The moment the bombardment began, Ajige understood something with brutal clarity, something no battlefield manual had ever taught him and no ancestor had ever warned him about.
He had lost command.
Not partially, not temporarily, but completely, violently, and irreversibly.
Smoke swallowed everything.
Black smoke from burning earth, white smoke from shattered charges, thick rolling dust thrown up by explosions that hammered the ground like a relentless industrial piston. The battlefield around Dalinghe did not merely shake, it convulsed, as if the land itself had been dragged into a mechanical rhythm of destruction.
Sound collapsed next.
Orders could no longer travel.
Ajige leaned toward his personal guard, mouth nearly pressed to the man's ear, shouting with every ounce of force he possessed, veins bulging, throat tearing.
Only then did the guard barely catch the words.
The man nodded, turned, and sprinted.
Three steps.
That was all he managed.
A flash, a thunderclap, and the man was gone, lifted into the air by an explosion that did not even bother to acknowledge his existence. Flesh, armor, dust, and fragments became indistinguishable components of the same expanding shockwave.
Ajige froze for half a breath, then forced himself to breathe again.
Orders were meaningless.
Transmission was impossible.
Command, in the classical sense, had ceased to exist.
He stood inside his reinforced shelter, surrounded by the dull roar of continuous detonations, and reached the only conclusion available to a commander who still retained a fragment of rationality.
Wait.
Endure.
Survive the phase.
The bombing did not come in a single wave.
It stretched.
Intermittent, irregular, relentless.
A bomb here, a bomb there, no rhythm to predict, no pattern to exploit, no cycle to interrupt. It was not a battle, it was consumption. A steady burning of resources from above, indifferent to efficiency, unconcerned with cost.
Somewhere far behind the frontline, Lu Xiangsheng watched.
At first, he tried to analyze.
He always did.
Every weapon he had seen before, iron war wagons, naval cannons, compact firearms, no matter how strange, no matter how advanced, he could still find an angle, a weakness, a theoretical countermeasure. Even if he could not win, he could imagine resistance.
But this…
This was not a weapon that engaged the enemy.
This was a system that ignored the enemy entirely.
He stared at the Sky Battalion drifting above Dalinghe, releasing destruction from a height no formation could reach, no arrow could touch, no discipline could stabilize.
His mind ran through scenario after scenario.
What if he stood in Ajige's position?
What would he do?
He calculated.
He reconsidered.
He searched for variables.
After a long silence, he exhaled slowly, the answer settling into him with cold certainty.
"Nothing," he said quietly. "Absolutely nothing."
Beside him, Gao Qiqian was already trembling, his body unable to conceal the fear that had bypassed reason entirely.
"This… this method… what kind of madness is this…" his voice cracked, eyes fixed on the sky. "If they… if they used this on the capital…"
Lu Xiangsheng did not look at him.
"The walls would be irrelevant," he said. "The Forbidden City included."
The statement did not carry emotion.
That made it worse.
Gao Qiqian's legs gave out beneath him, and he collapsed to the ground as if the foundation of his world had just been quietly removed.
Up above, Li DaoXuan was having a completely different experience.
He was not commanding.
He was not optimizing.
He was, quite literally, struggling.
His balloon drifted unevenly, swaying left and right like a drunk man trying to walk a straight line after too much wine. While the rest of the Sky Battalion had already entered efficient bombing patterns, Li DaoXuan was still figuring out which lever controlled direction and which valve adjusted altitude.
He carefully avoided colliding with friendly units, his attention divided between control mechanisms and spatial awareness, which, to his mild annoyance, turned out to be more complicated than expected.
Eventually, after a series of unstable adjustments, he drifted above the core zone of Dalinghe.
Below him, there was nothing.
Not in the meaningful sense.
Only smoke.
Endless, rolling smoke.
From this height, the battlefield had become an indistinct mass, a blurred canvas of black and gray, where individual targets no longer existed.
He paused.
Then frowned slightly.
This was boring.
There was no feedback.
No confirmation.
No sense of result.
If a single shot kills a visible enemy, the mind registers it, satisfaction forms instantly. But if one fires blindly into a fog and only learns later whether anything was achieved, the entire process becomes hollow.
No feedback loop.
No reward signal.
No sense of acquisition.
He even recalled, with mild amusement, how certain games exaggerated damage numbers just to enhance that feeling.
He looked down at the smoke again.
Then made a decision.
He would wait.
Below, the bombing gradually weakened.
Explosions became less frequent, then sporadic, then stopped altogether. The Sky Battalion had exhausted its current load. The thunder faded, leaving behind a battlefield filled with distant cries, wounded voices echoing through thinning smoke.
"Return!" the Sky Battalion commander ordered through a metal loudspeaker.
The formation began to withdraw.
One by one, the balloons drifted away from Dalinghe, their mission for this cycle complete.
Visibility slowly improved.
Smoke dispersed.
Shapes returned.
Ajige pushed open the entrance of his shelter and stepped outside, lifting his head to look toward the retreating balloons.
Through the haze, he saw them.
Bright, drifting, retreating.
A cold smile formed on his face.
"Out of explosives?" he muttered, voice regaining a trace of confidence. "I knew it. Such bombardment cannot be sustained. Your resources must be strained by now."
He let out a low laugh.
"My shelter still stands. Let us see how long you can continue."
What he did not see was directly above him.
One balloon remained.
Sky Battalion Seven.
Li DaoXuan had not left.
He hovered silently above a thinning patch of smoke, patient, waiting for clarity, waiting for that one moment where randomness would transform back into certainty.
Then he saw it.
A figure below.
Distinct.
Armored differently.
Presence unmistakable.
"Now this," he murmured, a hint of satisfaction returning, "this is what I call feedback."
He moved quickly.
Fuse lit.
Bomb released.
Below, Ajige had just finished speaking.
A soft sound landed near him.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just enough.
He turned his head.
Through the fading smoke, a faint spark burned on the ground a few meters away.
For half a second, nothing happened.
Then realization struck.
Bomb.
His body reacted before thought could form.
He lunged.
Full force.
Toward the shelter entrance.
The explosion came at the same instant.
A violent shockwave expanded outward, sweeping everything in its radius into motion. Soldiers nearby were lifted, thrown, erased by force rather than precision.
Ajige, mid-leap, was caught by the rear edge of the blast.
Instead of being torn apart, he was propelled.
Accelerated.
Thrown forward into the shelter with brutal efficiency, sliding across the ground until his head slammed against the inner wall with a dull, solid impact.
For a moment, everything went quiet.
He groaned, dazed, then turned his head back toward the entrance.
And froze.
The doorway was gone.
Collapsed.
Buried under loosened stone and falling earth.
His "shelter," reinforced with layers of mud and rock, had turned into a sealed chamber.
He scrambled forward, pushing, clawing, forcing against the debris.
Nothing moved.
Not even slightly.
The structure held.
From outside.
Not from within.
He was trapped.
Above, Li DaoXuan clenched his fist, a grin spreading across his face.
"Perfect," he said, thoroughly satisfied. "Direct hit. Full feedback."
The feeling was unmistakable.
It was no different from eliminating a boss target in a game, except this time, the system did not need to display numbers.
Reality itself confirmed the result.
He exhaled, content.
Now he could leave.
His balloon began drifting back toward the rear.
At that exact moment, far behind the lines, Cao Wenzhao issued the next command without hesitation.
"Artillery battalion," he said, voice steady, cold, precise.
"Open fire."