On the ground battlefield at this moment, over sixty thousand Azure soldiers held an overwhelming advantage against the remaining fewer than one thousand isolated Great Spikes, throwing their full might into wiping them out.
In the past, whenever such a situation arose, alien crafts in the sky would arrive without pause, crashing downward continuously.
Because of this, it was always difficult for Azure to bring a large-scale battle to a decisive conclusion. Even when they ultimately triumphed, victory was often chaotic and tragic.
Yet today, behind them, stretching all the way from the ground into the sky, was a battlefield dominated entirely by one man—ranked third among humanity, Azure General Bochen.
One against nearly a hundred Great Spike aircraft. All on his own, he was a magnificent spectacle of epic scale.
The sky-shattering warhammer roared...
The dead iron chain clanged and rattled, shrieking with piercing reverberations.
Explosions rang out relentlessly in midair. Debris from Great Spike aircraft rained down like a heavy deluge, while mangled alien corpses plummeted stiffly one after another.
The sunlight above the battlefield, once blotted out, broke through once more in shaft after shaft of brilliant light.
Across this world, twenty-seven major cities had not had a proper look at blue skies and sunlight for a very long time.
For before losing this world, humanity had already lost the zenith above—and throughout that entire process, with virtually no resistance.
That was precisely why this decisive battle in Oceania had been named the Zenith War... It had seemed a bit contrived, at least before today.
Yet today, here on the outskirts of the Oceanian city of Hughenden, on the battlefield of the Zenith War's first large-scale decisive clash, General Bochen's dead iron warhammer finally roared toward the zenith...
It was like a declaration, just like the words General Bochen had uttered when he first struck: "Get the hell down from above our heads."
This was also the first time in human history that airborne Great Spike craft were attacked in such a violent, direct manner.
Not only had it never happened before, it had never even been genuinely imagined.
Precisely because of this, the Great Spike aircraft in the sky were completely caught off guard, thrown into total disarray.
Over on Han Qingyu's side, everyone was utterly dumbfounded as well.
Though at present, due to distance and perspective, they could only see the spectacle in the sky and not the figure standing upon the earth.
"On the ground! Who's that on the ground?" someone asked in a daze.
"General Bochen of Mitli. It has to be him," Zhe Qiuhong said with certainty.
"Oh..."
The soldiers had naturally all heard General Bochen's name. Amid the flurry of murmured acknowledgments, Captain Lao, his gaze fixed on the sky, suddenly asked out of curiosity, "Qingzi, could you pull this off?"
"Huh? Me? You've got to be kidding, Captain Lao."
Beneath his iron armor, Han Qingyu gave a wry smile. He couldn't do it.
Even now, when he considered himself at the martial peak of his life, he was not arrogant enough to believe he had the slightest chance of pulling off the same feat.
This was the ultimate synthesis of extraordinary source energy control and pure physical power. A combat style like this—aside from General Bochen, perhaps not even the Commander-in-Chief or Ne could pull it off.
"True enough. Such an enormous hammer, fastened with an iron chain no less—swinging it around like that really is far too hard," Captain Lao mused, pretending he understood.
"Yeah." Han Qingyu nodded politely to indulge him, then murmured, "Actually, staying planted on the ground is vastly harder than swinging it."
"Is... is that so?" Captain Lao looked a bit sheepish.
"Yes. He has to overcome both centrifugal and centripetal forces simultaneously," Han Qingyu said.
Just then, a voice from some unknown soldier came from behind: "Aiyo! Aiyo, this... Since we had a tactic like this, why didn't we use it sooner?"
"Sooner?"
With just that single word, Zhe Qiuhong turned around, her face taut, her eyes and tone freezing cold.
Intimidated by this unfamiliar woman, the soldier averted his gaze and shut his mouth. After all, she was standing alongside Wu Xu, Wen Jifei, and the rest, seemingly under their protection.
The reality of the matter was:
From the perspective of the weapon, both the dead iron chain and the colossal hammer certainly made use of high-grade dead iron. Had humanity not waged months of bloody warfare, bringing down a great deal of specialized craft and Red Shoulders, and had their current situation not reached a critical juncture where a grand victory was imperative, the Azure Council could hardly have brought itself to allocate so many high-grade resources to forge such a weapon.
And from the human perspective, though no one could yet determine the precise price General Bochen had to pay for this fight, it was bound to be immense—truly immense.
For instance, setting aside the outburst of his trait power, how much life source energy did he have to expend to continuously channel and control source energy through a weapon of that scale?
On this point, there was only one person present who could even fathom the cost: Han Qingyu.
"Prepare to assist." The Han-style iron armor executed a silent salute, lowered its hand, and said.
Beside him, Rusty Sister promptly snapped to attention with a clack, returning a salute as well.
Then, "Help out!" He Tangtang pumped his arm, spun around, and bellowed.
...
Beneath the piercing shafts of sunlight, massive clouds of dust surged from the ground like dragons. Blood spilled from General Bochen's mouth and splattered outward from his body under relentless, crushing strain.
The Great Spike aircraft directly overhead had been almost entirely swept clear. Having finally adjusted to this unexpected assault, they either pulled up sharply in evasion or flew off into the distance in swarms.
Nearly a thousand meters away, a formation of more than a dozen shuttle craft suddenly dove steeply from high altitude, hurtling downward toward the Azure soldiers in the colossal crater.
Dodging space inside the crater was limited; once the craft crashed down, severe casualties were inevitable, and it might even allow the Great Spikes to establish a local advantage at the bottom and rally their forces.
Whoosh!
General Bochen was sprinting.
His heavy footsteps struck the earth, each step leaving a slight crater behind.
And high behind him, the dead iron warhammer in the sky was falling.
Falling,
Falling,
Amid its descent, the dead iron chain suddenly snapped taut—whoosh!
The warhammer swung under the applied force, then whipped outward once more... skimming low to the ground, horizontally, sweeping out a counterclockwise arc that kicked up dirt, sand, and stone as it swept across the mouth of the colossal crater.
Boom, boom, boom, boom!
Some of the soldiers inside the crater were nearly swept off their feet by the surging gales.
And before their upturned gazes,
four consecutive shuttle craft were struck squarely by the warhammer and sent hurtling away, vanishing clean out of sight.
The remaining descending Great Spike aircraft pulled up in sheer panic.
"..." A breathlessly stunning scene.
The warhammer did not stop. With its colossal momentum, even General Bochen himself could not bring it to a halt in an instant.
Conveniently, not far off, more than twenty shuttle craft had just seized the chance to land, joining the isolated Great Spikes on the ground to temporarily form a cluster of nearly three hundred.
Clatter, clatter... In that split second, General Bochen made his decision, suddenly letting out dozens more meters of the dead iron chain.
The chain lengthened, and the warhammer swept further outward.
BOOM! It smashed straight into the swarm of Great Spikes.
On the spot, the entire swarm was blasted apart. At least twenty to thirty Great Spikes that failed to dodge in time were crushed to pieces then and there.
THUMP! The warhammer struck the ground once, yet it did not stop.
A continuous sideways force quickly propelled it into a rebound, keeping it moving to the side.
Yet right at that instant, there was a momentary hitch.
Clang, clang, clang, clang!
From ahead, more than fifty Great Spikes and fifty column swords lunged forward to slash at the dead iron chain.
Both the Great Spikes and their column swords were knocked flying.
The chain did not break, but its speed slackened slightly.
Seizing this opening, "Sreee-aoww!" a blue-sheened Great Spike nearby suddenly charged headlong at the chain, leaped flat, turned its body horizontal, and drove the tip of its column sword straight down into one of the chain's links with both arms.
Thwack! The blue-sheened Great Spike hit the ground, failing to stop the chain's momentum.
Yet another Great Spike swiftly threw itself forward, likewise thrusting its column sword into the chain links.
A third tried directly tackling the chain.
A fourth,
A fifth,
...
Chapter 676