Chapter 540: Dessert Before the Meal

Beneath the crimson night sky, the raging flames of battle roared along the hastily constructed northern bank defense line, as the united trains surged forward in a relentless charge, crossing the rail bridge and racing deep into the southern shore.

At this moment, every survivor aboard the trains knew that even amid the perilous crimson night, once they crossed this abyss, they had passed the first gate of death.

Indeed, across the entire wasteland, countless strange entities seemed to have been teleported here by the crimson mist—yet the Silver Star, advancing without pause, faced only scattered attacks from crimson zombies, thanks to its heavy firepower and the protection of three main combat battalions along the route, suffering little pressure.

The tracks are completely clear—this is unbelievable! Did Captain Lin maintain them all?!

The engineering team marveled in awe.

“He’s a mechanical adept—the tracks are the simplest problem for him,” Jian Xuwēi said, her expression stern as she watched the motion recording screen. “We can’t accelerate further. This speed is already pushing our temporary tracks to their limit. Any breach in the defense could trigger a chain of derailments.”

“But if we don’t speed up, those behind us won’t hold out!” someone cried anxiously.

Jian Xuwēi exhaled sharply. “Our duty now is to maintain stability—not blindly chase speed.”

She turned, gazing through the window at the century-long train line snaking like a dragon across the earth, her face grave. “The rest is up to them.”

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The steel tide surged and churned across the burning wasteland; the six-kilometer northern defense line stood like a dam forged from blood and steel, screaming under the endless pounding of the crimson tide.

Thousands of TFV-600 twin-barrel tanks formed an unbroken steel barricade, their muzzles piled high with charred corpses and shattered metal. Each roar spat forth Huimie fireballs, blasting the swarming multi-legged zombie insects into a rain of bloody pulp.

Eight Planetary Plunderer mechs, each sixty meters tall, marched onto the battlefield like titans from myth. Their heavy alloy feet shook the earth with every step; their massive orbital star-shatter cannons slowly rotated, blue light gathering at their muzzles. Each full-power detonation erased an entire zone—along with the writhing A-class tumor beasts or swift hunter entities—leaving behind only terrifying craters hundreds of meters wide, flooded with molten lava.

The sky had long been obscured by smoke and crimson—but now it tore open with even wilder light and fire.

Hundreds of aerial warships, gunboats, and fighters from the Dragon Kun and Thunder Fleet formed a sky-blocking aerial formation; the deafening roar of ten thousand cannons drowned out every other sound on the ground.

Gunboats hovered at low altitude, their decks lined with 1130 close-in defense cannons weaving a storm of metal, interlaced with cathode high-energy particle beams, all stitched together by long-tailed anti-air missiles into an absolute zone of death, shredding the descending aerial hordes and countless unnameable flying anomalies into burning, falling fireballs.

At the heart of this boiling hell, the colossal silhouette of the Skytrain tore through the battlefield with unyielding resolve.

Its main body had split into four sections; the three rear segments—basic living pods lacking heavy firepower—accelerated across the canyon, racing toward the relative safety of the southern shore’s depths.

What now plunged into the heart of the northern horde were the four main arsenal ships under Chen Sixuan’s command! Triple-mounted orbital star-shatter cannons, dense missile launch silos, G-6T electromagnetic railgun arrays, and plasma cannon batteries unleashed full firepower—like four mobile volcanoes of destruction, carving four blazing paths through the dense tide of monsters.

“All these entities here are A-class or higher—they must have been teleported by the crimson mist!”

“Power armor squads, plug the left flank gap—move!”

“Watch out for hunters!”

A massive force of Taitiewei power armor special units and armed personnel from various convoys fought ferociously on the front lines, flying through air and earth like a galactic war.

The hum of energy weapons, the shriek of chain-swords, the roar of flamethrowers, and the muffled thuds of power gauntlets shattering carapaces wove together into a cruel symphony of metal amid the crimson mist.

At the edge of this chaotic slaughter ground, a wave of pure metal surged forward with unstoppable force.

It was Lin Xian’s six-thousand-strong high-energy combat robot legion, fighting furiously on the front lines.

Lu Xingchen, Long Zhijie, Mo Nika, Qian Dele, Xiang Ningjing, and over a thousand other adept elites were also battling on the northern bank.

Lu Xingchen was wreathed in roaring flames, like a fire god descended to earth. He hovered above the most critical section of the line, hands clasped, Ningju a white-hot flame sword spanning hundreds of meters. Each slash unleashed a wave of incinerating heat, vaporizing vast swathes of the horde—including massive anomalous entities—into smoke.

“Dregs, how dare you defy me?!”

Long Zhijie stood atop the shoulder of a Planetary Plunderer mech, expressionless, his fingers dancing like a pianist’s as he controlled twelve colossal metal golems, unleashing a storm of metal amid the horde.

These golems swung alloy hammers weighing tons, smashing tumor beasts into broken bones and torn sinews; or transformed their arms into high-speed rotating circular saws, carving through swarms of zombie insects like meat grinders.

Mo Nika’s sonic blade became an invisible high-frequency shockwave, precisely slicing through elite monsters with tough carapaces or regenerative abilities, shattering them from within.

Qian Dele became an elusive golden flash, darting across the battlefield. Each pause was marked by the piercing of a hunter’s core or the instantaneous destruction of a critical joint.

Xiang Ningjing transformed into a towering, power-type evolved being, her punches like artillery shells, crushing monsters blocking her path into pulp, shielding her comrades.

Shi Di roared as he transformed into a bear-like beast form, claws tearing through air as he battled a ferocious A-class giant scorpion anomaly charging toward the armored convoy.

Every strike they delivered bought the crumbling defense precious moments to breathe.

At the very core of this meat grinder battlefield, Lin Xian, Kiki, Jiang Yun, and Chu Yan formed a small team that surged upstream at astonishing speed, racing toward the more chaotic, denser crimson mist regions behind the train line.

Their goal: repair the train tracks along the way, ensuring the accelerating trains behind wouldn’t lose cohesion.

Jiang Yun led the charge, surrounded by raging tornadoes! He thrust both hands forward—invisible wind pressure, like the breath of a titan, forcibly clearing a massive hollow six hundred meters wide through the thick crimson mist, revealing the twisted, cracked earth below and the writhing shadows within, granting the following forces brief but vital visibility and breathing room, greatly easing local perception pressure.

Kiki followed close behind, eyes shining like stars. Her formidable psychic power formed invisible giant hands, sometimes crushing dozens of monsters midair into blood mist, sometimes snatching burning tank wrecks or broken rail beams and hurling them like catapults into the core of clustered hordes—each surge of psychic energy clearing vast areas.

With these two holding the line, Lin Xian and Chu Yan could fly low alongside the united trains, repairing the tracks below with their mechanical adept power, while Chu Yan suppressed the tide with her powerful psychic field—because the insect horde now seemed to have locked onto Lin Xian, surging like a tidal wave.

“Grace!” Lin Xian called out as he repaired a severely warped gap in the track.

【Chaos coordinates located. But I must warn you.】

“What?”

High above the void, a 12-kilometer-diameter ring-shaped energy array flared with blinding You blue arcs. Twenty-four “Zhu Long”-class constrained particle beam arrays unfolded like wings of judgment, silently pivoting their barrels—originally aimed at deep space to destroy asteroids—toward the northern battlefield.

Grace stood before the control panel, speaking to Lin Xian.

【Dynamic scans indicate this is not the entity’s main body.】

“What do you mean?”

“What you see is not the Chaos’s main body,” Chu Yan said, gazing at the planetary eye in the sky, to Lin Xian. “Its core is underground.”

“What the hell?!”

Lin Xian’s face twisted in shock. “Eyes in the sky, core underground—what kind of monster is this?!”

Chu Yan shook her head. “I don’t know. The Dawn Center’s battle in Colorado never fully observed its full form. We only know its true body is underground—a creature capable of destroying terrain over ten kilometers wide.”

Lin Xian’s gaze sharpened.

“Everything’s absurdly huge. If you looked down from space, you could probably see it with the naked eye.”