Hu Hao and his squad had pushed about a kilometer deep into the city. Throughout their methodical advance, they had not found a single living Imperial citizen.
Inside every house they breached, they found nothing but corpses.
Hu Hao realized that the civilians in this city hadn’t been able to evacuate. The Allied blitzkrieg had advanced too rapidly; Nanlin City had fallen before the population could even attempt to flee across the river.
A tiny sliver of hope had existed in Hu Hao’s heart that perhaps the civilians had managed to flee in a different direction, escaping the urban center before the siege began. But now, seeing the staggering number of bodies littering the homes and streets, he knew that hope was nothing but a delusion.
“KILL THEM ALL!” the Imperial soldiers roared as they surged forward.
The veterans were fighting with a terrifying, unhinged ferocity. This was entirely different from the desperate defensive retreat in Langcheng. Even the newly arrived conscripts, who had been too terrified to stand up just hours ago, were now charging forward with bloodshot eyes. Seeing the mutilated corpses of their own people had ignited a bottomless, volcanic rage within them.
“Motherfuckers,” Hu Hao hissed, his hands trembling with fury as he dropped behind cover to slap a fresh magazine into his rifle. He could barely control his rage.
“Get me my satellite phone!” Hu Hao roared over the gunfire.
A radioman sprinted forward, dodging debris, and handed him the heavy receiver. Hu Hao immediately punched in the direct line to Zone Command.
“It’s Hu Hao! Get me the Commander!” Hu Hao yelled the moment the line connected.
Less than 20 seconds later, Jiang Kai picked up.
“Hu Hao, what’s the situation?!” Jiang Kai asked urgently.
“Commander… do you know what they did?! The civilians of Nanlin City… they’ve been massacred! Every single one of them! The Allied coalition slaughtered them!
We are soldiers! We are soldiers of the Empire, and we couldn’t even protect our own people! Every single house is filled with corpses! The streets are paved with the bodies of unarmed men, women, and children! They wiped them out!” Hu Hao screamed into the phone, his voice cracking with anguish.
“What did you just say?!” Jiang Kai yelled, his eyes widening in absolute horror.
“They’re all dead! Our people were systematically slaughtered! Commander… what we let happen here… it’s a crime! It’s an absolute sin!” Hu Hao choked back a sob, unable to suppress the overwhelming grief.
Before the war, Nanlin City boasted a population of nearly a million. Hu Hao had no idea if any of them had managed to escape, but he knew what he was seeing: in just a one-kilometer push down a single avenue, he had already seen thousands of bodies. And there were dozens of other streets just like it. He didn’t dare imagine the full scale of the atrocity.
“What… how is this possible? How could they… how could this happen…” Jiang Kai muttered into the phone, stunned. But as the reality set in, his shock rapidly transformed into a guttural, furious roar.
The staff officers in the bunker froze, terrified. They had no idea what was happening on the front line; they assumed the counter-offensive had suffered a catastrophic defeat.
“Commander, did the assault fail?! What happened?!” Chief of Staff Sun Qinxue asked frantically.
Jiang Kai dropped the phone onto the console. He slowly sank into his chair, buried his face in his hands, and began to weep uncontrollably.
“Commander! Tell me! What happened?!” Sun Qinxue panicked, grabbing Jiang Kai by the shoulder.
“They’re dead… all of them. The civilians of Nanlin City… they were massacred. A million people, Old Sun! A million people! And if they did this here… think about the other provinces the coalition has captured! Tell me, Sun Qinxue… how many of our people is this war going to consume?!” Jiang Kai wailed, the tears streaming down his face.
“What?!” Sun Qinxue and the surrounding staff officers stared at him, absolutely paralyzed by shock. Not a single one of them had ever imagined the Allied coalition would enact a systematic genocide upon the Eastern Spirit populace.
“Impossible… that’s impossible. They wouldn’t do that. How could they massacre civilians?! Our people are unarmed! They pose no threat to an occupying army! Why would they slaughter them?!” Sun Qinxue stammered in disbelief.
“DRONES! PATCH THE STREET-LEVEL VISUALS TO THE MAIN SCREEN IMMEDIATELY! I WANT TO SEE IT! SHOW ME!” Jiang Kai suddenly shot to his feet, roaring at the drone operators.
The massive tactical map on the main screen vanished, instantly replaced by a mosaic of high-resolution live feeds from the observation drones hovering over the city streets.
The truth was undeniable.
The streets were littered with the bodies of Imperial citizens. In the alleys and inside the blown-out storefronts, the bodies of women lay half-naked, the horrific evidence of their brutalization before death agonizingly clear.
“ISSUE A GENERAL ORDER TO ALL FRONTLINE COMBAT UNITS! I DO NOT WANT A SINGLE PRISONER! I WANT EVERY LAST ALLIED SOLDIER IN THAT CITY DEAD! WIPE THEM OUT! SLAUGHTER THEM ALL!” Jiang Kai screamed, his voice tearing.
“YES, COMMANDER!” the staff officers roared back, their own eyes burning with furious tears as they rushed to the comms stations.
In truth, Jiang Kai’s order was entirely unnecessary. As the Corps, Division, and Regimental Commanders advanced through the city and witnessed the atrocities with their own eyes, they realized exactly what the Allied coalition had done to their people.
Every single Imperial soldier was consumed by a blinding rage. They threw themselves at the Allied barricades with absolute disregard for their own lives. They no longer cared if they died; they only cared about killing the bastards in front of them.
“KILL THEM!” Hu Hao roared, charging at the absolute vanguard of his unit.
He raised his rifle and fired relentlessly into the retreating Allied ranks. As they overran an Allied defensive pocket, several wounded Allied soldiers dropped their weapons and raised their hands, begging to surrender.
The Imperial veterans didn’t even break stride. They simply pointed their rifles and executed the surrendering soldiers without a fraction of a second’s hesitation. Some veterans, completely overcome by rage, stood over the bodies and emptied entire magazines into the corpses just to vent their fury.
“Report! Nanlin City Command reports that our garrison is completely surrounded! The Eastern Spirit forces are attacking with unimaginable ferocity! They are not giving us a single moment to regroup or maneuver! The pressure on our frontline barricades is critical!” a staff officer reported to Supreme Commander Mushaqi.
Mushaqi and Wenkeduo were currently in an armored convoy, speeding away from Nanlin City toward the captured airport. The airport was over fifty kilometers away, and due to the ruined roads, the journey would take at least two hours.
“How are they fighting this aggressively?! Are they simply exploiting our lack of ammunition?! I truly never expected the Imperial Army to execute such a coordinated combined-arms offensive. They deployed their fighters to tie down our air force, blocked our transport drops, and immediately launched a massive ground assault while we were paralyzed! I underestimated them. I severely underestimated Jiang Kai!” Mushaqi grimaced, staring out the window of the armored car.
“Commander… we still have over a hundred thousand wounded soldiers in the triage centers inside Nanlin City. If they are captured… will the Imperial Army execute them?” a senior staff officer asked hesitantly.
Mushaqi slowly closed his eyes. He knew exactly what fate awaited those men. They were already dead.
“Commander, surely we can negotiate a prisoner exchange later? The Eastern Spirit Empire adheres to international law; they should be willing to exchange them,” another staff officer suggested hopefully.
“There will be no prisoners,” Mushaqi sighed heavily. “The Eastern Spirit prisoners we captured during our advance was executed. And it wasn’t just the prisoners… the troops massacred the civilian population of the city as well.
Sigh.
Our wounded will not survive this. Furthermore, once the Imperial Army realizes the true scale of our purges, their resistance is going to become infinitely more fanatical. The strategic cost of these massacres is going to be astronomical!”
“Commander, if we don’t purge the population, what is the point of conquering this territory?!” a high-ranking political officer argued from the front seat. “If we leave the Eastern Spirit civilians alive, they will consume the resources of this land! Our own citizens will still starve!
According to the grand strategy agreed upon by our coalition governments, the moment we fully pacify the Eastern Spirit Empire, we are initiating a massive demographic migration! We have far too many people in our home countries, and virtually no arable land!
If the Eastern Spirit civilians don’t die, how are our people supposed to live?! The only reason our soldiers are bleeding and dying in this war is to secure fertile land for their own families back home!”
“That may be true, but the purge shouldn’t have happened now!” Mushaqi retorted sharply. “There would have been plenty of time for that later! We just secured these provinces! Initiating mass exterminations immediately guarantees that the Imperial Army will fight us to the absolute bitter end!
If they realize that national defeat means total genocide, the Eastern Spirit Empire will mobilize every single citizen they have! It will turn into an apocalyptic war of attrition! If the populace knows that surrender means death, they will throw everything they have into supporting their military! Sigh… our political leaders were too impatient!” Mushaqi rubbed his temples in frustration.
“It’s not that we were impatient, Commander. You know the reality,” the political officer countered. “Just last month, our nation—and several others in the coalition—suffered catastrophic flooding. Our primary agricultural regions yielded absolutely nothing this harvest! How are our people supposed to survive?!
By occupying these Eastern Spirit provinces, we have at least secured enough grain to feed our armies of millions. More importantly, we can export the surplus grain through the captured ports back to our home countries to prevent mass starvation! If we let the Eastern Spirit civilians live, they will consume the food our people desperately need!”
To the political officer, massacring the Eastern Spirit civilians was an absolute necessity. If the Imperial citizens didn’t die, the citizens of the Allied nations would starve to death. It was a simple equation of survival.
…
“Surrendering?! I TOLD YOU TO TAKE NO PRISONERS! KILL THEM ALL!” Hu Hao roared.
He had just spotted a pocket of Allied soldiers frantically waving white flags from behind a barricade. Many of the Allied troops had completely run out of ammunition. Their home nations were poor; their logistical supply chains were always strained. A significant portion of the ammunition they had used during their invasion had actually been looted from captured Imperial armories.
Because the Imperial Air Force had destroyed their forward ammo dumps last night, and they had burned through their remaining reserves during their morning assault, thousands of Allied soldiers now found themselves trapped in the city with empty rifles.
“Hao-ge! There’s an Allied command post in the building dead ahead! Do we want high-value targets alive?!” Huan Xingtao yelled over the radio. His platoon was spearheading the push and had just identified the fortified structure.
“I SAID NO PRISONERS! EVEN IF IT’S AN ALLIED FULL GENERAL, PUT A BULLET IN HIS HEAD!” Hu Hao screamed back.
“Understood!” Huan Xingtao acknowledged.
He signaled his platoon to fan out and prepare to breach the command post. But before they could even move—
BRRRRRRRRRRT!
“Air Cavalry! You motherfuckers are stealing my kills!” Huan Xingtao cursed loudly as a flight of Imperial attack helicopters swooped low over the street, unleashing a devastating barrage of 30mm chain gun fire directly into the command post.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Explosions ripped through the building, blowing out the walls and collapsing the roof.
“Sweep the rubble! Make sure they’re dead!” Huan Xingtao ordered. He was annoyed that the helicopters had stolen his glory, but he knew this wasn’t a game; the only thing that mattered was exterminating the enemy as fast as possible.
Huan Xingtao and his men breached the ruined command post. Inside, they found a severely wounded Allied Lieutenant General pinned beneath the rubble, along with several dead and dying Major and Brigadier Generals.
The Imperial veterans didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second. They raised their rifles and executed every single Allied officer on the floor, systematically double-tapping the corpses just to be absolutely certain.
The slaughter continued block by block. Hu Hao’s regiment, along with the other Imperial units, methodically carved their way toward the city center. After punching through several defensive rings, Hu Hao’s forces eventually linked up with adjacent Imperial regiments, consolidating their line for the final push.
As they drove deeper into the urban core, the concentration of Allied troops grew denser. Many of the Imperial units that had taken heavy casualties during the initial breach were forced to pull back to secure the rear. However, Hu Hao’s regiment had suffered minimal losses thanks to his flawless tactical leadership, and they relentlessly spearheaded the advance into the heart of the city.