Chapter 397: A Mind-Boggling Display
Half a month after the worlds made contact.
On the outskirts of a small city in India, several young men and women carrying guns cautiously threaded their way through the streets.
They climbed across a road clogged with vehicles. While the others covered her from a corner, one of the girls slowly climbed onto the roof of a half-collapsed building.
This town was not a contact zone, yet it was eerily desolate and silent. There were no civilians or soldiers in sight.
"It stinks here... This place makes my skin crawl... Amira, do you see anything?"
The girl called Amira raised her sniper rifle and used its scope as a telescope, scanning the distance.
She focused on several shops and a medium-sized clinic.
Fine beads of sweat covered her face. Through the scope, she could see bloodstains everywhere-on the walls, the ground, and countless other surfaces.
Perhaps because she had been up there too long, another woman climbed up and quietly asked what was happening.
"I don't see anything! I'm coming down."
The girl glanced at the man and her nervous companions below, then climbed down.
These people wore no uniforms, but they carried rifles and other weapons because they had originally been soldiers of India, after a fashion.
They were not trained regulars, however, but recruits hastily conscripted in huge numbers across the country's states.
Although India was a major world power in both population and territory, its state machinery's ability to respond clearly fell short of even the second tier, and might have been worse still.
Its only advantage was its vast population, which allowed it to rapidly assemble enormous armies during the global wave of conscription.
But the development of a competent officer corps had fallen badly behind. Even the original army