The engineers of Qianlong Star grumbled incessantly. Every day, they had to wake up before dawn to clean the camp, only finishing by dusk. Then, they’d have to spray it down again at night.
“Why do they have so many flyers? Does Jiangye Star have a hundred printing factories here?”
“Do flyers cost nothing?”
“This is seriously polluting the environment, so much plastic!”
“Why don’t we just give up? Picking up flyers every day, my back is about to break!”
“The Jiangye Star forces are really going head-to-head with us. When will this ever end?”
“We can’t win a fight, and command won’t let us surrender. Are we just going to drag this out like this?”
Many Qianlong Star soldiers began to waver.
But, things had only just begun.
The mechanical兵工厂s of the Jiangye Star forces had already been completed and were now churning out mechanical soldiers at a furious pace, ten thousand per day.
These mechanical soldiers couldn’t construct anything else; their sole purpose was to march in formation at the border and demonstrate.
With an output of ten thousand per day, even the blindest Qianlong Star forces couldn’t miss it.
Another ten days passed quickly.
The Qianlong Star people were extremely uneasy.
The Jiangye Star people on the other side already numbered a full two hundred thousand. This rate of production was utterly outrageous!
Every day, over a hundred thousand mechanical soldiers patrolled the border in formation.
Their movements were synchronized, the ground vibrated, and each step they took echoed with a deafening roar.
The Qianlong Star people were also desperately reinforcing their troops, but after all their efforts, they had only managed to increase their numbers to thirty thousand.
Thirty thousand against two hundred thousand, a difference of nearly sevenfold.
Finally, Jiangye decided not to wait any longer.
An order was sent to Che Zhen.
[All troops engage, immediately surround the Qianlong Star border camp, forcing their complete surrender and capture as prisoners.]
When Che Zhen received the order, it was exactly four in the morning, and the sky was still dark.
Both camps were quiet. The last wave of planes scattering flyers had just departed.
At 4:30, the Jiangye Star border camp suddenly lit up!
A massive roar erupted, and over a hundred thousand stripped-down mechanical soldiers marched out in formation, running at high speed!
Some mechanical soldier officers followed behind, their rear signal lights flashing incessantly as they adjusted the assault direction of their subordinates.
The Qianlong Star camp on the opposite side reacted quickly, sounding the alarm.
The Qianlong Star soldiers, who had just fallen asleep, were startled awake and scrambled to get up and assemble.
“The border wall is on fire!”
“This is bad! The enemy has launched a full-scale attack!”
The soldiers rushed to the windows, their faces filled with terror.
The border wall was engulfed in flames.
Outside the wall, dense black mechanical soldiers stood in formation, numbering over a hundred thousand, like a flood held back by a dam.
But now, the dam was burning!
The mechanical soldier officers, armed with flamethrowers, had set the fires. Ten-meter-long streams of fire slammed into the plastic border wall, and with each burst, large holes appeared in the wall!
“Quick! Get the fire trucks over here! We have to save the wall!”
The Qianlong Star soldiers frantically organized fire trucks to combat the blaze.
But it was too late.
To save costs, the border wall material was extremely poor. Several breaches had already been burned through.
The black torrent poured in, and over a hundred thousand mechanical soldiers invaded Qianlong Star territory almost simultaneously!
At the same time, a roar echoed from the sky.
Drone swarms appeared, and more flyers rained down.
After the drone swarms passed, hundreds of ornithopters descended from the clouds, hovering above the Qianlong Star camp.
“Qianlong Star people, listen! Lay down your weapons and exit the camp! You will be treated well!”
“Resistance is futile! You’ve seen it yourselves! The overwhelming disparity in strength!”
Chaos erupted within the Qianlong Star camp.
All the Qianlong Star soldiers felt a sense of impending doom, their expressions filled with fear.
However, there were no signs of surrender for the moment.
After days of confrontation, they had prepared countermeasures.
Hundreds of high-pressure water cannons and thousands of high-pressure water guns were mounted on the camp walls, spraying the encroaching mechanical soldiers.
The stripped-down mechanical soldiers, with their inferior performance, were immediately knocked over by the torrents of water, resembling an insect swarm hit by insecticide.
The mechanical soldier officers withstood the water, continuously issuing commands and directing their subordinates to advance in a prone position.
The mechanical soldiers advanced slowly, stopping twenty meters from the camp wall.
The water flow was too fierce for them to move.
The mechanical soldier officers immediately sent a message to the rear:
[Attack is blocked, unable to enter enemy camp. Water flow is too strong.]
Che Zhen’s reply came back immediately:
[Hold steady, wait for the water to run out.]
The mechanical soldiers lay prone, enduring the impact of the water cannons and hoses.
One minute.
Five minutes.
Ten minutes.
An increasing number of stripped-down mechanical soldiers began to emit malfunction signals. To meet production quotas, their protective modules were of very poor quality, and they malfunctioned when hit by the strong water flow.
Sparks flickered intermittently within the dense mass of mechanical soldiers.
The mechanical soldier officers grew anxious and tried to command their troops to advance.
But the front-line mechanical soldiers were immobile. The moment they stood up, they were swept backward, like small fish overturned by a large wave.
The surrounding ground, initially very dry, had become a swamp after ten minutes of torrential downpour.
The mechanical soldier officers received an inquiry from Che Zhen.
[Has the enemy’s water flow shown no signs of decreasing?]
It seemed Che Zhen was also getting impatient.
[No,] all the mechanical soldier officers replied in unison.
Che Zhen was frustrated.
Where was all this water coming from?
Was it stored beforehand?
Unlikely. The amount of water sprayed so far wouldn’t even be enough to fill the entire enemy camp.
Absorbed from the air?
Also unrealistic. Even if they extracted all the air within a ten-mile radius, it wouldn’t gather this much water.
Only one possibility remained.
Groundwater!
There was an underground river beneath the Qianlong Star camp!
Che Zhen immediately called Xu Yan.
Soon, a fleet of engineering ships from White Ant Real Estate arrived, a total of forty medium-sized spacecraft, a truly spectacular sight.
The construction team quickly moved into action, drilling near the Qianlong Star camp.
Ten minutes later, Che Zhen received a message from Xu Yan.
[The underground river has been found. It’s not realistic to block it quickly, but we can try to create a small earthquake to divert the underground river channels.]
Che Zhen frowned.
[A small earthquake? Will it affect the enemy camp on the surface? We cannot cause any casualties, that is the bottom line.]
[It won’t affect the surface. At most, there will be a slight tremor. Buildings won’t collapse, and no one will be shaken to death,] Xu Yan replied quickly.
Che Zhen was relieved.
He sent back a message of approval.
A minute later, he faintly heard a muffled thud from deep underground.
The Qianlong Star camp’s outer wall was continuously spraying streams of water outward.
Suddenly, one stream of water receded, shrinking to a trickle within seconds.
Then, one by one, the water streams disappeared!
The mechanical soldiers, who had been impatient for a long time, rose and charged collectively. Within seconds, they swarmed over the wall, pouring into the Qianlong Star camp like a migrating swarm of metal crabs.
The stripped-down mechanical soldiers had no combat functions; they could only form human walls and push inward. But in the narrow camp area, the metal human wall was quite effective, forcing the Qianlong Star soldiers to retreat.
Tens of thousands of human soldiers, waiting in the distance, also set out simultaneously, dividing into several teams moving in different directions, charging towards the Qianlong Star camp.
From the high-altitude perspective of the ornithopter swarms, the human tide from all directions quickly engulfed the camp, as if a plug had been pulled, releasing the accumulated water to flow down.