Chapter 45: Artillery Bombardment

After a full second, the other side still gave no answer. Yu Lian grew impatient. His time was limited, and he had no intention of wasting it on these shorties.

"Sigh, I'm afraid I'm talking to an idiot," Yu Lian sighed, raising his gun once more.

"I'll talk, I'll talk! My name is Babas, I'm, I'm a Confederation citizen—oh, damn it, I'm an employee of the Compass Trading Company! I, sob, uh, right, the ten heavy cannons here were all shipped in by the company, they are Tsunami—no, ground-to-air dual-use ion cannons modeled after the Confederation Tsunami-4! There are twenty of us here, all company employees! We're just wage slaves earning a paycheck! We are truly not dangerous enemies, please don't hurt us! Waaaaah!"

Seeing that Yu Lian remained expressionless and entirely devoid of emotion, the goblin engineer named Babas repeated himself in halting Earth Common, then added, "I, I'm willing to cooperate, really, truly, everyone will cooperate. We'll do whatever you want us to do!"

That was more like the right attitude. Yu Lian nodded with satisfaction, glanced at the headless corpse nearby whose brains had just been blown out, and remarked, "This gentleman was struck by a stray round from the Sand People. How terribly unfortunate! I hope the Spirits of the Universe bless him. Isn't that right?"

"Y-Yes, yes..." Babas now understood why the intruder had bothered to pick up the Sand People's weapon, which only heightened his terror. In this world, something far more frightening than a madman was a madman with sanity and good judgment.

"Your cannons are operated through a central computer system, aren't they?"

Strictly speaking, they didn't use vacuum tubes, so they should be called information terminals, but to make things easier for the Lords, the Observers from beyond the macro-universe, let's just call them computers from now on.

Yu Lian had already checked out those mobile homes. Aside from a few residential ones, the largest clearly served as a multi-purpose terminal command vehicle, which ought to be the central command hub of this artillery position.

"Yes, yes," Babas nodded obsequiously. He was certain that Yu Lian knew his stuff, making him all the harder to fool.

"Then get a move on and get to work!"

The engineers scrambled out of their respective mobile homes like rats driven from a hole, howling as they were herded into the command vehicle. Yu Lian gave Captain Winter a thumbs-up. The latter had recovered from his daze, though his mood was somewhat complicated. *Well, well. To think I'd be rescued by a student—how utterly disgraceful! Heh... If all Lunarians possessed this kind of competence, the world would truly be at peace.*

With that thought, the captain returned the thumbs-up, waved for a few soldiers to follow Yu Lian inside, and shifted his entire focus back to perimeter defense. This was effectively handing over the entire artillery command to Yu Lian, yet he felt not the slightest issue with it, nor did any of the other officers of the 101st Company seem to find it unusual.

"Just as Sub-lieutenant Yu Lian said, that goblin was killed by a stray bullet from the Sand People. If anyone lets slip otherwise, I'll shove an artillery shell right up your arse!" The captain roared over the company communication channel, eliciting a chorus of "Indeed, indeed!", "What goblin?", and "I didn't see a thing!", followed by a series of incomprehensible jests about how "to die is merely to die" and "the death of a goblin is actually a philosophical proposition," which sent the troopers into roars of laughter. The channel was instantly filled with a cheerful atmosphere.

"I like this Lunarian. More interesting than any Lunarian I've ever met! No, more interesting than every elite bureaucratic clique I've ever laid eyes on!" Lieutenant Parkin provided a summary.

The time was now 8:17 PM. Arch 6 Highland and all ten heavy cannons had changed hands. The defenders of the position were completely wiped out; the killed Sand People soldiers and laborers likely numbered well over a thousand, while their own side hadn't suffered a single injury—an almost flawlessly smooth operation.

Up until this moment, most of the Sand People hadn't even realized what was happening. The scene of the massive brawl over there remained boisterous and chaotic, and the tank and firearms training ground was still burning with activity.

Standing inside the command vehicle, Yu Lian held his C10 in one hand and the casually picked-up White Raven in the other, staring with a smiling gaze at the backs of the goblins' heads. These short statured creatures trembled as they operated the computers, pulling up the battlefield map on the holographic light screen.

"Three barrels aimed at A7, two at B12, two at H11, and leave the remaining three on standby. Get moving, everyone... Oh my, that unlucky gentleman over there, why are you adjusting the barrel angle? If you nudge it one notch to the left, wouldn't it hit open ground? How regrettable!" Before the goblin could even plead for mercy, Yu Lian stepped forward and brought the butt of the White Raven rifle down onto the fellow's head. That yellowish, hairless little skull burst instantly like a watermelon, scattering gore all over the surroundings.

The goblins let out miserable screams, but a soldier stationed outside the vehicle simply fired a shot into the air, and the wails ceased abruptly.

This terrifying figure truly knew his craft. There was simply no fooling him! Stifling their terror and grief, the goblins had no choice but to honestly knuckle down to work.

Yu Lian hadn't intended to operate so many cannons all by himself anyway; although he certainly knew how, even if he were to awaken another two or three star rings, he simply wouldn't have enough hands. Since subsequent history had already informed him that there was a large group of goblin mercenary engineers and gunners here, why not delegate the heavy labor to them?

The only reason he had tagged along was because someone who knew what they were doing was required to watch these toad-like creatures and ensure they strictly executed the orders.

As for being so-called Confederation citizens... Heh. To be sure, citizens of the two superpowers spanned the entire universe, which might indeed give a righteous fellow like Captain Winter some slight misgivings, but how could that possibly hoodwink Yu Lian, a time-traveler and reincarnator who had roamed both the underworld and the underworldly stars? Did this hero not know the bottom line of your Compass Trading Company? Registered in some obscure little nation in the galaxy, naturally backed by Confederation conglomerates, but also tied to quite a few other forces and even interstellar crime syndicates—to put it bluntly, you are merely the outer perimeter of a black glove worn by bigshots. Once you join such an organization and get caught red-handed, what good is calling yourself a Confederation citizen? Even if you were active-duty Confederation soldiers or diplomats, killing you meant just killing you; did you really think anyone would acknowledge you?

Under the gentle gaze of Yu Lian's eyes, the goblins finally calibrated the trajectories and looked over tremblingly.

"Captain, how are the enemy forces down the mountain?"

"Some Sand People have tried to charge up the slope, but it's not a major issue right now."

"We are fully prepared here as well. Do we have authorization to fire?"

With this kind of work ethic, the rest of the military academy elites simply couldn't compare! Captain Winter sighed inwardly, suppressing the surging excitement in his heart, and spoke in a cold, stern tone: "Fire authorized!"

The captain couldn't help but be excited. How could he not know that the order he was about to give would go down in history books?

Seven cannons commenced their bombardment! Energy condensed into beams of light, roaring out from the muzzles and streaking across half the sky. They were originally meant to plunge directly toward the light shield enshrouding all of Toulon, but halfway through their flight, they altered course straight toward the densely packed Sand People encampment on the ground below.

"Whoosh! Snap!" A photon-beam style explosion occurred. The drastic shifts in airflow and temperature caused the energy clusters to detonate mid-air. Though the sound wasn't deafening, it created a lethal high-temperature domain that utterly destroyed every stone dwelling and living being within its expansion radius.

Following that, an even more terrifying explosion erupted, accompanied by billowing smoke and truly ear-splitting blasts. It was the extreme heat igniting all flammable substances. The Sand People who had miraculously survived the intense heat now had to endure yet another onslaught of light, warmth, and lethal shockwaves.

Katz Khan naturally saw the fiery glow rising from the Grand Elder's direction and stood dumbstruck for a moment. He knew the most terrifying thing had happened—the heavy artillery position had indeed been captured by the enemy. The ultimate weapon the Sand People had squeezed dry to acquire had instead become their own death warrant.

*Should I go over there to rescue Teacher Hersen, or should I recapture the position?* This thought crossed Katz Khan's mind, but he quickly made up his decision.

Fierce as the bombardment was, it shouldn't be enough to finish off the Grand Elder, and plenty of people were rushing to curry favor with him right now. However, if they failed to retake the position and the cannons, they would all become objects of slaughter.

"Ink-tail! Gather everyone, quickly..." Before he finished his sentence, Katz Khan felt a sudden, searing wave of heat descending from above.

"Khan, watch out!" Driven by some unknown wellspring of power, Ink-tail reacted even faster than Katz Khan, a first-ring spiritualist. He lunged forward, slammed Katz to the ground, and used his far more robust physique as a shield.

The blistering heat of the energy blast instantly snuffed out Ink-tail's life, and its cutting edge pierced into Katz Khan's body like a sword. Immediately afterward, his hearing and senses were completely overwhelmed by the massive explosions and tremors rolling in one after another. If he hadn't been a "Guardian"—someone innately endowed with much stronger physical functions and resistance than normal life forms—he would hardly have escaped death himself.

Who knows how much time passed? Nearly fainting, Katz finally recovered a sliver of his senses and struggled to crawl out from beneath Ink-tail's remains, only to discover with a jolt that his loyal friend and kinsman's body had been utterly mangled beyond recognition.

He looked around in a daze, his gaze landing on that tiny training ground. Barely a minute ago, over a hundred of the tribe's finest young men had been sweating and striving there for their own sakes and for the future of their race. Now, however, nothing remained except a gigantic crater and charred bits of severed limbs scattered all around.

The young Khan stumbled forward in a daze, instinctively shuffling toward his stone dwelling—the place where his wife lived—before his knees suddenly went weak, and he dropped blankly to the ground.

He saw the collapsed stone house, and he saw a single arm wearing a bracelet, wrapped in beautiful white scales.

Only a single arm...

Katz Khan sat there motionlessly, like a puppet stripped of its soul, not even hearing the bugle calls echoing from the direction of Toulon Port behind him.

But to the rest of the Sand People, it sounded precisely like the shrieks of demons crawling up from the abyss.