The Real High-Intensity Battle

The First Guard left a hundred-man unit to clear the battlefield. With flashlights and rune lamps, they moved through the scorched earth and ruins, prying out carapace fragments, bony spurs, broken scales, and shattered bone artifacts. Anything that could be salvaged as cultivation material went into the storage bags carried by the Qi Refinement Practitioners accompanying them.

Several slabs of deep-sea basalt set into the mountain's reinforced surface were buried too deep to remove intact. The Qi Refinement Practitioners used rune cutting knives to carve out a few relatively complete sections along the seams and took those too.

They emptied the warehouse of Energy Crystals, spare rune bases, and several unopened crates of standard-issue armor, taking even the crates and racks. Only a few bare shelves remained against the wall.

Yang Wenqing had always turned a blind eye to this. Battlefield spoils were one of their reasons for joining the war.

The moment he received the order to "continue advancing," he sent the Water Police Detachment deeper in and dispatched reconnaissance shuttles to probe the defensive line behind the island. The First Guard's advance Combat Shuttles had already exchanged fire with several outlying defensive positions jutting above the sea.

He had returned to the flagship's Command Center, and the ship had reached the side of Windrider Island. He stood before the water-screen map with Lan Ying crouched on his shoulder while Kang He delivered a rapid report.

Windrider Island's outline was circled in red at the lower right of the sea chart, marked "Occupied." Beyond that circle, dark markings still crowded the entire defensive front of the Thunderclap Archipelago. Windrider Island looked more like a door pried open in the line, with a long corridor waiting behind it.

The chart labeled that corridor the "Sea Serpent Chain." Its seven islands