Chapter 242 The All-Out Blood War Between Humans and Demons

The main defense line in the Jianghuai region.

The strategic retreat of thirty kilometers tightly packed the hunters, who were originally scattered in the wilderness, into this Great Wall of Steel.

The rain had been falling all night without any sign of stopping. The trenches at the front of the defense line were soaked into a mushy mess, the muddy water mixed with human oil, excrement, and an overwhelming sense of panic.

Old Ding leaned against the cold concrete blast wall, the rough engineering robotic arm humming slightly. He looked behind the trench, where heavy trucks were dumping boxes of psionic armor-piercing rounds and piles of second-generation exoskeleton armor directly onto the muddy ground.

The powerful clans have truly bleed a lot this time. Equipment that hunters used to have to sign indentured servitude contracts and mortgage their lifespans for in exchange for is now piled up like cabbages by the roadside, available for anyone to take. Not only that, even those pseudo-spiritual root repair fluids have been moved to the battlefield by the case.

But none of the veterans in the trenches could laugh.

Little Stone held a brand-new heavy psionic machine gun, his hands trembling slightly. He looked at the free equipment, then at Old Ding.

"Uncle Ding, are they giving away the money for free?"

Old Ding spat out the rainwater from his mouth, touched the hilt of his battle sword with his fleshy hand, and looked as cold as ice.

"This is what they call a last meal before execution. Before, they wanted money; now they want your life. If you take their things, when the monsters charge at you, even if you take half a step back, the supervisory team will kill you without hesitation."

Old Ding stood up, looked at the new recruits around him, their faces beaming with fervor at receiving their new equipment, and shook his head. With such a massive population, the last thing they lacked was human life. The authorities and powerful clans pushed the poorest people to the front lines, arming them to the teeth with free steel, just to make them the cheapest cogs in this meat grinder.

Ugh.

A deep, drawn-out blast, like a horn sounding from an ancient, desolate land, suddenly pierced through the thick rain curtain and echoed across the entire Jianghuai defense line.

This wasn't a human air raid siren at all; it was the attack horn sounded by a demonic beast. It was the sound of a magical artifact made from the spine of some enormous, mutated sea monster.

"They're here! Everyone, get ready!"

The hoarse roars of commanders at all levels echoed across the defensive line. The sound of countless bolts being pulled back blended together, and a dense array of gun barrels protruded from the trenches and firing ports, fixedly aimed at the fog-shrouded wilderness ahead.

The earth began to tremble.

At first, it was just a very slight tremor, with tiny ripples spreading across the muddy surface of the trench. But after only a dozen seconds, the tremor turned into a violent shaking.

"Illumination flares! Fire!"

boom! boom! boom!

Hundreds of high-intensity psionic flares were launched into the sky, illuminating the wilderness for more than ten kilometers ahead as if it were daytime.

When the scene behind the thick fog came into view, all the humans on the defensive line, including the battle-hardened mercenary veterans, felt a bone-chilling despair.

A black tsunami.

It was a black torrent stretching as far as the eye could see, composed of countless unintelligent, mutated beasts: mutated rats, berserk wild boars, and red-eyed gray wolves. Their eyes were bloodshot, and foul-smelling saliva dripped from their mouths. They were like a pack of madmen who had completely lost their minds, trampling over the bodies of their own kind as they launched a frenzied charge towards the human defenses.

"Open fire! Give them a good beating!"

Rumble!

The human defenses instantly transformed into a colossal steel beast spewing a storm of metal. Tens of thousands of psionic heavy cannons fired simultaneously, the dense rain of bullets forming a massive net of fire that relentlessly engulfed the beast horde.

The explosions were deafening. The tens of thousands of mutated beasts at the forefront didn't even have time to scream before they were torn into a cloud of blood mist by the violent psionic shells. Limbs and debris mixed with dirt were thrown dozens of meters into the air before raining down.

This is the first layer of the meat grinder.

The enlightened demon commanders were utterly ruthless, treating their low-brained, instinct-driven brethren as cannon fodder to consume human ammunition. They didn't care how many died, because in the wilderness, there were countless such low-level beasts.

"Fire! Don't stop! Change the barrel!"

Little Stone gripped the trigger of the heavy machine gun tightly; the barrel was already red-hot and emitted a pungent, acrid smell. He fired wildly, watching the wild beasts fall in droves, the immense recoil numbing half of his body.

The cannon fodder's charge lasted for a full two hours.

In the open area in front of the defensive line, the carcasses of wild beasts had piled up into small hills several meters high. Dark red blood flowed like rivers, trickling into the human trenches.

"Cease fire! The gun barrels are overheating! The heavy artillery positions need cooling!"

With the commander's order, the deafening gunfire finally subsided briefly. The soldiers collapsed in the mud, panting heavily; many of their pseudo-spiritual roots, damaged by prolonged overclocking, were beginning to bleed.

However, the demon race's real attack has only just begun.

"Uncle Ding...look over there." Little Stone pointed into the distance, his voice distorted with extreme fear.

Behind the pile of cannon fodder corpses, the thick fog slowly dissipated.

Accompanied by an extremely heavy, uniform sound of footsteps, an army that plunged humanity into utter despair slowly emerged, treading over the blood and flesh scattered on the ground.

It was a group of mutated black bears and armored rhinoceroses, each the size of a heavy truck.

They were no longer charging with their bare hands. Embedded in their extremely broad chests, heads, and joints were obscured black steel bulletproof plates stripped from human armor. Forged by demonic fire, these alloy plates had fused perfectly with their flesh, forming a rugged and terrifying demonic armor.

What's even more disheartening is that behind these heavily armored monsters, hundreds of snow foxes, their bodies radiating an icy blue light, are standing in a row with perfect coordination.

"It's the demon kingdom's regular army. They're about to break through!" Old Ding dragged Little Stone into a blind spot in the blast wall, roaring hoarsely, "Everyone down! Prepare for impact!"

Roar!

The lead, heavily armored black bear let out a roar.

The Snow Fox pack behind them simultaneously opened their mouths, and countless beams of icy blue light converged in mid-air. They did not attack the human soldiers, but instead precisely unleashed an immense amount of ice-type spiritual power onto the heavily armored demonic beasts in front of them.

Click, click.

A thick layer of mysterious ice instantly covered the black bear and rhinoceros's black steel armor. The metal and mysterious ice formed a double-layered composite armor that was almost impossible to penetrate with conventional firepower.

"Charge!"

With a sharp screech coming from behind the demon race, hundreds of heavily armored behemoths covered in ice armor, like hundreds of heavy tanks moving at full speed, launched a death charge towards the human's steel defense line.

"Fire! Armor-piercing rounds! Quickly!"

The human positions erupted in intense fire once again. But this time, the bullets, powerful enough to tear apart low-level beasts, only shattered into clumps of ice when they hit the double-layered demon armor, doing nothing to stop their advance.

Even if a large-caliber psionic cannon hits the black bear directly, knocking it to the ground, the rhinoceros behind it will still run over its corpse without hesitation.

Fifty meters. Thirty meters. Ten meters.

boom!

With a deafening roar, more than a dozen heavily armored rhinoceroses slammed into the city wall of the first line of defense.

The supposedly indestructible reinforced concrete blast wall was instantly covered with spiderweb-like cracks under the impact of thousands of tons of terrifying physical kinetic energy, and then collapsed with a roar.

A huge gap was torn open.

"The breach is open! Push forward!!!" The company commander brandished his sword, his eyes bloodshot, and led the charge toward the breach.

The meat grinder has entered its most brutal close-quarters combat phase.

Countless human hunters clad in exoskeletons, like frenzied ants, swarmed towards the charging behemoth. They had no way out; their families were behind them.

Old Ding leaped out of the mud, his pseudo-spiritual roots bursting forth with a blinding red light. He completely ignored the armored black bear waving its giant paws, and with practiced ease, slid down between the bear's legs.

"Shoot it in the eye with a stone!"

As Lao Ding glided, the engineering robotic arm gripped the gap in the black bear's leg bone armor, and the vibrating knife in his right hand ruthlessly pierced the unarmored joint of the black bear.

Roar!

The black bear roared in agony, its massive body suddenly lurching downwards. Little Stone seized the opportunity, raised his rifle, and unleashed a full magazine of armor-piercing rounds into the bear's face. Even the thickest ice was shattered by the close-range fire, the bullets piercing its eyeballs.

The black bear crashed to the ground, crushing more than a dozen human corpses.

But Old Ding didn't even glance at it. He directly cleaved open the black bear's chest cavity with a single stroke, dug out a second-tier demon core that exuded rich spiritual energy, and stuffed it into the bag at his back.

"Uncle Ding! What are you doing! Is the war still going on?" Little Stone was stunned.

"Nonsense! If you don't dig out the inner core, how will you buy medicine tomorrow!" Old Ding slapped Little Stone's helmet, his face covered in blood as he roared, "This world is a fucked-up marketplace! Kill monsters, survive, exchange for money, then keep killing. Understand?!"

This is the abnormal resilience that humanity has displayed in this bloody battle.

Even though the defense line had been torn apart, and even though their comrades were being ripped to pieces by monsters, these low-level hunters were still like a pack of starving wolves, frantically scavenging every usable resource from the monsters' corpses.

They poured the essence and blood of dead demonic beasts directly into their pseudo-spiritual roots, squeezing their lifespans in an extremely brutal way in exchange for a brief burst of combat power.

A hunter, his mech damaged, had half his body bitten by a mutated leopard. Instead of calling for help, he laughed maniacally and detonated the pseudo-spiritual root in his spine, which was in an overclocked state.

boom!

The violent self-destruction blasted the hunter and the leopard into a shower of minced meat.

On the other side of the gap, a second-tier demon wolf that had just killed several humans was stabbed into its body simultaneously by dozens of high-frequency vibrating blades before it could even chew its prey. A group of human hunters with glowing green eyes used sheer numbers to chop the beast into mincemeat.

It lacks both order and grace.

This was a pure exchange of flesh and blood. The demon race used their powerful physique and discipline to break through the steel of humanity, while humanity used its massive population and fearless madness to fill the gaps in the defenses.

The entire Jianghuai defense line has been turned into a giant millstone.

The blood turned the sky a dark red. The rain fell, carrying the metallic smell of rust.

Inside the Kyoto Supreme Council.

The top decision-makers and a group of high-ranking military officials stared intently at the constantly fluctuating death toll on the holographic screen. Each fluctuation represented the demise of thousands of lives and thousands of demonic beasts.

"Sir, all seventeen gaps in the first line of defense have been plugged." The chief of staff wiped away tears, his voice hoarse, "but one-tenth of our reserves have already been deployed."

"This is the price we have to pay." The top decision-maker closed his eyes, his hands gripping the edge of the table tightly, his knuckles turning white from the force.

In this all-out bloody war that will determine the survival of the race, Earth is undergoing an unprecedentedly painful birth. Both humans and demons are frantically draining each other's flesh and blood in this extremely high-pressure life-or-death struggle, completing their own bloody evolution.