38. The Army Moves Out

The Army Moves Out

At first, the abnormal weather around Sanguang City did not attract much attention.

Heavy fog was common in Sanguang. A morning fog of such small scale hardly merited concern.

Then the strangeness worsened.

Out of nowhere, the local atmosphere began showing sharp rises in temperature and pressure. Humidity reached saturation within minutes. Electromagnetic interference stronger than that of the most violent thunderstorms disrupted meteorological sensors across the region.

Meteorologists brought the phenomenon to the authorities’ attention almost exactly when every signal in and around the area suddenly vanished.

Mobile phones stopped working. Landlines failed. Radar and lidar could not function normally. Even satellites specifically designed to see through cloud cover found nothing useful.

Even if that had been the end of it, plenty of people across the country would have dropped everything to investigate.

But it was not the end.

A stable, persistent source of high pressure and high temperature continued pumping energy into the surrounding air mass, affecting the entire region on a massive scale.

Thunderstorms, tornadoes, abnormally violent rainfall, hail, and similar extreme-weather events spread outward one after another. Atmospheric circulation tried to find equilibrium and failed every time.

The Emergency Management Agency’s plans and forecasts had not accounted for anything like this. Soon, all available personnel across Sichuan Province had been mobilized.

Urban search-and-rescue teams and mobile emergency response support units rushed toward the region alongside armed police, spreading out to assist towns affected by the slowly expanding front of extreme weather.

When military drones sent toward the apparent source of the phenomenon failed to return, the authorities decided to prioritize evacuation of surrounding areas until they understood more about what was happening.

While the main bodies of the Emergency Management Agency and the military went to work, dozens of smaller investigative teams were sent out to gather intelligence.

When none of these well-trained teams, all prepared for the harshest environmental conditions, reported back, the Emergency Management Agency and the military naturally concluded that this must be the work of an enemy across the sea.

Yes, weather control might still belong in the realm of fantasy.

Yes, there was currently no scientific explanation for what they were seeing.

But none of that changed the facts: the phenomenon was too consistent to be random; the effects on communications were too thorough and uniform to be accidental. This was deliberate.

Military forces from at least three theater commands were mobilized, with emphasis placed on ground troops and support units. The weather severely limited aircraft operations, while the failure of communications and sensors seemed specifically designed to suppress drones, missiles, and other unmanned combat systems.

For the first time in more than a generation, the most advanced military on Earth went into action without reliable intelligence, without a concrete plan, and without any real understanding of the enemy’s capabilities.

That produced a cautious response, especially after all scouts were wiped out.

Rather than rush blindly into an unknown and potentially lethal situation, the army dug in.

They dug trenches, built fortifications, brought in artillery, stockpiled supplies and ammunition, and established as secure a perimeter as possible around the “abnormality.”

When the first enemy forces attacked, that decision proved wise.

At first, when very small and highly agile drones emerged from the signal-denial zone, they glowed on thermal sensors, and when cameras captured images of them, they created immense confusion, doubt, and fear.

The sight of tiny winged humanoids breathing fire stunned and even panicked many analysts. Some more devout civilian leaders were paralyzed by hesitation.

For the soldiers on the ground, however, the matter was simpler.

They had spent a week digging trenches, preparing, and adapting to the earlier strangeness.

In addition, most of the younger generation had been psychologically conditioned for years by films and computer games to shoot at monsters. Compared with what might otherwise have happened, the confusion was far less severe.

A storm of bullets and light missiles quickly annihilated the enemy. Once everyone saw that, however strange or frightening the enemy might be, it could still be killed, discipline returned.

When an entire army of zombies poured out of the fog, the military met it with discipline and overwhelming firepower, winning with minimal casualties.

The enemy’s only truly severe threat turned out to be their ability to shoot down aircraft with lightning, though its range was more limited than modern artillery, let alone missiles.

Despite the terrible weather, morale rose.

The army began preparing plans for a counterattack.

Then meteorologists informed command that the abnormal weather had begun to weaken.

Less than one hour after the abnormal phenomenon above Sanguang City began to recede, two high-altitude drones took off.

With an operational radius exceeding fourteen thousand kilometers, distance from the war zone was not a problem. More importantly, their slow climb to altitudes above sixty thousand meters placed them far beyond prying eyes.

Equipped with the best electro-optical sensors available for high-altitude drones, along with precision-coded global positioning systems assisted by advanced inertial navigation, they were the best available choice for reconnoitering enemy-controlled territory. They could avoid the worst residual interference and probe unknown defensive capabilities without risking human lives.

Two and a half hours later, the drones used the thermal updrafts and unusually dense atmosphere produced by the enemy’s weather manipulation to enter the presumed enemy air-defense zone at an altitude of sixty-four thousand meters.

Though the remaining thin fog still completely interfered with thermal and radar detection, their electro-optical systems worked well.

The two drones were designed to scan tens of thousands of square kilometers with enough precision to detect targets as subtle as a single camouflaged insurgent.

Within fifteen minutes, they had learned the condition of the city, transmitted the data back to mission control, and settled into a wide orbit at maximum altitude.

They had more than thirty hours of endurance remaining, enough to provide situation updates and target coordinates.

At mission control, analysts studied the data carefully, fed it into computers, and compared it to existing records of the city before the event.

The results were not encouraging.

Two-thirds of the buildings were damaged. More than half had been completely destroyed, while many of the rest showed varying degrees of harm.

The streets were covered with thousands of craters. The burned and exploded wreckage of vehicles inside and outside the city explained why no refugees had emerged during the ten days of storm: the enemy had deliberately attacked every attempt to evacuate and every effort to bring aid from outside.

Preliminary calculations indicated nearly two hundred thousand dead, including two thousand emergency response and intervention personnel.

More worrying still were the new structures.

The entire city center had vanished completely. The original buildings had left not even ruins behind.

In their place stood a fortress of black walls and massive windowless defensive structures, half a kilometer across.

The wall was fifty meters high and ten meters thick. The entire structure was seamless and uniform. It had no decoration. Though its crude style carried medieval characteristics, it resembled a magnified modern curtain wall more than anything ancient.

On the inner northern side of the wall were three cylindrical towers higher than the wall and twice as thick. Two more stood on the southern side.

The interior was entirely isolated. There was no obvious gate or other passage. Within it were twenty-three vast two-story structures, more like black stone domes than buildings.

They, too, had no windows, but they did have entrances. Each entrance opened onto a semi-sunken passage wide enough for a truck to pass through.

The moment analysts noticed enemy troops continuously pouring out of those structures without anything entering them, they marked the buildings as Level-One priority targets.

They had to be production centers of some kind. Judging by the way the enemy had enclosed them, the structures were vital to their forces.

Despite all the losses already suffered, thousands of enemy troops remained inside the facility and in the surrounding area. The production speed of this hastily established foothold in enemy territory was assessed as a greater threat than even their weather manipulation.

Outside the main facility, lines of fortifications extended into the surrounding city like spokes from a wheel.

Each defense line consisted of a shorter, thinner wall, with smaller towers built every few hundred meters.

There were eight such spokes, each extending roughly half a kilometer from the main fortification. All but one had six smaller towers along the way, with two more towers at the end.

The eight spokes appeared unfinished. The two terminal towers had no car-sized humanoid monster statues on top.

The possibility that those statues were living creatures was discussed, but because they were perfectly identical and did not move, that possibility was dismissed.

Until more information was obtained, headquarters chose caution and treated them as a defensive system of some kind.

More attention focused on the actual enemy forces inside and outside the fortress.

With the fog almost entirely dispersed, the exposure of enemy ground units, their patrol routes through the city, and nearly fifty airborne units the size of fighter jets but shaped like giant birds made everyone who saw the data hunger for revenge.

The images and information were checked and analyzed repeatedly, but all pointed to the same conclusion: the enemy used no vehicles and had no obvious artillery. Their ground forces were armed with medieval weapons.

No matter how dangerous their numbers made them—and nearly one hundred thousand troops were certainly dangerous—or how formidable they might be in close combat, their lack of long-range attack capability would be decisive.

Because heavy artillery had arrived one hour earlier.