Chapter 58 — Sparrow Tactics

Pitch-black, deathly silent, and filled with pungent chemical sulfur and heavy metal dust, the underground Broken Horn mine shafts were a massive and unforgiving geological maze.

These were the abandoned ore veins left behind from the extraction period on the edge of Tartarus centuries ago. Hundreds and thousands of abandoned horizontal tunnels and vertical shafts crisscrossed like a spiderweb, plunging thousands of meters deep into the volcanic rock strata. Erosion from underground rivers and frequent collapses caused by crustal compression had rendered the terrain here extremely complex and chaotic. More importantly, the mine shafts were rich in highly dense magnetite and heavy metal veins; once higher-dimensional signal beams entered here, they would be forcibly physically deflected and refracted by the strong magnetic fields, reduced to a mess of disordered clutter.

"Drip... drip..."

Deep within the gloomy mine shafts, cold water droplets continuously fell from the cracked volcanic rock walls, striking the rusty old guide rails and the massive wreckage of heavy mining gears, emitting crisp and monotonous echoes.

After the first pass defensive line was completely physically melted by the Scorched-Earth Purge, Elias led the surviving mortal vanguard soldiers to hide entirely within these dark underground blind spots. And the furious Aries vanguard commander, Divine Envoy Phalan, clearly had no intention of letting any survivors go. Dozens of ground search-and-destroy squads, composed of heavily armed silver divine soldiers and carrying highly sensitive life signature radars, forcibly cut into the mine shafts and began a carpet-style, iron-fisted sweep.

Although these royal guards were unable to activate their law shields due to the physical remnants of the insulating field on the surface, they still gripped high-thermal cutting sabers and automatic rapid-fire plasma short guns in their hands; their physical combat power remained far beyond compare to ordinary mortals.

However, in this pitch-black underground maze, what determined life and death was no longer the rank of a divine core, but the degree of familiarity with this darkness and mud.

"They're coming, still two hairpin bends away from us."

In a dead corner of a tunnel, Elias lay on the cold volcanic rock wall, his right hand gripping the handle of his heavy cutting knife tightly. In the darkness, those lake-green eyes of his shone astonishingly bright, as calm as if devoid of any temperature. Beside him, veteran Caleb used his left hand to tightly grip a bundle of scrap wire blown to white smoke by gunpowder. Although the wound where he had lost most of his mechanical arm was still bleeding, his face was full of a bloodthirsty sneer.

"Attention, activate magnetic trap," Elias lowered his voice, issuing the command over the communicator.

Two minutes later, the sound of heavy boot steps dragged out messy echoes in the darkness. Six Aries royal guards wearing silver armor, holding plasma guns, spread out in a single line vigilantly in the narrow mine shaft, advancing slowly. The searchlights on their bodies pulled blinding white light through the damp air, but due to the strong interference of the magnetite, the life detection radars in their hands were frantically jumping with disordered gibberish, completely unable to provide any precise coordinates.

"Damn it, the gravity well here is extremely disordered, the gravity vector is constantly physically deviating, my armor's balance system has failed!" a royal guard cursed somewhat irritably in a low voice in the darkness. They were accustomed to the precisely calibrated gravitational constants of the higher-dimensional heavenly realm; in this chaotic physical mire, the heavy silver armor made every step feel like struggling in a deep swamp.

When they stepped into a spacious intersection track, the metal floor beneath their feet suddenly let out an ear-piercing physical electromagnetic shriek.

That was a "physical magnetic well" arranged by Nova leading artisans using abandoned heavy truck capacitors. In a flash, high-intensity electromagnetic suction frantically exploded from beneath the iron plates, and the heavy titanium-chromium alloy armor on the royal guards was instantly sucked dead onto the iron plates. The intense physical magnetism locked their boots and leg armor, causing them to lose all mobility in an instant.

"It's physical magnetism! Quickly cut off the armor's power!"

"Boom!!"

Before they could cut off the power, several tons of giant volcanic rocks suddenly smashed down from the rock ceiling overhead. Immediately following that, sealed tunnels on both sides of the rock wall, pre-filled with methane and radioactive radon gas, were forcibly detonated by mortals using flint.

A violent physical explosion within the enclosed, narrow mine shaft instantly amplified the acoustic and thermal energy by dozens of times. The furious shockwave swept up countless sharp volcanic rock fragments, like a shotgun blast, instantly battering the silver combat armor of the two divine soldiers charging at the front full of holes. Golden-red divine blood sprayed a large, eye-piercing scorch mark across the rock wall.

"An ambush! Fire! Fire!"

The remaining divine soldiers, in a panic, blindly pulled their triggers frantically toward the depths of the darkness. Plasma clusters carrying searing high temperatures burned the damp rock walls with cracking sounds, melting large swaths of glassy patches. But in such a narrow terrain with many bends, mortal soldiers had already used cables to slide down the vertical shafts right above their heads.

"Roar——!"

Orion's massive, mountain-like black shadow brazenly fell in the darkness. Holding the unlit heavy broken knife like a mountain-cleaving giant axe, he smashed it heavily onto the back of a divine soldier who was pinned down by the strong magnetism.

"Thud!"

Accompanied by a teeth-grinding sound of bone shattering, that divine soldier's spine, along with the hard alloy breastplate, was instantly stomped into a physically caved-in deformation. The whole person sank into the muddy water like sludge. Leveraging the momentum to twist his body, Orion's broken knife carved a tragic arc in the darkness, physically slicing an arm clean off at the root of another divine soldier attempting to turn around.

In the dark, Orion's divine core continuously flashed red light due to the severe pain of the "Saturn-Pluto opposition," but he gritted his teeth, saying in a low voice to Elias beside him, "In the dark, the searchlights on these divine soldiers are the best targets. Divine law can't help them; they are more fragile than the beasts on the wasteland."

From rock crevices all along the trenches, countless mortal soldiers leaned out like ghosts. Using physical tripwires pulled taut from old steel cables, they tripped those divine soldiers awkwardly trying to turn in their heavy armor one by one into the thin mud. Then three or four people would swarm up, using rusty shovels and bayonets to frantically tear at the fragile leather defenses at the armor joints.

"Retreat! Don't drag out the fight! Fall back toward Tunnel No. 3!"

Elias commanded in a low voice after severing a divine soldier's carotid artery.

By the time more Aries search-and-destroy squads frantically rushed over following the sounds of the explosion, all that remained in this narrow tunnel were the heavily mutilated corpses of three divine soldiers and the foul-smelling stench of blood flowing in the muddy water. The shadows of the mortal vanguard army had long since vanished into the depths of those intricate, spiderweb-like tunnels.

This sparrow-like, nimble guerrilla warfare tactic—Sparrow Tactics—over the course of a full thirty hours, dragged this silver vanguard army, which had run rampant across the heavenly realm, to the brink of collapse.

Deep within the crisscrossing underground defensive lines, inside a temporarily erected signal bunker, Lyra sat before a violently shaking CRT crystal-core monitor. Her pale fingertips tapped rapidly on the crude keys, continuously transmitting the enemy movements gathered through infrared sensors:

"Elias, three Aries mechanical metal seeker hounds have entered the fourth branch tunnel on the right. They are carrying independent physical infrared life sensors; the strong magnetic field's interference on them is decaying!"

"Nova, can you cut off the lighting generators in that sector?" Elias's calm voice rang out over the communicator.

"No problem! I can overload the generator in twenty seconds and blow the high-voltage copper transmission cables there!" Nova, hiding behind a distribution box, yelled loudly and pulled down the rusted knife switch heavily.

"Bzzzzt!"

Accompanied by a screeching sound of electrical arcs tearing, the fourth branch tunnel instantly plunged into absolute darkness. Violent high-voltage short-circuit electrical arcs turned into a dense rain of fire falling down, instantly physically burning out the visual sensors of the three mechanical hounds, reducing them to blind scrap iron on the ground.

In the narrow, dark underground hell filled with physical traps, the royal guards had to constantly guard against volcanic boulders smashing down from overhead, impossible-to-prevent steel wire tripwires underfoot, and heavy physical armor-piercing shells suddenly fired from some dark dead corner. Every minute of waiting was a tragic torture to the limits of the divine minds. They began to jump at shadows; even the sound of a water droplet falling would trigger frantic plasma sweeps from them.

And Divine Envoy Phalan on the flagship could only watch helplessly as the red dots representing ground troops on the holographic stream-light disk, at an extremely slow but unstoppable pace within the dark underground maze, turned one by one into grey embers representing death.