"I heard the military research institute is testing an upgraded mag-rail rifle. It should be much easier to handle than these heavy bricks."
The fireteam leader kept his thoughts silent, raising his heavy mag-rail rifle to aim outward from the deep trench, tracking the distant horizon where the first hints of movement blurred against the sky.
They held zero complex operational directives. Their solitary command was to hold the line at all costs, eliminate as many hostiles as possible, and delay the enemy advance.
Under the desperate gaze of the Mindborn soldiers anchoring the eastern trench line, a colossal shark head breached the ridge. Soon, a towering three-meter-tall silhouette materialized clearly through the dust.
"They are here!"
The features of several Mindborn soldiers stiffened beneath their tactical helms, their fingers trembling slightly over the mag-rail trigger arrays.
Throughout the millennium following the unification of the Mindborn Empire, a large-scale war had never broken out across the planet. Their historical operations were limited to routine culls of primitive wildlife across the wilderness.
As the absolute apex predators of Kugrage, they had always held that right by default.
The moment the eastern perimeter logged hostile contact, the remaining three sectors flagged incoming threats simultaneously.
The chiefs directing the Sharkborn legions were far from incompetent, calculating that a solitary division would take eons to break a fortress reinforced with this much structural mass.
Silas Trifang had repeatedly pressed them for results, leaving them with zero margin to delay the advance.
To claim absolute ownership over an entire planet, every pocket of active resistance had to be systematically deleted from the grid to prevent endless partisan harassment later.
The force assigned to crush the eastern sector was the Blackshark Legion, directed by Chief Sickleback. He evaluated the looming fortress before him, his face armor twisting into a naturally bloodthirsty grin.
Over the past few solar cycles, he had watched dozens of citadels crumble into structural refuse under the savage jaws of his drones. This engagement would be no exception to the math.
"Drones, charge!" Sickleback barked, lowering his heavy arm.
Thousands of Sharkborn soldiers leveled their barbed mace-spears, roaring as they swarmed toward the trenches of Tas City.
On the surface, the sight of the Sharkborn rushing into standard melee configurations while packing high-tier energy weaponry resembled a primitive army using advanced sniper rifles as blunt clubs.
Yet that evaluation was fundamentally flawed.
The cyborg nature of their half-biological, half-mechanical frames indicated a high probability that the species had been synthetically engineered by an outside power. Their deep-space transit capabilities had likely been gifted to them by their creators or a superior cosmic empire.
This artificial forced acceleration carried an irreversible systemic weakness: a severely fractured technological tree.
It was as if a species learned to spark a fire one second, and was immediately booted into orbit to pilot starships the next, completely erasing the organic centuries of developmental evolution.
Consequently, they could only deploy the exact hardware provided to them, relying on simple, brutal combat methods that maximized their raw physical specializations. The current assault was the perfect manifestation of that logic.
The exact millisecond the Blackshark Legion initiated its charge, the five concentric rings encircling Tas City opened fire in a massive counter-strike.
Pale blue energy beams erupted continuously from the mag-rail barrels, while heavy static artillery inside the concrete pillboxes roared, launching an unbroken volley of high-explosive ordnance across the plain.
Yet the resulting damage metrics fell far short of the Mindborn soldiers' expectations.
It required a concentrated cluster of rail shots, or a highly precise impact targeting the exposed structural gaps along the Sharkborn skull modules, to successfully take down a single hostile drone.
As the Blackshark vanguard pressed forward, the Whiteshark Legion in the south, the Earthshark Legion in the north, and the Voidshark Legion in the west unleashed their respective assault vectors simultaneously.
The Earthshark and Voidshark legions operated as highly specialized divisions within the armada, pooling their assets with the Seashark Legion to anchor the swarm's land, air, and aquatic dominance grids.
The drones of the Earthshark Legion had undergone extensive lower mobility modifications, swapping out the standard webbed plates for heavy, shock-absorbing track drives that allowed them to sprint across the terrain at incredible velocities.
The Voidshark infantry were integrated with high-output thruster packs along their back armor, granting them full atmospheric flight capabilities.
Meanwhile, the specialized aquatic units of the Seashark Legion were built with reinforced hydraulic joints and advanced sonar matrices, backed by heavy energy thrusters to operate across the absolute deeps for sub-surface ambushes.
Out of these three highly specialized wings, outside of the Seashark units who held zero operational purpose on this dry terrain, two separate divisions were deployed directly into the opening salvo.
Across the northern perimeter of Tas City, the high-speed Earthshark drones were the absolute first to establish contact with the imperial defensive lines.
The moment they closed the distance to the outermost ring, the charging drones leveled their mace-spears, locking their targeting arrays mid-stride.
A dark red corrosive laser burned through the air directly above an imperial soldier's helm. Before his systems could even register a sense of relief, a secondary energy beam slammed straight into his sector.
This time, the defender's evasion parameters failed entirely, the high-intensity blast striking him dead center across his face armor.
The residual chemical energy immediately began eating through his structure, rapidly expanding the puncture wound across his skull module.
This was the terrifying reality of the Sharkborn weaponry; even a glancing impact that missed a critical internal node would trigger a cascading breakdown due to the weapon's extreme corrosive properties.
The energy was specifically engineered to disrupt molecular chemical bonds, serving as a lethal implement designed purely to dismantle carbon-based life forms.
With a dull thud, the Mindborn soldier collapsed onto the metallic soil of the trench, his skull armor almost entirely dissolved by the chemical burn.
"Curse it!"
A comrade standing right next to the fallen fighter dropped his mag-rail rifle, ducking low into the trench to draw a series of heavy breaths in a desperate attempt to suppress his rising panic.
This marked the third squadmate deactivated before his own optics, and he felt his psychological baseline fracturing under the strain. The hollow frame lying just a few feet away felt like a direct prediction that his signature would be next on the ledger.
"Fireteam Sixty-Seven, report status. Why have your weapon feeds dropped offline? Verify coordinates immediately."
The urgent demand rattled through his tactical helm's communication grid, forcing his subroutines to boot back into focus as he routed a rapid reply. "This is Fireteam Sixty-Seven, executing a manual ammunition reload protocol."
A live war zone offered zero space for a soldier to rest his systems.
Driven by raw necessity, the Mindborn soldier gripped his heavy mag-rail rifle and forced his frame back into a standing firing posture.
Yet as he stared at the wave of alien hostiles relentlessly pushing their way forward without demonstrating a single trace of self-preservation, a deep wave of dread took root within his thoughts.
Possessing emotional subroutines was traditionally an evolutionary advantage, yet in the heat of a high-intensity engagement, it served as a fatal weakness.
Raw courage held zero functional weight when forced to balance out absolute terror.
Despite the Mindborn soldiers possessing an unyielding resolve to protect their cradle world, their organic programming stood no chance against mass-produced drones that completely lacked the concept of termination.
Deactivation held zero meaning within their logic blocks.
Stripped of any higher cognitive subroutines, they were fundamentally incapable of feeling panic; their simple programming excelled purely at executing direct operational scripts.
On the battlefield, their parameters dictated a single unbroken directive: charge forward, close the distance, and systematically tear every enemy target to pieces.
Inside the central command palace of Tas City.
"General Silae, the outermost defensive ring along the western sector has fractured! The frontline commanders are requesting immediate reinforcements!"
"What?" Silae barked, his face plating hardening with sudden shock.
Bypassing the tactical projections across his sandtable, he turned on the messenger with a furious roar. "Clarify the data! How could the outer trenches collapse this early into the engagement?"
According to his strategic layout, he had anticipated losing the concentric lines eventually, but never within this chronological window.
The siege had barely commenced, yet they were already losing ground before the opening phase had even concluded.
Before deploying to this theater, he had personally guaranteed the Emperor that his legions would halt the Sharkborn advance at Tas City, confident that no external force could match his surface warfare specifications.
He hadn't expected the opening clash to entirely tear up his predictions. Was the raw destructive output of the alien army truly this extreme?
"They... the hostiles..." the runner stammered, his vocalizers hitching under the crushing authority radiating from the general.
"The alien army has deployed an unmapped infantry variant across the western sector. The defensive lines lacked the specialized counters to manage their trajectory, allowing them to breach the main trenches."
"An unmapped variant?" a legion commander interrupted, his brow plates furrowing before Silae could speak. "Detail the hardware specifications. Our logs indicated they fielded nothing but standard bipedal ground drones."
"专 门 的 数据 仍 未 确认... The exact specs remain unverified," the runner replied, forcing the words out as he kept his optics locked onto the floor. "The hostile units possess full flight capabilities, launching high-velocity strikes directly from the upper airspace."
"Flight capabilities?" Silae murmured, his systems rapidly re-establishing control as he dismissed the runner with a sharp wave.
"Understood. Maintain absolute surveillance on the western sector and route any fresh telemetry straight to my terminal."
"Right away, General."
"General," a legion commander said cautiously the moment the hatch sealed. "Do we authorize a deployment to reinforce the western perimeter?"
"Agreed," a secondary officer chimed in. "If our outermost line fractures during the opening cycle, the remaining defensive phases will become exceptionally brutal, forcing our staff to entirely rewrite our primary operations."
Silae kept his vocalizer silent, falling back into a deep state of calculation.
In truth, deciding whether to abandon the outermost perimeter or reinforce the sector was a choice that heavily strained his logic subroutines.
The five concentric defense loops surrounding Tas City were mapped sequentially from the First to the Fifth Line.
Every individual ring was garrisoned by over ten thousand active soldiers, pooling a combined force of over seventy thousand troops along the outer sectors.
Seventy thousand soldiers sounded like a massive footprint on paper.
Yet when dispersed across a series of massive ring lines whose total diameter easily cleanly outscaled a standard small citadel, the numbers were just barely sufficient to cover the grid, ensuring every defensive bunker maintained an active firepoint.
Among them, the First Line was the absolute most difficult to hold, yet it carried the highest strategic value.
Securing it would significantly boost troop morale, while guaranteeing the garrison a comfortable tier of operational space to potentially map a counter-offensive.
Fracturing it meant losing an entire defensive boundary, but it would simultaneously allow their logistics to consolidate the surviving troops, heavily reinforcing the remaining four perelines.
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