Chapter 240 The Darkest Hour of the Global Defense Line

"Those who cross the line shall die."

Above the round table of the Kyoto Alliance's Supreme Council, a holographic projection was playing this blurry image over and over again. In the picture, the ice-blue tiger king, as majestic as a mountain, did not display the ferocity of a wild beast in its eyes, but rather a condescending, extremely anthropomorphic indifference.

It is issuing an ultimatum, but more importantly, it is delivering a verdict.

The hall was deathly silent, with only the faint hum of the holographic projector.

Those pot-bellied powerful figures who had been arguing heatedly just days before over dividing up the Hunter's Guild's profits were now all deathly pale.

"Tiger... Tiger can talk now?" A congressman's fat fingers trembled violently. He tried to pick up the teacup in front of him to drink some water to calm his nerves, but he couldn't even hold the expensive teacup steady.

"Stop fooling yourselves, esteemed leaders. This is not a tiger at all."

Professor Wang Mingyuan gripped the solid wood conference table tightly with both hands. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot, revealing a deep weariness, as if he had aged ten years overnight. He slammed a thick stack of battle damage reports onto the table, scattering the papers all over the floor. The reports were filled with shocking numbers of casualties.

"Everyone, open your eyes and look at this true battle report. This talking tiger king of Changbai Mountain has only torn off its last fig leaf. In the past two days, the world's major defense lines have been experiencing a complete massacre!"

Wang Mingyuan turned on the big screen, and a series of bloody aerial photos of the scene jarred everyone's eyes.

"We used to think that no matter how much demonic beasts evolved, as long as they didn't reach the high level of being able to condense a golden core, they were just a bunch of moving targets that relied on instinct to bite people. We thought that as long as the exoskeleton armor was thick enough and the caliber of the psionic guns was large enough, even mortals without any cultivation foundation could harvest them in the wilderness like cutting leeks. But now, it turns out that we were terribly wrong."

Wang Mingyuan's voice became hoarse with excitement, "They've developed brains!"

He pointed to the first photo with his laser pointer. It was the remains of a human supply point in the mountains of southwestern China. There were no signs of intense fighting in the photo, only the corpses of human hunters lying on the ground, foaming at the mouth and blackened.

"In the Southwest Theater, an elite hunter regiment of two hundred men was completely wiped out. They weren't overwhelmed by the beast horde, but poisoned. Those intelligent mutated macaques didn't even choose to confront our heavy mechs head-on. They spent three whole days collecting every poisonous mutated berry they could find in the jungle, crushing the juice, and then discreetly pouring it into the water source upstream of the defensive line!"

Wang Mingyuan scrolled to the next photo, which showed a row of deep pits in the Gobi Desert in Northwest China. The bottom of the pits was covered with sharp rock spikes, and several second-generation exoskeleton armors, smashed to pieces, were stuck inside.

"In the Northwest Theater, the red-eyed gray wolf packs have learned to dig traps. Under the cover of night, they dig pits along the paths that hunters patrol, carefully covering them with a thin layer of frozen soil and snow. Rune exoskeletons weighing up to a ton stepping on them fall straight into the pit and become immobile iron coffins."

The breathing in the conference room grew increasingly heavy.

The arrogance of relying on massive industrial capacity and technological gap to treat monsters as mobile wallets has been shattered by reality at this moment.

When wild beasts learn to use tactics, to take advantage of the terrain, and even to wage psychological warfare, the previously enormous gap is now instantly leveled out.

At this very moment, in a muddy trench at the forefront of the Jianghuai defense line.

Old Ding had half his body submerged in the icy, dirty water, his rough, mechanical right arm pressing down hard on a small stone that was still trembling beside him.

Two hundred meters outside the trench, a thick fog blanketed the area, reducing visibility to almost nothing. The air reeked of blood and engine oil.

"Help... Someone please save me... My leg is broken... Please..."

A heart-wrenching, tearful cry for help echoed faintly through the mist. The voice, filled with fear and despair for death, pounded on the nerves of everyone in the trench.

Little Stone's eyes were red, and his teeth were grinding together. He gripped his psionic rifle tightly and was about to stand up and rush out: "Uncle Ding, it's Rat from the second team! He's not dead yet. I smoked his cigarette yesterday. I have to go and help him!"

"Get down! Are you fucking crazy?!"

Old Ding grabbed Little Stone by the back of the neck and shoved him hard into the mud with all his might, cursing in a low voice, "Don't you have a brain? Rat was dragged away during patrol last night; his bulletproof plate was chewed through. With those beasts' bite force, they would have gnawed him to skin and bones long ago. How could he still be alive!"

"But that voice is definitely his!" Little Stone's eyes turned red with anxiety as he desperately tried to break free from Old Ding's grasp.

Old Ding slapped Little Stone's helmet, making him see stars. Then, Old Ding quietly pulled a broken rearview mirror lens from the mud, peered out from the edge of the trench in the dim light, sneered, and threw the lens in front of Little Stone.

"See for yourself."

Little Stone leaned closer and peered into the depths of the thick fog through the reflection in his glasses. After just one glance, his stomach churned, and he almost vomited bile.

Deep within the dense fog, a mutated hyena, larger than an adult water buffalo, lay sprawled among the rubble. Beneath its paws lay half of a mangled human torso. The hyena did not eat directly, but rather cruelly used its sharp claws to repeatedly pry at the exposed vocal cords on the corpse's neck.

By utilizing its uniquely mutated vocal cord structure and airflow resonance, combined with the physical pressure of its claws, it remarkably mimicked the desperate cries for help of humans. With each sound, a cunning and triumphant glint would flash in the hyena's pale green eyes.

In the ruins and blind spots surrounding the hyena, Old Ding's extremely sharp eyes spotted at least a dozen pairs of its kind glowing green.

They are fishing.

Using the last vestiges of human compassion as bait, they lured the eager recruits out of the trenches to their deaths. Once anyone left the cover of the trenches, they were met with a dozen gaping maws capable of easily crushing steel.

"Do you understand now?" Old Ding spat out a mouthful of muddy saliva, his eyes as cold as icy blades. "If you rush out now, you won't save the dead, and you'll become their new bait to lure others tomorrow."

Little Stone collapsed completely into the muddy trench, his body ice-cold, too weak even to grip his gun.

We can't beat them.

In the past, wars were fought by who had the most firepower, who was most fearless, and whose pseudo-spiritual root could stay overclocked the longest. But now, when your enemy is not only stronger and faster than you, but also more cunning and treacherous, and knows how to exploit human weaknesses, how can you fight such a war?

This sudden and dramatic leap in intelligence dealt a devastating blow to the defenses of all humanity.

In just one month, the global human defense line was forced to shrink back a full fifty kilometers. Seventy percent of the hunter outposts that were originally deep in the wilderness and regarded as cash cows by major guilds were eradicated.

Hospitals in major cities are overflowing with hunters who have lost limbs and are suffering excruciating pain from mutated toxins.

Panic spread like an uncontrollable plague within the major fortified cities.

The atmosphere inside the Kyoto Supreme Council was so oppressive it was maddening.

The military commander suddenly stood up and slammed his hand hard on the solid wood conference table, the force of which created a deep crack in the surface.

"We can't keep fighting like this!"

The commander's eyes were bloodshot, his hair disheveled, like a cornered beast. He roared through gritted teeth, "Conventional positional tactics have completely failed. Our heavy artillery can't hit those foxes who know how to use the terrain for cover, and our armored vehicles are being lured into their traps. The casualty rate is doubling every day. In less than a year, all our reserves and human hunters will be wiped out!"

"So what do you want to do?" The top decision-maker sat at the head of the table, his fingers tapping lightly on the table, his voice heavy as if it were pressing down on a mountain.

The commander clenched his teeth, his facial muscles twitching violently from the extreme effort. He stared intently at the vast wilderness on the holographic screen, then uttered a sentence that sent chills down the spines of everyone present.

"Contract all outer defenses and completely abandon the surrounding satellite cities that cannot be defended."

The commander took a deep breath and made the final, mad decision: "Then prepare to activate the tactical nuclear arsenal. Since conventional forces can't outwit their minds, and since they want to wipe us out, then let's use absolute annihilation to erase those brainless beasts, along with this entire wasteland, from the map!"

Upon hearing this, the entire conference room fell into a deathly silence. Only the howling wind outside scraped against the glass.

Everyone knew that opening that long-sealed Pandora's box meant humanity had officially acknowledged the complete defeat of conventional cultivation methods. It meant that humanity would drag its newly revitalized home planet and its painstakingly restored spiritual veins down with it into a catastrophic abyss.

This is an unreasonable table-flipping.

While the higher echelons of humanity are struggling.

In the far north, on that desolate wasteland buried by wind and snow, a newly born demon race is completing an even more terrifying and chilling gathering.