NOVEL NEXT Chapter 152: A few more minutes
Author note: Warning. Graphic and gory details ahead! Slightly depressing chapter depicting the pain of war. Skip if you don't want to feel the pain. If not… enjoy.
As usual, reality was completely different from the neatly prepared plans that the Chinese Government had made.
They were supposed to end the war with the European Empire in one month, prepare the army for war within two months even as Grand Marshal Li Qingshan sought to delay the invasion by killing the Lion King.
Never in their wildest dreams did they imagine that they would be fighting the beasts within such a short period of time. On top of it, they had to fight with 70% of their defensive capabilities destroyed.
The beasts came like avalanches. No pause. No rhythm. Just endless hunger, crashing down from every direction with a soundless certainty that drowned sirens and swallowed prayers.
Emerald Pine Town was the very first town to fall. The early warning was too late. The tranquil forest village town, once famous for its hot springs and lantern festivals, vanished beneath claws and fire.
Thunder Ligers charged through the trees like living tanks, their roars splintering eardrums before their jaws ever reached flesh.
Blood Hawks screamed from above, snatching defenders off rooftops like ragdolls.
Earth-crushing Brutes, seven meters tall, tusks of black crystal, toppled the final wall with one bone-rattling stomp.
Families died in their homes. Hunters died in their towers. Mages burned through their entire reserves casting citywide barriers, only for them to collapse seconds later under sheer pressure.
And yet, they fought back.
From beneath the village well, a concealed mecha silo cracked open. One. Two. Five units launched, steel shells gleaming with hastily applied mana runes.
Their pilots didn't hesitate.
Some hadn't even finished training. But they charged into the heart of the swarm with blades drawn, shielding the last civilian convoy as it fled into the mountains.
Steel clashed with claw. Fire met fang.
For a moment, they held.
But only for a moment.
The awakened beasts numbered in the millions, there was no hope at all for them.
Ironshade County screamed next. A snowy province bordering the northern frontier. It turned crimson within the hour.
A B-Rank officer climbed atop a fallen crawler tank, his megaphone blaring.
"KEEP FORMATION! DO NOT BREAK RANKS—" He didn't finish the sentence.
A Shadow Ape leapt from a shattered rooftop, its claws cleaving through reinforced armor and bone alike. His blood sprayed across the snow like spilled paint. His mecha, still linked to his neural band, exploded in a blast that vaporized three nearby soldiers.
Yet the others didn't run.
An A-Rank lightning mage unleashed one last arc of plasma, then screamed as her core cracked.
Artillery crews fired until their arms bled.
Riflemen with anti-beast cartridges stayed on their bunkers long after the ammunition ran dry, hurling explosives by hand.
And in the air, a lone drone captured it all.
A snapshot of madness.
A portrait of defiance.
In Xueyuan Province, the sky turned red. Then it fell.
Fire Drakes descended like gods of wrath. Their breath melted bunkers. Their talons crushed APCs. Airfields ignited. Refugee convoys turned into pyres of twisted metal.
"Launch! Every fighter! Every mecha! Launch now god damn it!" A colonel roared.
His men launched. And died within minutes.
There were tens of thousands of Fire Drakes, the hundreds of 6th gen fighters and mechas were completely overpowered.
Scenes of extreme heroism and tragedy unfolded everywhere.
A lone military bus marked with a blue flag for children, veered off the road as insectoid monsters surrounded it. A middle-aged captain leapt from the roof, mana blades crackling in both hands. He charged into the swarm alone, trying to draw them away.
But he failed.
Ten giant wasps surrounded and killed him while the other hundred thousand wasps surged towards the bus.
Screams rang out of the bus… but only for a few seconds. And then… nothing.
A mother clutched her child beneath a bridge as ash rained from above. Her spell flickered once. Then failed.
Her last word was "Run."
The child ran…
But there was nowhere to run to.
The last thing her mother saw before she died was the child being pulverized by a giant turtle beast.
Tragedy.
Upon tragedy.
Upon tragedy.
Upon tragedy.
Upon tragedy.
Made much worse by heroic sacrifices which had completely no effect.
A squad of first-year students from the Northern Academy, barely seventeen, most without battlefield experience, refused the order to evacuate.
They stayed on one side of a critical evacuation bridge, trying to buy time for their schoolmates to escape.
Their mechas had been torn apart in the first wave, limbs and plating strewn across the ground like broken toys.
But instead of fleeing, they climbed back into the wreckage. They wired the scraps shut from the inside. They used shattered limbs as barricades. They turned failure into a final redoubt.
With shaking hands and tear-streaked faces, they aimed their remaining mana cores outward and fired until the cores ran dry, then until the barrels cracked, then until their throats bled from screaming spell incantations that barely worked.
One girl, her name was Liu Yiran, crawled out of her ruined cockpit to throw mana grenades by hand.
She threw out seventeen mana bombs and slowed the onslaught by ten seconds before she got swarmed and died.
As a group, they held the bridge for ten minutes.
Ten minutes that let an entire refugee convoy, one thousand strong, cross the frozen river and reach a transport shuttle on the other side.
Parents hugged their children. Doctors carried patients. Wounded soldiers wept as the bridge finally collapsed behind them.
And the beasts crossed the bridge anyway and massacred everybody on the other side.
In the heart of Hai'an, five elderly cultivators stepped out of an abandoned shrine.
They had not drawn a blade in decades.
Their names had long faded from war records. One was blind. Another walked with a cane. But when the city fell into chaos, they did not hesitate. They brushed off their robes. Tightened their belts. And walked into hell.
They did not roar. They did not chant. They simply moved.
Silent. Efficient. Terrifying.
Wind parted around them. Flames froze. Beasts recoiled. Their spells were old, built before modern spell theory. But they were pure, sharpened by decades of quiet contemplation and forgotten grief.
One opened the skies. Another split the earth. A third turned his own life essence into a wall of light that could not be breached.
They held the inner city for twelve minutes.
Long enough for the evac trains to depart.
Three thousand people made it out.
And as the last cultivator fell to his knees, breathing his final breath, he smiled.
"Good," he said. "That's enough."
But it wasn't enough.
The beasts were everywhere, and the evac trains were destroyed anyway.
Across the countryside, in isolated hamlets and broken towns, it was the same story again and again.
A beast swarm charges. Defenders fall. Reinforcements still hours away.
And someone always stood, always paid the price, and failed anyway.
But fate was a fickle thing.
There were pockets of miracles here and there where people actually survived.
A lone engineer held a mana flare tower upright with her body, pouring her own life force into the spell to keep the signal pulsing for one more minute. That signal summoned a strike squad that eliminated a beast pack just in time.
A teacher refused to board the evacuation bus. She stayed behind with fifteen orphans who couldn't walk. She fought with kitchen knives and household runes until a mech pilot noticed her flare and tore through the beasts to reach them.
A retired janitor sealed the school's mana vault with his own blood signature. He had no training, no weapons, and no core. But he sat on the vault door with a steel pipe, ready to die keeping the last reserve mana from falling into enemy claws.
Though many failed and some succeeded, all of them fought.
Bravely.
Sacrificially.
Not because they thought they would win.
But because they believed.
If they could just buy a few more minutes… then help would come. Someone would arrive. Someone stronger. Someone faster. Someone who could still turn the tide.
They screamed, they bled, they died.
So that their loved ones and their countrymen might live long enough to see the sky split open by salvation… Their stronger elder brother… The military.
Seconds later, the sky did light up.
But it was not with hope, not with dawn.