Chapter 1007 — The Bone-Grinder

The war technician who had spoken first pursed his lips and did not pursue the topic. He went to the side of the car and pressed his eye closer, studying the snow-white world outside more carefully — a military train with armor plating, narrow windows, and steel mesh over every opening would of course offer no fine sightseeing view; all he could see was a single vertical, narrow strip of scenery, in which listless copses and hills whitened by snow receded swiftly, and farther off in the sky, faintly, something like an iron-grey shadow seemed to drift in the light.

That was probably the sign of another snowfall — this damned winter.

"What is it?" his companion asked casually. "See something?"

"There are dark clouds on the horizon, and by the look of them not small ones; it'll likely snow again," the war technician muttered. "From my experience, I'd say a blizzard."

"You fix machines — and now you have experience reading the weather?" His companion curled his lip in disdain and turned to look out the window on the other side of the car — beyond that narrow, thickened pane, the imposing bulk of the Iron Throne — Jörmungandr crouched on the track not far off, rumbling forward.

...

In the tactical section of the Jörmungandr, the front-line commander Ma Qi stood before the command station, gazing intently at the many markings on the map. On the desk at his hand, communication devices, drafting tools, and neatly arranged documents lay in good order.

After a moment, Ma Qi suddenly raised his head and looked at the adjutant beside him. "How long until we reach the engagement point?"

The adjutant answered at once: "We reach the firing zone in thirty minutes — we leave the firing interval in forty."

Ma Qi nodded. "Good, the timing is just right... Notify the armory section to begin pre-injecting coolant into the Iris Light generators, and warm up the power spines at both ends ahead of schedule — we'll soon enter the Typhonians' alert range. Their reaction speed lately has been much faster than before."

"Yes, sir."

Ma Qi's attention returned to the map before him, and among its winding and straight lines, the respective control zones of Typhon and Cecil interlocked like interlocking teeth.

In thirty minutes, the Iron Throne — Jörmungandr would enter a designated firing zone; over roughly ten minutes of travel, the train would use its onboard Iris Light cannon to unleash a powerful bombardment on some marginal strongpoint on the Typhon side — though in truth the distance was a little far, and the Iris beam could likely only partially burn away some of the enemy's outer walls and outbuildings, perhaps not even inflicting many casualties, but that did not matter.

A sudden Iris Light strike would be enough to put every Typhon soldier along the whole line on high alert; they would carry out large-scale movements to meet the formal offensive that might follow, would send out great numbers of scouts to try to determine the Iron Throne's next route and whether more armored trains and escort convoys lurked nearby. And once they were all busy... the Iron Throne — Jörmungandr would return to its station in Shadowmarsh, where Ma Qi would treat himself to a cup of rich coffee and, if possible, a hot bath — while pondering when the next armored train would set out, and from where the next true frontal blow should begin.

As for gathering and assessing intelligence on Typhon's military movements throughout the process... he would do that together with his staff team.

This was what he had been doing often of late, and one of the tactics he had devised together with General Philip — its core idea being to give full play to the Cecil mechanical legion's mobility and its capacity to deliver massive firepower in a short time, relying on the several railway lines of the Winterwolf Fortress–Shadowmarsh region and the hastily built forward railways, with the three armored trains — the Zero, the Jörmungandr, and the recently commissioned War Citizen — as the core of operations, conducting an unceasing harass-advance-harass-advance.

The armored trains' new Iris Light main guns were immensely powerful and had an extremely long range; with a suitable firing angle they could deal devastating blows to enemies at extreme distance. On this strength, the armored trains and their escort cars patrolled the rails continuously, randomly raiding Typhon's fixed strongpoints near the limit of their range; the enemy would be forced to redeploy frequently, exhausting themselves in response or dodging the attacks. And if they simply abandoned those strongpoints and kept their distance from the Iron Throne on the plains, waging mobile warfare, then the tank squadron carried aboard the Iron Throne would immediately enter the field to maneuver and reap them, or else withdraw outright, draining the enemy's strength.

If the Typhonians' front line as a whole fell back during this process, then the engineering cars accompanying the armored trains would immediately go to work — laying "forward railways," further widening the Iron Throne's range of action, and establishing temporary stations and energy transfer points to provide magic-energy resupply for the tanks and infantry. If the Typhonians simply sat by and did nothing, then within a week the Cecil legion could raise a great tangle of defensive networks and solid fortifications across the newly occupied territory.

And if the Typhonians did not wish to watch all of this come to pass, then they had no choice but to counterattack into the Cecil-occupied zone, and to pay a staggering price for it.

At first, Ma Qi would still choose to meet those fearless Typhonians head-on in battle, but once he realized that those extraordinary legions—of unwavering morale, unafraid of death, and vast in number—could inflict tremendous damage on the mechanical legions the moment they fought with their lives on the line, he chose another approach: if the Typhonians counterattacked, then fight them for a while first, and the instant results were won, retreat at once. The mechanized legions moved along the railway lines at a speed ordinary infantry could never hope to match; the Iron Throne and its attached regiments, executing "harass-advance," could quickly fall back into the protection of the artillery positions and permanent fortifications, and the only thing the enemy could do was destroy those unfinished fortifications and the temporary "forward railway."

To Cecil's engineering corps, such losses were all but negligible.

Such an advance could go on without end—had there been no orders from the imperial capital, Ma Qi felt he could, before the Month of Fog ended, rely on this improved version of the "steel advance" tactic to level the entire Winterfort defense line step by step, and even push all the way to Aldnan...

But in the end, the imperial capital had given its orders... At least at this stage, the Empire had no intention of attacking Aldnan.

Ma Qi let out a soft breath.

That was just as well; after all, that region was all corruption zones... The shadow of a god gone out of control hung over Typhon's lands, and going too deep was hardly a good idea.