Chifuyu nodded and began selecting the first wave of pilots to deploy.
Houki Shinonono, Cecilia, Lingyin Huang, Charlotte, Laura, Tatenashi Sarashiki, and Kanzashi Sarashiki were assigned to the core combat team; Maya Yamada took charge of the second echelon and rescue operations; Tabane herself insisted on heading to the front in a technical IS fitted with additional sensors, arguing that the first batch of BETA specimens from another world could not possibly be left to ordinary researchers to handle however they pleased.
Seventy-six minutes later, twenty-four IS units rose into the sky above Penglai.
After crossing the East China Sea, they continued climbing, their Sakuradite superconducting buses beginning to sustain continuous high output. Their shields compressed long, narrow fields of high-energy flow ahead of the units. Radar below could detect only twenty-four high-speed targets moving west across the Great Han heartland at an average speed exceeding Mach 5.
Meanwhile, by the fifth hour of the Battle of Kashgar, the human defensive lines had already suffered nearly two hundred thousand casualties.
Ten Indian first-class divisions had been struck from the effective order of battle. More than sixty thousand men were confirmed dead, over forty thousand were missing, and a substantial portion of the remaining wounded would be unable to return to their units anytime soon. More than three hundred thousand follow-on personnel were steadily being fed into the front, but the railways and roads were nearly overwhelmed by fleeing troops, casualty evacuations, and reinforcement convoys all at once.
This world had no true Total War Air Force.
Global expansion under Charles and the conquest of Area 11 in 2010 had shown every nation's military firsthand how KMFs could smash traditional defensive lines built around conventional tanks in a single month. High-Mobility Walkers, Flying Swallow Claws, urban maneuverability, and the Floating System