On the ground, Wu Erhun seized the opportunity. He violently kicked the charlatan priest aside and swung his crude shotgun—with a machete welded to the end—downward, pointing toward the distant ruins.
"Since the gods have decreed it, then the water, fuel, and all those gleaming cans of food down there now belong to the Black Tooth Tribe as sacred offerings!"
"What are you standing around for? Charge!"
With Wu Erhun's unscrupulous and mysteriously confident call to plunder, the deathly silent balance on the high embankment was shattered in an instant.
The thousands of warriors of the Black Tooth Tribe erupted in a chorus of wolf-like howls.
One after another, they kick-started their small motorbikes, which were welded together from scrap diesel engines and steel plates.
Accompanied by plumes of black smoke and the piercing roar of engines, they surged like a black torrent toward the riverbed below.
However, the Black Tooth Tribe wasn't the only large tribe on this Wilderness.
"Wu Erhun! You carrion-eating vulture! Who do you think you're kidding with that god act?"
"You want to swallow that ship whole? You'll have to see if my guns agree first!"
On the distant embankment on the opposite side, the leader of another large Tide-Follower tribe that had occupied the area for years also saw red.
They had originally been cowed into shrinking back like cowards by the military might of the Sky Eye Organization.
But seeing the Black Tooth Tribe beginning their charge, the greed and madness inherent in the bones of the Wilderness folk instantly shattered the last shred of their reason.
To hell with Destiny's Mandate and divine blessings.
In the Wilderness, without the firepower that could vaporize a person into blood mist in an instant, that broken land ship was nothing but an unowned mountain of gold!
"Open fire! Stop those Black Tooth curs! Don't let them near our treasure!"
"Bang! Bang! Bang! Boom—!"
In an instant, both banks of the Red Tide Plain transformed into a scene of absurd and bloody war-torn revelry.
Countless homemade muskets and heavy weapons modified from scrap aircraft machine guns spat long, orange-yellow tongues of flame into the night sky.
Substandard bullets and highly toxic chemical bombs crossed paths in mid-air, bursting into blinding sparks along the charge paths of the Tide-Follower tribes.
"Boom!"
A modified motorbike from the Black Tooth Tribe was flipped over by a crude cannon halfway down. The warrior screamed as he rolled across the ground like a ball of fire.
Immediately following that, the heavy infantry of the Black Tooth Tribe used rotary machine guns to riddle a small tribe attempting to take a shortcut with bullets, shredding both men and vehicles.
The big fish eat the small fish, and the small fish eat the shrimp.
This was the only law of survival in the Wilderness.
Within the first minute of the behemoth's fall, the conflict had returned to this ancient, deep-red riverbed in an even more tragic and chaotic fashion.
In just a few minutes, both sides of the plain had turned into complete chaos.
High in the air, Ren Yi watched the scene of fratricide triggered by greed with cold eyes.
He looked at the ragtag armed forces on both banks, which totaled tens of thousands—perhaps even hundreds of thousands—of people.
"Am I forgetting something?"
A mysterious sense of foreboding was growing stronger and stronger within him.
A certain sentence the Lord of the Sky Lake had said back in the central control room suddenly flashed through Ren Yi's mind.
"I have already prepared a 'secret weapon.'"
"When the time comes, S-099 will be buried in that damn riverbed along with those Tide-Followers."
Ren Yi silently estimated the physical distance between the massive embankments on either side.
"But... how will they be buried?"
This plain, evolved from an ancient riverbed, was far too vast, spanning dozens of kilometers in depth.
No matter how frenzied S-099 became or how limitlessly it proliferated...
Relying solely on that pool of black-red flesh fluid to wipe out tens of thousands of tribal warriors equipped with mobile vehicles across such a massive area in a short amount of time was an impossible task.
Furthermore, according to his observations just now, S-099 clearly preferred Anomalies and inorganic matter.
Moreover, it was currently playing dead.
What exactly was the City Lord's trump card?
The moment this thought crossed Ren Yi's mind, he suddenly felt a wave of hair-raising terror without any warning.
It was an instinctive warning of danger.
It didn't come from the unresponsive S-099 below, nor did it come from the tribes on the embankments.
This malice and sense of destruction that almost froze his soul in an instant came from... above.
It came from that cold, silent, and lightless high altitude.
Swoosh—!
Without the slightest hesitation, Ren Yi instantly pushed his perception radius to its limit.
Like a massive invisible radar, he swept his senses toward the higher reaches of the firmament.
This time, in the high altitude completely free of atmospheric dust interference, he found the source of the danger.
Directly in front of that massive, silver-white, and hollow star corpse moon, hidden against the backdrop of the brilliant Star Ring fragments...
A tiny, elongated shadow appeared abruptly beneath the massive celestial body.
It was dragging a trail of white exhaust. Against the vast backdrop of space, it appeared to move slowly from a distance.
However, on a concrete scale of physical velocity, the descent speed of this object had likely already easily surpassed Mach 20.
As the distance closed, Ren Yi finally "saw" the thing.
A streamlined, massive pointed head made of a pure white unknown special alloy, a cylindrical main propulsion structure, and four titanium alloy stabilizing fins...
Along with that pale exhaust flame that was ruthlessly tearing and scorching the cold air of the high altitude...
The City Lord hadn't lied.
He truly hadn't intended to bring this land ship back.
This steel behemoth carrying countless staff members, Consumables, and S-099...
From the very beginning, it was nothing more than a giant "target" placed by the Red Tide riverbed to lure all the tribes of the Wilderness and pin them to the spot.
It was merely a "lure," or a "reason."
And now, the bait had fulfilled its historical mission.
"Holy crap... that madman from the City of the Sky Lake..."
Ren Yi let out a cry of extreme shock in his mind.
It was a weapon capable of completely erasing every carbon-based life form within dozens of kilometers—
A strategic tactical nuclear missile!
Rate on N.U.
