Before two in the afternoon, as the sun gradually climbed high into the sky, the rising ground temperature brought the strength of the upward thermal currents soaring from below to its daily peak. For ordinary glider pilots, this was the golden stretch of time when gliders flew most easily through the sky.
Zhang Tie, however, felt nothing special about this golden period. Just as a fish entering the sea would not care much about the weather above its head, Zhang Tie was equally unconcerned by the strengthening and increasing thermals below. No matter when it was, he felt that as long as he wanted to fly, he could keep riding all kinds of air currents through the sky indefinitely. Unless the air itself became completely still, he had no worries whatsoever about flying.
From the moment he left the Fool until now, Zhang Tie had been circling alone in the sky like a hunting eagle for nearly four hours. Having penetrated roughly two hundred kilometers into the right-wing region of the Selnes War Zone, he had already made a circuit through the area. During that circuit, the Winged Devils he had taken down had reached thirty-four.
Most of those thirty-four Winged Devils had been in groups of two or three. The moment they spotted Zhang Tie, they flew toward him without hesitation—and then, without exception, became his targets. At distances ranging from two hundred to four hundred meters, Winged Devils after Winged Devil had their heads blown apart by Zhang Tie's Palm Arrows, their corpses subsequently plummeting from the sky.
The greatest number of Winged Devils Zhang Tie had encountered at once was eleven. That had been an hour ago. When he saw thick smoke billowing into the sky from the distant ground, he flew toward it. There, he saw