The delayed-fuse 203 mm shells punched through the ground loosened by artillery fire and detonated beneath the Destroyer-class and among the heaps of their dead. Their frontal shells, with their absurd Mohs hardness of 15, could take direct hits from many medium-caliber rounds, but their torso joints, lower bellies, and the flanks and rears exposed once they lost momentum lacked equivalent protection. More than a dozen Destroyer-class were overturned by heavy shells at once, their enormous bodies slamming sideways into the trenches and further blocking the charge routes of those behind them.
That was when the Hexi Divine Strategy Army's Gao Hai battalion moved in from both flanks.
The TQ-21 had been designed for complex terrain and high-speed ground maneuvering from the outset. Its room-temperature superconducting sakuradite power system gave it instantaneous output far beyond that of conventional armored vehicles. With its High-Mobility Walkers fully deployed, it could approach a hundred kilometers per hour on level ground; when it encountered terrain obstacles it could not cross directly, it could retract the wheels and step over them on mechanical legs.
Six Gao Hai squads dispersed through the gaps torn open by the artillery, their 70 mm linear cannons firing in succession. They fired solid armor-piercing rounds accelerated to extremely high muzzle velocities by superconducting electromagnetic mechanisms.
By modern standards, when this 70 mm cannon fired long-rod penetrators, its short-range kinetic energy roughly approached that of a late-Cold War 105 mm tank gun. Under favorable conditions, it could even reach the threshold of early 120 mm smoothbore guns.
Its shells were light, its ammunition capacity high, and its rate of fire fast. The drawback was that its high-explosive rounds still had only the explosive payload and damage radius of 70 mm shells, making it far inferior to a true 125 mm main