The immense deluge of earth and rock could not budge the tractor field, nor could it crush many Great Spikes to death (unless they were already critically wounded and exceedingly unlucky), and naturally it could not harm Han Qingyu and Pegmont, who had prepared in advance.
Why, then, had Han Qingyu expended the force of a source energy surge to shear the cliff face down?
The reason was simple: it altered the valley floor's original environment—a relatively enclosed space that the Great Spikes had long since constructed and knew intimately.
For outside ambushers, altering the terrain almost always offered more advantages than drawbacks.
The massive upheaval of collapsed earth and rock provided fleeting chaos, concealment, and cover. For Han Qingyu and Pegmont, this translated to precious room to maneuver and a rare window of opportunity.
Beyond that lay an unexpected boon Han Qingyu had not factored in before, only now realizing it: the thick blanket of earth and rock gave Pegmont an environment of survival and combat that had been his most familiar for the past six months or more.
When a man fought in a terrain where he was most comfortable and confident, his conviction and performance were generally far superior. And for Major General Pegmont—humanity's greatest anomaly—this happened to be crucial.
Han Qingyu did not deliberately remind him or urge Pegmont to seize the moment; he said nothing at all.
The comms stayed silent. Han Qingyu moved with cautious precision beneath the blanket of earth and stone, striving all the while to gauge the positions of Pegmont and the two Daies through fluctuations in source energy.
Before long, numerous Great Spikes burst up through the rubble at the bottom of the valley and leaped clear.
Standing above, they swung their swords frantically, trying to sweep everything aside. Yet this was clearly futile—brutal impacts could shatter the earth and rock into finer debris, but could not make it vanish.
"%￥#..." A string of low syllables sounded. A Daie had finally spoken.
Beneath the rubble, more than twenty dead iron battleblades immediately surged forth, slashing in unison toward its position, while Han Qingyu gripped his own blade, poised to charge in for the kill at any moment.
Clang-clang-clang... Thwack! Following the clash of dead iron, something was pierced.
One Daie had been wounded in the ambush.
Yet Han Qingyu's follow-up strike never had time to land, for an intense surge of source energy was already upon him.
Boom! In an instant, the entire floor of earth and rock across the valley was blasted more than twenty meters into the air.
In the hollowed-out space below, the two Daies and a massive swarm of Red Shoulders had simultaneously slammed their column swords into the ground. That had been the Daie's command: using an area-of-effect source energy strike, they hurled all the rubble upward en masse, attempting to flush out Han Qingyu.
Yet he was not there.
Han Qingyu had sensed it a step ahead, seamlessly melding himself into the thick airborne layer of earth and stone, rising and falling with it.
In the midst of this, he even carefully peered out for a glance, worried that Pegmont might be exposed and subjected to concentrated fire.
Fortunately, he was not exposed either.
Han Qingyu did not know exactly how the fellow had pulled it off, or whether he had used the same method, but that was clearly unimportant.
*He must be far more accustomed to this environment and situation than I am, and far better equipped to handle it...*
*Damn it.* Han Qingyu abruptly realized something: there seemed to be no living Great Spikes left within the airborne layer of debris, only mangled corpses.
This, too, was evidently the result of the Daie's command. From the Daie tier upward, Great Spikes were undeniably beings of higher intelligence.
*What are they planning to do?*
At that moment, the entire uplifted layer of earth and rock began to fall back down.
Abruptly—*swish!*
Below, a Red Shoulder raised its column sword straight overhead with both hands. Source energy detonated as it sprang upward in a swift, vertical thrust directly into the falling debris.
Swish, swish, swish, swish...
Ten, fifty, a hundred... two hundred...
Swarms of Red Shoulders launched a synchronized assault in identical fashion.
They charged en masse into the descending debris in what appeared to be blind fury—thrusting in, piercing through, scattering chunks of stone, punching hole after hole upward until they reached the peak of their leaps, then spinning around to slash back down.
At the same time, the two Daies gathered power at the bottom of the valley, blue light blazing behind them, waiting for Han Qingyu to show himself.
*Clang!* Finally, Han Qingyu had nowhere left to dodge and was forced to parry.
He was exposed.
Instantly, with sharp whooshes, the two Daies on the ground vaulted upward together, column swords leveled straight like missiles as they soared toward him.
*Clang!* High in the air, Han Qingyu held his blade horizontally with both hands, bracing the flat downward to block head-on.
In the ringing crash of the impact, cracks spiderwebbed across the blade.
*Pfft!* Han Qingyu spat a mouthful of blood midair. With his battleblade locked desperately against theirs, he was propelled skyward by the Daies' column swords, left completely exposed in the open air.
In the very next instant, all the Red Shoulders that had leaped high flipped downward, slashing toward him. The Red Shoulders landing along the surrounding cliff walls kicked off the stone, hurtling back to strike him as well.
From the ground, yet another wave of Red Shoulders leveled their swords and surged upward.
...
"Reporting in, this is CA117!" For the first time today, and the first time in a very long while, Yang Qingbai's voice over the comms sounded taut, flustered, and bewildered. "The Great Spike ships pursuing me have turned back! Only four left—all the rest turned back!"
In truth, this meant he could survive today. When the chasing fleet shrank from four hundred Great Spike ships to four, escaping alive in CA117 was no trouble at all for a pilot of Yang Qingbai's caliber.
Yet Yang Qingbai felt not the slightest flicker of joy, for he knew precisely where those returning ships were heading to reinforce.
The mere arrival of these ships was a lethal threat, not to mention that they were likely ferrying numerous Red Shoulders, or perhaps even another Daie.
"Understood," Wen Jifei replied. Spoken as a brother rather than the supreme commander of the Martian theater, his voice held a trace of panic as well. Then he switched to the command channel and said with resolve, "All ship formations, execute previous orders immediately.
"I want the skies over that valley locked down tight. Not a single Great Spike ship gets through." Wen Jifei's eyes were bloodshot, yet his tone harbored not a shred of hesitation or wavering.
"Sir!" came the chorus of replies over the pilots' channel.
Simultaneously—*whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh...* Amid the shrieking roar of source energy engines pushed to their absolute limits, the human craft cast off all concealment, streaking forth from every direction and ripping across the Martian skies.
...
*Crash! Boom! Boom...*
Collisions. Unhesitating, deliberate rams unfolded over the Martian F9 Fenghua Belt, above the Great Spike valley tractor field.
One ship, two ships, three ships...
Far exceeding the calculations of the Great Spike commanders, a massive swarm of human ships defended this narrow pocket of airspace unto death in the most brutal, direct, and ruthless manner possible.
There were no farewells of doom, no tragic cries of defiance. Aside from the curses muttered by pilots in languages from around the world, every channel remained in stony silence, broken only by the recurring thunder of metal colliding, echoing continuously across the alien sky.
The vast majority of these human vessels carried no passengers; there was only a lone pilot aboard each craft. According to standing orders, they could have ejected a split second before impact (even if the chances of surviving such an ejection were slim). In reality, very, very few pilots did so, because...
*What if one last nudge on the control stick lets me ram into a few more?*
So they thought, and so they did.
Amid the sky full of suicidal human ships, only a small handful flew with caution, striving to exploit the gaps carved out by their comrades' sacrifice to reach the mouth of the valley. For these ships carried passengers—one or two individuals each—super combat powers.
General Jiang Longchi, Lieutenant Wu Xu, He Tangtang, Shen Yixiu... were all among them.
Chapter 922