"The Fourth Soul Engineer Regiment has reached its designated position."
A scratchy mechanical voice came through the communicator, cutting through the oppressive silence surrounding the group.
Xu Wenjun glanced at the comrades who had followed him for most of his life. Their mottled white hair reflected a faint silver gleam in the early dawn light. The warmth of sunrise did little to thaw the chill growing in his heart.
Originally, these elite teams under the Soul Engineer Regiments,people whose cultivation had been forced higher by drugs,only needed to serve another two or three years before they could retire. Their retirement life would be bleak, short, but still something they longed for.
Their pension benefits were not bad,perhaps because they would not live long to enjoy them. The bodies enhanced by drugs had already been worn down by years of harsh military life.
Some advancement potions had minimal side effects, but those were never something a squad captain like him could afford.
"This deployment order feels strange."
Veteran Xu Wenjun, who had survived countless skirmishes, had his own instincts for intelligence.
Everyone remained silent; some even kept their eyes shut, resting while they still could. They also knew something was off,because every unit around them was full of "old acquaintances."
The soon-to-retire scout teams from the border corps,who lived between life and death year-round,had all been deployed here.
"Talking won't help. Just think about how to stay alive."
A soul master with a mechanical arm finally spoke.
Static crackled.
The communicator buzzed, and Xu Wenjun looked over. The battle order had arrived.
"The mission is here."
He glanced at everyone. Under the gaze of thirteen pairs of lifeless eyes, he actually felt a bit relieved.
"We're not cannon fodder. Our task is to protect the soul-tool artillery battery behind us."
"It just means we'll die a little later."
The man with the mechanical arm adjusted his limb. He had lost his original arm during a mission protecting an artillery battery.
Protecting an artillery unit usually came with a hidden rule: you were not allowed to retreat until the battery had fully withdrawn.
Ignoring the pessimist's words, Xu Wenjun led his fourteen-man team to position themselves at the eleven-o'clock direction relative to the battery. Other directions were covered by other teams.
Among them, Xu Wenjun was a level-five soul engineer; the rest were level three or four. By the standards of a formal national army,most soldiers being around rank two or three,they were unquestionably elite.
In fact, the four soul engineer regiments deployed by the Sun and Moon Empire this time,over five thousand soul masters,were mostly elite.
Boom!
A flash burst in the distance, followed by a deafening explosion rolling toward them.
The first shot wasn't from their battery. Xu Wenjun's squad quietly sighed in relief.
He lit a cigarette, then tossed the lighter to the man with the mechanical arm. Last time, that man had lost his arm saving him from a quick-attack soul master.
Guarding artillery was usually a dull job. Sometimes, if luck was good, your artillery never fired a single shell before the war ended.
To a Title Douluo, an artillery battery was nothing but a slow-moving toy. But for soul masters below the Soul Sage level, it was the deadliest weapon on the battlefield.
Of course, "slow-moving" was only by high-level standards.
Hiss,
Xu Wenjun flicked away his cigarette and called everyone to action.
The mission had arrived. They had to move with the artillery as it advanced.
On the front lines,
Amid the thunderous barrage of soul-tool artillery fire, Sun and Moon Empire soldiers clad in simple mechanical exoskeletons charged forward behind the bombardment.
Along the way, they drew their soul-tool blades to finish off any crippled enemy soul masters.
Swish!
Another head was severed. The soldier reversed his grip and thrust the blood-slick blade backward from under his arm, piercing the chest of a would-be ambusher. He lowered his head to avoid a dying strike and then turned, pressing his elbow against the blade's spine as he beheaded the enemy from below.
Soul master abilities came in countless varieties; only a beheaded soul master was a safe soul master.
Through the slit of his metal mask, Taidi looked toward the sky. The smoke of battle smothered the rising sun. Soul power and killing intent filled the heavens, erupting amid showers of blood and flesh.
The bombardment steadily pushed forward. The soldiers around him passed him, continuing their charge.
He didn't actually like battle or killing. But he couldn't deny his yearning for the land beyond the horizon,land he dreamed of one day claiming.
More and more veterans stopped nearby, raising their heads toward the beautiful arcs of artillery fire streaking overhead.
Bang!
A brilliant red firework blossomed in the sky,stunning to Taidi and the others.
"Artillery cover! Fall back!"
The artillery overhead thinned visibly. Taidi's penetration unit began retreating. If they were even slightly slow, they would be blown apart by their own side's fire.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The second artillery battery opened fire, their shells landing right behind Taidi's unit, pummeling the enemy forces that had barely begun regrouping.
Bang!
A distant explosion blossomed into a mushroom cloud.
Within just half an hour of battle, over a hundred members of the first artillery battery had gone up in a sacrificial explosion.
Watching the fiery trails repeatedly streak overhead, Xu Wenjun's heart grew cold.
"I heard you have a wife?" he asked.
"In this half-dead state? I already told her to remarry long ago."
The one-armed man pinched out his cigarette. The glowing ember cast no reflection on his expressionless face.
"I remember I had a daughter. If that beast hadn't carried her away… she'd probably be old enough to run errands by now."
It was a message a hometown friend had sent to him through the army. Xu Wenjun silently activated all his soul tools.
"I don't like dying quietly, like I was never part of this world at all."
"You're right. The Empire is sometimes rotten as shit, but that doesn't change the fact that it once gave me hope. It let someone like me,with only rank two soul power,become a Soul King."
Even if the price was draining his future dry.
"My mother used to say that if you weren't a soul master, even having a nice-sounding name was a luxury in this world."
"No wonder a big guy like you has such a poetic name."
The one-armed man laughed. The sound reached Xu Wenjun's ears… and the next moment, the man's head rolled to Xu Wenjun's feet.
In that final instant, he saw eight soul rings behind the enemy. His struggle had been nothing more than a joke.
As his vision darkened, a flash of white light erupted,and everything turned to ash.
Artillery units would usually rather abandon their escorting teams than self-detonate, unless their mission from the start was to serve as bait.
The White Tiger Legion's top combat power had been drawn away, so,
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The massive third artillery battery unleashed its fury, pouring its entire payload onto the White Tiger Legion,whose formation had unknowingly been disrupted again and again by the penetration teams, forcing them into tight clusters.
At the same time, fierce fighting erupted at the remains of the second battery.
With the enemy's high-level fighters lured away and contained, the Sun and Moon Empire's Soul Engineer Regiments relied on flexible maneuvering to keep the enemy at their optimal attack range at all times.
After several exchanges, the Star Luo Empire's border legion was nearly broken by this new style of warfare.
Only when Star Luo's Title Douluo finally arrived and displayed the terrifying might of a Title-level powerhouse did the Sun and Moon forces abandon their encirclement and begin a slow withdrawal.
So this was the power of a Title Douluo?
Taidi crawled feebly among shattered armor pieces. With just one exchange, six of his soul rings had been destroyed, and his internal organs were splattered all over the ground.
He could only hope the death compensation for his family would be generous. He felt his life flashing before his eyes.
Thud, thud, thud…
A figure with heterochromatic eyes stopped before him.
With all his bones shattered, Taidi couldn't even turn his head.
He saw the man bend down and pick up his fallen communicator.
Then,bang. A massive boot crushed his remaining vision.
Throughout the battle, the Sun and Moon Empire had used their information advantage to suppress the Star Luo Empire's weaknesses with precision. For the first time, a communication network formed by communicators allowed long-range strikes to appear on the battlefield at scale. But once a Super Douluo arrived, the Sun and Moon side chose to retreat.
Overall, however, the Sun and Moon Empire suffered about fifteen hundred casualties,yet nearly wiped out the famed White Tiger Legion, causing over three thousand casualties.
Five hundred losses on the Sun and Moon side were caused by the enraged White Tiger Duke alone.
Despite this terrifying casualty ratio, the Sun and Moon high command felt no excitement,only fear.
The detailed data from the Battle Soul Device had long been in the emperor's hands. The more they learned, the more terrified they became of Chen Fu, the person capable of condensing all its functions into a chip with absurd performance.
The soul-tool knowledge of the Douluo Continent was far too primitive,they had no way of understanding how monstrous that person truly was.
The Sun and Moon Empire also had a metal-manipulation martial soul user, but that was nothing remotely comparable.
The machinery that controlled an entire continent began to move. Massive armies marched toward the Star Luo border.
Although the conflict erupted suddenly for every nation, the Sun and Moon Empire had at least some mental preparation. Still, many of their plans were incomplete, leaving them awkwardly positioned against top-tier combatants.
But the Sun and Moon Empire could no longer afford to wait.
If they were lucky, they might even clash with the ultra-domain spiritual network created by "Azure Blue."
Of course, that was assuming their morale wasn't crushed by Azure Blue's future achievements before that day came.
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