Chapter 277: Taking Everything Back Part 2
The peace lasted only for a couple of minutes.
Then the tree line to the north dissolved.
Something hit it, and the trees simply ceased to be obstacles. What replaced them was a wall of bodies, moving low and fast, thousands of them packed so tightly that the ground beneath their legs disappeared under the noise they made.
East flank, same thing. West flank, same thing.
My field officer said something. I wasn’t listening.
I was already counting.
Three directions. Thousands of them. The outer ring was made up of the same stone-carapaced variants we had encountered on approach — fast, coordinated, their plated bodies catching the light as they charged.
Behind them, larger ones. Slower, heavier, built like siege weapons that had learned to walk.
My army held formation behind me.
I stepped forward.
Alone.
"Stay back," I said. "Watch your footing when they fall."
I leveled my spear and exhaled once.
"Moonlight Dragon Lightning Strike."
I was gone before the sound finished leaving my mouth.
The strike didn’t travel in a straight line. It branched — one point of contact becoming many, the force redistributing itself through whatever was nearest, chaining from body to body the way lightning finds the shortest path to ground.
I crossed the northern charge in under a second, and by the time I stopped moving, three hundred of them were already coming apart.
Good.
I reset my stance and swept the spear in a flat arc.
The displacement of air alone was enough to knock the front line off their feet. The ones behind stumbled over them. The ones behind those had nowhere to go, and I was already moving into the pile before they sorted themselves out.
"Moonlight Dragon Lightning Thrust!"
The force carried through the first body and into the second and the third and whatever was behind that, compressing them into each other until the structural integrity of the formation just gave up.
I came out the other side of the northern charge in eleven seconds.
Behind me, a trench of wreckage stretched back two hundred meters. None of it was moving.
I turned to face the east.
"Moonlight Dragon Storm Sweep."
The cyclone opened at a hundred-meter radius. The aliens didn’t have time to register what was happening before they got cut.
When I turned around, I saw that my army was dealing with the aliens with ease as well. They worked together seamlessly, and their coordination was top-notch thanks to all the training they had undergone with me.
"KEEP UP WITH ME!" I roared.
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After traveling for days, we finally reached our destination. The Hive.
The scale was the first problem. One hundred meters at its peak, wider at the base, its surface covered in those grooved channels running with green liquid that moved too slowly to be water.
Then a flood of aliens burst out from within. There were land types, flying types, insect types, and many others. The sheer variety gave me the impression that these aliens were nothing more than mutated animals native to this planet.
That meant the original alien that had established the hive here had yet to reveal itself. I would probably meet it once I got inside, and that would be the key to ending this simulation.
I stopped walking.
My army stopped behind me.
"Today, we either win and claim victory, or we die fighting. Men, there is no retreat. Give it everything you’ve got!"
I raised my spear, and Qi erupted around me. At the same time, the sky cracked as lightning crashed down. The wind howled around us while I pushed my body to its limit.
The display had an immediate effect. The soldiers’ morale surged, their fear drowned out by the overwhelming force pouring from me.
"ARGHHHH!"
"LET’S KILL THEM ALL!"
"FOR HUMANITY!"
With that declaration, everyone charged forward.
I made my move as well. Despite moving last, my speed allowed me to reach the enemy forces first.
The world blurred around me as I shot across the battlefield. In an instant, I slammed into the alien horde like a spear driven through paper, tearing a path straight through their ranks.
Two more strikes. Thirty gone.
They kept coming.
My army didn’t need instruction at this point. They understood their function — hold the perimeter clean behind me, handle anything that came around the flanks, don’t get in the way of what I was doing at the front.
They were disciplined enough to execute it, and I trusted them enough to stop checking.
I moved deeper.
Up close, the large ones were genuinely dangerous. Not to me in terms of outcome, but in terms of physics.
One of them caught me with a sweeping foreleg that I partially deflected — partially — and the remainder of the force still drove me back four meters. I felt it in my shoulder. Real contact. Real mass.
I adjusted my technique slightly. Time to get a bit more serious.
"Moonlight Dragon, Lightning Barrage!"
Strike after strike after strike. I stopped counting at some point — not because the number wasn’t useful, but because the rhythm became more important than the accounting.
Move, find the gap, drive through it, move again. The spear became an extension of the calculation rather than a tool I was consciously operating.
The green liquid from the hive’s grooves was running faster now. I noticed it between engagements. As if the structure was metabolizing something in response to the losses, accelerating whatever process produced them.
It wasn’t going to matter.
I hit another horde from three different angles in under ten second, each pass using a different technique — the lightning strike for range and chain damage, the storm sweep for clearing packed groups, and direct contact for the ones that broke formation and tried to flank around me.
None of them managed it. The ones that got close enough to threaten my army’s perimeter I handled personally before they made contact.
At one point, one of my officers shouted something behind me. I turned and saw three of the larger ones had broken through a gap on the eastern edge of our formation. Five of my soldiers got killed.
I crossed the distance in two seconds.
Three strikes. All three of the large ones stopped.
I pulled my soldiers back from the edge and pushed the perimeter wider to close the gap.
"You two, move back. Now."
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