Chapter 1389 — Attack and Defense Reversed
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 5
The upheaval in the central wasteland was transmitted to the entire Alliance at the first opportunity. This earth-shaking change shook the leaders of the Alliance member states, but no one truly panicked—ever since the day the Blockade Wall project began, the Alliance Supreme Staff, led by the three great empires of Cecil, Typhon, and the Silver Empire, had run simulations. The senior generals and military-political heads of the three empires had long predicted that once the wasteland legion's command layer realized the situation was irreversible and attrition tactics were useless, they would regard the Deep Blue Well as the "final option." The entire Alliance had been waiting for this turning point, so although it arrived more abruptly than expected, the mortal armies were not unprepared.
On the fifty-third day of the Month of Revival, after an unprecedented mobilization of material and personnel, the Alliance's advance across the wasteland began to accelerate. Led by the main forces of the three great empires, dozens of member states contributed everything they could—soldiers, food, laborers, steel. All of it flowed toward the ancient land of Gondor and turned into a searing torrent at the front, along with purification spires rising one after another from the ground.
Not long after the Alliance's full-scale advance accelerated, the commanders of the vanguard units confirmed signs of decline in the wasteland legion—although the deeper into the wasteland they went, the more mutants and synthetic beasts there were, the command quality and combat awareness of those monsters were falling rapidly. The wasteland legion, once disciplined and orderly in tactics, was growing more and more chaotic. On most fronts, the mutants now knew only to charge blindly and attack moving units by instinct, and in a few areas there even appeared completely uncontrolled "wild" mutants and synthetic beasts wandering lost. This eased the pressure on frontline troops while also confirming the judgment of commanders and leaders—
The wasteland legion's soldiers might be infinite, but the commanders behind them were limited. When all of those commanders turned to attack the Deep Blue Well, the "delaying force" left on the main battlefield could only be a rabble.
On the Cecil front, a glaring white torrent screamed across the sky, leaving behind a faintly distorted trail that shimmered with heat. At the far end of the battlefield, the torrent made contact with the earth. High-purity, high-intensity arcane energy melted rock outright, vaporized the soil, and left a chain of dark red lava scars upon the ground. The monsters racing across that land were reduced to smoke and dust beneath the white light, not even a residue left behind.
The armory sections at both ends of the heavy armored train "General Winter" emitted a low rumble. Heat vents opened beneath the armor plates. Alchemical coolant absorbed a great deal of heat within the heat-exchange grilles of the prismatic generator and turned into billowing white mist that jetted from both sides of this war machine. Inside the armory sections, technical sergeants immediately loaded new coolant tanks into the slots, while the emptied tanks rolled down a rail at the end of the carriage into a recycling bin, ready to be refilled.
The disposable, jettisonable coolant tank—this new technology, or rather new approach—greatly increased the rate of fire and stability of the prismatic cannon mounted on the armored train. Compared with the traditional cooling system maintained by a massive network of pumps and pipes, the new alchemical coolant tanks nearly doubled the prismatic cannon's rate of fire, and the entire system occupied less than one-third the space of the old pump assembly—the extra space was even enough to install two close-in defense weapon stations and their corresponding ammunition magazines.