Chapter 62: Torrent
Li Qingsong had confirmed that the unknown enemy’s Warships were capable of intercepting minuscule targets.
This was yet another capability completely different from his own, one that far surpassed his level of technology.
When faced with bullets, all he could do was pile on armor and rely on its thickness to withstand the impact. But these enemy ships, using means he couldn’t identify—perhaps Electromagnetic Cannon Projectiles or laser beams—could precisely intercept those same projectiles.
But it didn’t matter.
’Even if their interception rate was one hundred percent, even if they could just sit there and pick off these hundreds of billions of projectiles, their interception systems would overload and burn out before they could stop even one percent of them!’
When quantity surpasses a certain limit, it triggers a qualitative change. And clearly, this massive number of bullets from Gunpowder Guns had achieved just that effect.
Under the gaze of his spy satellites, Li Qingsong saw that after a moment of silence, the small ships gathered around the mothership seemed to have finally made a decision.
The mothership’s engines, which had never been ignited and seemed to be not yet fully repaired, finally spewed bright exhaust flames. Its massive hull slowly accelerated, gradually breaking free from its orbit around Enemy God Star, and fled into Deep Space under the protection of the smaller ships.
The target of the bullet swarm was Enemy God Star. Therefore, as long as they left Enemy God Star, they could avoid being caught in the torrent of projectiles!
This was obvious, and something Li Qingsong had long anticipated.
He had known from the beginning that this wave of attack from the bullet swarm would most likely be unable to harm the enemy’s mobile forces.
But, that still didn’t matter!
From the very start, Li Qingsong had never intended to destroy the enemy’s ships with this wave of attacks.
His target was the industrial bases on the surface of Enemy God Star!
’Your ships can flee, they can reposition, but how are you going to move your industrial bases?’
’It has been so many years since you used others as a weapon against me, driving those strange birds to attack. After all that time, you’ve finally managed to build industrial bases of considerable scale.’
’Once I destroy your industrial bases, let’s see where you get your supplies. Let’s see where you get your fuel, how you manufacture parts, how you repair your damaged mothership!’
’Without the support of an industrial base, what good is the performance of your ships? Aren’t they just like guns without bullets—all for show?’
With the mothership at its core, the fleet fled with all its might, trying to escape the bullet swarm’s area of effect. An explosion even occurred at the mothership’s stern, causing a massive gas leak, yet its engines never stopped pushing. The extent of their desperation was clear.
Sometimes, low accuracy wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Just like now. His weaponry couldn’t precisely target Enemy God Star, so when the bullet swarm arrived, it would inevitably be very dispersed, covering a massive area.
To escape this coverage area in a short amount of time, they needed to accelerate as quickly as possible.
Only by accelerating with all their might, heedless of the consequences, could they hope to escape!
This was precisely why that mothership was so desperate.
"I didn’t expect to damage the mothership again. This is a pleasant surprise."
Li Qingsong sneered inwardly, "But the main course hasn’t even started. Just you wait."
The mothership and its dozens of smaller ships finally fled to a distance of tens of thousands of kilometers from Ceres.
There, they stopped accelerating and began to drift away slowly under their own inertia.
This distance most likely wasn’t enough to escape the bullet swarm’s coverage area; at best, they could only avoid the core zone.
And the mothership’s condition seemed poor; it really couldn’t sustain another acceleration.
So, Li Qingsong saw the dozens of combat ships all move to form a protective screen in front of the mothership, seemingly attempting to protect it with their own interception capabilities.
Amid this escape, several hours passed quietly, and the vanguard of the bullet swarm finally arrived.
In the next moment, a torrent composed of countless projectiles slammed into the entire face of Enemy God Star that was oriented toward Ceres, like a colossal flood.
A single projectile had a mass of only 0.5 grams, but its velocity reached six kilometers per second. This meant each one carried about 9 kilojoules of energy, equivalent to a large-caliber, high-power sniper rifle bullet!
What kind of scene would hundreds of billions of large-caliber, high-power sniper bullets arriving all at once create?
Li Qingsong watched as the ground, no matter how solidly frozen, and the factories, no matter how sturdily built, all seemed to be made of paper at that moment.
Dust flew up from the surface of Enemy God Star. Countless tons of hard Tolin, solid dry ice, and Solid Oxygen were instantly vaporized, exploding into massive clouds of smoke that enveloped almost the entire landscape.
The tall factories built on the plains were torn apart in an instant, riddled with holes. In the next moment, they were shredded into fragments, completely merging back into the surface of Enemy God Star.
Some bases, which were either built to be especially sturdy or were located in canyons and underground, were desperately holding on.
But it didn’t matter. This wave of attacks was only the beginning.
The assault would continue at the same intensity for three whole days!
During these three days, Enemy God Star would continue to rotate, and the relative angle between the two celestial bodies would also change.
Thus, factories that had previously been sheltered by canyon walls soon rotated to face Ceres directly, and the torrent of bullets from the sky poured down upon them unimpeded.
Factories that had been built on the far side of Enemy God Star, relying on the planet itself to block the assault, soon rotated into the line of fire as the planet turned. They too could not escape the torrent of bullets.
Only a few factories built deep underground could survive. But how many such factories could there be?
This was a near-total, inescapable deluge of bullets. Anything with a direct line of sight to the sky, whether on a cliff, in a canyon, or on a plain, was unable to escape the bombardment.
Due to the sheer number of bullets, the ground was completely shrouded in smoke and dust, and Li Qingsong could no longer see the condition of Enemy God Star’s surface.
So, he shifted his gaze to the mothership.
Li Qingsong saw that the dozens of Warships were truly advanced vessels that surpassed those of peak Human Civilization, just as he’d expected.
Although the concentration of the bullet torrent there was far less than in the core zone, it still had a "flow rate" of tens or even hundreds of thousands of projectiles per minute.
And yet, they managed to intercept the vast majority of this staggering number of bullets!
Amid a crisscrossing web of laser beams and Electromagnetic Cannon Projectiles, one tiny bullet after another was knocked off its trajectory, failing to strike its target and release its destructive power.
But, no matter how advanced their interception technology was, a few stragglers were bound to get through.
’Even if only one-tenth of them got through, that would be enough!’
And so, Li Qingsong saw faint flashes of light begin to erupt constantly across the mothership and the combat ships.