Blast Those Titled Douluo Out of the Sky!!!

Fasinuo Province, the Ten Thousand Mountains, the Military Industrial Base Grand Canyon.

Gales swept dark clouds across the vast land, thick with industrial pollution and the smell of engine oil. The sky hung so low it seemed ready to be dragged down.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

Footsteps rang in perfect unison, like a war drum sounding in the underworld. They drew closer, shaking loose stones from both sides of the canyon.

Figures slowly emerged at the far end of the horizon.

Spirit Hall had come out in full force. On Pope Qian Xunji's personal orders, its finest troops had assembled: six thousand Ironclad Holy Knights, armed to the teeth!

They wore heavy armor engraved with the Angel God's crest and carried three-meter-long Fine Steel lances. With killing intent fierce enough to trample mountains and rivers, they surged toward the pass leading into the base.

At the head of the army floated twenty figures, each radiating a suffocating, terrifying power!

Twenty high-ranking Soul Saints, all above level seventy-five!

Behind the army, the auras of two Titled Douluo rose like towering mountains and locked onto the defenses inside the canyon.

They were the trump cards sent by the Papal Palace to hold the line. But in the eyes of those proud Titled Douluo, twenty Soul Saints in the vanguard were more than enough to flatten an entire mountain range of mortals!

"Ants! Feel the wrath of the gods!"

A red-robed archbishop leading the charge let out a cruel, fanatical roar.

The twenty Soul Saints exchanged glances. Holding nothing back, they roared at the sky as their seventh, black Ten Thousand Year Soul Rings—the marks of a Soul Master's peak power—blazed to life!

"Seventh Soul Skill: Martial Soul Avatar!!!"

Rumble—!!!

In an instant, a Soul Power storm that threatened to destroy heaven and earth erupted before the canyon!

The elements were violently drained from the air. Amid a raging curtain of Soul Power, twenty colossal Martial Soul projections rose dozens of meters high and blotted out the sky!

Gale Two-Headed Demon Wolves wreathed in flame!

Great Strength Vajra Bears as massive as mountains!

Purple Lightning Mad Dragons coiled in thunder!

The twenty behemoths advanced side by side. Their combined pressure made the canyon's very bedrock groan beneath the strain.

To them, mortals were mortals. Faced with the pressure of bloodlines that had endured for ten thousand years, the enemy's resolve would surely collapse in an instant. They would lose even the courage to raise their weapons!

It was a sight terrifying enough to make any imperial army mutiny and break on the spot.

Across the canyon pass stood the Multi-Tower Heavy Armored Train.

Lin Fan leaned against a thick slab of first-grade special rifled steel, his work clothes smeared with coal ash.

He narrowed his eyes and raised a hand against the light pouring from the Martial Soul Avatars. Then he took a stick of cheap tobacco from his pocket and lit it against the edge of a hot cannon barrel.

"Whew—"

He blew out a mouthful of smoke, and the canyon wind scattered it.

Lin Fan drew the Commander's Sword from his waist and pointed it straight at the Martial Soul Avatars blotting out the sky!

"But no matter how thick your defenses are... you still have to obey the laws of physics!"

"Truth exists only within the range of my cannons!!!"

Lin Fan's hoarse roar thundered across the base's defenses through a steam-powered loudspeaker!

"Rail turrets one through six! Load High-Explosive Armor-Piercing Shells!"

"Extend your fire! Creeping barrage!"

"Shuilianzhu Civilian New Army! Work your bolts and chamber rounds! Seal the area with overlapping fire!"

"Fire—!!!"

Click! Click! Click!

At Lin Fan's command, metal clattered across the armored train and through the trenches!

Gunners and ordinary infantrymen worked their actions with mechanical, cold-blooded precision.

The next second—

Rumble—!!!!!!!

For an instant, the entire Ten Thousand Mountains fell into deafening silence.

The roar of the explosions had surpassed what human eardrums could bear!

On the armored train, six breech-loading rifled howitzers roared at once with earth-shaking force!

Billowing yellow smoke and blinding orange-red fire burst from their muzzles!

The recoil shoved the hundreds-of-tons armored train half a meter backward. The rails shrieked as they twisted!

Lin Fan had fought tooth and nail to develop those breech-loading rifled barrels, and the propellant charges used Yellow Gunpowder of exceptionally high purity.

The instant six High-Explosive Armor-Piercing Shells weighing dozens of pounds each left their barrels, they tore six unbroken white shock waves through the air!

The steel messengers of death, traveling several times the speed of sound, struck the Martial Soul Avatar formation in a fraction of a second!

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom—!!!

The first volley of high-explosive shells ripped through the Soul Saints' charging formation like a storm crushing dead branches!

At the very front, a defense-type Soul Saint had activated his Great Strength Vajra Bear Martial Soul Avatar. Grinning viciously, he prepared to withstand the mortals' attack head-on.

Then a special steel armor-piercing shell traveling at three times the speed of sound spun into his protective barrier with terrifying force.

The Martial Soul defense he claimed could withstand even a collapsing mountain met that shell!

Squelch!

It could not slow it down!

The shell punched cleanly through the dark-gold aura and burrowed into the chest of his ten-meter-tall bear avatar!

Then its delayed fuse triggered.

Dozens of pounds of high-purity TNT detonated inside that sealed chamber of flesh!

Boom!!!

A deep, thunderous explosion sounded.

The level-seventy-six defense-type Soul Saint never had time to scream. In a blast of searing heat and high-pressure gas expanding tens of thousands of times over, his Martial Soul Avatar and his body exploded into a huge cloud of bloody mist dozens of meters across!

A rain of blood and gore burst outward in every direction!

And that was only the beginning!

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The creeping barrage advanced!

The rifled cannons on the armored train poured out fire without pause.

The breech-loaders fired rapidly enough to send shells raining into the depths of Spirit Hall's army!

In the trenches on both sides of the canyon, two thousand ordinary soldiers armed with Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifles were not idle either.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang—!

The crisp, dense crack of Smokeless Powder gunfire sounded like torrential rain battering banana leaves.

Overlapping fields of fire formed in an instant!

The Soul Saints whose Martial Soul Avatars had collapsed under the bombardment, and the Ironclad Holy Knights trying to charge from behind them, faced full-metal-jacket bullets with tremendous velocity and penetrating power. Their Fine Steel heavy armor became a ridiculous ornament.

Bullets passed through it with ease, tumbling inside their bodies and churning their organs to pulp.

Holy Knights at the Soul Grandmaster and Soul Elder levels fell in swathes beneath the dense hail of bullets, unable even to scream. Severed limbs flew through the air and were vaporized by the heat of the high-explosive shells!

Even the Soul Saints lucky enough to escape a direct hit from an armor-piercing shell had half their bodies torn away by the blasts and special steel fragments. They howled in agony amid the mud and blood!

Slaughter!

It was a merciless slaughter across the divide between eras!

The moment industrial civilization collided with the agricultural age, it displayed its absolute dominance!

Boom—!!!

Across the Firmament, that apocalyptic sight—modern artillery plowing the earth while mortals ground Soul Saints into the mud—became a series of terrifying, crystal-clear images seared into the depths of every soul on the continent!

In the present, above the Tack Town Crater in Fasinuo Province—

The Titled Douluo of every faction had been on the verge of drawing swords over the Blast Furnace projection reflected from underground, ready to unleash a battle at any moment.

Chrysanthemum Douluo Yue Guan, Ghost Douluo Gui Mei, Sword Douluo Chen Xin, Yu Yuanzhen of the Blue Lightning Tyrant Dragon Sect...

These peerless experts stood among the strongest on the Douluo Continent. Yet at that moment—

They felt the blood in their veins freeze as the howitzers fired!

Rain still fell from the sky, striking Chen Xin's white robes, pristine as snow and frost.

The level-ninety-six Peak Douluo was famed for the greatest offensive power under heaven. He had devoted his life to cultivating a single Seven Kill Sword, but now he stared fixedly at the Firmament.

His pupils trembled violently, reflecting the gruesome sight of twenty Martial Soul Avatars blown into drifting clouds of blood like weeds.

Clang...

Chen Xin's hand shook so badly he could no longer hold his sword.

The projection of the Seven Kill Sword, which had accompanied him all his life and slain countless powerful foes, gave a mournful cry. It even showed faint signs of dissipating.

"This... this isn't a battle..."

"It's slaughter... butchery with only one side doing the killing..."

"Twenty Soul Saints... Twenty who activated their Martial Soul Avatars, and before that man's machines, they couldn't struggle for even a second..."

Chen Xin jerked his head up and gazed at the smoke-belching armored train in the Firmament.

"Against that sheer physical speed and those terrifying explosions... our sword techniques, our meditation, the Soul Master cultivation passed down for ten thousand years..."

Chen Xin screamed, his voice carrying the ultimate sorrow of an entire old era of cultivators confronting an industrial revolution:

"What... does any of it amount to?! What have we spent our lives cultivating?!!!"

And Chen Xin was not alone.

"Fall back... Quickly!"

Chrysanthemum Douluo's voice rose to a shrill pitch. He pointed at the Blast Furnace below, which had fully taken solid form, and at the seemingly peaceful ground around it, as though he were looking at a living volcano ready to erupt.

"The battle in the Firmament has already begun! That Blast Furnace, those land mines... If Tack Town in the real world has manifested one of those monsters called cannons too, we'll all die here! Retreat!!!"

Panic spread like a plague through the skies above Tack Town in the real world.

Far away, atop the walls of Heaven Dou Imperial City's prison—

Xue Ye slumped in his dragon throne, watching the battlefield in the Firmament, a hellscape fit for Asura.

He felt no fear. He had already exhausted every last drop of it.

He simply stared at the godlike figures shattered by a single mortal cannon blast and the rows of fallen armored knights. A bleak smile twisted his lips.

"It's over..."

"The arrogance of ten thousand years of Soul Masters, the imperial authority of the Two Great Empires... Today, one mortal has blasted it all to pieces with a few piles of scrap metal and yellow powder."

"The sky has fallen!"

Meanwhile, within the Firmament—

On the battlefield, where the smoke had yet to clear, Lin Fan casually ejected an empty shell casing. It struck the train's deck with a clang, trailing white smoke.

He looked toward the two figures who had just risen from behind the army, radiating the terrifying pressure of Titled Douluo. His gaze grew colder.

"Finally decided to come out?" Lin Fan worked the bolt and roared.

"Turrets, take aim! Load high-explosive anti-armor shells! Blast those two Titled Douluo out of the sky!!!"