Chapter 62: The Torrent!

Li Qingsong had already confirmed that the warships of these unknown adversaries possessed the capability to intercept tiny targets.

This was yet another capability fundamentally different from his own, and one that far exceeded his current technological level.

When facing bullets, the only thing he could do was stack armor thickness and rely on raw armor to endure the impacts. Yet these hostile spaceships could precisely intercept those projectiles using methods that were either electromagnetic cannon rounds or laser beams.

It did not matter, however.

Even if their interception rate reached a hundred percent, if those hundreds of billions of projectiles were simply left there without moving for them to intercept, their interception equipment would burn out from overload before managing to stop even one percent of them!

When quantity exceeds a certain limit, it triggers a qualitative change. Clearly, this sufficiently massive swarm of conventional firearm bullets had produced precisely this effect.

Under the surveillance of the spy satellite, Li Qingsong saw that the small spaceships clustered around the mothership seemed to have finally made a decision after a brief silence.

The mothership’s engines—which had never been ignited and seemed not yet fully repaired—finally spewed out bright exhaust flames. Its massive hull slowly accelerated, gradually breaking free from the orbital path of the enemy planet, and escaped into deep space under the escort of the smaller ships.

The attack target of those bullet swarms was the enemy planet. Therefore, as long as they left the enemy planet, they could avoid being caught in the torrent of bullets!

This was obvious, and it was something Li Qingsong had anticipated long ago.

He had known from the beginning that this wave of bullet swarm attacks would most likely fail to inflict damage upon the enemy's mobile forces.

Still, it did not matter!

Li Qingsong had never intended to rely on this initial offensive to wipe out the enemy's spaceships.

His targets were the industrial bases on the surface of the enemy planet!

Your spaceships can escape and relocate, but how are you going to move these industrial bases?

Ever since you borrowed a knife to kill someone by driving those strange birds to attack me, all these years have passed, and you have finally managed to build industrial bases of a considerable scale.

Once I wipe out your industrial bases, let us see where you will obtain material supplies, where you will get fuel, how you will manufacture replacement parts, and how you will repair your damaged mothership!

Without the support of industrial bases, no matter how good the performance of your spaceships might be, of what use would they be? Wouldn't they simply become useless shells, much like guns without ammunition?

With the mothership as their core, this fleet fled with all their might toward the region outside the coverage of the bullet swarm. The rear of the mothership even suffered an explosion resulting in massive gas leakage, yet its propulsion engines never stopped, a testament to their extreme desperation.

Sometimes, low precision is not necessarily a bad thing.

Just like now, since his firearms could not accurately target the enemy planet, the bullet swarms would inevitably become heavily dispersed upon reaching it, resulting in a vast coverage area.

To escape this coverage area in a short time, extremely rapid acceleration was required.

Only by accelerating desperately and with all one's might could one escape!

Because of this, the mothership was in such frantic haste.

"I never expected to cause further damage to the mothership; this is truly an unexpected bonus."

Li Qingsong sneered inwardly, "However, the main course hasn't even started yet. Just wait."

The mothership and dozens of smaller vessels finally escaped to a location tens of thousands of kilometers away from the planet.

There, they ceased acceleration and began to slowly drift away under the effect of inertia.

At this distance, there was a high probability that they could not escape the coverage of the bullet swarm entirely, able at best to avoid the core zone.

Moreover, the condition of the mothership appeared poor, making it utterly incapable of sustaining another round of acceleration.

Thus, Li Qingsong saw that all dozens of combat spaceships had formed a defensive shield in front of the mothership, seemingly attempting to protect it with their own interception capabilities.

Amidst this escape, several hours quietly slipped by, and the vanguard of the bullet swarm finally arrived.

The next moment, the torrent composed of countless projectiles slammed into the entire hemisphere of the enemy planet facing the opposing world like a tidal wave.

A single projectile had a mass of only 0.5 grams, yet its velocity reached six kilometers per second, meaning one projectile possessed approximately nine kilojoules of energy—equivalent to the energy carried by a large-caliber, high-power sniper rifle bullet!

What is the scene like when hundreds of billions of large-caliber, high-power sniper rifle bullets arrive simultaneously?

Li Qingsong saw that regardless of how solidly frozen the ground was, or how sturdily built the factory structures were, at this moment they were all shredded as if made of paper.

Dust flew high across the surface of the enemy planet, and countless hard tholins, solid dry ice, and solid oxygen were directly vaporized, bursting instantly into massive billows of smoke that enveloped almost the entire landscape.

The tall factories constructed on the plains were torn apart in an instant, riddling them with countless holes, and in the very next moment, they were ripped directly into fragments, completely blending into the soil of the enemy planet.

There were also some bases built with exceptional sturdiness, or constructed within canyons and underground, that were struggling to hold on.

It did not matter. This wave of attack was merely a beginning.

Attacks of the exact same frequency would continue for three whole days!

During these three days, the enemy planet would also rotate on its axis, and the relative angles of the two celestial bodies would shift.

Consequently, the factories that could previously rely on canyon walls to fend off the bullet torrent would soon find themselves directly aligned perpendicularly with the launching world, leaving the bullet torrent in the sky to pour down unimpeded.

Factories previously built on the far side of the enemy planet, which could use the entire planetary mass to block the bullet torrent, would soon rotate into view due to the planet's rotation, proving equally unable to escape the onslaught of the bullet swarm.

Only a few factories constructed deep underground could survive. But how many such factories could there possibly be?

This was virtually an omnidirectional, dead-zone-free deluge of bullets. Anything facing the sky—whether located on mountain cliffs, in canyons, or across plains—unavoidably fell victim to the strike.

Because there were simply too many bullets, the ground was thoroughly obscured by dust and smoke, preventing Li Qingsong from seeing the surface conditions of the enemy planet at that moment.

Therefore, he shifted his gaze toward the mothership.

Li Qingsong observed that those dozens of warships truly lived up to being advanced spaceships surpassing the peak of human civilization.

Although the volume of the bullet torrent there was far below that of the core zone, it still amounted to a "flux" of tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand projectiles per minute.

Yet the vast majority of these numerous bullets were actually intercepted by them!

Amidst intersecting streaks of laser beams and electromagnetic cannon rounds, one tiny projectile after another had its trajectory altered, failing to impact the target and failing to release its destructive power.

Even so, no matter how advanced their interception technology might be, there were bound to be a few that slipped through the net.

As long as one-tenth of them leaked through, that would be more than enough!

Consequently, Li Qingsong saw that faint flashes of light also began to erupt continuously across the hulls of the mothership and the combat spaceships.