45: Chapter 45 Technology Unleashes Its Power: The Meat Grinder Defense Line

The instant Lu Changyuan's right hand fell, the entire city wall seemed to suddenly awaken.

The crossbow arms, winches, and talisman slots originally hidden behind the battlements, arrow slits, and bunkers lit up almost simultaneously. It was not just twenty crossbows; including the backup mounts, lateral reinforcements, and the harbor's angled firing platforms, these fifty crossbows were not built in a single day. In addition to the earliest twenty in the main array, Su Qingli had forced the Workshop to rush out another thirty before the beast tide pressed in—the crossbow arms used thick blanks prepared during trial production, the thin slices of Mystic Ice Jade were drawn directly from the storehouse, and the Array Patterns were carved by all apprentices capable of doing so, working in three shifts. By the time the beast tide truly reached the foot of the wall, though a few of the thirty rushed crossbows had not yet had their strings fully stabilized, they were already able to be mounted and fire. A total of fifty modified mystic ice spirit-breaking crossbows let out a low rumble that sounded almost like the panting of Vicious Beasts at this very moment.

In the next instant, fifty thick, long crossbow bolts tore through the night wind.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

That was no longer a simple "shooting."

Instead, it was like a row of cold steel spears, plowing straight through the oncoming wave of beasts. The frontmost group of sea beasts, who had just climbed over the carcasses of their kin across the shallows, were pinned to death in the bloody mud before they could even touch the base of the wall. The spirit-breaking cold energy and the fire of the Explosive Talismans attached to the bolts exploded together in the tide, sending large chunks of shredded flesh mixed with blue-black demon blood into the air, falling like a foul-smelling rain of blood.

The low-tier sea beasts that had been desperately filling the path earlier were, for the first time, blasted into a momentary blank space.

It wasn't that they were afraid.

It was that the entire front layer charging forward had been directly vaporized.

Lu Changyuan gave them no room to breathe, his voice as cold as a blade: "Second round, continuous fire. Shred the shallows for me!"

The winches turned again, and the crossbow strings tightened once more.

The second volley was unleashed immediately after.

This time, they did not just hit the front of the wave, but drove straight along the advance route where Demon General Fuhai had just hidden, suppressed, and packed his troops. A large number of long-tailed sea wolves and Bone-Spurred Sea Lizards, which it had intentionally kept in the middle and rear ranks to climb over the front-line carcasses, were pierced and torn apart on the spot by a succession of crossbow bolts, instantly throwing the entire tide formation into chaos.

Standing on the eastern city gate, Lu Hu felt the suffocating frustration he had harbored since the start of the battle suddenly burst. He roared, "Excellent!"

But what truly made one's scalp tingle was yet to come.

Because the rushing sea beasts quickly discovered that Blue Moon Island was completely different from the small Human Race islands they had overrun in the past.

After the first rain of crossbow bolts, a small number of sea beasts fortunate enough to survive finally trampled over the shattered corpses and broken armor, rushing to the base of the wall and scaling the outer low slope. But the moment they touched the defenders, they slammed into a hard shell that drove them to near despair.

Cold Iron Heavy Armor.

Heavy armor plates forged from Tier 3 Deep-Sea Cold Iron—the Dao soldiers of the Sea Cavalry Battalion and those at the core crossbow positions on the wall were completely encased from their necks down to their lower abdomens. As for the other Qi-refining Cultivators and Mortal auxiliary soldiers on the wall, they wore Cold Iron Half-Armor rushed out by the Workshop: cold iron protective plates were only embedded on the chest, back, and sides of the neck, while the rest remained thick leather armor. But even with half-armor, it was enough to prevent the sharp teeth of those low-tier sea beasts from biting through their vital areas.

A Bone-Spurred Sea Lizard, fully half a person tall, pounced onto a Dao soldier's shoulder, its sharp teeth snapping shut viciously.

Crack!

Its teeth shattered.

The Dao soldier himself was dazed for a moment, but then a fierce light flared in his eyes. Swinging his Cold Iron Saber with a backhand strike, he split the sea lizard's head in half with a single blow.

The same scene quickly played out one after another along the entire defensive line.

In the past, when facing sea beasts, the Human Race defenders feared being entangled in close combat the most. But now, this batch of Cold-Iron-Armored Soldiers of Blue Moon Island, who had just been fully re-equipped, actually turned "close combat" into the most ideal distance for a meat grinder.

The sea beasts rushed up, unable to bite through or tear apart the armor. Instead, the instant they closed in, they would have their heads split by a saber, their throats pierced by a spear, or be directly burned to charred bones by the talisman fire supplied by the rear ranks on the wall.

Standing at the highest point, Lu Changyuan watched this scene, and his gaze finally settled slightly.

This was exactly what he had spent this entire period pouring Spirit Stones, exhausting mineral veins, and risking human lives to force out.

It wasn't just for show.

It was an iron foundation capable of truly grinding the enemy into mincemeat in a major battle.

"Eastern gap, open the gate by half a zhang!"

"Sea Cavalry Battalion, deploy!"

The moment the vanguard of the tide was forcefully suppressed by the rain of crossbow bolts and the armored soldiers, Lu Hu finally received his order.

The heavy city gate did not open fully, only parting enough to leave an angled gap just wide enough for a small squad to charge out. In the next breath, fifty Purple Lightning Sea Cavalry stepped onto the waves simultaneously amidst the sharp resonance of the Beast-Controlling Conchs, the fin-manes of the seahorses crackling with fine arcs of electricity, tearing a piercing white line of lightning through the dark night.

Lu Hu took the lead, clad in Cold Iron Heavy Armor, the long saber in his hand dragging a trail of eye-catching cold light.

"Kill!"

The Thunderous Battle Array plowed fiercely through the bloody mud of the shallows outside the city gate.

Those low-tier sea beasts that had just piled up relying purely on numbers had almost no resistance against this kind of short-range charge. Wherever the Purple Lightning Seahorses passed, electric arcs surged wildly through the muddy water and demon blood, leaving any sea beast they touched either dead or paralyzed. Meanwhile, the sea cavalrymen themselves were wrapped in Cold Iron Heavy Armor, completely unafraid of brief close encounters. The entire squad was like a thunderous meat grinder charging out along the ground, tearing yet another gap in the already chaotic tide formation.

Seizing this instant, the crossbow positions on the wall fired supplementary shots at an angle.

The two killing forces, one after the other, forcefully blew the vanguard of the tide—which had just been reorganized by the demon general—to pieces once again.

On the other side, the Black-Armored Giant Crab had also completely lost itself to the slaughter.

Lu Changyuan had stationed it at the eastern gap, which was the most vulnerable to being breached by large sea beasts. Initially, it had only been instinctively guarding its position. However, as more and more sea beasts crowded toward this area, its exotic vicious nature was fully unleashed. Its giant pincers snapped open and shut; almost none of the large-sized Vicious Beasts that dared to charge straight at it could retreat in one piece. In the most extreme instance, it forcefully crushed a two-zhang-long Heavy-Armored Sea Crocodile in half from the middle, scattering blue-black internal organs and broken bones all over the ground, even splashing the nearby Dao soldiers.

Shi Jian wiped the blood from his face, yet laughed like a madman: "Bring it on!"

At this moment, both on and below the walls of Blue Moon Island, the stifling frustration that had been suppressed for half a day was finally vented entirely along with this round of frontal slaughter.

The sea beasts were dying.

Dying in droves.

The seawater was no longer just dyed red, but was completely stained a deep, ink-black color by the massive number of corpses, shattered bones, and churning black blood. The waves crashed up layer by layer, but what they carried back was no longer just the sand and mud from beneath the wall, but mostly mangled demon corpses and fragments of shells.

Even the Qi-refining Cultivators on the wall, whose spiritual energy had been nearly drained by Demon General Fuhai's attrition earlier, felt a touch of color return to their pale faces as they looked down at the blood-soaked path carved out by the Heavy Crossbows, Thunderous Cavalry, and Heavy-Armored Soldiers.

They suddenly realized something.

As long as this system above was still functioning, Blue Moon Island was not just waiting to die.

They could truly defend it.

And once they truly held it, all the blood, wounds, and sheer endurance they had been forced to go through would finally have been worth it.

Yet, Lu Changyuan's expression did not ease up because of this.

Because he had been staring at Demon General Fuhai at the very rear.

From beginning to end, that creature had not lost its composure.

It simply watched quietly, letting the low-tier cannon fodder die beneath the walls batch after batch, allowing Blue Moon Island to reveal this meat-grinder defense line layer by layer. In its eyes, there was not even much fury, only a growing intensity of gloom and resentment.

It was memorizing.

It was memorizing the range and rotation rhythm of the mystic ice spirit-breaking crossbows, the gap exposed in the city gate when the Sea Cavalry Battalion charged, the position of the gap guarded by the Black-Armored Giant Crab, and the core nodes in this defense line that could truly inflict massive casualties on the cannon fodder.

An enemy like this was far more troublesome than one that went mindlessly mad.

Finally, when the last large wave of driven low-tier sea beasts was also ground into a mountain of corpses before the city, Demon General Fuhai let out a deep and long-drawn roar.

That roar was no longer as urgent and life-threatening as before.

Instead, it sounded like a summons after being suppressed to the absolute limit.

In the next moment, the sea surface suddenly parted.

It was not the waves bursting.

Rather, the seawater from much deeper down was being pushed up from below by something larger and with a heavier aura.

One, two, ten...

Soon, hundreds of dark shadows slowly emerged from the sea.

They were no longer the low-tier cannon fodder driven to their deaths like before, but elite forces that had truly survived in the deep sea until now. The aura of each one was far stronger than the Vicious Beasts from before; some had bone armor on their backs, some had sharp horns on their heads, and some dragged long venomous stingers behind their tails. Just by floating to the surface, they caused the surrounding seawater to part outward of its own accord.

More importantly,

Almost every single one of them possessed a Foundation Establishment aura.

The breath that had just been raised on the city wall instantly sank once more.

Lu Hu led the Sea Cavalry Battalion back to the city gate, looking up at the dense mass of high-tier dark shadows on the sea, his eyelids twitching violently: "Lord..."

And beyond the horizon, Demon General Fuhai finally moved forward slowly by a short distance.

Those deep green demonic eyes stared at Lu Changyuan, revealing unvarnished killing intent for the first time.

The cannon fodder was completely dead.

Now, it was time for the blades in its hands to strike.