I raised stunning young ladies, but they all wanted to possess me.

The first convoy began its retreat to the sea before dawn.

Trucks, buses, and private cars—all vehicles that could still be started were requisitioned. Luggage was tied to the roofs of the vehicles, and the truck beds were crammed with elderly people and children.

Every few dozen meters along both sides of the highway, a soldier held up a glow stick to guide the way. Their voices had long since become hoarse from shouting, and they mechanically waved their arms to direct the convoy along the provincial highway that had been blasted apart by artillery fire toward the port.

No one cut in front, no one honked their horns, only the sound of wheels rolling over gravel and a mother's soft words to comfort her child.

Soldiers on the front line rubbed their hands together in the cold wind of the early morning, breathing warm air into their palms.

Some people were eating compressed biscuits, some were checking ammunition, and some were carving words on magazines with daggers.

It's not a tactical marker, it's a name.

They would carve their own names so that the people who collected the bodies could recognize them.

A young soldier of the Great Xia Expeditionary Force wrote a line of words on the wall of the bunker with chalk.

My name is Zhao Yuan, I'm from Jinghai. My mother's name is Wang Xiulan. If anyone gets back alive, please tell her that I didn't run away.

The armored formations were arrayed in the basin in front of the pass.

Hundreds of main battle tanks were lined up in three rows, with their guns pointed at the direction of the crevice.

Behind the tanks were missile launchers, and further back were heavy rune cannon positions, their barrels densely packed and pointing skyward, reflecting a cold light in the morning glow.

The air battleships slowly descended from the clouds, their runic armor plates shimmering with a dark golden light in the morning mist. Hundreds of warships were arranged in a tiered formation, stretching from the clouds all the way to the sea level.

Heavy mech units deployed on both sides of the tank formation. At the feet of the steel giants, which were dozens of meters tall, maintenance crews were still conducting final checks. Their figures appeared insignificant on the feet of the mechs.

In more distant cities, convoys of millions of civilians are slowly moving along the highways.

From the air, the convoys looked like countless luminous rivers, flowing from every city along the eastern coast of the Sakura Kingdom, through mountains and tunnels, through the road network behind the passes, and converging on the ports on the west coast.

Each river was protected by soldiers with their bodies.

There was a temporary checkpoint every so often. The soldiers at the checkpoints stuffed water and compressed biscuits into the truck windows and carried lost children out of the truck beds to the recovery team following behind the convoy.

No one complained, no one cried out; there was only a silent, almost numb order.

That silence itself is a kind of power.

We are evacuating, but we are not collapsing.

The crack opened in the early hours of Beijing time.

The dark red crack tore open from the very center of the sky, wider than ever before.

Dark red lightning surged along the edge, each flash causing the entire earth to tremble violently.

The first wave that surged out from the depths of the fissure was not bone-eating insects, but fog.

A pale green poisonous fog rolled along the ground and surged toward the pass, causing vegetation to wither, streams to stink, and soil to turn grayish-white in its wake.

Everyone was waiting for that order.

There was only the hissing of electricity in the communication channel, and then Chiyomiya Hanyu's voice came through the loudspeaker.

Her tone remained as composed as ever, but every word seemed to be engraved on a stone tablet.

All firepower units, fire all missiles.

Hundreds of main battle tanks opened fire simultaneously, the roar of shells sending rocks crashing down from the mountain walls on both sides of the pass.

The rune-infused shells exploded in the poisonous fog, the shockwaves tearing gaps in the fog. Then, a second wave of shells filled those gaps, blasting the fog into countless fragments.

The missile launchers began firing in unison, dozens of medium-sized rune missiles rising into the air, trailing plumes of flame and tracing dense parabolic arcs as they crashed into the densest area of ​​the Black Tide.

In the instant flames soared into the sky, countless severed limbs were blasted into the air, and black blood poured down like a torrential rain.

The shockwave blew away all the nearby bone-eating insects, leaving a charred crater tens of meters in diameter at the center of the explosion, with unburned fuel still burning at the edge of the crater.

The heavy rune cannon positions followed suit and opened fire.

The dark golden rune cannonball exploded deep within the rift, releasing not fire, but a mental shockwave compressed to its limit.

The nerve centers of the emerging bone-eating worms were shattered, and hundreds of them fell to the ground, convulsing and frozen.

But even more surged from the depths of the rift, far too much, so much that the missile's explosive orb in the Kuroshio Current was like a stone thrown into the sea, creating only a ripple before being swallowed up.

Then the second wave came.

Steel colossi emerged from the cracks one after another, each larger than before, their gears at the joints emitting a deafening roar with each rotation.

Their feet left footprints several meters deep in the basin, and the soil around the footprints was scorched black.

Skeletal dragons hovered above them, their bony wings casting shadows that covered the entire defensive line.

The main guns of the air battleship began charging, their light more dazzling than the sun.

A thick beam of energy shot out from the bow of the ship, punching a huge hole in the head of a skeletal dragon.

The dragon roared as it plummeted to the ground, its massive body crashing into the edge of the basin, creating a crater tens of meters deep.

Before the fleet could even cheer, several other skeletal dragons simultaneously unleashed their breath at the fleet. Dark red flames engulfed the leading escort ships, and the energy shields on the hulls flickered violently before shattering like soap bubbles.

The frigate plummeted from the clouds, trailing thick smoke, and crashed into the artillery positions on the flank of the pass, turning into towering pillars of fire along with the gunners who were loading ammunition.

Debris flew everywhere, crashing into the side of another destroyer next to it, punching a large hole in its hull. The ship began to list to one side, and the crew fell like dumplings into a pot. Some fell into the crater that was still burning with black blood, while others fell into the mouths of wriggling worms.

Then the third wave came from underground.

Worm-like calamities burst forth from the rock strata beneath the basin, possessing mouthparts resembling meat grinders and skins covered in dark green slime.

They emerged directly beneath the tank formation, simultaneously overturning dozens of main battle tanks. As the tanks rolled, they collided with nearby missile launchers, triggering a chain of explosions.

The tank company commander jumped out of the turret the moment his tank was overturned, landed on the worm's back, fired more than a dozen magazines of his sidearm at its head, and was then thrown off by the worm, his back hitting the mountain wall of the pass and never getting up again.

The heavy mech forces pressed forward in full force.

Dozens of steel giants, each tens of meters tall, leaped off the maintenance platform, their impact sending all the nearby worms flying.

The heavy sword mounted on the mech's left arm cleaved open the steel colossus's head, while the boomerang on the right arm swept a line of fire through the charging ranks of the skeletal knights.

But more calamities surged from the flanks. Under the Gorgon's vertical pupils, pilots with low mental resistance collapsed in the cockpit, bleeding from all seven orifices.

The out-of-control mech was caught by the steel behemoth and rolled into the still-burning missile wreckage, with the blast debris reaching anti-aircraft gun positions more than ten meters away.