In the early dawn of the following day, at approximately 4:30 a.m. local time, the entire CA Formation had fully deployed across its assigned sector in northwestern Oceania.
Among them, Squad 1777 lay in ambush on a small slope beside a highway, alongside the rest of the Mixed 3rd Battalion to which it was attached.
This highway led to the coast. By estimates, more than a million residents of Oceania would pass through here, boarding the vessels that had brought the expeditionary forces here to leave this isolated continent behind.
After that, until the Zenith War was won or brought to an end in some other fashion, convoys carrying reinforcements would likely continue to arrive, but there would hardly be any more ships taking people away.
In the words handed down through the chain of command: confronting the current situation and the looming threat ahead, humanity had staked everything on this single throw of the dice.
In the dim light, the bushes and tall grass formed an unbroken stretch of murky black, thick and overgrown.
Blades of grass pricked against their faces.
The sky appeared impossibly vast, the stars brilliant and cold.
The ground sprawled endlessly, stretching far beyond sight.
"Hey, Erzhu." Hu Biaomao tugged on Zhao Erzhu's sleeve, gesturing for him to look off to the side. "In this kind of light, can you tell from a distance which of the female soldiers over there are foreigners and which ones are ours?"
Zhao Erzhu turned his head and peered closely. "...No."
"I can. Come on, let me tell you. Look, everyone's lying prone right now, right?"
"Yeah."
"Cast your eyes over them casually and look for round things... Right, if the first thing you spot is the back of their head, they're mostly ours. If the first thing you spot is their ass, they're mostly foreign," Hu Biaomao said.
Zhao Erzhu asked, "Why?!"
"Because normally, foreign female soldiers have bigger, perkier asses. If they turned over onto their backs, heh-heh..."
"Shut up," Lao Jian snapped, casting a glance over as well... Thinking of his wife at home and the child soon to be born in her belly, he turned back around.
Using his blade to hollow out a small hole in the dirt, he lowered his head into it to light a cigarette...
Smack, smack. Qin Guowen suddenly slapped him twice on the back.
Lao Jian hurriedly dropped the cigarette and jerked his head up tensely. "Are they here?"
Based on combat experience over this recent period, whenever populations evacuated cities under alien coverage or reconnaissance, if Great Spikes in the air spotted them, there was a high probability they would dispatch a few craft to intercept.
Particularly during this stretch after Daie waged its global guerilla harassment, such interceptions had grown increasingly frequent and reckless.
"No," Qin Guowen whispered, pointing toward a distant patch of scrub. "Did you guys see that just now?"
"What?"
"A figure just passed right through there," Qin Guowen said with subdued excitement. "Fast, crazy fast. Judging by that speed, it has to be a super combat power on the move."
"Whoa!" A ripple of low murmurs rose from the soldiers around them as they whispered excitedly, "Could it be a super from Huaxia?"
It wasn't that Squad 1777 had never seen a super before... They had seen two: Han Qingyu and Wu Xu.
Yet now, stationed on a battlefield like this, the sudden sighting of a super combat power still brought a wonderfully reassuring feeling.
"Nothing strange about it." Eager to show he was a man who had seen the world—having commanded Han Qingyu and Wu Xu in his time, after all—Squad Leader Lao ducked down to retrieve his cigarette, took two hard drags before it went out, and said, "There are plenty of supers showing up for this battle.
"Every super that Azure Headquarters and the various fronts could spare is definitely here. I reckon there have to be at least thirty or forty of them," Lao Jian continued in a low voice. "Yesterday I heard from the regimental commander that from our Huaxia Front alone, at least three came: Marshal Hua, God Lü, and that girl who became a super last year—what was her name again? Right, Huang Dudu... What a name to give a kid."
A few crude chuckles broke out around them.
"That's great then. With so many supers around, all we have to do is trail behind them. If our corps commander came too, even better—then we'd just be on cleanup duty..." one soldier daydreamed aloud.
"Keep dreaming... It doesn't work like that," Lao Jian cut in. "You think super combat powers are here to lead our charges? No, they're reserved for the Red Shoulders. The crux of this battle comes down to whether they can pin down and cut down every Red Shoulder on the field. Otherwise, a single Red Shoulder showing up would be enough to wipe us all out..."
Lao Jian only went as far as Red Shoulders. As for that Daie hovering constantly in the skies, it was beyond his pay grade to contemplate.
"Uh, can't we take down Red Shoulders like they did in Xiongzhanli? I mean, we're all outfitted with tenth-generation devices now!" A young soldier spoke up, somewhat unconvinced though hesitant to show it, his eyes fervent. "Last night I saw a whole bunch of those giant javelins being hauled ashore. Wonder if they'll hand them out to us."
"Even so, that requires teaming up with super combat powers," Qin Guowen said glumly. "If they just handed them to us, do you think we could keep up with a Red Shoulder? Could we even hit it? In terms of speed and sheer impact, the vast majority of us can't even match a black armor or a blue-sheened Great Spike..."
"You've never experienced a large-scale clash, so you wouldn't understand. In a real head-on collision, even with those javelins, we wouldn't break through a horde of Great Spikes. Back in Xiongzhanli, it only happened under special circumstances bought with piles of lives," another veteran chimed in.
"Right. So there's no need to get worked up over spotting a super. On the other hand, if you see someone getting into a shouting match with a Great Spike, feel free to get excited and let me know," Lao Jian chuckled. "In that case, we'd have to march right over and salute the Deputy Chief of Staff."
The Deputy Chief of Staff was, of course, Liu Yiwu—and in this battle, he was the supreme commander of the CA Formation.
"Speaking of which, can Chief of Staff Liu really curse a Great Spike to death?" a young soldier asked.
"Yeah, Qingzi said it himself. How could it be fake? Back then on the peak of Xilang Peak, Chief of Staff Liu even cursed a Red Shoulder to death," Lao Jian snickered.
"Otherwise, how do you think someone who isn't even a top combat power made general?!" another young soldier blurted, utterly convinced.
"...Pfft." Qi Rourou stifled a laugh.
Just then, the communicator on Lao Jian's chest buzzed.
"They're coming," he said after listening to the transmission.
Everyone on the slope instantly readied themselves for battle.
Yet what arrived was not a Great Spike craft, but the evacuating civilians.
The first group, about twenty-odd large trucks, departed safely under the cover of night.
Then, as the sky paled slightly, a long column of people on foot arrived. They had likely been waiting nearby; with evacuation time running short and transport vehicles scarce, they had set out on foot first to reduce the turnaround time needed for trucks to circle back and pick them up.
According to past casualty statistics, walking columns were actually less likely to be intercepted than vehicular convoys, and even if intercepted, their casualty rate was comparatively lower—provided, of course, that an Azure squad was on hand.
Hurried footsteps, frightened faces—the walking column carried only the barest essentials, moving swiftly along the road in hushed silence...
Whenever children started to cry, the adults covered their mouths and hugged them tight to their chests.
Pairs of young, quietly weeping eyes mirrored the starlight.
Unlike the convoys, the walking column soon noticed the Azure formation lying in ambush along the ridge. In that instant, their faces visibly relaxed. Parents pointed out the soldiers on the high ground to their weeping children, whispering words of comfort...
Many of the children stopped crying; some turned their tear-streaked faces toward the heights, waving their hands.
Qi Rourou turned her head and met the eyes of a little girl of seven or eight.
"Sister," the little girl called out softly.
"..." Qi Rourou understood the English word. A touch helpless, her habitually cool gaze nevertheless softened. After a brief hesitation, she smiled and waved back.
The little girl squirmed down to the ground, waved to Qi Rourou once more, then took her mother's hand and jogged forward.
Boom!
A shuttle craft abruptly slammed down from above.
Before Lao Jian could even pass on the warning broadcast over the comm channel by the Rejectors, it had already crashed down. Perhaps it wasn't even the craft that the Rejectors had locked onto.
Azure was no longer capable of monitoring the movements of all Great Spike craft. This state of affairs had persisted for quite some time following the blanket invasion, and despite the tremendous effort the Rejectors had poured into Oceania, they had been unable to reverse it.
The heavy shuttle craft slammed down at high speed right onto the highway, crashing into the rear of the long column and killing over a dozen people on the spot.
The front of the column collapsed into sheer chaos in an instant. Adults and children alike broke into shrill screams... Some stood frozen in shock, while others scrambled up the slope in panic, searching for cover and protection.
Whir-whir-whir-whir-whir...
Before the Great Spikes inside could eject from the craft, Squad 1777 and another neighboring squad—roughly ninety soldiers in total—received the battalion's order to strike and leaped out together.
"Go!"
"Don't be afraid!"
"Keep moving!"
The squad members shouted at the top of their lungs in the crude English they had hastily picked up aboard ship on the journey over.
Landing on the ground, Qi Rourou darted to the side of a deceased couple, scooped up an injured child of three or four, whirled around, and thrust the toddler into the arms of a twenty-something youth sitting nearby, sobbing in hysterics.
The young man on the ground looked up, his gaze blank for a second, and numbly took hold of the wailing child... Perhaps they didn't even know each other.
"Go."
"There are more troops ahead."
"Doctor."
"Be brave."
Aside from the words "go" and "doctor," Qi Rourou spoke in Huaxian.
The young man likely didn't understand all of it.
Yet the man who had just been sitting on the ground weeping in despair wiped his nose with a swift swipe, clutched the child to his chest, scrambled up, and sprinted away with all his might, tears still streaming down his face.
Whoosh! Whoosh! The Great Spikes ejected—a blue-sheened Great Spike and a black armor slammed onto the ground.
"Don't look back!" the soldiers bellowed.
At the same time, Lao Jian barked, "Move, bring them down!"
At this moment, as the night had yet to retreat and the sky turned a faint gray, the fleeing civilians sprinted toward the northwest. And behind them, the warriors of Azure surged forward with roaring devices, throwing themselves into the kill against the Great Spikes.
Chapter 665