Insolent Brat, How Dare You!!!

Smoke from the explosions, so thick it would not disperse.

On the scorched earth that High-Explosive Armor-Piercing Shells had plowed over dozens of times, the severed limbs of twenty Soul Saints lay scattered everywhere. Their Martial Soul Avatars had long since become stinking pools of bloody pulp.

"Insolent brat, how dare you!!!"

A roar of utter fury tore through the thunder of artillery from the rear of the army.

The two Level 90 Titled Douluo holding the line for Spirit Hall had finally gone mad!

They had watched with their own eyes as the backbone Spirit Hall had poured untold effort into cultivating was butchered like livestock by those merciless steel shells.

They knew that if they led the armored knights in a frontal charge, even Titled Douluo would eventually be worn to death under explosions that dense and devastating!

"We'll break through from the flank! Once we kill that mortal who doesn't even have Soul Power, these peasants will fall apart!"

"Understood! Martial Soul Avatar! Ninth Soul Skill—Void Ghost Shadow Kill!"

The two Titled Douluo, radiating earthshaking pressure, abandoned the dignity of high-level Soul Masters.

Holding nothing back, they sent all nine of their Soul Rings blazing and became two streaks of light that seemed to tear through the void!

Braving the explosive fragments raining from the sky, they used the terrifying burst of speed of Titled Douluo to race up the steep canyon walls in an uncanny serpentine pattern, forcing their way past the first line of howitzer fire!

"Die, heretic!"

In the blink of an eye, the two Titled Douluo had closed to within three hundred meters of the heavily armored train.

Killing intent cold enough to freeze blood locked onto Lin Fan, who stood atop the turret.

A decapitation strike!

It was the deadliest assassination tactic Soul Masters possessed!

Standing atop the train turret, Lin Fan watched the two figures hurtle toward him. Far from panicking, he broke into a sly grin.

"Heh. Trying to use the terrain to avoid damage and force your way into the back line? You really think those few cannons were all I built in seven days?"

Lin Fan slowly raised his right hand and pressed a red steam-control valve beside him. His voice carried through the loudspeaker across the second defensive line:

"Let them come!"

"Second defensive line, reinforced-concrete bunker cluster! Prepare overlapping fields of fire!"

"Roll out the Maxims! Show these two flying monkeys what real war looks like!"

Boom—!!!

Inside the Firmament, the instant the words "reinforced-concrete bunkers" and "Maxims" left Lin Fan's mouth—

Outside the Firmament, in the real world of Fasinuo Province, a world-shattering transformation struck the battlefield at Tack Town!

Rumble, rumble, rumble—!

Across the ruins of Tack Town in the real world, the earth heaved and churned as though it had come alive!

At the edge of the pit, tens of thousands of Dragon Soul Guards from the Two Great Empires, along with Chrysanthemum Douluo, Sword Douluo, and the others hovering overhead, stared in horror.

They watched the seething earth as a miracle descended upon the world once again!

One after another, strange, squat, ugly gray-white structures "grew" from the soil like bamboo shoots after rain!

"What... what kind of rock is that?!" Sword Douluo Chen Xin sensed at once that the gray-white structures held no trace of Soul Power and no gathering of earth elements.

Yet the modern reinforced concrete, cast from cement, sand, gravel, and special steel bars, had a terrifying solidity ten times greater than granite!

And it was not just the bunkers.

Ahead of them, countless rusted iron posts thrust up from the ground. Ring after ring of high-strength barbed wire followed, weaving the entire Tack Town position into an impenetrable barricade of razor-edged killing ground in the space of a few breaths!

In an instant, the Tack Town of the real world had been transformed by the Firmament's divine power into an impregnable fortress of modern heavy industry!

Atop the phantom command platform at the fortress's center lay several faintly glowing blueprints—the plans for a machine gun and the formula for reinforced concrete!

"Those treasures are mine! No one else touches them!!!"

In the real world, an eager-to-prove-himself Level 83 Soul Douluo in Spirit Hall's ranks showed naked greed in his eyes.

Looking at the strange structures that had just taken shape, he gave a contemptuous laugh. "A few gray rocks and iron wires with no Soul Power? They think they can stop high-level Soul Masters? Spirit Hall, charge with me! Seize the blueprints!"

"Kill!!!"

Led by the Soul Douluo, hundreds of Spirit Hall's elite high-level Soul Masters ignored the Titled Douluo's warnings from above. They became hundreds of streaks of light and charged straight into the newly manifested barbed-wire position!

How terrifying was a Level 80 Soul Douluo's speed?

In a single breath, he had reached a point less than fifty meters from a bunker. His eighth, black Ten Thousand Year Soul Ring flared as he prepared to smash the squat gray-white structure to pieces with one palm strike!

They had just entered the overlapping fields of fire.

From the narrow, concealed firing slits of six reinforced-concrete bunkers that had manifested beneath the earth, flames suddenly flashed like the eyes of demons in hell!

No gunners from inside the Firmament operated them. This was the fortress's automatic defensive response, triggered when the geography of the two worlds overlapped!

Barrels sheathed in thick water-cooling jackets bared their savage fangs in the darkness.

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat—!!!!

The sound was dense and piercing, like an ancient giant frantically ripping apart an enormous sheet of coarse cloth!

It was the first frenzied roar of Maxim Machine Guns in ten thousand years of Douluo Continent's real history!

Their precision barrels had been the fruit of Lin Fan's relentless toil, and Smokeless Powder drove their chamber pressure to terrifying heights.

Canvas ammunition belts whipped into the firing mechanisms.

Six hundred rounds per minute!

Six bunkers firing across one another!

Thirty-six hundred pointed, full-metal-jacket bullets with muzzle velocities that broke the sound barrier became blazing whips of fire tearing through the night!

These were no longer bullets. They were a wall built of solid steel, sweeping forward at the speed of sound—a wall of death!

"What is that?!"

The Level 83 Soul Douluo at the front had not even managed to shout the name of his Ten-Thousand-Year Soul Skill. The light from his eight Soul Rings had only just flared—

Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud!!!

A dense storm of bullets smashed through the protective Soul Power around him as easily as a gale sweeping away dead branches!

He tried to dodge, but at six hundred rounds a minute, there was not a single inch of safe space left!

The first bullet shattered his shoulder blade...

The tenth tore open his abdomen...

The hundredth sawed his thigh clean off his body!

"Aaaagh—!!!"

His shriek lasted only half a second before it stopped dead.

Under the concentrated fire of hundreds of bullets, the Level 83 Soul Douluo seemed to dance a twitching dance of death in midair.

Then his body could no longer withstand the terrible force tearing through it. With a bang, it was blown apart in midair into a cloud of flying flesh!

And he was not the only one.

The hundreds of Spirit Hall elites charging behind him—Soul Emperors and Soul Kings—were like rotten tomatoes thrown into a meat grinder at full power before those six crossing whips of metal and fire!

Bones cracked under tearing metal. Bullets thudded through flesh.

In just five seconds!

The hundreds of high-level Soul Masters, together with the phantoms of the Martial Souls they had summoned, were sawed into fragments across the ground before the barbed wire!

Blood burst out like fountains, staining the rusted wire a shocking dark red. Shreds of flesh hung from the barbs, dripping blood.

The entire charging formation had been wiped out!

Sharp gasps rose one after another overhead.

In the real world, Chrysanthemum Douluo, Ghost Douluo, Sword Douluo Chen Xin, Yu Yuanzhen—the head of the Blue Lightning Tyrant Dragon Sect—and the other Peerless Douluo who looked down upon the world all felt their hearts skip a beat at the sight of that terrifying "metal storm"!

The shock made several Titled Douluo's Soul Power falter for an instant. They staggered in midair and nearly fell!

What had they just seen?!

There was none of a cannon's world-shattering thunder, only that cloth-tearing rat-a-tat.

Yet the dense rain of bullets held a dominance ten thousand times more despairing than any cannon!

"Hundreds of shots... in a single breath?!"

"With fire that dense and penetration that fearsome... no blind spots, nowhere to dodge! Even with my Seven Kill Sword, I could never block hundreds of metal Hidden Weapons traveling faster than sound in a single breath!"

"How is this possible... How could a monster like that exist? It consumes no Soul Power, yet with one pull of a trigger, it spits death without end!"

Chrysanthemum Douluo Yue Guan's heavily powdered face had twisted beyond recognition.

He stared at the gray-white bunkers below, still trailing thin curls of smoke, their black gun barrels aimed at the sky.

The reinforced-concrete bunkers held no trace of Soul Power. Water-cooled machine-gun barrels jutted from their firing slits.

In that moment, they became a forbidden zone of death in the eyes of every extraordinary fighter on the continent—one none dared cross and whose mere sight would haunt their dreams!

Behind them stood the thirty thousand Dragon Soul Guards of the Heaven Dou Empire, who had been ready to charge at any moment.

Now every knight lowered his lance in unison.

Without waiting for an order from Xue Ye, the army retreated a full three miles!

A miracle? Treasure?

No. Those were the gates of hell!

That was how the demon named "Yu Xiaogang" harvested the lives of Soul Masters!