The silence of Tycho Crater was broken by the synchronized thrum of twelve thousand fusion cores cycling to maximum output.
Jiang Chen stood on the gantry of Lunar Command, looking down at the mustering yard. The Pre-Era Mechs were not the sleek, humanoid shapes of his Ronin suit. They were brutalist war machines. Known as "Star-Drop Troopers," they were three meters tall, encased in ablative ceramic armor designed to survive orbital reentry without a ship. They held gauss-rifles the size of tree trunks.
They didn't breathe. They didn't fear. They waited.
"Target coordinates locked," the AI of the base, a fragment of the ancient 'Architect', intoned. "Beiluo Siege Lines. Sector 04 through 09. Deployment strategy: Kinetic Saturation."
"They wanted to crush us with the weight of the heavens," Jiang Chen said, his synthesized voice cold in the vacuum of the moon. "Let's return the favor."
He slammed his fist onto the launch console.
"Drop."
In the airless sky, twelve thousand launch tubes fired simultaneously. It looked like a cloud of angry hornets swarming out of a hive. The pods accelerated away from the moon, caught by the planet's gravity well, and turned into streaks of fire as they hit the upper atmosphere of the Great Spirit World.
Beiluo City - Sector 01
Overseer Zhao was tired. The artificial lights of the vertical farms were bright, but they couldn't replace the sun. He sat on the rooftop of a factory, eating a synthetic nutrient bar, looking up at the purple dome of the Spirit Barrier that had imprisoned them for months.
"It looks brighter tonight," his wife murmured, pointing at the zenith.
Zhao squinted. The purple dome was usually static. But tonight, there were sparks dancing across it. Orange streaks. Hundreds of them. No, thousands.
"Meteors?" Zhao whispered.
Then, the sound arrived. A low, vibrating roar that shook the tea in his cup. The streaks grew larger, turning from orange to blinding white. They weren't burning up. They were aiming.
"Air raid!" Zhao screamed, grabbing his radio. "Activate the flak towers!"
"Belay that order!" Ye Bai's voice cut through the emergency channel, breathless. "Do not fire! Those aren't enemies! They are the cavalry!"
The Siege Lines - Myriad Swords Sect Encampment
Sect Leader Ouyang sat in his command tent, sipping spirit wine. He was a Peak Nascent Soul cultivator, one step away from Spirit Severing. To him, the world was a chessboard.
"The barrier holds," an Elder reported, bowing low. "The mortals inside are quiet. They must be conserving energy."
"Good," Ouyang smiled. "In another month, we will enter. We will dismantle their machines and reclaim the..."
He stopped. The wine in his cup rippled.
A sound like tearing canvas filled the sky. Ouyang rushed out of the tent.
The night sky was falling.
Thousands of fireballs were hammering the top of the purple Grand Spirit Lock Array. The barrier, designed to stop spiritual attacks, groaned under the sheer kinetic abuse.
CRACK.
A massive spiderweb fracture appeared in the dome directly above the camp.
"Impossible!" Ouyang roared, his aura flaring. "That array can withstand a Spirit Severing strike! What spell is this?!"
It wasn't a spell. It was mass times acceleration.
The first drop pod punched through the weakened barrier. It slammed into the middle of the Qi Condensation disciple barracks.
BOOM.
The impact annihilated the tents, sending a shockwave of dirt and body parts outward. A crater ten meters deep smoked in the ground.
Before the dust settled, the pod hissed. Explosive bolts blew the door off.
A Star-Drop Mech stepped out. It stood three meters tall, its single red optical sensor scanning the terrified disciples.
"Demons!" a disciple screamed, throwing a fireball.
The fireball splashed harmlessly against the mech's heat-shielded armor. The mech raised its rotary gauss cannon.
BRRRRRRT.
The sound was like a chainsaw cutting through bone. High-velocity tungsten spikes shredded the disciples. Their protective Qi barriers popped like soap bubbles.
Then, the rain truly began.
THUD. THUD. THUD. THUD.
Pods landed everywhere. On the hills. In the valleys. On top of the Elders' pavilions. Twelve thousand impacts in sixty seconds. The Grand Spirit Lock Array shattered completely, falling as glittering purple rain.
"Form up!" Ouyang screamed, drawing his flying sword. "Elders! With me! Destroy these puppets!"
A Golden Core Elder charged a mech, his body wreathed in golden light. "Iron cannot defeat the Dao!" he bellowed, slashing his sword.
The blade cut into the mech's shoulder, sparking against the underlying chassis. But the mech didn't flinch. It grabbed the Elder's head with a hydraulic claw.
SQUELCH.
The Elder went limp.
"These aren't puppets," Ouyang realized with horror, watching his army disintegrate. "They are soldiers."
Upper Realm Observation Post
Envoy Azure stood frozen at the viewing port. The planet below was no longer dark. The entire Northern Continent was lit up by the flashes of orbital insertion and plasma fire.
"The balance is gone," Azure whispered. "He didn't just break the siege. He escalated the war to a planetary scale."
"Look at the energy signatures," Envoy Crimson pointed at the console. "Those machines... they don't use Qi. They use miniature fusion cells. They are immune to the Spirit Suppression arrays."
"We must intervene," Azure said, his hand trembling. "If the mortals see this... if they see that machines can slaughter Nascent Souls... the Faith will die."
"We cannot," Crimson said grimly. "Read the Ancient Treaty. We can only intervene if an External force invades. Those machines came from the Moon. The Moon is part of this realm. Technically... this is a civil war."
Crimson looked down at the burning continent.
"The Iron Prince has checkmated us with bureaucracy."
The Battlefield
Jiang Chen did not drop in a pod. He descended in the Lunar Lander, flanked by his personal guard of Heavy Siege Mechs.
The lander touched down in the center of the Myriad Swords Sect's main formation. The thrusters turned the sand to glass.
Jiang Chen walked down the ramp. His Mark IV Ronin suit was pristine. The green reactor in his chest hummed, syncing with the thousands of blue reactors of his mechanical army.
He saw Sect Leader Ouyang hovering in the air, surrounded by five desperate Nascent Soul Elders. They were panting, their robes torn, their spiritual energy draining fast as they fought the relentless tide of steel.
"You!" Ouyang screamed, pointing his trembling sword at Jiang Chen. "You coward! You hide behind metal shells! You dare not face a Grandmaster!"
Jiang Chen looked around. The battlefield was a slaughter. The arrogance of the Sects—the belief that they were the apex predators—was lying in pieces on the ground.
"I see no Grandmasters here," Jiang Chen's synthesized voice amplified over the battlefield. "I only see obsolete hardware."
"Die!" Ouyang bit his tongue, spitting essence blood onto his sword. "Blood Sacrifice Art: Heaven Severing Slash!"
A massive red beam of sword energy, capable of splitting a mountain, roared toward Jiang Chen.
Jiang Chen didn't move.
Behind him, four Heavy Siege Mechs stepped forward. They locked their tower shields together.
VZZZT.
A Hard-Light Barrier—technology recovered from the moon base—flickered into existence.
The sword beam hit the barrier. The light rippled, turning orange, then red, but it held. The energy dispersed harmlessly into the ground.
Ouyang's eyes bulged. "A barrier... without Qi?"
"Force fields," Jiang Chen explained, stepping through the shield as it deactivated. "They run on math. And yours just ran out."
He raised his hand.
"All units. Target the flying ones."
Five thousand gauss rifles aimed upward.
"Fire."
The sky turned into a wall of lead.
Ouyang and the Elders danced, dodged, and blocked, but the volume of fire was absolute. Their protective barriers chipped away, layer by layer.
An Elder screamed as a railgun slug took off his leg. Another fell as a missile lock blew him out of the sky.
Ouyang, the great Sect Leader, fell to the mud, his chest riddled with holes. He gasped, looking up at the smoke-filled sky where the stars used to be.
Jiang Chen walked over to him.
"Why?" Ouyang wheezed, blood bubbling from his lips. "We... we are the guardians of the world..."
"You were the jailers," Jiang Chen said, looking down. "And I just broke the lock."
He turned to his army. The mechs stood amidst the ruin of the Sect Alliance. The surviving disciples were on their knees, surrendering by the thousands.
"Secure the prisoners," Jiang Chen ordered. "Strip them of their spatial bags and weapons. Send them to the re-education camps in Sector 10. They have a lot of farming to do."
Ye Bai landed beside him. The Sword Saint looked at the carnage. He looked at the mechanical army that stretched to the horizon.
"The Northern Region is yours," Ye Bai said quietly. "The Empire will be terrified."
"Good," Jiang Chen looked south, toward the Imperial Capital. "Fear prevents unnecessary wars."
He tapped his comms.
"Old Wu. Begin Phase 3."
"Phase 3, Sir?"
"We have the land. We have the sky," Jiang Chen's green eye flashed. "Now, we connect them. Start building the Mag-Lev Train Network. I want a direct line from Beiluo to the Capital. We are going to conquer the Empire... economically."