Counterfeit Hero

Chapter 1272: Chapter 42: Morning Light (Part 3)_2

Everyone stared hard into the distance. No one knew when exactly it had happened, but Fatty, together with Hagrove and Wagstaff, had already hacked their way into the central command cluster of the Jiepeng Armored Division.

Originally, the 221st Division’s central command cluster shouldn’t have been here. But with the SkyNet System destroyed, and electronic control authority in the hands of the Chuckna Army, the command post had been forced to relocate. When the second echelon suddenly appeared from the south, the 221st Division’s command, barely three kilometers from the front line, was brutally driven to this spot.

The 221st Division commander, who fancied he had caught the Chuckna Army’s main force and was about to grab a great military merit, was now a turtle trapped in a jar.

On the outer ring, the Red Mecha Group was attacking in an orderly, methodical way, continuously cutting up and encircling the Jiepeng Mecha Group. In the center, three White Mecha were charging back and forth through hundreds of Spirit Cat Mecha, unstoppable wherever they went.

The desperately resisting Jiepeng Mecha only managed to tightly surround the central Command Mecha, straining to maintain the integrity of a circular defensive formation. The Mechanical Warriors on the outer ring were falling almost layer by layer. Shattered hulls piled on and on; no one could tell how many had already accumulated. Constant sympathetic detonations flared, staining the sky a bloody red.

The defeat seemed beyond any hope of reversal, and the Jiepeng people had no intention of breaking out. The Mecha on the outer ring fought to the death, while around the central silver‑white Command Mecha, more than forty black Spirit Cats clustered in silence, rotating with the formation, on guard. Their entire focus was locked on the three White Mecha; as for their comrades continually falling on the outer ring, they didn’t spare them so much as a glance.

The three White Mecha drew closer and closer to the Command Mecha at the center, heavily protected on all sides.

After killing a Fushan with a single punch, Fatty’s Mecha stomped hard on the ground; the auxiliary thruster on its back and its short flight wings flared open together, and it shot into the last inner ring like a shell!

At the same time, the Spirit Cats guarding beside the Command Mecha moved as well!

The two sides collided at close quarters! Several Spirit Cats snapped together like a giant hand, slamming shut and squeezing Fatty into the middle.

The lead Spirit Cat leaped into the air, body spinning three hundred sixty degrees. Its left leg swung a huge arc in midair like a sledgehammer and crashed down hard. Beneath it, the other three Spirit Cats pounced in at the same time—some punching, some kicking, some chopping down with ion light sabers. Four Mecha fought in perfect coordination, striking at Fatty’s vital points all at once, fierce and seamless.

Jiepeng Mechanics’ close‑quarters combat skills had always been among the best in many countries. When energy shields grew ever more dominant on the battlefield, when long‑range attack methods all declined one after another, the Spirit Cat, built specifically for close combat, came into being. For close‑quarters fighting techniques and formation coordination, the Jiepeng people had put in ruthless, painstaking effort.

These four Mecha moved with precision; their timing was exact down to the fraction of a second. The areas they targeted did not interfere with each other yet mutually complemented, and once they launched, it was like four bolts of lightning interweaving into a dense, seamless web of light that covered the sky, impossible to dodge—a textbook example of small‑area coordinated assault. It was obvious that the Mech Knights of this inner ring were the top aces of this Armored Division!

Facing the simultaneous assault of four Mecha, Fatty advanced instead of retreating. Thunderbolt’s Mecha flickered, and in a blink was pressed right up against the four Jiepeng Mecha. All that could be seen were Thunderbolt’s two metal mechanical arms churning rapidly; the smoke and dust in the air suddenly contracted and swirled. Beside the Mecha, four clearly visible vortices seemed to surface abruptly from the void.

”Dang dang dang dang dang!” A rapid clamor of clashing metal hammered the eardrums. The storm‑like flurry of blows from the four Jiepeng Mecha was blocked completely by those dust‑and‑sand vortices.

The next second, Fatty launched his counterattack. Thunderbolt kicked off the ground, its frame folding into the shape of a boomerang. The huge body brought up a piercing whistle of air as it hurtled sideways, one leg sweeping into the Spirit Cat on the left. With a thunderous boom, the entire right side of the Spirit Cat that took the kick collapsed inward, and like a golf ball struck by a club, it flew backward, crashing into the outer Mecha Group.

In the instant that Mecha was sent flying, Thunderbolt did not slow at all. Its bizarrely folded body traced an arc in the air, spinning as it shot straight in front of another Spirit Cat.

With a deafening boom, the shock wave from the impact blasted up dust, carving a ring on the ground that spread outward in a violent surge. Thunderbolt grabbed the dazed Spirit Cat with both hands and gave a vicious wrench—actually tearing the Spirit Cat’s body clean in two!

In that spark‑and‑flash instant, before the other two Spirit Cats could even react, Thunderbolt’s tall frame surged up, swinging the Mecha wreckage in its hands and smashing it down brutally onto those two Spirit Cats.

The tooth‑aching crunch of metal rang out; the two Spirit Cats were turned into scrap iron in the blink of an eye. All across the line, people sucked in cold breaths.

From block to counterattack, the whole sequence took only two or three seconds. Not one of the four Jiepeng Mecha survived.

The gap in Mecha performance and Mech Knight ability was laid bare in those mere two or three seconds. In front of Thunderbolt’s lightning speed, once their combined assault failed, the four Jiepeng Mecha didn’t even have time to make any response at all.

At the same time that Fatty killed the four Spirit Cats, Hagrove and Wagstaff, from the other two directions, had also wiped out the Jiepeng Mecha besieging them.

Looking down from the hilltop, in that split second, it was as if three flowers with white cores and black petals had bloomed amid the Jiepeng Mecha Group. Twelve Jiepeng Mecha—some exploding, some flung away, some falling apart—offered only one kind of visual impact: sheer shock!