Boom! Boom! Boom!
A huge fireball after another exploded right in the middle of the dense Swift Shadow Insect swarm, sending massive waves of flame surging outward. As the tightly condensed fireballs erupted, the shock waves they unleashed by shaking the air easily tore through the Swift Shadow Insects' hard shells, shredding them to pieces. Severed limbs and shattered shells flew through the air. The explosions lasted only a brief instant, yet each fireball blasted a crater more than ten zhang across into the brownish-yellow earth, deep in the center and shallow around the edges.
More than a dozen Fire Dragon Cannons roared in unison, clearing swaths of ground with overwhelming force. Hundreds of Swift Shadow Insects perished in that round of bombardment, showing just how formidable the cannons were. But compared with the swarm as a whole, it was too little—far too little. After firing one round, the operators in the gun towers hurried to load Upper Grade Spirit Stones. The one they had just used had been drained of its spiritual energy and reduced to a small pile of white powder.
The swarm moved at tremendous speed. The craters they had cleared were soon filled again with densely packed Swift Shadow Insects. The overall number of insects seemed not to have diminished at all.
Some fifty or sixty li beyond the range of everyone's spiritual sense, an army of barbarians—also known as the Alien Race—had gathered into ranks of square formations. Yet the so-called barbarians were, in a sense, no fundamentally different from humans. It was only that they lived in a different environment. Over time, that had made them somewhat taller and broader, with darker, rougher skin.
More than ten thousand barbarians had assembled there. Every one of them rode a Swift Shadow Insect. But these insects