Chapter 70: Stand Up!

Chapter 70 Stand up!

The postwar landscape of Yellowstone City was a picture of desolation. Chen Jian led his team to re-establish the electromagnetic cloaking, arranging without a single moment of rest for Lei Jie and Shen Yue to disembark and unload their gear, while they continued driving two cat-cars back to Fort 7025 to haul more of the desperately needed weapons and ammunition.

On the other side, the man named Huang Yu, who had organized the local frontline, was busily running about compiling casualty figures and assisting He Shuo and Xie Liu in treating the wounded.

After a round of tallies, he only hindsightfully realized that the casualties among those who had stayed behind until the very end were remarkably few: only one person had their arm scratched by a flying piece of shrapnel from an artillery shell, one had a leg torn off, and two had been struck in the torso by bullets.

None were even fatal wounds.

He reported this outcome to Chen Jian, who shook his head and spoke with a trace of regret in his voice.

"You were brave, but you have not yet learned to obey orders."

"In fact, if you hadn't disrupted the deployment at the final stage by gathering the scattered people together, even those two gunshot casualties wouldn't have happened."

"Do not be fooled by how close that monster appeared; it was at least three hundred meters away no matter what."

"Most of the Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii fighting alongside it were cannoneers. They didn't have many firearms to begin with, and they were shooting from the back of a jolting beast. As long as you stayed scattered, hitting any of you would have been pure luck."

"They actually had no way to deal with you at all; it was simply that you yourselves grew afraid."

Huang Yu stared at Chen Jian in stunned silence, and only after carefully retracing his memories did he finally react with hindsight.

It was true; these men under his command had indeed been frightened out of their wits by that beast.

When that monster, nearly ten meters tall, came lunging toward them, it seemed everyone lost their reason and their capacity for thought.

Though paths to survival surrounded them everywhere, they believed themselves entirely cornered, to the point of blindly wanting to trade a life for a life.

What a foolish sacrifice.

At this very moment, Huang Yu finally sensed the divide between a rabble like themselves and the so-called Chosen of Heaven.

Even though those men claimed they were not the Chosen, but rather the Ancestors.

He looked toward Chen Jian, his face filled with shame

He had once thought that ‘standing up’ was a privilege reserved for the brave, but now he understood that for these ‘ancestors,’ a person was meant to stand.

Thus, they truly were ancestors.

Because Huangyu still recalled, in the hazy recesses of memory, that the elders of Huangshi City had once said that the people of Huangshi City never lightly knelt before others.

They knelt only to heaven and earth, to parents, and to benefactors.

But when did the people of this city begin, gradually, to become like this?

When did the people here start to habitually express obedience through kneeling?

Probably it was from the moment the power of the Machine God Sect began to seep into Huangshi City.

They brought technology, and over the span of a few decades the population here grew from a mere few hundred to over two thousand, yet they also changed everything about this place.

Even in the end, they once again pushed the people of this city back into the abyss.

Huangyu's gaze gradually shifted; he looked ahead at Chen Jian, while the other continued speaking:

“From now on, all of you are the masters of Huangshi City.”

“The battle is not yet over; we have slain the monsters reared by the Machine God Sect, and they will surely retaliate with full force.”

“Therefore, I demand that all of you rise to defend your homeland, prepared for sacrifice.”

“But you may rest assured.”

“We will stand beside you!”

(End of Chapter)