NOVEL NEXT Chapter 155: Anyone?
When It Rains, It Pours
Even as Beijing bled and screamed.
Even as beast claws tore across a nation already drowning in fire.
Europe invaded.
They came not as allies. Not even as conquerors.
They came like vultures to a corpse, seeking to clean out the remaining flesh of a dying behemoth.
From the western horizon, under skies still choked with smoke, the full weight of the European war machine poured through China's broken borders.
Not a single message was sent ahead. No flag was raised. No negotiation was offered.
They simply appeared.
Armored columns rolled like polished steel rivers across the scorched plains of Xinjiang and Gansu. The ground trembled beneath their treads.
Thousands of fresh mecha units advanced in flawless formation, their plating clean, their weapons primed, their energy cores humming with anticipation.
Behind them marched mana-artillery walkers, thick, brutish machines with long-range anti-city cannons mounted on their backs, glowing with freshly charged mana crystals that had never been tested in real combat.
To them, this wasn't war but a brutal and heartless cleanup.
They did not come to help China against the beasts.
They came to harvest what was left.
And there was no resistance.
As in most wars of such brutality and evil, most of the foot soldiers were actually vehemently against it.
They were human beings after all, and a deep sense of solidarity against the beast was abloom in their hearts.
But alas, doing anything else apart from obeying direct orders would result in their deaths, and better the Chinese than them.
So they marched in, guns and spells ablaze into cities that had already been ravaged by waves of beasts.
The forests were stripped bare, reduced to jagged skeletons of charcoal.
The defenders, those who had survived the last wave, were scattered across blood-soaked fields and collapsed bunkers, too few and too broken to regroup.
Europe's mechanized divisions swept through towns and villages like industrial threshers, clearing away corpses, toppling burnt-out ruins, and "securing" strategic locations.
Their forward scouts weren't searching for enemies.
They were looking for survivors.
And when they found them… they didn't hesitate.
—
In a half-ruined village just north of Dunhuang, a father crawled through the rubble of his collapsed home. One arm was broken. The other clutched his four-year-old son, who whimpered softly, his face smeared with ash.
The father whispered over and over, "It's okay. We're safe now. The beasts are gone."
They weren't.
A European recon drone spotted them. Within seconds, a mecha unit stomped around the corner, plasma cannon primed. The father raised his hand, screaming in Mandarin, "We're civilians!"
The plasma bolt didn't care.
It struck them both.
The father's body disintegrated instantly. The child's scream ended in silence, his silhouette burned into the concrete behind him.
—
In a makeshift field hospital outside Yumen, a dozen nurses stood in a line. Some had bloodied aprons. One still had a needle in her hand. They had just finished treating the last of the beast-maimed when the drones arrived overhead.
One nurse raised her arms and shouted, "There are only wounded here!"
A soft whine filled the air.
Then the mana bomb dropped.
The blast ripped open the earth, flinging metal, bone, and beds into the sky. Bodies flew like dolls. The hospital tent folded in on itself, soaked in blood.
—
In the smoldering outskirts of Jiayuguan, a teenage girl stumbled through the wreckage. Her clothes were torn. Her legs were scraped raw. She had spent the past two days digging through collapsed rubble trying to find her younger sister.
She found her.
Crushed beneath a fallen wall. Cold.
The girl didn't scream. Not at first.
She just knelt beside the body and pulled the little one's arm out of the debris, brushing dirt from her tiny fingers.
When the European patrol passed overhead, she didn't hide. She looked up, tears finally falling, and screamed.
A drone broke formation and turned.
It released a low-frequency pulse.
The shockwave blew out the crater's edge and buried both girls beneath a wall of concrete and dust.
Her scream was never heard again.
—
These were not accidents.
These were not stray blasts or battlefield confusion.
This was deliberate.
Calculated.
Systematic.
The European commanders had given standing orders. "No witnesses. No survivors. No stories."
They were preparing to claim the west. Permanently.
And that meant erasing the people who had once lived there.
They bulldozed villages. Flattened townships.
Cleared away refugee camps with mana-fueled shock artillery.
One by one, the provinces fell silent.
The few that tried to flee were met by hunter drones. Most never made it past the hills.
Those who tried to surrender were gunned down.
Those who tried to fight were crushed.
In just six hours, two provinces went dark.
An entire tenth of China was silent.
Gone.
In the war room beneath Beijing, the screens didn't flicker.
They simply turned red.
Red for "lost."
Red for "silenced."
Red for "consumed."
But no one looked away.
President Jiang stood at the head of the central command platform, unmoving, eyes fixed on the growing patches of red overtaking the western half of the map.
Around her, generals and aides moved like ghosts, some shouting coordinates into comms, others scrambling to re-route satellite coverage, a few simply slumped in their chairs, mouths set in grim lines as the data poured in.
Every three seconds, another alert.
Another town. Another call for help. Another scream cut short mid-transmission.
Still, they didn't stop.
This was not a room of paralyzed leaders.
It was a furnace.
For thirty-six hours, the Chinese high command resisted collapse not with hope, but with will.
"Send the Seventh Battalion to reinforce the southern ridge at Changsha! Now!"
"Beast tide approaching from the northeast! Shift Long-range mana batteries to Grid 42!"
"The Jiangxi Shield Node is on the brink of failure! Do we have anyone left who can reinforce it? Anyone?"
The answers were fewer each hour as the number of available troops plummeted.
The number of cities on fire grew.
But they kept fighting. They kept dying.
And as they did so, the massacre in the western provinces continued unabated.
They simply could not spare the men to fight the European invasion.