Chapter 938
Chapter 938
[Time]: Autumn 1956, early night (about 25 minutes after the battle began)
Location: Frontal positions along the Bayamo River
"Squeak—squeak—!!" It didn't sound like the cry of a wild beast, but more like the desperate scream of a mouse before it was being crushed.
The last few dozen Atlas Diggers, who were trying to burrow back into the cracks in the vitrified earth, were forcibly pulled out of their burrows by a storm of blue-white electric arcs.
"Bang!" A black-painted "Mingguang" mech fell from mid-air, its hydraulically driven left foot landing on the back of a monster like a hydraulic press.
No firearms were used.
It's just the simple gravitational acceleration plus its own mass of several tons.
With a muffled, explosive sound, the monster's entire chest cavity collapsed into the ground.
The black chitinous exoskeleton, as hard as iron, was no more solid than an eggshell under the feet of this black iron giant.
Dark purple fragments of internal organs were squeezed out of the shell like toothpaste and scattered everywhere, but before they could fly a meter away, they were blown away into a cloud of blood mist by the cooling air jets from the mecha's lower legs.
This is... dynamic crushing.
In the trenches less than two hundred meters away.
The bayonet that Castro had never let go of fell with a clatter onto the dusty ammunition box.
He looked like a plaster statue, his mouth agape, but he couldn't make a sound.
His gaze could not leave the scene before him, which was filled with incomprehensible violence, even for a second.
Ten minutes. Just ten minutes.
A full ten thousand of those monsters that even thousands of people couldn't stop even after they died.
It was like wheat in autumn being flattened by a combine harvester.
There was no tactical maneuvering, nor any covering fire.
That is the most primitive and also the most efficient straight-line charge.
A thousand steel giants, lined up in a seamless black line, like an iron gate several kilometers wide, pushed across the battlefield from one end to the other.
Castro saw with his own eyes the commander wearing the three-stripe epaulettes—the man who had just coldly told him to avoid him.
He even holstered his gun during the charge. He strode forward, and before the giant leader, which had just swatted Castro away with a single claw, could react, a burst of bright blue flame erupted from the elbow thruster of his right arm.
One punch.
An extremely simple straight punch.
"Bang!!!" The sound of a metal fist striking organic matter was as heavy as a temple bell being knocked away.
That was a level of power he had never seen in the boxing ring or the bullring.
Half of the monster's head and half of its shoulder vanished into thin air in that instant.
It was blasted into a molecular cloud that dispersed in the air by that punch.
Its body flew backward like a cannonball for dozens of meters, smashing three or four of its kind who crashed into it from behind into a bloody pulp.
"Is this... their one-on-one combat...?"
Old Jose next to him rubbed his eyes hard and muttered to himself.
"This isn't a war...it's like stepping on ants."
The battlefield fell silent. Only the wreckage scattered everywhere, emitting that foul, burnt smell, and the bubbling sound of porridge being cooked.
"Wait... that sound?" Castro's nerves, which hadn't fully relaxed yet, twitched again.
His pupils contracted. Even though they were hundreds of meters apart.
He could still clearly see a pile of mangled flesh less than five meters from the black-clad commander's feet.
It is wriggling.
The purplish-black blood scattered everywhere did not seep into the soil, but instead gathered towards the largest piece of flesh as if it had a mind of its own.
Countless tiny granulation tissues are growing out of the broken bones, like a thousand wildly dancing red worms searching for each other's broken pieces in the air.
"Damn it! Don't stop there!"
Castro lunged at the still-smoking mound of earth, ignoring his hoarse voice, and roared at the top of his lungs down at the top of his lungs.
"Break them apart! Burn them! Don't just stand there!"
"That thing can survive on any piece of flesh the size of a fingernail!"
"They are reorganizing!!"
but.
The black iron giants below did not panic or open fire as he expected.
Not one of them even glanced back at the friendly force shouting on the mountain.
They simply stood there silently. Those thousand pairs of emotionless red electronic eyes coldly watched the sea of rotting flesh beneath their feet, which resembled a petri dish where flesh was frantically splitting and multiplying.
"Abnormal cell activity detected." That deep, synthesized electronic voice rang out again on the battlefield, clear and steady.
"The target has been identified as R-type regenerative biological tissue. Even under physical fragmentation, it still possesses the self-repair function of gene telomeres."
The three-bar commander looked at the monster in front of him, which was rapidly piecing together half a head and cracking its jaws, emitting a mocking "heh heh" sound.
His faceplate was tilted slightly.
It's like examining a cheap toy.
"Physical destruction alone is meaningless."
He explained calmly, as if giving a final lesson to those monsters who were still alive.
"As long as the law of conservation of energy holds, the recombination of matter will not stop."
"Then try another way."
He slowly extended his jet-black right hand.
It's not a clenched fist, but rather a loose clench towards a part behind you.
He didn't draw his gun. Nor did he take out a flamethrower. Instead, he used a rectangular hilt that was always stored in the back armor slot and looked extremely inconspicuous.
"Everyone. Switch to knife combat mode. Power output setting... maximum frequency band."
"Buzz—" A thousand straight swords, each about 1.2 meters long and with a very simple dark gray blade, were all drawn from their sheaths in an instant.
Their movements were so synchronized, it was as if someone was looking in a mirror.
Castro was stunned.
A knife? In this day and age? Draw a knife at a bunch of monsters that even cannons can't kill?
But the next second, his doubts were silenced by an extremely unique visual spectacle.
That was originally a very ordinary straight metal blade.
At the instant that "buzzing" sound rang out.
changed.
The blade did not emit light.
It didn't turn red either.
But its cold, hard outline suddenly became blurred, as if seen by someone with severe astigmatism.
Within a few centimeters of the blade, a ripple of air, similar to the water ripples seen on an extremely hot highway, appeared.
A high-frequency buzzing sound, so sharp it could pierce the brain even if you covered your ears, made every Cuban present feel their teeth ache.
"Pfft." The commander made his move. It wasn't any fancy swordsmanship.
He simply swung the blade across the head of the resurrecting monster, as casually as if slicing butter.
There was no resistance. Castro didn't even see the blade touch the flesh.
All he could see was the monster's head, which was still twisting and growing and making a "sizzling" sound, and the entire shoulder blade connected to the neck, which was reconstructing.
In the instant the blade slices through the air.
"Pfft—sand—" It suddenly turned into... ash.
It wasn't burned to ash. Instead, like a sand tower collapsing, it instantly scattered into a pool of extremely fine, non-sticky, grayish-white dust.
The dust particles drifted away with the wind from the blade, shimmering with an eerie light in the air.
And the remaining part of the body, which was originally full of vitality, was broken off.
No new granulation tissue grew. On the clean, mirror-like cut, all the still frantically writhing purple blood vessels and muscle fibers appeared as if they had been suddenly frozen, a deathly pale white.
"Life... has been cut off?"
Old José practically popped his eyes out this time.
He rubbed his eyes, unable to believe it.
Even if you burn it, the meat will struggle for at least half a day.
But wherever the knife touched, even a single cell committed suicide within a millisecond.
"Molecular blocking." The commander's voice was as cold as iron. "Through high-frequency oscillations of 20 million times per second, we can directly break the carbon-hydrogen bonds and intermolecular forces of all organic matter in the target area."
He looked up, and the knife, still buzzing from the high-speed vibration, was spotless.
The air around the blade still retains its unique character due to the intense heat from friction.
"At this frequency, the cell is no longer a cell; it is merely a fundamental particle."
"And dead dust... will never jump up and bite again."
He raised his knife and swung it forward.
"Start cleaning. Don't miss any piece of flesh larger than a fingernail."
This time.
He is no longer the simple and violent boxing champion.
The silent black-armored formation disbanded.
A thousand mechs transformed into a thousand gray-black death whirlwinds, scattering across the battlefield.
Castro lay on the now-cool rock. His heart was pounding.
What I was seeing no longer looked like a massacre.
It's more like playing a silent symphony. Or perhaps performing a surgery full of geometric beauty.
The knives in the hands of those soldiers were no longer weapons.
It's a paintbrush, not a paintbrush.
See that one.
With a slight flick of his wrist, the tip of his knife made an extremely elegant circle around the chest of the largest monster in the pile.
The monster's entire chest cavity collapsed like weathered sandstone.
Even obsidian bones, which are normally extremely hard and impenetrable even by gunfire, are no more than a piece of paper in the face of that high-frequency vibrating blade. When it cuts through them, there is no crisp sound of bones breaking, only a hissing sound of matter disintegrating.
Look at those two over there. They're standing back to back, facing the pile of flesh that's still trying to get up and make one last struggle.
Their movements were almost synchronized.
The flashing blades clashed, weaving a gray, misty net.
This isn't a battlefield. This is a room filled with the smell of disinfectant...
No, it's the morgue's autopsy room, filled with the smell of ozone.
Those once ferocious fangs and claws that instilled fear in tens of thousands of people were like snowflakes hitting boiling water in front of this invisible "air knife".
One touch. A piece of meat gone.
Slide it again. One leg crumbled into sand.
There was no blood splattering.
The bodily fluids that were about to gush out were instantly evaporated into a gray mist by the high-frequency heat energy.
The entire battlefield was shrouded in this eerie fog, which appeared both terrifying and sacred under the beams of searchlight in the dark night.
Castro watched all of this.
His hand gripped a stone, and unconsciously he gripped it tighter and tighter, until his fingernails dug into the cracks in the stone.
This is an absolute... technological hegemony.
You think you're tough? I have a punch with kinetic energy ten thousand times greater than yours.
You want to regenerate? I have a molecular cutting tool that's a hundred million times faster than your DNA repair speed.
This is... what the Dragon Kingdom has been hiding behind that Eastern fog for the past few years?
He recalled the awe he felt when he first saw "Xingtian" and was struck by its immense power.
At that time, he still thought it was a kind of heavy deterrent that relied on "great force to create miracles".
But now, looking at this high-frequency blade that effortlessly slices through tens of tons of monsters as if it were embroidering.
He suddenly understood a deeper fear.
Great strength is easy to imitate. Anyone can build a bigger bomb.
But this kind of precision down to the molecular level... completely disregards life, treating it merely as a pile of data and particles that need to be broken down... cold rationality.
That's the real generational gap.
"This is art..."
Castro muttered to himself, forgetting that he was covered in wounds and blood.
"The art of dying."
twenty minutes.
The "surgery" is over.
This time.
No more rotten flesh has healed.
Because there was no meat left on the ground.
The entire battlefield was covered with a thick layer of grayish-white powder.
The texture was like freshly made quicklime or the ashes of burned bones.
The night wind blew and swirled, covering the black glazed floor in layers.
The commander stopped in his tracks.
He flicked the knife in his hand lightly.
With a soft click, the blade stopped its unseen, frantic vibrations and solidified back into an ordinary dark gray steel bar.
That unique atmosphere instantly calmed down.
He looked up, his red electronic eyes seeming to be confirming something.
"Area A has been cleaned. Biological residue index: zero."
He turned around, not looking at the dumbfounded guerrillas, but at the newly created gray-white desert, and made a simple sheathing motion.
"Boom."
The sword is sheathed.
"Phase Two of the Mission".
"Locate your sights on that forest five kilometers to the southeast."
"Go and dig up all those nests over there like that."
"Walk."
A thousand black-armored figures lined up once more, and amidst the oppressive clanging of steel, they stepped over the ashes of their "kindred spirits," passed Castro, and marched unhesitatingly into the deeper darkness.
Only a cold wind carrying ozone and the smell of burning remained, causing Castro's facial muscles to twitch.
PNB