle report. “The Naqdal has attracted attention. A unit of enemy forces is approaching.”

Hao Ren nodded. “It does not matter. The modified shield can withstand a long period of bombardment. Keep moving and start bombing as soon as arriving at the target position.”

They were not on the bridge of the Petrachelys but in the command station on the Naqdal fortress. It was a new facility that has a data link with the control center, but its architectural style and size were more suitable for the needs of ordinary humans and did not feel as depressed as in the oversized facilities of the guardian giants.

The layout of the command station was similar to that of the Petrachelys. The center of the ring-shaped platform was a depression, where there was a large holographic projector showing the vividly close-up image of Amantir.

There festered army was rushing out from the fissure in the ground to engage the drones in a dogfight in space. The Guardian Legion’s battleships continued to push forward under cover of the drones. They finally cleared out an area at tens of thousands of kilometers above the atmosphere and began to perform a fixed-point bombardment of the planetary fortress below it. The orbital cannons under the belly of the black battleships started to focus at one point of the planetary shield and fire orange-red and bright white beams. Bright light and ripples burst out from the impact point. In the spot where ripples were the densest, the shield began to show signs of weakening.

The cloudy shield was a crucial barrier of Amantir to protect the dirty earth below. But the breakage of the shield at one spot would not lead to the complete collapse of the shield. The guardians already had the technology—Force Field Variable Frequency Splitting Technology—which divided the shield into numerous effective pieces. When a single effective piece gave way, the shield’s force field would immediately reset to ensure the force field of other effective pieces remained intact.

But Hao Ren only needed to penetrate a small piece of this shield.

The holographic image of Salaman was beside Hao Ren. The giant general took this opportunity to explain the situation of the Amantir fortress. “The battle of 3,000 years ago caused irreparable damage to both sides. Naqdal was destroyed when it was launching its doomsday weapon. The core of the fortress was filled with energy. When this energy burst, it devastated everything on the battlefield. The Apocalypse Torrent punctured part of the shield of the Heart, and the Denizens of the Stars had paid a high price to restore it. It also hit the Agodal’s energy system and burned almost all conventional weapons depots and caused damage to the energy core. The situation of the freaks on the Amantir was not much better; the blown-away energy core of the Naqdal hit the Amantir and tore open the surface at the equator. Had Amantir not dodge quick enough, the impact force would have slit the entire fortress in half.”

“How do the monsters replenish themselves?” Hao Ren’s brows knitted together as he looked at the festered army climbing out from the rift at the equator of Amantir. “And it looks like they have transformed the terrible wound in the earth into barracks. How many monsters the rift could hide?”

“We still had not figured it out. But they seem to have an endless supply of soldiers; no matter how many of them have died on the battlefield, they could always quickly replenish the number.” Salaman shook his head. “The speed and quantity of replacement have far exceeded the resources they could collect from the battlefield and the Amantir’s production capacity. We suspect that they have resource collection points in other places of or even outside the sacred land. But it is just a guess. We are trapped here and unable to send out reconnaissance.”

“Their materials do not come from the outside.”

“We just came from the outside, remember? Our drone cluster has now expanded to cover half of the galaxy, but we have never seen the festered monsters had any other lairs. What’s more, the divine storm in the galaxy would impede their movement, so they could only roam freely in the degenerated environment.”

Hao Ren scratched his chin. “We need to check out the rift, if possible.”

Just then, Salaman turned around as someone seemed to have sent a report. He talked to the person for a while and then turned to look at Hao Ren again. “The target spot is about to break. Should we proceed to the second stage?”

Hao Ren looked at the large holographic image showing the spot at which the Guardian Legion was focusing their firepower. Visible interfering noises began to appear on the Amantir shield. The chaotic white interference looked as if the static noise of the old TV. It covered an area of hundreds of kilometers wide. The energy circulation of the planetary shield had almost stopped in this area, and it was a sign that it was going to break down.

The counterattack coming from the planet’s surface was fiercer than before as the festered had realized that the invaders were focusing on boring a hole in the shield. They had directed a large part of the energy to the giant anti-air cannons, which were now conducting a massive bombardment campaign on the guardian battleships in space. The guardian battleships were not designed to take such massive firepower, and even though a large number of drones had taken the anti-air fire on themselves, more black warships were leaving the formation.

The corner of Hao Ren’s mouth curled upward: it was about time.

“The guardian fleet, retreat. Enter the Naqdal, stage 2, code name: Operation Best Actor.”

The black battleships left immediately in the direction away from the enemy fire under cover of the drones. This movement would appear to the ground forces on Amantir that the enemy was fleeing from their anti-air fire.

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But the exit of the black battleships was not the end of the battle. Instead, a much powerful monster had come from behind, taking the place of the retreating black warships.

The Naqdal fortress was in position. It started to bombard the same spot of the Amantir shield using the heavy cannons mounted on the base of the fort. At first, the noise on the Amantir shield had shrunken. But as a new wave of bombings came, it did not just stop shrinking but growing larger rapidly.

“Sorry, I got to say this; I sincerely think that the operation code name is rather lame.” In the command station of Naqdal, Lily stared at the scene of the planetary bombardment while wagging her tail. “I think Operation Troy sounds so much better.”

“The method of infiltration is not that important. The acting is the most crucial part of the operation. Don’t you understand what acting is?” Hao Ren looked at the husky maiden. “You had better strap yourself in the seat. The ride is going to be a little rough.”

“Hah! What rough is to me?” The husky maiden said with her arms akimbo, looking confident. “I am the king of Siberia! You should know how strong I am—”

Before Lily could finish, the entire Naqdal fortress began to shake violently, and alarm blared throughout the command station as the anti-air fire hit them.

The husky maiden, who was still in high spirit seconds ago, quickly strapped herself into the seat.

The appearance of the Naqdal had apparently put enormous pressure on the festered. Meanwhile, the slowdown of the offensive of the drones on the battlefront gave the festered the opportunity to redirect their firepower. Almost in an instant, all anti-air guns and orbital cannons aimed their crosshairs at the Naqdal fortress, which was now the most eye-catching target on the battlefield.

Ripples covered the entire shield of the Naqdal under the heavy bombardment.

But the Naqdal fortress had no intention to retreat. Instead, it braced the anti-air fire and continued its bombing mission and descended toward the clutter-filled spot on the Amantir shield. At the same time, swarms of drones fired directly at the spot as if they were going to storm through the shield.

“The Amantir forces are going crazy.” Hao Ren lamented as he looked at the flashes on the surface of Amantir.

Meanwhile, in an idle radio frequency, the cries of the sprites almost overwhelmed the channel. “Aah, aah, aah! we are going to die, we are going to die, we are going to die!”

Indeed, the sprites had been screaming since the beginning. It was just that no one could not care less.

Despite the noise and gibbering, they had no problem in managing the subsystems in the fortress.

Vivian reminded Hao Ren, “Be careful not to overplay your hand. If the festered begin to think that they will lose the battle, they will surely blow up the Amantir and bring us down together.”

“No worries. They can handle it. It will be a joke if these Mad Lord minions are so easily frightened.” Hao Ren grinned. “And see? Is the opportunity not coming already?”

A large number of drones around the Naqdal had exploded under the heavy bombardment of the enemy anti-air fire. Meanwhile, a massive patch of never-before-seen dark-red pattern gradually appeared on the Amantir surface. In the center of the dark-red pattern line, bright light started to spurt out.

The MDT screamed. “Warning, super-high energy detected! Super-high energy detected!”

“Redirect all power to the shield. The priority is to protect the living zone.” Hao Ren adjusted himself in the seat. “Prepare to blow up the island connecting belt.”

The massive weapon on the Amantir surface had finished recharging. A bright light spot began to grow in the field of vision.

“This is a crazy plan, but I believe that you will—” The holographic image of Salaman flickered and blurred and his voice was barely audible. At last, the connection was lost entirely.

The huge dark-red light finally hit the Naqdal’s shield, and it shattered like glass. A series of explosions began to rise throughout Naqdal Continent. Amid the blasts, the attached island on the southern tip broke away from the mainland.

But no one noticed that at the moment when the main shield of the space continent shattered, there were two smaller, inconspicuously transparent shields had sprung up on the space continent and the attached island respectively. The air defense cannons of Amantir had merely taken down the outer shield of Naqdal but did not cause any material damage to the fortress.

The Naqdal fortress quickly climbed and pretended to flee. At the same time, the breakaway island seemed to have lost its propulsion and fell straight toward Amantir, dragging a long trail of fire and smoke behind it.

It crashed through the already weakened spot of the planetary shield. During the impact, the island rolled over before breaking into three smaller pieces and then fell and disappeared into the thick atmosphere of Amantir.

“Had I not known the ‘script’ earlier,” Salaman stood on the bridge of his battleship and said to his adjutant with a poker face, “I would have thought that they were hit.”