Chapter 998 - 43: Marching Through Hell

The sky is burning.

Ultron exhausted all its firepower, but there was simply no way to disarm this thing by blasting it into fragments before the King’s Throne reached the explosion site—

It exhausted all firepower, tens of millions of robots, artillery, missiles... charging fearlessly towards the sky. Unfortunately, the hope of interception grew increasingly slim, forcing it to change strategy.

In that moment, all of Ultron’s weapons and robots halted operations, redirecting all computing power to correct and adjust combat models, and data fled.

The Iron Riders descended in a chaotic rain, roaring against metal and flames, yet in that moment, all of them stopped thinking as the battlefield went still:

The people of Latovia had just emerged from the old era; the King’s Throne, to them, like its name, was the King’s seat, a symbol of power. Even though they knew this scene would come, watching Lille defiantly smash the symbol of power into the enemy’s formation, they were nonetheless inspired, and their hearts were shaken...

An endless white light engulfed the world.

This nuclear bomb’s direct vaporization radius reached 5 kilometers, and Ultron’s core unit, data center, and communication array all disappeared—

What followed was an overwhelming tremor!

BOOM———!!!

The heavens collapsed, the earth tore apart, and the power of sixty million tons of TNT exploded in the sky. A fireball more intense than the sun rose high, engulfing the entire steel world in an infinite heat wave!

This heatwave tore through the atmosphere, a shockwave sweeping everything like a world-devouring flood, turning all metal it touched into incandescent liquid that scattered, making Ultron’s industrial district akin to Hell in the truest sense!

Near ground zero, metal melted into a lake of red-hot lava, and in regions swept by the explosion, even sturdy metal withered and collapsed. The orderly industrial district toppled, and robots became wreckage.

The flames still burned, rolling black smoke obscured the sky, the nuked ground turned into a boiling inferno, molten steel rivers flowed across the torn battlefield.

Bang.

Lille was the last to land on the ground.

The bomb’s power indeed exceeded imagination, yet the scale of Ultron’s Mechanical Nest was equally exaggerated, with the explosion’s reach potentially extending to ten thousand square kilometers, still falling short of a decisive blow compared to the fifteen thousand square kilometers of the Mechanical Nest City.

The Iron Riders’ airdrop location was on the outskirts of Mechanical Nest City, distinctly feeling the explosion but not being dragged into the harm’s way zone.

At this moment, though Lille didn’t have to pilot a Titan, his fully armed figure was also about three meters tall, and the heavy armor on him burst with power. The sound of his footsteps on the metal floor wasn’t much lighter than a Titan’s.

In his ears, there seemed to remain only the howl of the storm; the world leaned towards silence after terrifying destruction...

But it was not over yet.

An EMP interfered with wireless communications, but Lille could rely on the cross-dimensional communication module on each Iron Rider for bandwidth-limited signal transmission—

[Lille: It’s not over yet.]

It was not over...

Ultron is a super AI evolving at an astonishing speed, and defeating it in any version is no easy task!

...

On the main battlefront, all Ultron Robots lost control, seemingly turning into junk crashing to the ground. The Latovian soldiers, disrupted by the nuclear EMP, only thought the earlier explosion had delivered the final blow, shouting fiercely!

"Kill these robots!"

The treads of Power Armors roared in the desert, soldiers with one arm holding a large-caliber machine gun and the other wielding a red-hot high-frequency blade, furiously darting among the disarrayed Ultron Robots, cutting down the action power of these scraps—

The drones, with no rivals, fully occupied the skies, launching raid after raid; the frontline advanced tens of kilometers even before the fireballs extinguished, reaching a point where Mechanical Nest City became clearly visible!

They cut off Ultron’s logistics line, destroyed communication arrays, eliminated mechanical soldiers, fighting furiously!

But Lille’s voice suddenly echoed in their minds:

[It’s not over yet!]

[Combat Alert: Residual units detected—]

Ultron soldiers lying in the desert trembled and stood up, appearing like zombies resurrecting in the soldiers’ eyes, causing dread. Drones struggled to take off from the sand again, with blood-red indicator lights flashing madly...

And there was a hoarse metallic voice!

"This... is not... the end..."

A Latovian soldier reflexively severed an Ultron with the high-temperature blade in his right hand before it recovered, but an Ultron Robot on the ground suddenly sprang up, fiercely ramming the missile in its hand into the leg of a fast-moving soldier!

Boom!

"We... are still here..."

Just before the Latovian drone dropped bombs, a targeted factory suddenly regained power, and these halted defense guns suddenly fired at the drones!

Boom!

The bomb exploded atop the factory, yet the drone was hit and smashed to the ground!

Even more horrifying was the core factory at the heart of the explosion:

Right before Lille, right in front of the Iron Riders, in the broken core nest, from the cracked walls, from the ground, countless metal arms, countless broken Ultron Robots crawled out!

Their bodies were scorched by high temperatures; their frames became shabby in the impact, but as long as a complete circuit formed between power, CPUs, and any one action module, they could still operate!

Their rigid movements grew smoother, and uncontrolled weapons slowly resumed—

Ultron switched its strategy; it didn’t "die" in the nuclear blast but completely adjusted its data structure in the remaining fragile time, fracturing into countless signals and hiding within devices across the Middle East!

EMP interfered with all communications, meaning Ultron endowed each of these robots with self-iterating abilities...

Each one had just awoken as Ultron.

The nuke delivered a heavy blow to Ultron, but just as Lille anticipated—

They had to kill every Ultron Robot, destroy every data body carrying Ultron’s consciousness.

The nuclear EMP disrupted both Ultron and the Latovian legion, meaning the war truly entered a white-hot phase—

From a modern warfare perspective, now marked the beginning of "melee combat."

The battles to come would truly enter Hell, a hell made of metal, heat waves, and radiation with no return path.

Thud——

Lille’s Leader’s Blade stabbed directly through the Combat Robot before him:

[Lille: Iron Riders, soldiers, the Atomic Light has severed all of Ultron’s combat networks; it can only rely on that trash’s self-battle awareness to fight—]

[Lille: Grip your weapons, focus, today, we will penetrate its lair, today, we will destroy this killing machine here, ending this nightmare!]

[Lille: This is Hell, the Hell we are about to destroy—]

[Lille: Raise your weapons, fear nothing!]

Christopher was the first to respond, his Titan raised the long sword behind it, slicing a row of stiff Ultron Robots in two:

"We stand ground..."

The Titan’s feet crushed over these robots’ corpses, gazing towards the flaming cracks and underground structures:

There, countless structurally intact Ultron Robots emerged from production lines, trembling as they loaded weapons...

It was unimaginable that after such an explosion, Ultron could still counterattack.

This horrific mechanical city housed at least millions, if not tens of millions, of robots...

Meaning every Latovian soldier had to deal with tens, if not hundreds, of Ultron Robots on average.

The King was right: this was Hell.

But it was Hell they must break through.

"Until... we tread Hell beneath us!"

The Titan leaped forward towards this inferno.