On the big screen, the picture coming down from the drones took in the whole battlefield, collisions everywhere across it like something out of a science-fiction blockbuster.

And once the real assault opened a little later, it turned savage. In all the fighting up to now the Eastern Theater Command had not once brought out its firepower; it had been held back for exactly this. The artillery spoke in chorus, and for all the thickness of the ratman city's walls, the shells opened them anyway.

None of which was as staggering as what the four-legged dragon did.

The snake-like lizard went through that wall the way a knife goes through bean curd — whoosh, and there was an enormous breach; whoosh again, and there was another. The wall might as well have been paper in front of it. Fortifications, in fact, are no use at all against something that size.

With the wall down, the ratmen went back to close quarters with the theater's units, and this time a thousand and more rat-beasts came thundering in and sent armored cars tumbling.

Better than a hundred rat-beasts converged on the four-legged dragon.

But the four-legged dragon had been with Shen Cong long enough to learn some finesse in a fight, and having worked out that standing and taking it was no way to go about this, it went over to hit-and-run without hesitation. It ran the circuit of the ratman city, east to west, north back round to south, running from any rat-beast that came in a group and biting or clawing to death any that came alone.

With an ultimate-grade jin beast on the field to tip the balance, and a dozen or twenty super iron people besides, a hundred-odd thousand ratmen still could not match them.

Exactly as Shen Cong had reckoned. The war would be won without him taking the field at all.

The scales went over to the Eastern Theater Command by degrees. The buildings of the ratman city came down one after another, and the various battle pets the theater had brought up behind were laying…