Shadow Slave

1045 The Fall of Falcon Scott (63)

In the tunnels under the abandoned section of the city and the vast killing field beyond the devastated wall, countless explosives simultaneously received a signal to detonate. To prevent the interference of the nearby Gates from influencing the execution of the scorched—earth protocol, all of them were connected into a labyrinthine network by simple, but reliable wires.

Even though the signal traveled through the wires with astronomical speed, there was still a slight delay between the detonation of those explosives that were nearest to the ramparts of the secondary defense line and those furthest away from them.

At first...

From afar, it looked as though a ripple had spread through the ground, moving outward. lt rolled through the ruined streets of the city, with countless fountains of dust shooting up between the rubble. Some of the buildings that had withstood the furious fighting started to collapse, some seemed to have burst apart.

The vanguard of the horde of Nightmare Creatures had already entered the city, racing through these streets. They met the ripple first and were thrown to the ground.

Then, the ripple reached the towering wall, destroying even more of its sections. The mass of alloy was only starting to fall, surrounded by the deafening groan of tearing metal, by the time the ripple moved past the mountainous corpse of the slain titan in the field beyond and exhausted itself. Now. the whole horde had been encompassed by the destruction zone.

All of it took no more than a couple of seconds.

For a moment, everything was still...

And then, the ground started to fall.

A vast swath of earth many kilometers across slowly started to cave in, as if forming a giant crater. Now that it was completely untethered, none of the buildings survived — all of them toppled and fell apart, devoured by the gargantuan landslide. The remains of the city wall were utterly destroyed, too. However, the true devastation was yet to come.

a furious conflagration. It was as though

moment, the night

cloud of dust and debris rose high into the air, obscuring the ocean of flames bursting from under the ground. A second terrifying blast resounded when the munition depots spread across the staging area below the wall detonated under the assault of heat, concussive

instantly killed, while the stronger ones were severely wounded and burned. Only the strongest ones managed to survive the initial

less than a minute, a gigantic area was utterly devastated, turning into an incandescent pit of fire, molten rock, and liquified metal. The furious sight of it all, up until the world had become obscured by dust, was both awe-inspiring and horrifying. The soldiers standing on the ramparts had long fallen

first—row seats

was stuck in the middle

'Die, die! Die, bastard!‘

down while pummeling him with his fist. Each of his blows would have been powerful enough to utterly wreck an armored APC like the Rhino, but the black bone armor of the

it endured, the more

'Just die, damn it!‘

them suddenly shuddered, briefly rising, then plummeting down. A violent tremor ran through its walls, and up suddenly became down — it

had been on top of the fiercely resisting Scavenger, found himself falling for a brief second. He hit the roof of the sphere, and a moment later, the hateful ogre came crashing down, as well, landing on him. A massive fist

'Curse... it...‘

press his advantage, because the shadow egg was flipped upside down once

inside the sphere. ricocheting off its walls like rubber balls. Sunny almost instantly gave up on trying to comprehend where the up and down were, and simply concentrated on holding onto the Scavenger — as soon as he let go, the

as he did not let go...

'Die!!‘

Scavenger had finally given up on trying to free himself from

things apart

let go of me, you