Counterfeit Hero

Chapter 1203: Chapter 8-19: The Perfect Ambush

”Zoom in, lower the altitude.”

A gray‑haired Lieutenant Colonel grabbed the Electronic Soldier’s shoulder and gave the order. His fingers, stiff and clenching hard, looked like ten iron hooks, pale with a faint tinge of blood.

The Electronic Soldier complied.

This seasoned Corporal swiftly directed the drone to drop in altitude, switched on low‑power hover mode, and, staying just outside the red zone of intense electromagnetic interference, pulled the zoom in as much as possible.

The image kept enlarging, the entire screen flooded with bursting energy light. Flash after flash made the display look like someone had thrown a hundred thousand flashbangs into it.

Inside the command center, everyone’s heartbeat was accelerating.

Not far in front of them, Hill 415, which had been under attack for nearly ten hours, had only just quieted down.

The smoke on the position hadn’t dispersed yet. The warriors were still nervously repairing trenches and moving the wounded and ammunition while taking turns on the forward line, watching the enemy at the foot of the mountain.

They had originally been the very front edge of the entire defensive line. But now, over a hundred kilometers ahead of them, deep inside the area under absolute control of the Jiepeng people, a battle was breaking out!

Who is over there?! Reinforcements? Another unit that broke out in the chaos and was fighting its way toward them? Or shattered remnants from the first defensive line? The Jiepeng suddenly halted their assault on Hill 415—was there some hidden connection between that and this unit?

Questions surged up in everyone’s mind. The camera zoomed in rapidly, and the Mecha of both sides came into view.

Identical Mecha. The same black paint. The same markings... ”Jiepeng?!” A sharp‑eyed Lieutenant shouted first: ”What are they doing?”

No one answered him. Everyone just stared blankly at these two Jiepeng Forces firing on each other!

This was clearly an ambush. On the mid‑slope by a very deep canyon, hundreds of Jiepeng Mecha had been cut into three segments by the ambushers. Ferocious firepower rolled in from all directions toward the center. The ambushed Jiepeng Armored Battalion was like a pile of rag dolls thrown into a bonfire. One Mecha after another shattered, burned, and exploded in the tide of raging energy.

The carefully chosen ambush site displayed the ambushers’ Commander’s ruthlessness.

Three hills arranged like a pin‑shaped character formed an inverted triangular kill zone. If you divided the three‑sided ambushers into three teams, then the six Heavy Mecha and twenty Medium-sized Mecha deployed frontally were the first team. The wave of fire they generated pinned down the enemy vanguard and kept extending backward over the wrecked Mecha.

On a jutting slope at the edge of the left‑side cliff, over thirty Spirit Cat Mecha formed the attackers’ 2nd echelon. Split into upper and lower fire lines, they mercilessly picked off the enemy who, after the ambush, were instinctively moving downslope toward the mid‑mountain.

On the right, another group of over thirty Spirit Cats, the third team, charged down the slope with extreme resolve, ramming hard into the middle‑rear of the opposing Armored Camp’s column and turning the entire formation into a mess of pulp.

The first team in front smashed hard, the second team on the left intercepted and controlled, the third team on the right pushed in and stirred up chaos... The ambushers had a clear division of roles and executed their tactics with iron resolve. With only a single company’s strength, they were beating an entire enemy battalion so badly it couldn’t even fight back!

”Look here.” A Captain rapidly tapped on the keyboard, zooming in one of the drone’s sub‑feeds and freezing the frame. The image showed several enlarged silhouettes of ambushing Mecha. On their hulls was the same red square mark. Clearly, this was the symbol these ambushers used to distinguish themselves from other Jiepeng Mecha.

Infighting? Mutiny? Various guesses jumped into everyone’s mind simultaneously.

Mecha after Mecha turned red in the meteor‑like Energy Cannon fire, then exploded. The whole battle zone shook as if the mountains and earth were moving. Time ticked by. Ten minutes later, the ambushed Jiepeng Armored Battalion finally, amid the panic, gradually stabilized its footing.

They still had an absolute advantage in numbers. Although they lost nearly two hundred Mecha in the instant of contact, the sacrifice of those machines bought time for the other Mecha in the center of the column.

Under the desperate counterattack of several Heavy Mecha and Medium-sized Mecha, the scattered machines gradually regrouped and began to concentrate fire to break out.

The Commander of this Jiepeng Armored Battalion clearly had rich experience and a cool head. That fleeting moment of clarity in the chaos at the head of the column was firmly seized by him. Under unified orders, the vanguard of the battalion started to change direction and launched a headlong charge toward the slope to their left front.

This shift in the battalion’s movement won the admiration of the Chuckna Army officers observing the entire battle from high above. The Jiepeng Commander had made the most accurate judgment and taken the most decisive and wise action.

The left front of the ambushed Armored Battalion was also the rear right of the ambushers. It was a gentle slope densely covered in trees. Less than a hundred meters up, it gave way to sheer mountains rising straight into the clouds.

This was because the ambushers’ 3rd echelon, positioned on the right‑side slope, had, at the first moment of the attack, already pushed rapidly forward into a strike on the enemy Armored Camp’s rear ranks to prevent the rear from calmly reacting. As a result, their control of the right‑side heights relied mainly on the powerful fire of the front‑facing first echelon.

This arrangement fit the ambushers’ actual situation very well. You could say they had used the strength of one company to the limit. But when an enemy with superior numbers recovered from the chaos of being hit and began sprinting up the slope regardless of casualties, the situation on the battlefield changed dramatically.