Chapter 79: Fairness
Su Xiao didn’t keep watching the battlefield constantly. In a prolonged war, given the intellectual caliber of his troops in executing commands, whether he monitored the situation or not was irrelevant.
Even if he observed the battle’s development 24 hours a day, what could he actually do at a critical moment? Rally his boar warriors and have them form various battle formations?
Dream on—anything was possible in dreams. After this period of grueling training, the boar warriors had finally managed to execute two commands neatly: charge and retreat. And that was it.
Forming battle formations or executing tactics? Forget it. Their strategy was the eternal gang-up tactic: whoever didn’t comply got beaten to death.
So Su Xiao didn’t need to constantly watch the battlefield. Baha, hovering above, kept an eye on things. If something unexpected happened, Su Xiao had two options: 1. Toss a Blazing Sun’s Wrath·Apollo, or 2. Personally take his blade to the battlefield. No one had decreed that a Sun Faction lord couldn’t appear on the front lines.
Su Xiao reviewed the fortress data to track his dwindling boar warrior numbers.
A plan had been prearranged: every two hours of melee, his side would launch a charge, advancing 300 to 500 meters before stopping, then gradually retreating while fighting the vassal soldiers.
Su Xiao checked the time. It had been 1 hour and 55 minutes since the battle started. Time to test the recent training results—the charge and retreat.
A signal flare shot up and exploded into a fireball, its sound distinctive.
Hearing the whistle and blast, a third of the boar warriors looked up. Spotting the signal, they roared and surged forward. The remaining two-thirds, recalling their training, joined in fearlessly.
Charging like this in a melee naturally made the vassal soldiers unwilling to trade lives. They could only fight and fall back. Such reckless, disorderly charges were bound to bring consequences.
Sure enough, after forcing their way forward a few hundred meters, the charge’s momentum faltered. The vassal soldiers seized the chance to cut down many boar warriors. With their counterattack, the boar warriors were pushed back to their original position.
War blades hacked through flesh. A vassal soldier, bloodlust blinding him, chopped at a pile of gore repeatedly. When he shifted his gaze, he suddenly spotted a strange “boar warrior.” This one stood about 1.4 meters tall, stocky, and held no weapon—just a few combat suits stripped from corpses.
Seeing this, the blood-crazed vassal soldier didn’t hesitate. He stepped forward and butchered the short, stout “boar warrior.” First strike: the enemy screamed. Second strike: the enemy died.
Covered in blood, the vassal soldier who killed a “boar warrior” in two strikes paused. He glanced at his blade, and a surge of confidence rose within him. He had grown strong enough to slay a boar warrior in two blows?
He was overthinking it. What he killed wasn’t a boar warrior—it was a dwarf boar-man.
The Sun Fortress had a total of 70,870 dwarf boar-men. After the battle began, they had all stopped mining.
Su Xiao’s strategy was this: first, let the boar warriors fight the enemy. Once enough vassal soldier corpses littered the battlefield, have the charge-trained boar warriors push the enemy back temporarily.
Simultaneously, the dwarf boar-men, using their “height advantage” to hide behind, would swarm forward. While the boar warriors pushed the enemy back, the dwarf boar-men would quickly scavenge the battlefield, stripping combat suits from bodies and picking up weapons. Then they’d immediately retreat toward the fortress’s main gate.
After that, the dwarf boar-men would enter the fortress’s first floor, pass through the rear door into the residential area, take tunnels within the mountain to reach Warehouse No. 2, and sort and bundle the bloodstained combat suits and weapons. Through the large teleportation array in Warehouse No. 2, everything would be sent to the human side.
On the human side, the slave merchant Azba would sell these items as quickly as possible and, at a price of 3 kilograms of Living Ore per head, sell them to his own pig-headed people.
With this process, Su Xiao barely achieved a war-sustaining economy. Before the battle, he had cultivated 118 heavy tanks specifically to push back the enemy at critical moments.
In terms of troop production, Su Xiao wasn’t afraid of the vassals. With a production rate of 120,000 per day, he didn’t believe the vassals could keep up the attrition.
The melee lasted from afternoon until night. Around midnight, the sky was filled with flares, illuminating the battlefield as bright as day.
By 2 a.m., both sides showed a strange tacit understanding. After a few signal flares from each side, they ceased fighting. Neither withdrew; instead, they dug trenches a kilometer apart and slept in them.
After nearly nine hours of melee, it was hard to tally the casualties on Su Xiao’s side. Reason: wave after wave died, while the evolution nest replenished them wave after wave. The boar warrior count stayed between 310,000 and 350,000.
The enemy wasn’t much better off. Frontline troops died in batches, and reinforcements arrived in waves.
Some new vassal units, arriving at the front, were terrified. They had seen “Heavy Cannon Volley” or “Heavy Cannon Rain” before, but the sun falling from the sky, or the beast with 4-meter-wide T-shaped horns and dark-gold flames covering its body—these new units had never witnessed such things.
The vassals sent new units not because they were out of troops, but because of proximity. Before setting up their “Large Teleportation Device,” all units within a certain range of the border region were being shifted here.
The morning sun rose. The boar warriors, each holding an oversized metal lunchbox for breakfast, heard a thunderous blast in the sky. It signaled the enemy’s attack.
Attacking at dawn, and with breakfast only half-eaten, filled the boar warriors with rage. Initially, over 98% of the boar-men had followed Su Xiao because of the good food he provided. The meals were just too delicious—they couldn’t help it.
After gaining the Sun Faith, this had improved somewhat, but among the reasons the boar warriors were willing to die, the Sun Fortress’s good food still held a significant share.
The melee continued. The battlefield echoed with screams and the clash of blades. Blood burned, iron melted, war beasts roared, and heavy cannon weapons thundered.
Unnoticed, night fell again. There was no ceasefire tonight. Only the next morning did both sides temporarily halt, looking like they’d rest for just an hour or two.
In the main command room of the base fortress, Su Xiao sat on the sofa, looking at the title shop before him. The list contained seven six-star titles, with an average price of around 4,000 Soul Coins.
[This title purchase requires payment of 29,300 Soul Coins. Yes/No.]
Su Xiao bought all the six-star titles as well. Watching his Soul Coins rapidly decrease, he didn’t feel too pained. These Soul Coins had come easily, so spending them didn’t hurt much. He could only thank Molei, Yueshitu, and Hao Mei for their “friendly sponsorship.”
Su Xiao checked his title list. From four-star to six-star, many new titles had been added, looking messy. He began synthesizing them.
A few hours later, after the title burning disc had cooled, a six-star title named [Immortal Will] was synthesized.
After spending a large number of Soul Coins, Su Xiao’s title list now displayed 11 six-star titles in the six-star column, including [Insect Glory], [Battle Master], and [Iron Will].
One main title plus five sub-titles could be used for one title burning, or five sub-titles alone for a random burn. Su Xiao had learned from experience that random burning, though seemingly consuming fewer titles, was a trap with a failure rate.
Su Xiao currently had three seven-star sub-titles for title synthesis. That meant he needed two more seven-star titles to upgrade War Lord to an eight-star title.
He was just one six-star title short of achieving this. Unfortunately, he was stuck on that one six-star title.
For now, he had to wait until his exchange level reached Lv.7. Even if he could only buy one seven-star title, he could start the [War Lord] burning.
Su Xiao had already met three of the prerequisites for reaching exchange level Lv.7 to buy seven-star titles. The conditions were as follows: