Chapter 566: Chapter 370: Fire at Me_1
The iron torrent of the Fourth War Zone faced the spherical battleship head-on, as if a long arm was about to grab it.
All live ammunition weapons are overloaded and operational.
Pure mass impact shells, super heavy physical poison shells, X17 sub-high-energy particle missiles, instantaneous positive electron energy stream infusion missiles, string energy explosion missiles, rift phase particle cannon shells, and other live ammunition weapons pour out, bombard the surface of the spherical battleship, first tearing apart the recently restored flowing light shield, then penetrating the thick fog, and striking the right ship’s outer metal layer that has just been thickened.
The brilliant series of explosions flicker and merge together, overshadowing the sun in the background.
The spherical battleship’s rapid advance comes to a halt.
Although human conventional weapons cannot penetrate the spherical battleship’s reinforced armor, they can consistently slow down and delay its advance.
It seems that humans have the upper hand again, but the sweep of the white light pillar has never stopped, and the dragonfly fighters and eight-legged beetles that rush up are causing casualties one after another.
Harrison Clark is still watching the battlefield like a meat grinder from a distance.
He no longer follows the human casualties through the command channel.
Not because he can’t bear it, but because he doesn’t want to watch it anymore.
Watching or not watching doesn’t change anything.
War has always been like this.
Human lives are as unstable as duckweed, small and fragile.
In daily life, the accidental death of a person can stir up waves of emotions.
But in war, it’s all too common, with not even time to mourn.
Harrison Clark has seen too many wars.
Although he knows that there will be different sacrifices each time, he is still saddened, only that he no longer knows the taste of sorrow and tears.
He has seen too much.
At this moment, a dazzling light suddenly erupts in the other end of the battlefield.
A massive spatial shockwave arrives, and the particle stream and shock energy push Harrison Clark to retreat explosively.
It is the real trump card of the soon-to-be-annihilated two hundred million duo-fighter pairs by the Blade Mantis.
Among them, two fighters carry 100,000 particle-interference bombs each.
The mission of these two fighters is to perish together with the enemy.
If two hundred million fighters could hold and annihilate the enemy aircraft, then these two cards would not be revealed.
However, the disparity in strength between the enemy and us is too great, with just twenty Blade Mantises slaughtering nearly two hundred million human combat units in a very short time.
Against small units, the Blade Mantis only changes its combat strategy, no longer swinging its blade arms but simply spraying small, bizarre energy streams.
These energy streams float in the air, forming large clouds before dispersing, then chase human fighters one particle at a time.
There is no escape, no place to hide, and the multiple composite energy shields of the fighters are virtually useless.
Once a human fighter is smeared with just a single small particle, it will be obliterated in a violent explosion.
This style of combat is completely beyond human comprehension.
Well-trained fighters can’t even counterattack.
Compressing the energy equivalent to a hundred fortress ships into a 55-meter frame, like an ant that can exert the force of a heavy industrial excavator, from a quantitative to a qualitative leap in enhancement, is indeed terrifying.
When their comrades gradually die, and the hope of achieving the strategic goal is slim to none, the operators of the two fighters make a decision, no longer caring about themselves and their comrades, and detonate the bombs directly.
The pilots push the pseudo-curvature engines to extreme performance, rapidly accelerating to nearly one-sixth the speed of light, making a wide range of evasive maneuvers, and eventually seizing the opportunity to suddenly switch to straight-line movement.
In the end, the pilots are no match for Galaxy Warriors and lack precision control.
There are no devices in the fighter comparable to the Galaxy Equipment for buffering, and the pseudo-curvature engines cannot perfectly fit and cover; the sudden change in direction exerts unbearable pressure on the human body.
At the moment of completing the sudden change in direction, the four operators in the two fighters die on the spot.
But they’ve done their best and made an instantaneous decision that intelligent fighters could never achieve.
Transformed into two streaks of streaming light, the two fighters shoot forward, landing precisely at the center of the two Blade Mantis arrays, and the automatically set countdown runs out, detonating simultaneously.
“We got them!”
The Deputy Officer in the command ship clenched his fists and yelled.
Nora Camp’s face is expressionless.
Under her command, nearly a billion humans have died in battle.
Her psychological pressure has already reached an unbearable level, but she is still standing firm.
In fact, the best option for small combat equipment like fighters is for them to be driven by pure artificial intelligence, not human pilots.
But the truth is that only about half of the fleet is equipped with artificial intelligence fighters, and the remaining half still relies on humans.
When artificial intelligence fighters form a battle formation, they perform well in large-scale group charges, but against small, specialized enemies like Blade Mantises, they are helpless.
Artificial intelligence can react and counterattack quickly, but when facing special warfare requiring more on-the-spot decisions, they become pure cannon fodder, and their overall performance is far inferior to human pilots.
To fully exploit all resources, human small combat aircraft can only participate in the war with a semi-intelligent, semi-human combination.
Of course, there are also remotely controlled fighters connected through a quantum network, but at this time, the external quantum and wireless network environment has become confusing under the interference of Star and spherical battleship intelligence, and the signal transmission speed has dropped significantly.
This was also in human intelligence early on, which is why they abandoned such a strategy from the beginning.
Besides, is staying on a battleship really safe?
Facing a specific enemy, in a specific battlefield, requires specific strategies.
Real human-controlled small combat aircraft are still the most efficient and best strategy.
Nora Camp keeps an eye on the battlefield intelligence and prays silently in her heart for everything to go smoothly.
However, three seconds later…
Twenty brand-new Blade Mantises slowly float out of the explosions of the particle-interference bombs.
Smoke lingers on the bodies of the Blade Mantises, but there isn’t a scratch on them.
Nora Camp’s Deputy Officer is shocked, his body swaying, and he mutters, “How… How is this possible?”
Star and Martha Owen, the technical analyst of the First Warzone, jointly provide intelligence.It wasn’t that the Blade Mantis was so tough as to ignore the impact, but rather it was covered in a layer of unknown composition, a special energy layer that allowed it to quickly absorb the impact of the particle-interference bomb and convert it into a shield on its surface to resist physical impacts.
In short, a particle-interference bomb detonated at mid-range was ineffective against it.
The Blade Mantis changed its direction of attack again and began to swoop towards the nearby Third Warzone fleet.
The gap in the encirclement grew even larger.
Below, the Fourth Warzone fleet had already sustained more than 50% damage, and the trapped spherical battleship was about to regain its freedom.
Another special operations squadron was given the order to approach the enemy ship with particle-interference bombs and black hole bombs, but they could not find a suitable opportunity to launch their attack.
Now the Compound-Eyed Observer was well aware that humans had mastered both the particle-interference bomb and the black hole bomb, two technologies that could seriously damage the spherical battleship and would not foolishly stay in place waiting to be bombed.
The same trick could only be used so easily once.
Under the continuous onslaught of the Blade Mantis, the Third Zone fleet also began to suffer casualties at an alarming rate.
Reserve fleets were added in gradually.
The price of reducing the fleet’s quality was faster damage, and more casualties.
Around the same time, Needham Brown finally led the First Warzone with millions of elite troops into the battlefield, and a new skirmish broke out.
Harrison Clark was still restraining himself.
He wanted to send a message to the mother of the child, saying that he had almost gathered enough information and it was time to move.
But he restrained himself.
The mother of the child couldn’t possibly have forgotten about his presence as a sharp-edged combatant on this side.
Since she hadn’t used it yet, she must have had her reasons.
Harrison Clark silently observed the battle through a hologram.
In this hologram, the green dots representing Needham Brown and thousands of other top warriors were more eye-catching.
Compared to ordinary Galaxy Warriors, these fighters had more or less custom enhancements to their equipment.
Better equipment, higher levels of the warriors.
This group of fighters also had a better learning situation from Harrison Clark’s combat memory and performed much better on the spot.
Needham Brown was the first to propose a new combat scheme, in which all elite fighters maintained a pseudo-curvature motion at a speed of 30,000 kilometers per second, never staying in place, always spinning and striking.
If they could hit, they would hit; if they couldn’t hit, they wouldn’t stop; and once they were attached, they would find a way to trap the enemy, even if it meant holding them tight.
Other fighters should not worry about accidentally injuring their comrades and should just bomb them with full force.
Needham Brown’s action was quite risky; having so many people gathered in a small area doing such high-speed spinning movements, even with artificial intelligence helping to avoid danger, it was easy to collide with one’s own.
But the benefits were obvious too; the Blade Mantis’ regular cruising speed was half the speed of light, three times faster than the Galaxy Warriors, but to cover the distance and catch up with the Galaxy Warriors took some time.
The time difference could be as long as one-tenth of a second, or as short as a hundredth of a second, giving others a brief time to pinpoint the location.
Moreover, Needham Brown quickly tested a weakness of the Blade Mantis.
If the Blade Mantis carried out an near-instantaneous short-range jump, there would be about one-thousandth of a second of stiffening in place during the moment of completion of the jump.
One-thousandth of a second, so short that it was barely there, but it wasn’t zero, and it was another opportunity to exploit.
Although Harrison Clark always considered Needham Brown worthless, when it came to this moment, “big head” still managed to redeem himself.
If it weren’t for Harrison Clark’s existence as a monster, Needham Brown would have been the pinnacle of human combat power all along.
As if sensing Harrison Clark’s gaze, Needham Brown, who had already switched out of his Eight-Armed Demon God Form and entered the battle with full energy, had put aside all distractions.
His progress was extremely fast.
Within ten seconds of the fight, he was already able to avoid the particle vortex from the Blade Mantis just by relying on his danger intuition.
He even took advantage of an opening when a comrade was caught off guard by the enemy’s pressure, pre-aimed and fired a heavy-toxicity bomb at his comrade.
But he didn’t hit his comrade, but instead was hit squarely by a Blade Mantis that had come through intending to cleave through the comrade.
With a wisp of smoke rising from the surface of the Blade Mantis, a shallow, nail-sized dent appeared on its originally flawless armor. Although the dent disappeared in the blink of an eye, the morale of the human side was greatly boosted.
We can do it!
This Blade Mantis let go of the doomed enemy in front of it, stopped its movements, and stared straight back at Needham Brown.
An alarm went off in Needham Brown’s mind, and he wanted to accelerate forward to escape.
But the Blade Mantis disappeared from its spot, and in the next instant, it appeared behind him.
Needham Brown turned around.
A blade came straight to his face, slashing at the chest of the Eight-Armed Demon Armor, where Needham Brown himself was hiding.
But Needham Brown’s laughter echoed through the communication channel.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment!”
The Eight-Armed Demon Armor, which should have been uncontrolled because of the death of its operator, suddenly moved.
Eight arms reached out in unison, and the legs wrapped around it!
Like a dying, struggling spider, the Demon Armor clung tightly to the Blade Mantis.
Light began to gather in the mouth of the Blade Mantis.
It seemed to want to spray the vortex.
But Needham Brown’s voice was already ringing throughout the command channel.
“I’ve got it! Locate me! Cover me! Fire at me!”
Actually, he didn’t need to shout.
As soon as he noticed his actions, the Starry Sky Giant Cannon on the Starry Sky side had already been adjusted automatically.
A total of a thousand Starry Sky Giant Cannons, which had already switched to energy strike mode and charged fully, were aimed at this spot.
This was the first time humans had caught the Blade Mantis.
A great step for civilization.