Chapter 117 - Kill Half
Xia Fei used his Breath Control technique to get up quietly, then he returned to the assaulting forces.
The spiral road they were on had many unknown buildings and pipes on both sides; everything was a complete mess. Xia Fei used these as cover and very quickly caught up to them.
Owl’s Sanctuary did not cover too large an area, and with Scar’s men attempting to obstruct the majority of the coalition army from advancing, the raid did not progress too quickly. At present, it had already been more than ten minutes since the army made the landing, and many of them had just pushed past the third level. It would most likely take them another hour or so to reach the command center on the highest level.
As military strategy and tactic stated, ‘the first beating of the drum boosts morale, the second weakens it, and the third sounds defeat’.
Though the coalition army attacked with great ferocity, the morale that they had thirty minutes ago when charging at the base was nowhere to be found at present.
The warriors had a bountiful harvest, and they were all carrying all sorts of spoils on them. Some even grabbed a lot that they were now having trouble carrying them all and could only dump the more worthless weapons to lighten their load.
This was a foolish move on their part, for all they had come across thus far were just the smaller teams among Scar’s men, and they had yet to clash with the main force of Owl’s Sanctuary. It would be a hell of a joke if the coalition army ended up finding themselves in a state where they had no weapons in their hands when the other party finally decided to fight it out with them.
It was evident that these four were experienced snipers and had received formal military training.
Actually, Xia Fei needed not to be afraid of these rifles given his speed. After all, it would take time for anyone to aim and pull the trigger. Their reaction time might be unable to keep up with his speed of over 800m/s. It was just that the risk of making a dash for them would most likely result in alerting all the enemies, and the result of such a confrontation was not comparable to sneaking in.
“Oh?” Xia Fei suddenly noticed that the doors to the rooms around the plaza had been sealed with thick metal plates, and there seemed to be several firing holes left on them. These circular firing holes had been blocked by some alloy metal behind, but the moment someone invaded, Scar’s men could very quickly open these firing holes and poke their gun barrels out to fire right at the open plaza.
This clearly meant that Scar was already prepared for the coalition army’s raid; otherwise, there was no way for him to have set up such heavy defenses in such a short time.
Xia Fei could easily picture the coalition troops stepping into the plaza without any knowledge of the ambush awaiting them; they would become no better than lambs being led to the slaughter, letting the men hiding in this room hit them hard.
“Hmm… professional soldiers, snipers… The situation has really become more and more interesting,” muttered Xia Fei quietly to himself as he took his eyes off the hole he made.
“What’s interesting?” asked Phantom, who was sitting with folded legs a short distance away from Xia Fei. As he was a spirit, he did not have a problem with the terrible air quality inside the pipeline.
“I’ll explain it to you later. I still need to further verify my speculations.” Xia Fei chuckled.
“Tsk! What are you acting all mysterious about?” Phantom rolled his eyes at Xia Fei as he scoffed rather unhappily.
Xia Fei spent several seconds thinking before he decided to go along the pipeline forking to the right. It was a direction that would lead him directly to the rooms surrounding the plaza.
Xia Fei changed his stance; now, his two knees were touching the pipe walls as he crawled onward, alternating his two arms in front of him as he moved 0.4 meters every time—no more, no less. There was no way for him to see outside the pipe, so Xia Fei needed to depend on his measurement to determine his approximate location.
After taking thirty-nine measured paces, Xia Fei once more used Chasing Light to poke a small hole on the pipe once more, and just as he calculated, he found himself in the first room to the right.
As expected, this room was around one hundred fifty square meters. It was dimly lit and had six men inside; they were all seated around a sturdy round table to the corner, doing the exact same action: cleaning their rifles.
The six of them each had a black laser rifle, slightly smaller than the ones he had seen in the four snipers outside. Each of them was very carefully running a piece of cloth across every part of their rifle, repeatedly wiping it with utmost care.
There was even a communicator placed on that table, as well as several dozens of cylindrical energy capacitors, each able to last ten full minutes of sustained laser fire. If these capacitors were all used, forget eight thousand men, nothing would be left after eradicating an entire army division.
“These people look like they’re prepared for this assault. It’s highly probable that each of these rooms holds several warriors who are ready to spring an ambush. What do we do now?” Phantom asked gravely.
“Then, we can only do our best to kill off half of them,” Xia Fei said after pondering for a bit.
“Why half?”
Xia Fei smiled as he very sinisterly explained, “Killing them all will lead to an imbalance in the forces on both sides, and what I want to see is a scenario where both parties suffer great losses.”