Total Collapse

Kelvin held his White Raven rifle, focused completely on his aim, then squeezed the trigger. He watched a Sandman who had been riding a swiftclaw and swaggering as he ordered the others to charge topple to the ground. Only then did he let out the breath he'd been holding.

"Hey, buddy, that's some fine shooting!" Yoyo shouted, praising him from inside his power armor.

Anyone who worked as a cowboy on New Jade Gate couldn't have lousy aim—after all, the ones who did were already dead. And once you'd honed your shooting skills, you could make a very comfortable living on New Jade Gate. Planters and mine owners everywhere were eager to hire you.

Even so, Kelvin still missed the days when he'd been back in the Galactic core worlds. After graduating from technical school, he'd worked at a small parts factory in his hometown. The pay wasn't much, but living costs were low, so he'd gotten by quite comfortably. The factory director had been an old friend of his father's, treated him well, and gladly taught him how to repair and assemble machinery.

Kelvin's dream was simple: by the time he turned forty, he wanted to own a small parts workshop. Before then, he hoped to marry a wife who wasn't beautiful but was gentle and capable, have a son and a daughter, and care for his mother through her old age. That would have been enough to honor his father, an orbital technician who had died in an aviation accident when Kelvin was ten.

But the state-owned machinery plant in his hometown, founded back in Marshal Li Yuan's day, had gone bankrupt. Its main customer, the Commonwealth Deep Space Mining Group, had decided to order cheaper, more efficient autonomous mining equipment from the Alliance, while the Commonwealth government had stopped subsidizing heavy industry. The small factory Kelvin worked at had always supplied parts and repair services to that state-owned plant, so it had gone under right along with it.

After the banks seized the factory building and equipment he'd spent his whole life struggling to acquire, the director ended his life in a quiet little warehouse.

Kelvin lost his job, and his mother fell seriously ill. He could only afford the most basic health insurance, but the insurance company told him that a plan at his level couldn't possibly cover expensive genetic treatment.

His mother's illness dragged on for three years, costing them the house his father had left behind and the compensation money. When the old woman finally passed away, worn down by poverty and sickness, Kelvin wandered the streets in a daze. Somehow, he wound up aboard a migrant ship and came to New Jade Gate, where he became a cowboy with a bright future.

Yes, he really might have had a bright future. His boss was a good man. He was rough-tempered, swore constantly in ways Kelvin couldn't understand, and was always calling him "Kel." But compared to all the polished, impeccably dressed bigwigs back home, he seemed far more human than the bank manager who'd taken the old director's life's work, the insurance agent who'd dazzled them with a pile of incomprehensible clauses, or the government legislators who'd announced the closure of the state-owned enterprises.

More importantly...

At that thought, Kelvin couldn't help turning to look behind him.

The woman was oiling a White Raven rifle. Her five-year-old daughter held a magazine and carefully loaded it with steel-tipped rounds. The woman had said she'd taught language arts at a public school, but after her husband died, the school had been crushed by the private schools that had suddenly sprung up everywhere. That was why she'd brought her daughter to the colony to try their luck...

A delicate woman like her ought to have been holding books and a fountain pen. How could she be holding a weapon?

The woman seemed to sense Kelvin watching. She looked his way and smiled.

Kelvin tried to smile back, but a large hand grabbed his collar and dragged him behind cover.

Pfft! Sand and gravel sprayed through the spot where Kelvin had been standing. Before he could even feel relieved, Old Man Wang Yougui slapped him on the back of the head.

"Hey, you little brat! We're in a fight! You trying to get yourself killed?"

Here it came again—another string of curses he couldn't understand. But they felt so warm!

Wang Yougui ignored Kelvin, who was rubbing the back of his head and grimacing, and turned to Sergeant Yoyo beside him. "Hey, Blackie! Is your young commander coming back to reinforce us?"

"B-Blackie..." Yoyo opened his mouth, then decided he kind of liked the nickname. "I've already reported the situation here to the commander. The rest is up to his judgment. He's a good guy. If we're really in danger, he'll definitely come back."

"Oh, he'll come back."

"But I don't want him to!" the big Black man added.

"Huh? You don't?"

"They're a bunch of nobodies. They can't even make it within a hundred meters!" After all the battles he'd fought over the past few days—and all of them victories—the Black sergeant was feeling pretty cocky. Of course, everyone at Outpost 12 was feeling a little cocky.

"Oh, they can't make it through..."

"They can't make it through! They can't make it through! If they do, I'll be the first to go out there and pound them all into little cakes!" The big man patted the power maul beside him, taking full responsibility for the boast.

Wang Yougui looked at Yoyo skeptically, then at the enemy outside the canyon. Based on his ten years as a model militia trainer, he figured the Blackie fellow had a point. He raised his "mirror box" rifle and tentatively fired off a few shots. Then he watched the Sandmen across the way abandon the corpses of more than a hundred people and mounts and retreat with anguished cries.

Even the fiercest warrior people couldn't take losses like that! Besides, they'd only happened to pass by. They hadn't prepared to storm a fortified position at all.

Well, they really couldn't make it through! Things were indeed secure here! The old man let out a relieved breath, then suddenly felt like a hero himself.

That was exactly how things turned out. This Sandman force of a little over two hundred was the first enemy the people in the canyon had encountered—and the last. The Sandman patrol that had stumbled across the valley couldn't contact its commander. It could only wander aimlessly through the increasingly chaotic battlefield, then vanished without a trace.

The heavy guns on the Alchi Heights had begun their thirtieth round of bombardment. They'd blasted the High Elder's encampment into a sea of fire, bombarded every warehouse and armored-vehicle barracks they could locate, and were methodically pounding every anti-aircraft position within sight. The garrison's air force, which had been trapped and frustrated in Tulong for days under the Sandmen army's pressure, could finally fly out of the city and run wild.

The garrison's flying vehicles consisted of just one type: Lynx armored airships. They were multipurpose transports capable only of low-altitude flight. Each could carry ten mobile infantry and their power armor, but certainly couldn't fit two tanks or four infantry fighting vehicles. Their speed and maneuverability were mediocre, and their armaments consisted of two Vulcan cannons and a honeycomb missile launcher.

Put simply, they were called multipurpose, but their combat strength and carrying capacity were both second-rate.

Their only real advantages were decent flight capability and a reasonable price.

As for the drones, they were nothing like the heavily armed war machines carried by space carriers, capable of charging through a hail of fire. They were civilian models, about a meter long, with a payload of less than twenty kilograms. At most, they could carry three small bombs or a Vulcan cannon... Yes, these Kingfisher drones were genuinely available on the market once their weapons were removed, and they were among the Commonwealth's few hit products in the international "high-end" industrial goods market. They were used mainly for urban deliveries and aerial photography.

The Sandmen's dual-purpose anti-aircraft guns, naturally, weren't any respectable high-end brand either. They looked like the sort of thing a workshop could hammer together, but that was more than enough to suppress these aircraft.

But these makeshift weapons—the first air-defense network in Sandman history—were now being destroyed one by one amid the thunder of heavy guns behind them and the charge of Tulong's defenders from the front.

And so, the garrison's "air force," its pent-up fury mounting after being cooped up in the city for half a day, sortied in full force.

Sixteen airships formed eight standard combat units, spreading into a fan-shaped attack formation as they swept over the advancing ground forces and scoured the enemy positions. The honeycomb missiles truly resembled gigantic wasps, screaming toward every Sandman barracks, armored vehicle, and firing position within their guidance range. Each strike sent a deafening roar through the air.

Whizzing past the airships were a hundred and twenty Kingfisher drones launched from six drone-control vehicles. A third of these small aircraft were equipped with Vulcan cannons; the rest were loaded down with bombs. They were called small bombs by aviation standards, at least. In fact, these smallest aerial bombs weighed six kilograms. When one hit the ground and exploded, it could create a shock wave more than ten meters across, along with intense heat, a vacuum, and electromagnetic disruption. Living things, machines, and even energy-based entities would all suffer a tremendous impact.

The Kingfisher drones flew at maximum speed, sweeping over the Sandman ranks in just ten minutes. They gleefully dumped all their bombs, then circled back to the city to reload, undergo maintenance, and prepare for another sortie. The first bombing run had been a great success. Everywhere in the enemy camp, towering flames and deep craters scarred the ground. The dazed, screaming, rolling, crying, and wailing seemed endless. The drones, meanwhile, had lost only three—probably brought down by a lucky shot from some hidden survivor.

Most Sandmen had either died in their sleep or had just woken up to a hellscape where their comrades were being slaughtered one after another. They couldn't find their weapons, their fellow soldiers, or their commanders. All they could do was stare blankly, then die for no apparent reason.

"Where's High Elder Hesen? Where is Elder Hesen?" The lords and chieftains couldn't even find their own guards. They could only cry out for their one remaining hope.

"J-Just now, several rounds of artillery fire were all aimed at the High Elder's encampment."

"T-The High Elder may already be..."

"No, no, no! The High Elder is an emissary of the gods. He can't be dead! He absolutely can't be!"

Whether their grief was sincere or feigned, by this point even the thickest-headed lords and chieftains knew the tide had turned against them.

Hanrat, the "king" of Black Mountain City, jumped into the armored off-road vehicle he'd bought for a fortune and was the first to flee the battlefield. As the first Sandman leader to run, he naturally set an example for the rest.

And just like that, the Sandmen's total collapse began.