Counterfeit Hero

Chapter 1502: Chapter 26: Blitz (9)

The winding Sunset Mountain range gradually revealed its undulating silhouette in the dawn light.

When a rising red sun at the horizon wrapped the clouds in the sky with ten thousand strands of golden silk, when the brightening sky filtered through the gaps of the swaying treetops in the wind and sank onto the quiet, damp ground, the tall positions on Sunset Mountain still firmly remained in the hands of the Fei Alliance Joint Army.

In this several-hundred–square-kilometer battle zone, the marks of yesterday’s brutal slaughter still lingered.

Tiny, dense dewdrops crawled all over the muddy yellow soil at the bottom of the trenches, the damaged metal bulletproof walls, the firearms scattered all over the place, and the soldiers’ filthy combat uniforms and tactical helmets.

Misty mountain fog drifted through the forest, veiling the charred craters, the fallen tree trunks, the scattered Mecha wreckage, and the stiff bodies of those dead soldiers.

Compared to a few hours earlier, Sunset Mountain in the early morning appeared unusually quiet.

There was no all-encompassing artillery barrage, no deafening shouts of killing, and no Mecha clusters surging against the positions like the crashing tide. Only from afar came, now and then, a faint rumble of artillery. Occasionally, from deep within the jungle, there would suddenly erupt the clanging of metal when Mecha clashed in fierce combat, only to vanish just as suddenly.

These sounds reminded the soldiers on both sides, up on the mountain and down below, that the battle was still ongoing.

They were the dozens of large and small Special Forces units on both sides hunting each other down! The fighting between them was far more brutal, far more soul-stirring than the dozen-odd large-scale engagements before!

The trenches were quiet; the officers, alert, watched the distance through portable long-range viewers, while the soldiers silently wiped the weapons in their hands or huddled in hidden dugouts, clutching their guns and dozing.

More of them, however, held a cup of steaming hot coffee, ears pricked, distinguishing the distant artillery while chatting in low voices.

No one could clearly remember how this battle had started.

People had only heard earlier that an Armored Camp of the bandit army, sent to reinforce Sunset Mountain, had first raided the Western Alliance’s forward positions, wiping out over a dozen of the Western Alliance’s reconnaissance teams in one go and completely blinding their battlefield intelligence. Immediately afterward, an unwilling-to-be-outdone Western Alliance dispatched their legendary Judger Force in retaliation.

This battle between Special Forces and Special Forces escalated rapidly after a Judger squad raided two field hospitals of the Fei Alliance Joint Army.

First, the bandit army’s Special Forces squads launched retaliation without the slightest hesitation, and then both sides began deploying large numbers of Special Forces units to curtail each other’s destruction.

For a full five hours, the battle situation on Sunset Mountain was locked in stalemate amid the strangling engagement of the Special Forces on both sides.

”Boom!”

A violent explosion came from the distant mountains and forests.

As the ground shook violently, the Fei Alliance soldiers in the trenches saw a mass of fiery red light leap skyward from the treetops in the distance, curling into a huge mushroom cloud, with billowing black smoke blotting out the sky.

”There goes another one!”

”Look, where is it?”

”Should be one of the Western Alliance’s self-propelled artillery positions, yes, that’s right.”

”Beautifully done!”

The warriors all craned their necks toward the direction of the blast, chattering away with their guesses, their excitement and elation plain to see.

For the past few hours, the sporadic explosions in the Western Alliance’s forward positions at the foot of the mountain had become the hottest topic among all the Fei Alliance soldiers on the line.

Those repeated explosions, along with the SkyNet Information uploaded from battlefield recorders, all pointed to one fact—In this Special Forces war, the Fei Alliance held absolute superiority!

A few hours ago, no one would have dared imagine such a thing.

After all, the perpetrators who massacred hundreds of wounded soldiers and more than two hundred medical personnel were none other than the near-legendary, almost invincible Judgers.

These Judgers, piloting Twelfth Generation Mecha of the Binart Empire, had once used the manpower of a single squad to smash through the formation of the Feiyang Armored Division head-on and sweep across all of Catalonia.

And now, there were a full five Judger squads deployed at Sunset Mountain.

Fifty Judgers were far too many for this narrow defense line. No one believed that the three battered Armored Divisions on the Sunset Mountain positions could possibly stand against the Western Alliance’s army equipped with five Judger squads.

In everyone’s eyes, the reason the Western Alliance did not launch a direct assault, but chose instead to send Judger squads on raids, was less to control the battlefield or gather intelligence than to flaunt their might.

Unfortunately for them, they just happened to run into the bandit army!

From the moment the field hospitals were massacred, the bandit army launched a hardline retaliation.

An entire Special Forces Camp—over four hundred Bandit Army Mecha—split into more than thirty squads and plunged deep behind enemy lines.

Those silhouettes vanishing into the jungle-covered mountains were like a host of grim reapers fading into the night, madly unleashing one appalling bloodbath after another in the Western Alliance’s forward positions.

The Western Alliance’s electronic bases, battalion- and company-level garrisons, the extended outer positions of their main force, their logistics depots, hospitals, command posts, repair depots and supply depots—all of them became targets of the bandit army’s unlimited reprisals.

No one could survive their assaults. Once they had you in their sights, within minutes the ground would be strewn with corpses and rivers of blood.

If the Judgers were a pack of ferocious starving tigers, then these Special Soldiers of the bandit army were a pack of ruthless wolves.

Through battle report after battle report, they told the Western Alliance—and told all the warriors on the line—that for every one of theirs the enemy killed, they would kill ten, repaying blood with blood, tooth for tooth!