I can upgrade the shelter-Chapter 653 - 551: The Battle Pauses Briefly

The evacuation work was proceeding tensely yet orderly. Despite the need to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people, thanks to a pre-prepared evacuation plan by the city government, there have been no issues so far.

The military relied on planting bombs in already evacuated shelters, and the air force used earth-penetrating bombs and other means to delay the alien creatures’ invasion of the city as much as possible.

Overall, the situation has finally stabilized.

Although the city still had to be abandoned, the confrontation between humans and alien creatures has gradually turned from fierce combat to a battle of attrition.

On the human side, there is no effective means to counter the underground offensive of the alien creatures, forcing the abandonment of cities along the Dongting Lake shores. Meanwhile, the alien creatures have suffered tremendous casualties.

Unlike the human military, which, thanks to advanced equipment, has not suffered significant losses but has expended vast amounts of ammunition, the alien creatures have lost a large number of individual entities.

Even though these alien creatures’ social structure resembles that of a hive, with combat sub-bodies and worker ant sub-bodies serving as cannon fodder and expendables, they have still had a massive reduction in forces due to the carpet bombing by humans and the subsequent continued large-scale attacks.

This has effectively changed their once unstoppable momentum to a state of being somewhat stretched.

But this does not mean the alien creatures are incapacitated.

Even though the loss of combat sub-bodies and worker ant sub-bodies has significantly weakened the overall number of the group, the mother bodies and hatching grounds hidden underground remain undamaged. For the alien creatures, replenishing forces is simply a matter of additional hatching cycles.

Especially when these alien creatures realized their substantial individual losses, they accelerated the hatching of sub-bodies through their mother bodies and hatching grounds, speeding up the replenishment of their forces.

Accelerating the hatch rate of sub-bodies, while greatly shortening their lifespan and affecting physical quality, allows for a rapid increase in sub-body numbers in a short period.

Since none survive more than three minutes on the battlefield, there is no difference between using the cheap fast-produced sub-bodies and the more expensive standard sub-bodies, right?

Though they’re just a group of alien creatures, their group has a highly intelligent individual. Even without human-level intelligence, they quickly learn these strategies on the battlefield.

While continuing to send reinforcements to the battlefield, this leader of the group also gradually changes strategy, beginning to recover the corpses of sub-bodies fallen in battle to recycle biomass.

For these alien creatures, the battle is essentially a war of mass. As long as there is enough biomass, the group can continuously hatch sub-bodies to send into battle until the opponent is completely overwhelmed.

For civilizations still on the planetary surface, they just can’t compete in a war of mass against them, who can regenerate endlessly.

In the inherited memory of their group genes, they have invaded numerous life planets, always relying on their astounding reproductive ability and formidable combat power, eventually submerging entire planets with overwhelming numbers of sub-bodies like an ocean.

However, this time, the planet they chose seems problematic. Not only is the entire planet covered in ice and snow, but the surface also lacks organic material and biomass, forcing the group to rely on geothermal energy conversion, significantly slowing their expansion.

If this group of alien creatures had invaded Blue Star before the disaster, relying on their strong reproductive ability, it wouldn’t have been just the Dongting Lake Area seeing a biological invasion, but the entire Yangtze River Basin.

At present, humans are unaware of this. However, as human research into alien creatures continues, they will eventually learn this.

As for how to completely eliminate these alien creatures and expel them from Blue Star, even Chen Xin currently has no clue.

Although there are ways to completely eradicate these creatures, Chen Xin is still entangled with the tasks at hand, unable to spare the time or thoughts to consider how to annihilate these invading alien creatures.

While organizing the evacuation of cities around Dongting Lake, the high command is also seriously considering the possibility of using nuclear weapons in the lake area.

After all, once the population around the city is evacuated, restrictions and constraints on using weapons of mass destruction like nuclear weapons are much reduced, allowing the high command to consider their deployment.

Currently, however, the high command is uncertain whether nuclear weapons can effectively damage alien creatures. Considering the potential impacts of using nuclear weapons on their own land, while there is such a notion, it is prepared only as a last resort.

For now, the high command hopes to rely on conventional military forces to deal with these alien creatures emerging from underground.

However, while the military can hold its defensive lines on the front, it is unlikely they can effectively eliminate these alien creatures at present.

After learning that most of the population from the rear cities has been evacuated, the military ceased using hard-hitting tactics, gradually pulling back lines, reducing the intensity of shelling and bombing to conserve ammunition.

Maintaining high-intensity air force bombings and shelling can indeed inflict effective damage to alien creatures, but it results in astounding ammunition consumption.

Though people often complain about Flame Country’s excessive ammunition reserves, with tons destroyed annually due to expiration, there is a logistics transportation and supply process between storing it in warehouses and consuming it on the battlefield.

Blowing things up on the front lines is certainly exhilarating, but it also burdens logistics with complaints.

Usually, the more intense the action on the front lines, the louder the complaints from logistics, as they are directly proportional.

After all, every bullet used by the front lines must be transported little by little by logistics.

Even though Flame Country has quite a robust and comprehensive logistics system, in such sudden large-scale warfare, the amount of ammunition that can reach the battlefield and the front line has its limits.

After such a prolonged period of high-intensity combat, the ammunition carried by the frontline troops is nearly exhausted, and the supplies sent by logistics have also been heavily consumed. Overall, maintaining the previous high intensity of firepower will face some supply issues.

Now that most city residents have been evacuated, the corresponding supply of transported ammunition has also been somewhat affected.

Therefore, after evaluating the battlefield situation, the military decided to gradually withdraw.