These words, amplified by the Mecha's loudspeakers, echoed clearly across the entire Allied Forces' positions.
The hands gripping weapons tightened a fraction more, unconsciously.
The legs that had been trembling with fear had, without anyone noticing, straightened.
Fear had not vanished.
It was just that a more searing, more frenzied emotion, like strong liquor poured on the heart, had overwhelmed the fear.
It was anticipation.
A high-stakes gamble, placed with their very lives on the line.
The cold electronic voice of No. 055 sounded over the communication channel, transmitted precisely to every squad.
"Attention all forces: The Highest Authority Holder is about to launch the attack."
"All assault units are to advance at full speed within sixty seconds of the countdown's start. Objective: Bottleneck No. 1."
"At all costs!"
A young Pandaren soldier swallowed hard in nervous anticipation, lowering his voice as he asked the Squad Leader beside him.
"Boss... are we really putting our lives in the hands of... someone we don't even know?"
The Squad Leader was an old Oxfolk, one of his horns broken in half, his left eye wrapped in a soiled bandage.
He didn't look at the young man; instead, he stared intently at the solitary, silver steel figure ahead.
"You've stood on the walls for two days. How many brothers have died?"
The young man fell silent instantly.
"If we defend for another two days, how many more will die?"
The battleaxe in the young man's hand creaked as he gripped it.
"So stop the fucking bullshit."
The veteran's voice was hoarse but carried immense weight.
"If she can really clear a path for us,"
"Then you run with your life."
"Run to the bottleneck, hold your ground, and don't look back."
Before the words could fully fade.
The Mecha moved.
The two sets of thrusters on Sam's back ignited to their limit at the same instant.
No warm-up, no gradual buildup.
From zero to overload, it took only point three seconds.
"Boom!!"
That was not the roar of an engine starting, but a dull explosion!
Fiery red flames erupted from the nozzles, instantly tearing through the air behind them and forming a conical zone of high-temperature vacuum.
The immense thrust sent the metal rubble below the platform flying, turning it into a whistling rain of shrapnel.
A few Allied Forces soldiers standing too close were caught off guard and knocked to the ground by the violent blast.
Sam's feet left the platform.
The silver-white Mecha hung abruptly in midair.
The tongues of fire behind it stretched, twisted, and expanded frantically, finally unfurling a pair of sky-blotting wings of flame behind the Mecha.
The wingspan exceeded twenty meters.
Each slow flap of the fiery wings stirred a vortex of air so scorching it distorted.
The two emerald-green giant blades in the Mecha's hands crossed before its chest, the flowing light on the blades accelerating, growing faster and brighter, until they completely transformed into two pillars of pure energy that were impossible to look at directly.
The temperature of the entire canyon was skyrocketing at an unnaturally fast rate.
"Everyone, fall back thirty meters!"
No. 055's electronic voice raised its volume unusually high, betraying a sense of urgency that even an AI could not completely suppress.
"Attack is about to be launched! Non-combat personnel, stay away from the impact zone!"
Lin Xiyue roared, holding her giant shield firmly at the front, urgently retreating with Su Wan and Xia Lian. The exposed surface of her plate armor was already starting to grow slightly hot.
"Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot!!"
Hao Chi didn't even need to be told.
He grabbed his Pandaren Guard, scrambling and rolling to hide behind cover, pulling down his goggles in the process.
"She said don't look directly..."
He muttered to himself as if possessed, his heart pounding so hard it felt like it would leap out of his throat.
"Don't look directly, don't look directly, don't look directly..."
The insects in the canyon were the first to react.
When the thrusters' flames completely lit up half the sky, the Mantisfolk, already restless from the dusk, fell into complete madness.
Phototaxis.
That was the most primitive, most savage instinct driven by the genes engraved deepest within.
The front-line Swarm instantly abandoned their attack on the defensive line. All their compound eyes turned, at the exact same moment, toward that blazing white light source suspended in the air.
Their antennae waved frantically, and their mouthparts emitted piercing hisses.
Then—
They charged.
Not one or two.
It was thousands upon thousands, an endless torrent.
The Insect Tide on the ground kicked up a dark green tidal wave. The flying insect swarms in the air instantly changed their circling orbits. The beetles clinging to the rock walls on both sides also broke away from the stone.
All the insects were frantically converging on "Sam."
This was exactly the effect Lin Qingyue wanted.
The Mecha's combat AI popped up a cold green prompt in her consciousness:
[Target concentration density has reached the optimal strike threshold. Immediate clearing is recommended.]
"Protocol approved."
The cold electronic voice echoed over the canyon once again.
"Execute: Scorched Earth Operations."
"Sam" moved.
Not by charging the Swarm.
But by charging into the sky.
The thrusters' power instantly overloaded, and the entire Mecha turned into a silver-white pillar of light piercing heaven and earth, shooting straight into the high sky.
Three hundred meters.
Five hundred meters.
One thousand meters.
Until its figure, against the dusky sky, became a pinhead-sized point of light, hanging high directly above the canyon.
Looking down from this height,
The entire canyon looked like a wound filled with dark green pus.
The Insect Tide wriggled, surged, and packed the space airtight.
And those insects, all the insects, were looking up at it.
Over two hundred thousand Mantisfolk, at this moment, collectively raised their heads.
In their compound eyes, the same point of light was reflected.
Then, that point of light fell.
The Mecha flipped its body in midair, head down and feet up, like a meteor set ablaze, smashing straight down toward the sky-covering Insect Tide.
Two giant, fluorescent green blades crossed in front of its chest during the dive.
Speed stacked.
Gravitational acceleration stacked.
Thruster overload thrust stacked.
Behind it dragged a magnificent yet deadly red tail of fire hundreds of meters long.
From the ground, it looked like a meteor.
A burning meteor of death crashing toward the earth.
The Insect Tide completely boiled.
The compound eyes of hundreds of thousands of Mantisfolk simultaneously captured that extreme glow and heat.
Phototaxis.
This was primitive code written into the deepest layer of their genes, deeper than the will to survive, more stubborn than fear.
When a light source became so intense that it overwhelmed all other sensory input, they would not flee, would not fight, but would only do one thing.
Pounce upon it.
All Mantisfolk within a one-kilometer range ahead of the canyon, whether on the ground, in the air, or on the rock walls, ceased all movement.
Their bodies involuntarily turned toward the falling orb of light. Wings unfolded, scythe-legs retracted, bodies leaned forward—
Then, like moths, they charged toward that artificial sun.
Tens of thousands of insects took to the sky at once, converging from all directions into a black tornado that blotted out the sky, madly surging toward the center of that aurora.
On the ground, more insects churned, scrambled, and trampled over the corpses of their own kind to pile upward, attempting to reach that mass of light in the most primitive, most frenzied way possible.
Moths to a flame.
Literally.
They chose death with their own hands.
Sam unfurled the twin blades on its chest approximately 30 meters above the ground.
High-speed rotation.
Then, a violent collision—detonation!
All the energy accumulated on the two giant blades was released with a brutal force in a ten-thousandth of a second.
The world turned fiery red.
There was no sound.
Not a true silence, but because the devastating sonic wave, the moment it was born, had already crudely exceeded the limits of biological perception, turning everyone's eardrums into meaningless ornaments.
It was a pure "vibration" that brutally pierced through the soles of their feet, passed through their bones, and reached straight into their skulls, making every cell tremble madly.
On the Allied Forces' positions, everyone lost their hearing at that same moment.
Fiery red flames spread wildly in all directions from the impact point.
This was not combustion.
It was "erasing."
All matter it touched, whether the Mantisfolk's hard shells, their foul-smelling flesh, or the black tornado of insects in the sky, was decomposed directly into basic particles the instant it made contact, then evaporated.
No screams.
No struggles.
No corpses.
No wreckage.
Not even a single bloodstain or a wisp of ash remained.
Where the flames passed, only scorched, cracked bare rock was left, its surface gleaming with an eerie, vitrified luster.
This was the death certificate formed when the rock was instantaneously heated to its melting point, then rapidly cooled by the vacuum in the next second.
The orb of light continued to expand for a full four seconds.
It turned the canyon for one kilometer ahead into a vitrified corridor of death.
Then, it began to contract, coiling back.
Finally, it extinguished.
The world fell silent once more.