Counterfeit Hero

The simulation program restarted, and the situation was restored. This time, Feiler included a time setting.

The circular cursor representing the bandit army’s main force dashed left and right among six red arrows, struggling to resist. However, no matter what it did, time continued to tick away second by second. When it finally annihilated two of the arrows, one of the remaining four arrows had already advanced into Puluo Town.

Once a path was breached, all of Puluo Town’s defenses collapsed instantly. A swath of red spread across the map of Puluo Town once again, settling the dust.

”Look....,” Feiler clapped his hands, unfurling a copy of the Mars Times, and picked up the coffee on the table next to him. ”War is an art.”

Fatty’s cold sweat soaked through his vest.

In the face of threats, timid people are always very meticulous. Upon learning that the enemy had split their forces, Fatty immediately paused the ambush plan, quickly running simulations while rapidly making contact with the base.

Russell had taught him that war is not child’s play. In the thousands of famous battles he had memorized, every mistake made by a commander was paid for with lives.

Fatty had vowed at that time that he would never become a cautionary tale sacrifice.

The simulation results indicated that, after splitting their forces, the Blood Shadow Mecha Group with four battalions departing from the Central City West District now formed two separate arrows. Although the total remained the same, the enemy attacking Puluo Town was now four-headed instead of three!

This extra route carried significant implications for the success of the battlefield’s anti-encirclement operations — in his original plan, Fatty had set to defeat the three enemy routes one by one. If there were indeed only three, with the 3rd Group of SM holding off the formidable Suss Armored Group’s main force, Fatty was confident in defeating the other two.

No one understood the true nature of the squad he was leading at the moment! As long as the defensive lines around Puluo Town could hold on a bit, the three-headed enemy forces would definitely be unable to attack Puluo Town.

Now, the enemy’s division had turned the three-pronged attack into a four-pronged one! The total remained the same, but Fatty had long understood that in battle, number is not the deciding factor.

Thirty years ago, during a local conflict between two countries in the western part of the human interstellar map, there was a case like this. Facing five times the enemy’s superior force, the commander in the case managed to divert the enemy’s main force with tactical deception, then used an armored battalion to raid the enemy’s command center and won the war.

At that time, the armored battalion, after advancing to within less than ten kilometers of the enemy command center, was detected and fiercely obstructed by a minor defensive force. However, they fully utilized the enemy’s redeployment time difference and directly advanced, destroying the enemy command center in one swift blow.

This case fully illustrated that intelligence is the basis of war and demonstrated that once a core weakness is exposed, a small force can also determine the outcome of a battle.

Despite the grim simulation outlook, Fatty’s mood was not entirely despairing. After all, Russell’s teachings had long ingrained in him the habit of leaving room for contingency when drafting operational plans. What Fatty was most concerned about was if the enemy launched one or two more attacks, then for the bandit army, things would really become troublesome!

The more you don’t want something, the more it comes to you. Just as the simulation completed, Fatty received the news he least wanted to hear in his contact with the base — several observation points stationed around Puluo Town by the bandit army had lost contact with the base, the longest exceeding forty-five minutes.

Upon hearing this news, Fatty’s mind went blank, and he was completely stunned.

These observation points were manned by ”refugees” deployed under the bandit army. They were relatives of the bandit soldiers, scattered within a thousand kilometers around Puluo Town along all high-grade highways and resource highways.

Within five hundred kilometers, wherever mecha could pass, there were more or less such ”refugee” settlements. Fatty referred to this monitoring system as the Eye SkyNet. Under such a simple yet effective layered surveillance, no large-scale military could silently approach Puluo Town.

Originally, these observation points should have been very safe. The personnel of the observation points were just ordinary families. In this war-torn era, such refugees were everywhere. Cities, agricultural zones, industrial zones, dense forests....No one would pay attention to their existence.

To avoid these people’s watchful eyes, unless the army advancing towards Puluo Town sent Mecha vanguards to slaughter all residents who might expose their tracks along the way!

Except for lunatics and demons, Fatty didn’t believe anyone human would do that.

Yet now, several ”refugee” observation points in the same direction but different observation circles...had gone missing simultaneously!

The disappeared observation points included four along the sixty-kilometer stretch of the Eastern No. 7 Resource Highway, two in the Southern Kalif River agricultural area, two on Windmill Plain, and critically, one at Mishan Pass on the essential route leading to the backside of the Pingqi Ridge Mountains!

Fatty entered these coordinate points into the electronic sand table. Two lines moving toward Puluo Town appeared on the sand table — there were two more arrows besides the four!

Two enemy armored battalions at the mountain’s base had already crossed the No. 5 bridge over Lorenzo River entirely, proceeding southwest at a moderate pace. The footsteps of the mechas, the squeaking of the treads crushing the road, the roaring of engines, all made a cacophony. The vanguards clearing the way at the front wings nearly walked right under the eyes of the bandit soldiers lying in ambush.

However, Fatty hadn’t given the attack order even after the enemy entered the ambush zone. Sweating profusely, he stubbornly stared at the electronic simulation program, running the data calculations repeatedly. He couldn’t believe the enemy would be so abominable to hide their tracks!

Apart from the Mishan 1760 Pass observation point being a small Pioneers settlement, most other observation points were located next to densely populated refugee areas.

Fatty was trembling all over. He could entirely rule out the possibility of these observation points’ identities being exposed. So, the fact left only one possibility — the route the enemy took to advance was paved with the corpses of ordinary civilians and dyed red with their blood!

Countless bones underneath one general’s success...... The opponent was a damned bastard!

The cacophony grew fainter. The Northern Alliance Armored Forces had exited the ambush zone.

The bandit army mecha warriors who never received Fatty’s order gathered from their hiding spots, glancing at the eternally silent [Ranger] No.1 in the twilight forest, exchanging puzzled looks.

No one knew what had happened. These elites from various factions all turned their gazes to the second in command of their group by default — Weii Jianshan.

Weii Jianshan frowned, walked up to Fatty’s mecha, climbed up.....and then he froze.

Through the cockpit canopy, he saw the Fatty, sitting before the central control panel and typing furiously, look up, revealing a face void of expression but eyes filled with confusion and fury!

Is this war?

War is absolutely not a justification for mass murder or arbitrary deprivation of life!

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