Chapter 432: Luring the Tiger Away from the Mountain

It took some time to first carefully brief everyone on the next phase of tasks and the matters that needed attention.

After dismissing everyone to go about their respective tasks, Sun Cheng walked around the Base alone in silence, feeling deeply moved.

"The changes are quite significant!"

Because Starscream discovered him stirring up trouble in Severodvinsk, Sun Cheng had been forced to stay in Russia for several months, and it had been a while since he last returned to Base No. 2.

Returning here once again and wandering around the familiar yet slightly strange Base, his current mood was truly a bit complicated.

Base No. 2 had been constantly changing; although limited by the fact that there were only a few shards of the AllSpark, the speed at which Atlas and the others cultivated Newborn Decepticons remained slow. Counting the newly cultivated Decepticons, the true Mechanical Life under Sun Cheng's command barely numbered around a hundred, and the vast majority of them were still the lowest-level Decepticon Workers.

However, the slow cultivation of Mechanical Life did not mean that the production speed of robots was equally slow.

The existence of Decepticons and Autobots constantly made Sun Cheng feel like he had thorns on his back; just like those politicians in the White House and on Capitol Hill, he never felt a shred of security.

Under the influence of this uneasy psychology, Base No. 2 was almost always in a state of war alert; all production lines and workshops were running at full capacity, and with the resolution of raw material and energy issues, even more production lines and workshops were continuously being put into use.

Almost every minute, industrial robots of various models were being manufactured within the Base.

As for those Combat Robots created specifically for war, they had already been designed to the third generation. Based solely on the original design and data, they were reliable products already capable of tangling with cannon fodder Decepticons like Brawl, Hammer, and Boomerang for a period of time, although the cost was equally exorbitant.

The scale of various types of robots under the control of Base No. 2 had already exceeded ten thousand. With such abundant labor, the changes to the Dixiadongku where the main body of Base No. 2 was located were actually small; the spatial changes to the underground building complex were not too great, having increased by less than thirty percent since he last left.

A large number of alloy pillars and explosion-proof metal plates were fixed in concrete and permanently integrated into the mountain; in the future, let alone being attacked by Bunker-busting Missiles, even a once-in-a-century magnitude-9 earthquake would find it difficult to affect the interior of the Base.

Compared to the Dixiadongku, which had not changed much, in the region covering nearly nine thousand square kilometers centered around it, Decepticon Engineers directed robots to transform a large number of mountains and canyons, deploying hundreds of Anti-aircraft missiles and Combat Robots in the remote mountainous areas and canyons of the western Baxi Gaoyuan, forming layers of Barriers to guard the safety of the Base.

Dozens of factories, hydroelectric power stations, and even semi-underground nuclear power stations had been built and put into operation one after another.

Although they had been promoted to Engineers, the twenty or so Decepticon Engineers under Sun Cheng were originally Decepticon Workers cultivated to build permanent steel fortresses and war bastions, and in their bones, they had a fanatical love for those war fortresses that had long been branded into the deepest parts of their memories.

If it hadn't been for Sun Cheng, who did not want to expose the existence of the Base in the short term, refusing them, he would surely have seen a steel fortress of considerable scale appear in this remote western mountainous region of the Baxi Gaoyuan in South America upon his return this time.

Come to think of it, Base No. 2 and the surrounding defense system were still built under his orders during the Pioneer period.

Although it was later supervised by Frenzy and completed by Atlas and the others, the main skeleton was built during the Pioneer period.

In this area of nearly ten thousand square kilometers, the air defense system alone had already deployed 256 sets of S-300PMU Anti-aircraft missile launch systems.

According to the Soviet standard, where one battalion generally consists of 4 launch units and 16 launch systems, 16 Anti-aircraft missile battalions had already been deployed around Base No. 2.

Do not think this number is small; on the contrary, when Sun Cheng first spoke up to buy S-300s from the Russians, although they were happy to export this poorly performing Anti-aircraft missile in exchange for more advanced alien technology, waiting for Russian military enterprises to produce new stock would take at least seven months, and to fully meet all his requirements, it would likely take five or six years.

Yet Sun Cheng needed them very urgently!

In the end, after several rounds of consultations, he paid the price for new goods, and the Russians withdrew a batch of older models that had been in service for more than three years from the active equipment of the Russian Army and delivered them to him.

Even so, it was only enough to barely scrape together the equipment for four Anti-aircraft missile battalions.

And the reason why Base No. 2 could have so many is self-evident.

After receiving his order, Atlas and the others had to pull a batch of Engineers and Workers to modify two production lines specifically for the production and modification of the S-300 series of Anti-aircraft missiles.

They did not actually make major modifications; for one, although the S-300 series could not be considered the most advanced on Earth, it was still sufficient to deal with the vast majority of fighter jets and missiles.

Secondly, its power was already enough to hurt the flight units of Decepticons and Autobots.

Therefore, under the philosophy of production first, the Engineers only added an automated control system to them; the significance of their existence was merely to ensure that the Base would not be completely defenseless when encountering strikes from the sky.

Of course, only defending without the ability to counterattack had never been his style.

Sun Cheng had actually always been seeking to obtain a decisive strategic weapon, such as medium-to-long-range ballistic missiles or even Nuclear Warheads.

Unfortunately, the two countries he had contacted, whether it was the Russians or that red regime in the Far East, were very firm in their attitude in this regard; even when he settled for second best and hoped to purchase some conventional warheads to go with them, they had always been very cautious.

With no other choice, they had to produce them themselves.

Sun Cheng used some underhanded means to steal part of the sealed data of the Russians' SS-21, also known as the Jiazhong short-range ballistic missile.

The Russians in this world had signed an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the Americans during the Soviet Union era to abolish their own martial arts; after that, although some technology was still retained, the degree of technological abandonment in medium-range and medium-to-short-range missiles in Russia was much more serious than imagined.

Three months ago, as they fully mastered the relevant technology, the first Jiazhong missile had been manufactured, and by now, the Base had already stored more than fifty of them.

This short-range tactical missile, which had its range increased by a full factor after being improved by the Engineers to reach over two hundred and fifty kilometers, although still equipped with a Normal Mode warhead, was enough to hurt Leader-class Warriors like Megatron and Optimus Prime, and could be considered one of the good cards he held in his hand.