Just yesterday, Suzaku received a battle report from the front: the main force of the last Paving Ant Barbarian Army standing in front of [Purple Leaf Li City] had been defeated.

This means that [Purple Leaf Li City] no longer has a formed paving ant army before, and the enemy's front can reach this nest at his feet at any time.

This day will come sooner or later, Suzaku has already been mentally prepared, the army that has been standing in front of him is originally cannon fodder, responsible for delaying the enemy's footsteps and buying time for himself to build this line of defense.

And how can he and his troops not be cannon fodder? The kings of the main nest did not expect that they would be able to lead their troops to block the attack of the mysterious ants, and the defense line of [Purple Leaf Li City], in the eyes of the males of the main nest, was just a buffer position set up to buy some more time for the defense of the main nest.

The loss of [Purple Leaf Li Cheng] is not a question of "yes" or "no" in the eyes of those kings, but a question of "when".

But Suzaku doesn't care about this, ants don't value the life and death of individuals, any individual ant can be sacrificed in front of the collective, and the individuals themselves also have this awareness, they are not particularly afraid of death outside of the survival instinct of living beings.

Suzaku thinks it's an honor to be given this task, and he's scrappy—even if he can't stop the enemy here, he'll have to pay a high price for these mysterious invaders. This is the greatest contribution she can make to this collective, to this historic country.

It's just that the friendly forces in front of him have collapsed faster than expected, and now the overall defense of [Purple Leaf Li City] and its surrounding lair has not been fully completed, which will obviously have a certain adverse impact on the next defensive battle.

The defense facilities of the paving ant barbarian country are not as hierarchical and reasonable as the legion of the Divine Envoy King, with trenches, earthen walls, and underground facilities.

The defenses of the paving ant barbarians are a single underground part, and these underground fortifications are no different from ordinary ant nests.

The so-called enhanced defense means expanding the underground nest as much as possible, and wants to expand horizontally and vertically, so that it can accommodate more soldiers and food. The underground environment, which becomes more complex as the lair expands, can also make attacking enemies dizzy to a certain extent, while defenders who are familiar with the terrain can flexibly attack in all directions of underground passages without worrying about being divided and surrounded by enemies - this is the only thing the defenders can rely on.

Now, the underground defense facilities of [Purple Leaf Li City] have only been expanded by eighty percent, while the other nests have been completed by less than sixty or seventy percent.

However, the enemy's approach was imminent, and Suzaku had to let the legions under the command of the male ants that had been trained in [Purple Leaf Li City] one after another, and stationed in other sub-nests to prepare for the upcoming battle.

- I'm the dividing line -

It was a cloudless, sunny summer day with temperatures on the high side.

Paver ants don't like the heat, preferring to hide in their underground nests** at midday, or in the shade of vegetation.

But after a period of war, the commanders of the paving ants understood that the mysterious ants were very fond of attacking in such weather, and they did not even hide from the blazing sun, but dared to march long distances under the scorching sun.

Not afraid of the heat or the cold, these mysterious ants are indeed exaggerated.

In order to guard against the enemy's attack, the scouts under the command of Suzaku have already been scattered, and there are scouts of paving ants all the way to the north of the two auxiliary nests on the front line at a distance of about three or four hours.

These scouts can only stay on the farthest cordon for a quarter of an hour in such a hot hour, and then have to go back to their nests or surface water sources to rehydrate. For this reason, Suzaku can only send a large number of scouts to rotate.

The reason why it is necessary to spend such a large amount of money to prevent enemy attacks in advance. In the previous battle with the mysterious ants, the scout troops that the paving ants were proud of did not bring an advantage on the battlefield.

The way these mysterious ants fight is so strange that they obviously don't send scouts, but they can always accurately grasp the location of the main force of the paving ant barbarian army, and then launch a surprise attack before the paving ant army gets an early warning, turning the battle into a scuffle.

This severely weakened the numerical superiority of the Paving Ant Barbarian Army.

In order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, Suzaku, who is good at summing up experience, scatters scouts in large numbers at any cost, even if many ants suffer from heat stroke.

Fortunately, the ants are still more resistant to heat than cold, and this attrition is completely acceptable.

The hard work paid off, and the scouts of Suzaku really discovered the actions of the mysterious ant force in advance.

A mysterious ant army formed two columns, winding in the distance, advancing in an arc under the sun.

Although the paving ant scouts who were on standby not far away were not as eyesighted as the other party, the boat turned around and immediately turned around and fled when they sensed that the enemy was already killing in a rage.

The speed of the Paving Ant Warrior is only slightly faster than that of the Mysterious Ant, and if the Mysterious Ant appears within half an hour's distance of the main force of the Paving Ant Barbarian Army and is discovered by the scouts, then the Scout will not be able to provide enough time for the large army to set up the formation even if he runs back to warn.

But this time, the fortified nest was still three or four hours away, and the paver ant scouts had plenty of time.

Along the way, there were also Paving Ant Scout Warriors who rushed to meet them, and these warriors immediately relayed and went to various parts of the nest territory, and other nests in the rear, and quickly spread the news of the enemy's attack.

Losing the advantage of surprise attack, the mysterious ant force could not weaken the defenders in the ground field battle first, and had to plunge into a hard-fought underground attack battle - this is exactly the wishful thinking of Suzaku.

There are about a thousand of this attacking mysterious ant army, and they are the vanguard of the large army. Such a force already has extremely strong combat effectiveness, and the battle examples of the Paving Ant Barbarian Army defeating a thousand enemy warriors in the enemy's engagement do not add up to the number of ant limbs (ants have six limbs).

This mysterious ant vanguard has been attacking the city all the way, fighting invincibility, and is far away from the large army for two or three days.

But they didn't feel anything wrong, and they still took the initiative to attack, even if this time the mysterious ants sensed that the enemy was coming, they would not be afraid.

This is the psychology that long-term victories produce. If there is a writer among the mysterious ants, maybe they will summarize the sentence "The mysterious ants are less than a thousand, and if they are full of thousands, they are invincible".

Arriving at the nest at the very front of the Suzaku defensive position, the force quickly threw itself into the assault on the underground defenders.

Thus began a defensive war.