Chapter 273 — Explosions and Flame
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
They had come.
Wreathed in corrupted magic, smoke, and dust, brimming with hatred for the living and for magic itself, bearing the ruin and madness of the Gondo Wasteland, they set foot upon Cecil Territory's pits and minefields.
Their assault was truly earth-shaking.
The instant the alarm sounded, tension gripped the walls. New recruits, equipped with thermal ray guns and force-field shields, took their positions atop the ramparts under the command of officers and veterans, forming a defensive line. In their sight, the monsters howled madly, trampling across the mine-strewn plain as though they felt no pain at all—a scene savage, awe-inspiring, and yet chilling to the bone.
The Cecil Territorial Combat Corps had a proportion of new recruits that would give any commander a headache. Of the thousand-odd soldiers in the corps, more than eight hundred had been recruited after the first defensive battle. Though they had the finest equipment and thorough training, a recruit was still a recruit no matter how well trained; without having faced the pressure of the battlefield, an insurmountable gulf would always remain between them and the veterans. To mitigate this disadvantage, Gao Yang had increased the proportion of live-combat training as much as possible—sending them into the deep forest to protect exploration teams and fight magic beasts, sending them into the mountains for training, even dispatching them to the northern wasteland and the borders of Kant Territory to wipe out bandits and the desperate mercenaries who had gathered in the chaos of Kant Territory. Only through such means had he barely ensured that every soldier in the Cecil Combat Corps had fired a gun and seen blood, allowing the recruits to grow. Yet only by passing today's trial could they truly be considered past their recruit phase.
After today, even if they still could not be called seasoned veterans, they would at least have shed the label of recruit once and for all.
The blood-red smoke pouring from the mountain gap was growing ever denser, gradually forming a blood-colored cloud mass of astonishing momentum. The aberrations surging out from that cloud threw themselves wave after wave at Cecil Territory's southern wall. To these monsters, the breath of the living and the omnipresent magical reactions of the city were like a beacon in the night. The moment they burst from the mountains, they charged with unmistakable purpose—even if the minefield ahead of them kept exploding, they never hesitated.
Landmines were a wonderful thing—Gao Yang had always believed this, especially when dealing with mindless monsters. No matter how many mines were buried on the battlefield, these single-minded creatures would charge without hesitation, then tread a straight line across the entire minefield. But the facts proved that even effective landmines could not fully resolve the threat of the aberrations, because those monsters' physical constitutions were simply too formidable, and their "physiological structure" was simply too bizarre.
A crystal mine could blow a monster's lower body to shreds, but with such wounds they would neither die nor retreat in fear. Instead, they would drag themselves forward with their remaining upper bodies, crawling until they triggered a second or even third mine before finally being killed. So while these monsters triggered mines with astonishing speed, their efficiency at "clearing mines" with their own bodies was equally remarkable.