Scipio Planet Vault Mountains—the brutal battle continued.
The stench of scorched flesh permeated the ventilation ducts. Every fallen imperial soldier was swiftly dragged into the shadows, followed by dreadful sounds of flesh and bone being torn apart. The Vasari wasted not a single gram of protein.
A 1-H super-heavy tank slowly glided through the vault. This terrifying super-heavy tank possessed formidable defenses. The Vasari Army's anti-tank weapon was the man-portable antimatter annihilation round, but their stockpile of such weapons was already running low, and it took two or three shots to destroy a single 1-H super-heavy tank.
After more than a dozen 1-H super-heavy tanks at the vanguard had been destroyed, the tanks behind them began smashing their way inside. Their overwhelming firepower slaughtered large numbers of Vasari Army soldiers.
However, the remaining Vasari began to disperse. Like ghosts, they melted into the vault's maze-like ventilation shafts and abandoned cargo passages. Their nano-alloy scale armor made them difficult to detect through thermal imaging, while burning armored vehicles interfered with sensors. They darted everywhere like phantoms.
Deep inside the vault, where the power had been cut, countless shadows moved endlessly through the vast, dark space. Imperial soldiers whose minds had long since shattered fired wildly at those places.
Yet only a handful of those shadows were real Vasari. Most were projections cast while they moved elsewhere.
The Vasari, masters of every kind of tactic, deliberately created faint light sources to cast shadows. This simplest and hardest-to-detect trick was an absolute Decisive Kill against Imperial Stormtrooper soldiers who had already been frightened out of their minds by the mountains of corpses and seas of blood the moment they entered the battlefield.
Under such extreme psychological strangulation, quite a few Imperial soldiers were even killed by their own comrades amid the panicked, indiscriminate