"Fill it in!"

Every armored car carried an enormous dozer blade at the front, and they drove earth and stone into the moat by the ton, cutting it through at the waist in short order and rolling the fill flat into a broad causeway.

The Eastern Theater Command had better than five hundred iron people all told, and two-fifths of them had been brought up for this.

The carrier vehicles went through at a charge, and once across the moat they put on speed and ran.

A deep, carrying note of horns rose from inside the ratman city, and rat slaves, rat soldiers, rat generals and rat-beasts came roaring out of it to meet the theater's assault.

That was only the vanguard. More ratmen were pouring up onto the walls with bundles of jin-core javelins in their arms.

The ratman city's defense came open in a single moment.

The tens of thousands outside made a front several times the size of the theater's, and they had no fear of death in them at all; they fed the charge with their lives. Others were burrowing beneath the ground, and had left the whole plain between moat and wall pitted and broken.

The super iron people's armored cars took no notice of the holes. The other iron people's vehicles were badly slowed by them and had to come down off their speed.

Two floods came together on the plain and struck hard.

Tak-tak-tak-tak-tak-tak!

Jin-core bullets swept across in a dense hail, and rat slaves went down in numbers at the first exchange, while those behind came on over the bodies of their own kind. Behind every dozen or so slaves came a rat soldier with javelins across its back, and the soldiers threw in unison — javelins glittering with the sharpening reaction, driving into the armored cars.

Clang, clatter, clang, without a break.

Han Shoucheng was riding in Zhang Changde's armored combat vehicle. These two vehicles had taken over from Bao Wenhui's iron-plate car as the command vehicles, with a whole staff team in the compartment.

He watched the encounter run on…