He Tangtang and Rusty Sister were roughly matched in overall strength at present. Taken as a whole, He Tangtang might have been slightly stronger, but because Rusty Sister wore new armor, her defensive capability was superior.
Both of their combat levels were in the breakthrough stage, having just begun stepping from the Super tier toward the Vault tier.
Combat power at this stage was noticeably greater than peak Super, but compared to genuine Vault-tier combatants like Qingzi and Pegmont, a vast gulf remained—so vast that if the two joined forces against a single Vault-tier enemy, they could only fight desperately to survive, with almost no hope of victory.
It was precisely because of this disparity that they had decided to wait—and had no choice but to wait.
What they were waiting for was the exact critical moment General Yergana had just judged: the turning point where Puta'er's upward momentum and kinetic energy began to wane.
As it happened, this critical point coincided with the moment Puta'er unleashed its two-handed, full-power cleave.
With both factors compounding, Puta'er's torso, angled across midair, was undeniably at its weakest in both strength and defense. At this very instant, He Tangtang and Rusty Sister unleashed their death-defying bursts and plunged down.
They were not going into combat to duel.
Facing a Puta'er, they had no qualifications to duel at all.
In her blistering downward dive, Rusty Sister's iron armor went taut, nearly sparking flames against the turbulent source energy churning in the air. She held an oversized pillar sword vertically inverted above her head in both hands.
He Tangtang was in much the same posture, gripping his heavy blade inverted with both hands, drawn back with all his might to ensure that weapon and body impacted in perfect synchronization.
They would concentrate all their energy onto a single point.
Like two heavy dead iron cannonballs fired from a barrel, they plummeted to smash and ram into the center of gravity of Puta'er's body.
To force it to abandon its strike and divert its focus to defense.
Or blast it to a halt in midair, ramming it down even a fraction.
Naturally, all of this was fundamentally nothing more than He Tangtang and Rusty Sister's own presumption, filled with a heavy dose of wishful thinking.
They hoped they could pull it off, but humanity still lacked a clear understanding of just how formidable a Puta'er was. No one knew whether this desperate gamble would produce the intended effect in the end.
Perhaps it would evade them, and they wouldn't hit at all.
Perhaps even if they scored a direct hit, with their level of power, the resulting impact wouldn't halt Puta'er in the slightest.
Win or lose, they went for it...
The two fell like burning meteors, hurtling toward Puta'er's undefended abdomen.
...
At that hour, the sun was about to set. The Martian sky grew dim, taking on a faint flush of pink.
Flesh and iron armor plummeted through the pink firmament.
The last human airship to ram the enemy filled their sight, shattering like a blossom in bloom. The battlefield below resembled an enormous pool of blood, spread out before them—every human warrior down there, the living and the dead, all within their view.
Yet the actual event unfolded in what was virtually a single instant.
*Boom!*
A direct hit!
Both people, along with their weapons, slammed into Puta'er's abdomen at the same time.
The colossal shockwave nearly warped space itself. Struggling to pull himself back from the dizzying, nauseating stupor of that split second, He Tangtang, drenched in blood, wrenched his head around to look.
Right then, he and Rusty Sister were being propelled high into the air by the tremendous recoil. They should have made their next move immediately to get away from Puta'er, but their limbs moved completely beyond their control, and the source energy inside them felt blocked, utterly depleted.
He Tangtang felt himself begin to fall.
Rusty Sister was falling too, her iron armor cracked and broken. The white garments she wore underneath were swiftly being stained crimson by blood seeping from all over her body.
As for Puta'er...
*Wait, where's Puta'er?*
He Tangtang hastily looked down, and a grin split across his lips.
It had been stopped.
Puta'er's entire body was still airborne, but an unmistakable downward momentum had seized its midsection.
No, not just downward—there was also an angular twist toward the flank.
Taken as a whole, it looked as if Puta'er were pulling in its belly while rolling over onto its side.
"What's this?" He Tangtang was baffled.
The answer arrived soon enough.
Through He Tangtang's blood-blurred vision, a small source energy airship was breaking apart in midair, shattering into countless fragments.
At the same time, countless shattered dead iron fragments and source energy blocks rained down from inside the craft.
Lubi Azha had rammed Puta'er.
From the rear flank, he had slammed right into its kidney... if it had one.
...
That had unfolded earlier, outside the frame of everyone's attention.
As an Expeditionary Force pilot, Lubi Azha had begun piloting his ultra-heavy small airship in a stealthy flanking circle not long after the battle began.
He kept circling, from the front to the flank, never finding a satisfactory angle of attack. In the end, by a twist of fate, he stealthily climbed into the high heavens, far above the aerial combat zone.
From up there, Lubi Azha watched the swarm of human airships ramming the Great Spike craft in the sky.
He planned to ram, too.
Only the target he wanted to hit was that superdreadnought.
Lubi Azha saw human airships attempt to ram it, only to crash into its flank without inflicting the slightest damage.
Yet he still decided to go after it.
Because he belonged to Stream Blades, too, and Stream Blades always took on the biggest and the hardest.
Conveniently, Lubi Azha and his ship were at high altitude, his craft was heavy—extraordinarily heavy—and he had spotted a prime point of impact: the ejection hatch atop the Great Spike superdreadnought, which remained open.
"If they can eject Great Spikes out of it, I ought to be able to ram straight inside."
The logic was just that simple and crude. To borrow a Huaxian curse he had picked up in Stream Blades, Lubi Azha meant to shoot straight into its fucking skull.
Just moments earlier, Lubi Azha had gunned the engines.
He drove the craft downward from high altitude at maximum speed, rocketing straight toward the superdreadnought's ejection port.
If he succeeded, he would take out the core pursuing vessel of the Great Spike fleet in one blow.
Then, during his downward dive, in a momentary shift of his gaze, Lubi Azha saw Puta'er in midair, and he saw that suit of iron armor diving straight down from the Doomsday Great Wall.
Yes, the iron armor was tiny compared to Puta'er, but Lubi Azha saw her—saw her more clearly than he saw Puta'er.
Without a second thought, Lubi Azha pulled the nose up at the final second, tracing a hair-raising arc across the top of the dreadnought... and ultimately slammed into the rear flank of Puta'er's body, right at the outer edge of its right kidney.
So the true impact against Puta'er had not come solely from Rusty Sister and He Tangtang; there had been a third force, delivered by Lubi Azha and his ultra-heavy source energy airship.
If Rusty Sister and He Tangtang's force was directed straight downward, then the impact from Lubi Azha's ship came at an angle.
They smashed Puta'er down, and he, working in tandem with that downward force, knocked Puta'er into a sideways flip.
There was one thing that perhaps no one would ever know: in the instant before his ship and body completely disintegrated, Lubi Azha's lips curved in a smile. His eyes held joy, and were brimming with pride.
A pride ten million times greater than if he had wrecked that Great Spike superdreadnought as planned.
The iron armor was shattering, but she was still alive. Lubi Azha had seen it clearly.
"I saved you, Second Lieutenant Shen Yixiu."
That had been several years ago. Back then, the iron armor had still been tattered and battered, and the Shen Yixiu inside had been an Azure second lieutenant on the run. Amid the factional strife of the City of Sin, she had rescued a young boy, smiling as she told him to hide.
Rusty Sister might not even remember it herself anymore.
Lubi Azha remembered.
Chapter 952