Conventional missiles couldn't kill them. Only nuclear weapons could.

Shen Cong tried to picture what Xuanwu and the Great Earth Dragon must have been — what tier of creature required that answer. But regardless of scale, even the most powerful evolved beast had been completely vaporized in under three seconds of nuclear thermal radiation.

With the industrial base crumbling, conventional weapons losing effectiveness, and stockpiles shrinking by the day, the remaining nuclear warheads had become humanity's only decisive card against the most dangerous evolved beasts.

"How many usable warheads does the Eastern Theater Command still have? And they can't be launched by rocket anymore — metal corrosion, communication failures, no targeting capability. They have to be detonated in place. Which means an iron person has to carry it in. One iron person per detonation."

Gao Jinyue and the others didn't know much about the warhead unit specifically.

What they knew: due to metal corrosion and the breakdown of targeting systems, rocket-launched delivery was no longer possible. Each warhead now required an iron person to transport and detonate it manually. Every detonation consumed one iron person.

The survivors had a name for these individuals: Ghost Operatives.

The reference was to the Starcraft II Terran faction — the Ghost unit, a specialist capable of calling in tactical nuclear strikes. A widely played game before the apocalypse, and the parallel was obvious enough that the name had stuck.

Ghost Operatives demanded the scarcest resource available: iron people. The warheads themselves required extensive maintenance from additional iron people and technical staff. The Command's operational nuclear arsenal was therefore limited — the exact number was classified, and Gao Jinyue's group were patients, not personnel; they had no access to that kind of information.

Shen Cong could estimate.

The Eastern Theater Command had started with a population of roughly 230,000. Among those: approximately 2,700 jin people, approximately 240 iron people. A ratio close to 1000:10:1 — for every thousand survivors, ten jin people and one iron person.

Those 240 iron people, by Shen Cong's extrapolation from how New Hefei's iron people were utilized, would need roughly…