Chapter Two Hundred and Twenty-Seven: Encircle and Destroy (Patreon)

I took a moment to digest the message, even as the remnants of Bahurnivaras’ body slid off the edge of my blade. Around me, the rest of the Honour Guard were dying with shocking suddenness, as the ultras and armoured troops cut their way through the survivors.

With the jump in Wisdom and Charisma, my MP maximum had risen to 4,970 and CP had climbed to 3,150. PP stood at a round 4,000.

Unfortunately, I was still bleeding from having two alien swords stuck in me. Health was dropping at 25 per second, even as Healing Aura halved the effect of the drain.

Casting a fully-powered Cure, I removed the Consuming Drain conditions and boosted by HP back to its maximum. I could see Mahotsukoi pinning down a slightly more shiny Honour Guard even as Indradhanush’s beams chargrilled his buddies.

The pinned-down Guard twisted, trying to get away from the girl, and the Giant Anime Hammer smashed down on its head.

Despite her almost cartoonish appearance, Mahotsukoi wasn’t squeamish.

“Clear!” the shout rang out from one of the troops. Green held up his hand. “Cease fire! Sound off!”

“West quadrant clear!”

“East quadrant clear!”

Indeed, as I glanced around the battlefield, I could see that it was, indeed, clear. The last of the enemy had been gunned down.

That left us with… only 702,433 Raptors at the moment. A number that was declining slowly.

Time to change the ‘slow’ part of that.

I activated my communicator channel. “Pemberley. We took down the Raptor commander.”

The voice of Molly Pemberley sounded relieved. “We saw.”

“Thanks for the save. What was that missile?”

“A modified cruise missile with a flashbang warhead.”

“Please convey my gratitude to the unit that came up with that.”

“Thanks, Belessar. How do you intend to proceed next?”

“We have them backstopped here. Send in heavy weapons teams to fortify this end of the tunnels. And then, we end this.”

“We’ll get it done.”

It took all of twenty minutes to get the heavy weapons teams into positions. Twenty minutes during which Green’s troops – well entrenched and able to use their lightning guns – stopped a counterattack from a determined Raptor force, leaving dozens more of the enemy dead.

We could see the Raptors hunkering down on the other side of the door, trying to create yet another fortification to slow down a human assault. At this point, they were being attacked from both ends of the tunnel – the worst nightmare a unit fighting underground could imagine.

Nanocloud’s bots filtered past the Raptor fortifications, unnoticed, sending back a vivid picture of an army slowly disintegrating. With the Scions and Clanlords gone, the remaining Raptor Captains were struggling to establish a clear chain of command – or agree on a path forward. Human forces at the upper end of the tunnel continued to probe, demanding more and more troops and ammunition be expended in holding them back, and the unknown intensity of the threat posed by the enemy below led to several Captains arguing about how much ammo to send up and how much to send down.

To make matters worse, the depth of the tunnel was wreaking havoc on their communications. The Raptor officers could not even guess whether the Xeranai had received their messages and would be mounting a rescue mission – in which case they just had to hold out a while longer – or had abandoned them entirely. If the latter, should they attempt a breakout – a suicidal, bloody affair – or offer terms? And if terms, who had the right to decide which ones?

Meanwhile, our soldiers and ultras continued to attack, the Raptors continued to rotate their troops back to medical holding areas, and Raptor logisticians continued to bemoan over the shortages of ammunition, food, and energy.

The energy shortages, it seemed, were the worst of the lot. Virtually all the Raptor weapons were power hogs. It was the reason they’d set up the geothermal power tap as a priority – right until we humans had captured it.

And now, the Raptor army was running low on its supplies of pre-charged batteries.

Less than an hour after we had taken the lower chamber, Nanocloud had mapped the entirety of the Raptor forces within the tunnels.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had so much insight into alien tactics,” Pemberley told me over the communicator. “We have recordings of their officers in meetings, logistics reports, power consumption figures – everything it takes to figure out how to run an army on the march.”

“That’s good for us, right?”

“You have no idea. Intel folks from three continents are salivating at the quality of data Nanocloud’s given us now.”

“As long as they don’t get greedy. We’re not delaying the final assault to get more movies about Raptor campaign planning.”

“I agree. On that note, Brigadier Cornwall has just sent word – the men are in position.”

I took a deep breath. “We’ve waited for this for a while now. Go ahead.”

And across the length of several kilometres of Raptor tunnels, a veritable warren buried under the Australian landscape, tiny holes began to form in the walls.

The holes opened up in canteen areas. In ammo dumps. In battery storage sites. In medical triage tents. In temporary latrines.

Tiny holes in the walls between the Raptor tunnel areas and those dug by Hifara.

Seconds after opening, the holes expanded.

At nearly fifty places across the tunnels, heavily armoured Wild Boars charged through the walls, cutting down Raptor soldiers who considered themselves safe for the moment.

Lightning spat and Raptors died.

In minutes, the vast tunnels and caverns holding the Raptor troops had been chopped into hundreds of tiny sections, each fighting to survive.