Apocalypse Gachapon - Chapter 1754: Night Blood (7)
The cannon’s roar this time was deafening, cutting through even the fiercest battles.
Every eye that could track the projectile turned toward it.
Sound didn’t always equate to power—but this time, everyone instinctively knew: This thing was terrifying.
The Candy Siege Cannon shattered upon firing. Its final shot had exceeded its structural limits.
Forged through collaborative efforts from Ye Zhongming to Little Candy to Le Dayuan, this colossal weapon had expended every ounce of its potential. Its destiny was fulfilled.
The massive metal shell screamed toward West City’s gates—now shielded by a translucent energy barrier.
Observers held their breaths, awaiting outcomes they either hoped for or dreaded.
CLANG!
The impact sounded like two titanic metals colliding.
Eardrums ruptured across the battlefield as hands instinctively flew to ears.
The entire western wall—no, the entire Holy City’s fortifications—shuddered violently.
Defenders near the gates staggered like drunkards.
Their imbalance synchronized perfectly with the screams erupting atop the walls.
These shrieks originated from the aftermath of the shadow gene soldiers’ explosions—specifically, the contents of their detonated black boxes.
Thousands of green triple-bladed shurikens.
Each box contained a launch mechanism activated upon detonation, firing these cicada-wing-thin projectiles in a devastating bloom.
Powered by magic crystals to maintain lethality and crafted at green-tier quality, each shuriken struck with the force of a level-six evolved’s full-power attack.
This weapon had begun as a researcher’s idle experiment—a practice piece prioritizing raw destructive potential above all else. While successful in that regard, its flaws were glaring: indiscriminate area saturation made activation suicidal, while the stringent requirements (minimum level-seven magic crystals and matching projectile grades) rendered mass production impractical.
Simply put: it was a friendly-fire nightmare.
The emergence of gene soldiers provided a solution.
For this siege, the Gene Life and Magic Crystal Weapon labs had collaborated in an unprecedented manner, birthing this cost-ineffective yet brutal system.
Fortunately, with Ye Zhongming’s supreme craftsmanship, mass-producing these shurikens—requiring only durability and sharpness—was trivial.
Dozens of gene soldiers. Dozens of devices. Over 200,000 triple-blades unleashed under the gene commander’s control.
The inventor had whimsically named this weapon “Pear Blossoms in Rain”—likely inspired by the legendary mechanisms found in ancient martial arts novels.
This was why Guang Yao had known victory was certain with just a few dozen gene soldiers reaching the walls. The shuriken storm would turn the battlements into hell.
True, the gene soldiers’ distribution created coverage gaps, but it sufficed to ravage over half the western defenses. Cloud Peak cared little for enemy casualties—their focus was the annihilation of siege engines.
These blades didn’t discriminate between flesh and machinery. Unarmored, undefended war machines fared worse than evolved.
Death and destruction arrived simultaneously.
The gate’s energy shield shattered. The metal shell rebounded, crushing gene troops in its path.
The walls became a graveyard—corpses and ruined machines studded with glowing shurikens, some intact, others broken.
The green weapons’ gleam contrasted starkly with the spreading crimson tides.
“Hold… HOLD THE LINE!”
The garrison commander’s order began as a growl before erupting into a scream.
He was unraveling.
The impregnable city was breaking.
The unrelenting artillery. The suicidal shuriken storm. The gate-crushing metal sphere. The zombie drops. The non-evolved siege army. All defied his apocalyptic combat experience.
This wasn’t evolved versus mutants anymore. This was total war between humans—fought without restraint.
And neither he nor the Holy City was prepared.
“Beg the King for reinforcements! Tell him… the Holy City is falling.”
As his order echoed, messengers fled the walls inward while outside, the vanguard gene troops reached the base. Some became living ladders for climbers. Others—massive but slow—hurled comrades upward like projectiles.
Then there were the specialists:
Armless constructs on wheeled platforms hammering the exposed gates with keratin-clad battering limbs—each strike vibrating the very earth.
Ranged variants spraying the battlements from below.
Leapers using dead comrades’ corpses as springboards to bypass the paralyzing barbed vines.
Worst of all? The leapers kept coming.
Meanwhile, Cloud Peak’s artillery shifted focus inward—harassing reinforcement routes while hunting the wall’s power sources. Neutralizing the burning brick enchantments would simplify everything.
Guang Yao monitored developments. The dwindling counterfire from siege engines confirmed Li Qiang’s snipers were picking off operators.
After murmuring with Liang Chuyin, he raised his hand.
The entire Cloud Peak evolved force mobilized.
Elsewhere, Ye Zhongming lowered his crossed arms upon hearing the battle contribution badge’s reports.
The time had come—not to breach walls, but to create openings for the western assault.
After notifying the other flank commanders, he stepped from his tent. From the camp.
Alone, he walked toward the gates.
