Bury It with Lives

On the ground battlefield. The initial advance of the coalition elites had actually gone exceptionally smoothly. The arrowhead formation spearheaded by five super combat powers had sliced into the final group of Great Spikes still defending outside the mothership almost like a knife cutting through butter. That part had long been factored into their calculations. The five supers were soon surrounded... but these were five super combat powers. Their five-man formation remained like a keen blade, carving and slashing across the swarm of Great Spikes, tearing open wound after wound. Elite squads began the slaughter from the perimeter, and the battle unfolded within a tight radius... In an almost entirely one-sided rout, Great Spikes collapsed and self-destructed one after another. Afterward, the command post detached a portion of their forces to attempt a breach of the mothership. Yet the iron hull of the Great Spike mothership was unyielding, and its exterior appeared to have no doors whatsoever in its design. This state of affairs had persisted right up until moments ago... Moments ago, just as the trio with Han Qingyu felt the hull violently shudder and rock, three hundred blue-sheened Great Spikes in neat ranks and a Red Shoulder suddenly surged forth from a section of the mothership that showed not the slightest sign of an entrance. It felt as if they had materialized out of thin air. The mass charge of the blue-sheened spikes and the surging outburst of source energy in that instant not only rocked the mothership, but even sent a tremor through the entire summit of Xilang Peak. Snow and glacial rock tumbled down, setting off a small-scale avalanche. Down below, people looked toward the peak, retreating at a run amid overwhelming dread to pull clear of the battlefield. "A Red Shoulder!" cried those in the elite battle formation. Sure enough, they thought, there really is another Red Shoulder. Just as Han Qingyu in the lower hold of the mothership was thinking at that very moment. So there were actually three Red Shoulders in total: two hulking brutes and one small one. It was unimaginable what the battle would have looked like had all three Red Shoulders appeared together in a coordinated assault... Perhaps Chen Buer would have had to come in person?! Yet the Great Spikes did not truly understand humanity, either. Over nearly a century, nearly every reconnaissance force they had dispatched along the way had vanished into the boundless cosmos. Especially this time—after their source energy field had been directly rammed and devoured by a puny insect, while a blue-light column sword was hauled off, suppressed, and could not be retrieved—they very likely overestimated the powerful beings within humanity and mankind's understanding of them... That was why they had not revealed all their trump cards at once. Believing themselves to be at a disadvantage, they were holding their ground instead. As the first large wave of Great Spikes to descend upon this azure planet, their original purpose had never been to launch widespread attacks or achieve conquest... What they truly had to accomplish lay in that massive, intricate traction array. Boom! Amid earth-shaking footfalls and sonic booms, within the mass charge of three hundred blue-sheened spikes and a blurred field of view... a blue-light column sword churned up ice and snow, thrusting toward the more than three thousand Azure elites deployed before the line. Perhaps having learned from the previous Red Shoulder, this Red Shoulder kept its grip on the sword, its body driving into the ranks together with the column sword. The sheer momentum and presence it unleashed far surpassed that of the hurled sword from the first Red Shoulder. It could easily pierce clean through their entire formation, leaving a trail of corpses behind. "Scatter..." Under direct impact, the Azure elite battle formation split rapidly to both flanks, exactly as planned before the battle. Down the corridor they cleared, five super combat powers swept forward in formation from the rear flanks, their silhouettes and blade edges blurred beyond recognition by their explosive, supersonic speed... This was why five supers had formed up together for this battle: Azure had long been on guard against another Red Shoulder or any hidden strength inside the mothership. With this strike, the five of them... surged forward like a colossal tide capable of collapsing a coastline. For Cao Min, this was the first time he had ever seen saber light unleashed like an unbroken ribbon of silk. Of course, it was not truly saber light, but an extension of erupting source energy—the blue of device source energy mingled with faint threads of red life source energy... a truly magnificent strike. Boom! Azure's five supers collided head-on with the charge of the Red Shoulder and its two hundred blue-sheened spikes. ...Soil and rock buried deep beneath the frozen earth were churned up, spraying in all directions. At least a dozen blue spikes shattered on the spot. As for the Red Shoulder, the iron armor across its shoulder and chest caved in, spraying blood as its massive frame was hurled violently back into the swarm of Great Spikes behind it... The blue-sheened swarm instantly fell into disarray. At the same time, Azure's five supers experienced a brief deadlock after unleashing their strike, before retreating sharply. "Kill!" The order was issued, and the Azure elite battle formation began the slaughter. "Skrrr-aaaooow..." The wounded Red Shoulder charged brazenly back. Facing the oncoming crowd, it lunged forward and slammed its column sword into the ground with both hands in near-explosive fury. Boom! With this strike, the iron armor across its body swelled once more, unleashing a violent fan-shaped shockwave ahead... Azure's first wave of offense was neutralized. Having done this, the Red Shoulder abruptly threw its head back and let out a long howl. Amid a cascade of sharp cracking sounds, its iron armor began to fissure, fracture lines spreading across its surface... This was the first time humans had ever seen such a thing from a Great Spike in battle, but it was not hard to deduce: it was fighting with everything on the line, burning its own life. A brutal stalemate of mutual containment and slaughter swiftly formed. Led by the Red Shoulder, the reckless swarm of blue-sheened Great Spikes drew the five supers and a large number of elites away from the mothership, pushing toward the lower battlefield. "What are they doing?!" "It seems they're stalling for time," Liu Yiwu said. "Which means..." With communications to the rear disrupted, all command decisions had to be made right on the front line, judged and executed by the generals taking part in person. So: finish the slaughter first, or split forces and continue trying to assault the mothership?! During that brief hesitation— Bzzzzzz... An eerie sound, like a shockwave, resonated from the Great Spike mothership. Yet it was not an attack. ............ At the very moment the avalanche had begun, Squad 1777 began to run in retreat. Like all the other Azure squads pulling back, they ran while craning their necks to watch the ice and snow tumbling from the mountain peak. Those two thunderous booms had pierced through the snow, echoing across the entire snowy mountain. They tried to imagine the battle at the summit... And then came that resonant hum: Bzzzzzz... "What is that?!" More than thirty thousand people came to a halt outside the foot of the mountain, looking up together to witness the spectacle that erupted as the sound rang out. In Wen Jifei's vision, the snowy summit that he previously could not see clearly—or even make out at all—suddenly seemed like an open-air stadium for tens of thousands of spectators, turning on tens of thousands of searchlights at once, all shining into the night sky... Blue-gold beams of light converged like a brilliant, magnificent light show... dazzling and radiant to the extreme. "Did the Great Spike mothership blow up?!" He Tangtang asked after a dazed moment. The mothership had not blown up, of course. It had simply opened on its own—from the top... Just a moment ago, in the sight of the Azure elites and commanders at the summit, the top of the Great Spike mothership had suddenly split open of its own accord, and beams of light surged skyward. The shape presented by the opened top of the mothership, to borrow Han Qingyu's phrasing, was a wok... Now, they had their wok. And that sound had not come from the outburst of light. It was ripples... energy fluctuations contained within the beams of light, so condensed that you could actually see the waves rippling through the air as if across water, spreading out one after another into the depths of the night sky. A traction field—a traction field so colossal that mankind could not comprehend it—had been activated. It might summon an entire army. Yet humanity and Azure were not ready; they still needed time. "Stop it!" "Attack the mothership!" "..." The five supers and a large number of elites were pinned down by the desperate Red Shoulder and the swarm of Great Spikes. The remaining fewer than one thousand elites who could disengage were ordered to charge the mothership. Shhhk! Once again, as if out of thin air. A small Great Spike wielding a blue-light column sword, accompanied by roughly thirty blue-sheened Great Spikes, appeared outside the vessel, barring the path of the Azure elites rushing toward the mothership. "It's a Red Shoulder." "There's another Red Shoulder." And among the thousand Azure fighters in this wave who could attack the mothership, there was not a single super. "...Bury it." With what? Lives.