Invincible through Touching Corpses

Zhang Yue stared at the detector, which displayed a 3D map of the enemy stronghold. At that moment, from beneath the stronghold, the drilling machine quietly emerged again.

Clearly, Gibson realized things were going south and wanted to make another run for it.

This also indirectly confirmed another point: the stronghold was truly on the verge of collapse. Otherwise, Gibson wouldn’t risk escaping at a time like this.

"Fire a Drilling Bomb over there. But tell the targeting team to be careful—don’t kill them, but don’t miss by too much, either. We need to put some serious pressure on them."

"If they dare to keep moving, hit them with another Drilling Bomb. The whole point is to scare them back into their hole."

"And while you’re at it, broadcast a call to surrender," Zhang Yue ordered.

His plan now was to keep ramping up the pressure, hopefully forcing them to break and surrender. If that failed, he would just eliminate their forces and then capture his target alive.

SWOOSH!

With a whoosh that tore through the air, a missile nearly the size of a full-grown man streaked across the sky and plunged toward the ground.

Upon impact, the missile didn’t explode. Instead, it began to spin at high speed, rapidly boring into the earth. It only detonated after reaching its designated depth.

BOOM!

A muffled boom reverberated. The ground near the stronghold buckled and heaved as if struck by an earthquake, rising in great waves before crashing back down.

Gibson’s drilling machine was sent tumbling by the subterranean shockwave. If the vehicle hadn’t been specially modified, the aftershock alone would have likely destroyed it.

But few were paying attention to the power of the Drilling Bomb, because the battle on the surface was far more intense.

The enemy had deployed 30 Mechas, 500 armed personnel, and 3,000 combat robots all at once—a force not to be underestimated on any battlefield.

So Zhang Yue didn’t hold back, unleashing all the goodies he’d brought with him.

First up were the Grenade Cannons. These things packed ten times the power of a Hand Cannon Bullet, but more importantly, they had an incredible range. With a maximum reach of five kilometers, they were far beyond anything non-military-grade weapons could match.

With a wave of his hand, Zhang Yue ordered a saturation strike of a full 100 Grenade Cannon rounds. As a hundred streaks of light tore across the sky, the area above the stronghold was completely engulfed in fire and explosions.

The armed personnel and combat robots were mowed down in droves. Ordinary soldiers were helpless against explosions of that magnitude; only the Defense Power of the Mechas allowed them to barely hold on.

But right behind the hundred Grenade Cannon rounds came 60 individual guided missiles. Each enemy Mecha was targeted by two missiles—it was practically a death sentence.

Of the enemy’s 30 Mechas, only one—piloted by a Blood Qi Realm expert—managed to survive the barrage.

But he was then faced with 40 Mechas from the special forces unit charging at him. Outnumbered and with his back against the wall, he was blown to pieces in less than three seconds.

The stronghold’s main force had been completely wiped out.

As for Gibson, he was scared back into hiding by two consecutive Drilling Bombs.

Still, he didn’t surrender immediately.

Zhang Yue wasn’t too concerned. He ordered the main force forward, with 40 Mechas at the vanguard, to quickly secure the entire stronghold.

The stronghold, of course, had its own internal defensive measures, such as automated turrets.

But such trifles were nothing before a Mecha. A few Micro Missiles were all it took to deal with them.

Finally, after nearly ninety percent of the stronghold’s personnel had been killed, Gibson surrendered.

After all, having been pampered his whole life, he lacked the resolve to face death.

If he had, he could have caused a massive problem for the special forces unit, as the stronghold was equipped with a self-destruct mechanism.

...

Meanwhile, the battle at the Shelter had turned completely one-sided with the deployment of 100,000 Attack Drones and 20,000 combat robots. Just ten minutes later, all fighting had ceased.

The entire battle, from start to finish, lasted only half an hour—an almost unbelievably short time.

Elder Wei had just finished reviewing the damage and loss reports when he received a message from Zhang Yue: Gibson had been captured alive. A smile finally broke across his aged face.

Of all the active battlefronts, the one he’d been most concerned about was, without a doubt, the operation to capture Gibson.

Of course, his concern wasn’t the combat capability of the special forces unit, but rather whether Gibson would be willing to surrender.

If Gibson had chosen to take his own life rather than surrender, the Star Shield Shelter would have been in enormous trouble.

For powerful foreign families and conglomerates, the death of a direct family member is no laughing matter. Whether for emotional reasons or to protect their family’s prestige, they would never take such an insult lying down.

Retaliation would be a certainty.

Of course, this was Huaxia territory, so the enemy’s options were limited. Elder Wei wasn’t worried they would dare to attack the Shelter directly.

But there were other, less direct methods of retaliation.

If the enemy decided not to attack the Shelter directly, but instead went after their Mercenary Corps in the field, they would be in a serious bind.

After all, the dispatched Mercenary Corps were like the Shelter’s arms and legs, gathering intelligence and resources from the outside world. If the Morgan Conglomerate sent armed forces to lie in wait for them, the Star Shield Shelter’s development would be completely stifled.

That was why Elder Wei absolutely could not allow Gibson to die. To ensure he was captured alive, he had even allocated nearly half of the armory’s missiles to the special forces unit.

Now, seeing Zhang Yue’s message, he felt it had all been worth it.

No matter how great their losses, as long as Gibson was alive, they could squeeze every last bit of it back from the Morgan Conglomerate.

Furthermore, with Gibson’s surrender, the Morgan Conglomerate’s main forces seemed to have gotten the news and began a swift retreat.

Meeting no resistance, the main force dispatched by the Military Department quickly returned to the Shelter.

However, when Elder Wei saw Lin Zhengyang’s grim expression, his heart sank.

"Old Lin, what is it? Don’t tell me there’s a problem with the Geothermal Energy Extractor!" Wei Tianxing asked urgently.

Lin Zhengyang’s mouth worked for a moment before he let out a long sigh. "Right before they retreated, the enemy launched an all-out assault. They took heavy casualties just to break through our outer perimeter. Once they were within one kilometer of the convoy, they fired every missile they had."

"I ordered interception fire immediately, but one Grenade Cannon round still got through and blew over an Armored Vehicle carrying a Geothermal Energy Extractor."

"The Armored Vehicle’s plating protected the precision instruments inside from the direct blast, but with the vehicle getting flipped, it was inevitable that the contents were knocked around."

"I had our engineers begin emergency repairs right away. The overall unit is mostly fine, but one critical component was damaged, and we don’t have the technology at the Shelter to fix it."