Volume One: The Arrival of the Apocalypse Chapter 57: Intermission, Space Ability

This battle between humans and ants entered its most fierce and desperate phase right from the start. Endless streams of giant army ants showed no fear of death whatsoever, continually hurling themselves at Xiang Chenguang, only to be smashed to pieces by the iron staff in his hands.

As massive numbers of giant army ants perished, a peculiar, pungent, and sour odor began to permeate the entire battlefield, causing the warriors in the rear camp to become tainted with their pheromones.

Consequently, the newly arriving army ants rushing up from the rear no longer focused solely on Xiang Chenguang. Instead, they bypassed his attacking range and began assaulting the camp defenders stationed along the rear line.

From this moment onward, the speed at which humans killed the army ants had to exceed, or at least match, the rate at which the ants were being continuously fed into the battlefield from behind.

Otherwise, an increasing number of army ants would spread outward, beginning to attack their flanks and even attempting to circle around behind them. Eventually, the fewer than two hundred militia members would find themselves completely surrounded by the army ant swarm.

Should that happen, it would be impossible to predict how many militia members could break through the encirclement, and the militia camp could simply not afford such heavy losses.

For humans equipped with iron shields and steel spears, whose physical stats were at least level six or higher, killing individual army ants was not particularly difficult. The real challenge lay in sustaining high-intensity combat against an endless wave of army ants.

Standing four to five meters ahead of the defensive line right in the middle of the road, Xiang Chenguang repeated the motion of swinging his golden-hooped staff, intercepting nearly half of the army ants all by himself.

The remaining army ants rushed toward the camp's defensive line from both flanks, outside his effective attack range.

The provincial highway, a two-lane road with traffic moving in both directions, was only about seven meters wide. Including the shoulders on both sides, the total width was less than ten meters.

A defensive line of this length could actually be held by a maximum of about ten people.

Xiang Dongliang had divided the remaining one hundred and sixteen people into eleven combat squads of ten, with the remaining six individuals serving as reserves. In the event of combat casualties within any squad, these reserves would immediately step in to keep the combat squads at full strength.

Therefore, the pressure on the defensive line was initially not too high. Every ten minutes, under Xiang Dongliang's command, the frontline combatants were rotated out sequentially from left to right.

Although the combat intensity was high, each person only needed to fight for ten minutes before retreating to the rear to rest. Watching their psionic points continuously increase, the militiamen were filled with great enthusiasm for the fight.

However, as time went on, the corpses of the giant army ants in front of the defensive line accumulated to the point where their height gradually surpassed that of the earthen wall. As the ant carcasses piled higher and higher, the giant army ants trampled over the bodies of their fallen comrades, gaining a high-ground advantage to attack the camp defenders from above.

At this stage of the battle, the pressure on the defenders spiked abruptly. The critical issue was that, despite killing so many army ants, the black wave of ants ahead on the road remained as continuous and endless as it had been at the start of the battle, showing no signs of diminishing whatsoever.

This exerted an immense psychological toll on the camp defenders.

The fervent passion the soldiers felt at the beginning of the battle gradually faded into numbness, reduced to mechanically raising their shields and using their steel spears to crush the army ants right before them.

Defending under such a mental state is prone to errors, and the first casualty soon appeared.

A giant army ant leaped up by stepping on the body of a companion, lunging directly at a camp militiaman.

Having fallen into a mechanical routine from the prolonged combat, this militiaman completely failed to react in time to the sudden emergency. The ant cleared his shield and landed squarely on his chest.

The army ant lunged straight for his most protruding facial feature on the head, clamping its jaws onto his left ear. Two thick, finely serrated mandibles immediately bit the ear clean off.

A piercing, miserable scream rang out, jolting everyone on the battlefield to full alertness.

Making a fatal mistake, the militiaman instinctively threw away the iron shield and steel spear in his hands, using both arms to grab the giant army ant clinging to his chest in a panicked attempt to toss it away.

This left his defenses completely wide open, and three or four more army ants immediately lunged at him.

In the nick of time, a steel spear grazed the injured militiaman's head and pierced straight through the skull of the giant army ant that was about to bite him again.

Simultaneously, an elliptical energy shield suddenly materialized around the militiaman, blocking the incoming army ants and keeping them safely outside the barrier.

Xiang Dongliang knew this was a critical, life-or-death juncture.

Although the camp militiamen had performed remarkably well in the preceding battles, they had after all only undergone a few days of accelerated training. They could handle victories easily enough, but the moment casualties occurred, morale could rapidly collapse, leading to chaotic flight.

He immediately stepped into the position of the injured militiaman and roared, "Rotate positions!"

After sweeping away several army ants right in front of him with a single thrust, a faint white glow condensed on the surface of his grayish-black steel spear, which he then swung horizontally from right to left.

This spear strike was immensely powerful, instantly shearing away the top ten-plus centimeters of the piled-up mountain of ant carcasses, thereby neutralizing the topographical advantage the army ants had gained by stacking upon their dead.

Meanwhile, Xiang Chenguang intensified his offensive as well. In addition to his golden-hooped staff, a silver flying wheel began to whirl around him, causing the number of army ants managing to slip past his flanks to plummet drastically.

In truth, the number of army ants he killed single-handedly was roughly equivalent to the total kill count of the entire rear defensive line, yet there was no massive accumulation of ant corpses piling up in front of him.

Because the force behind his golden-hooped staff was immense, most of the ant carcasses he struck were sent flying far away—some landing scattered across the road, while others were hurled directly into the Lihai River beside the road.

When the ant corpses in front of the camp's defensive line once again piled high enough to grant the advancing army ants a terrain advantage, Xiang Dongliang knew he had to alter the battlefield's momentum to give the militiamen a breathing spell.

Otherwise, even if he could still use his newly acquired powerful knockback skill—unlocked after his class advancement—to shear off another section of the ant-body hill, the militiamen's morale would inevitably collapse under the weight of this seemingly endless battle.

Consequently, after lopping off another section of the ant mountain before him, he shouted at the top of his lungs, "Prepare firebombs! Thirty meters ahead of the line, fire!"

At his command, glass bottles plugged with burning cloth strips were hurled from the rear, landing approximately thirty meters in front of the defensive line.

The glass bottles shattered upon impact within the ant swarm, and the liquid inside was ignited by the burning rags, instantly erupting into raging flames.

More and more firebombs were thrown from behind the defensive line, forming a wall of fire several meters high about thirty meters away, completely cutting off the ant wave.

Deprived of their endless reinforcements, the remaining army ants were swiftly cleared out, and enthusiastic cheers instantly erupted across the battlefield.

The battle had lasted less than two hours, and the combat squads of the camp militiamen had just completed their round of rotations. In other words, each of these militiamen had only actually fought for ten minutes.

Yet, the giant army ants' absolute fearlessness of death and their seemingly inexhaustible numbers had imposed tremendous psychological pressure on the men.

Now, with the ant wave blocked by the sea of fire—even though everyone knew this was only temporary—they were finally granted a brief respite from that seemingly endless cycle of combat.

Xiang Chenguang also let out a long, heavy sigh of relief. Nearly two hours of high-intensity combat had almost driven him to spend his attribute points just to alleviate the exhaustion racking his body.

Right at that moment, the system notification chime suddenly sounded: "Ding! The Civilization Continuation quest has been completed. Please select your quest reward."

This truly came as an unexpected pleasant surprise.

A few days ago, Xiang Chenguang had brought all the villagers of Wangjiawan back to the militia training camp. A quest he had expected to complete easily had previously stalled right there, yielding no completion prompt whatsoever.

Yet now, it had inexplicably finished out of nowhere. Without dwelling on the mystery, Xiang Chenguang immediately opened the quest panel, selected the spatial superpower he had long coveted, and claimed his reward.

However, when he switched to his personal attribute panel to check his skills, he found that something was amiss.