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.

reached a point of strange equilibrium... and then suddenly exploded upward in a furious conflagration. It was as though a giant bubble swelled from under it, and then burst open, unleashing a titanic pillar of flame into

the night turned as bright

dust and debris rose high into the air, obscuring the ocean of flames bursting

by the obliterating havoc. The weakest of them were instantly killed, while the stronger ones were severely wounded and burned. Only the

until the world had become obscured by dust, was

first—row seats to the

was stuck in the middle

'Die, die! Die, bastard!‘

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

endured, the more furious

'Just die, damn it!‘

rising, then plummeting down. A violent tremor ran through its walls, and up

sphere, and a moment later, the hateful ogre came crashing down, as well, landing on him. A massive fist connected with the

'Curse... it...‘

egg was flipped upside down once again a split second later... and then

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

long as he did not let go... he could continue to try

'Die!!‘

going to deliver another punch, a sharp pain pierced his shoulder. The dazed Scavenger had finally given up on trying to free himself from the mad human, and also on trying to meet

things apart with his

go of me, you