Chapter 1507 - 1234: Hulmatu's Sudden Collapse

What surprised Song Heping was that the collapse of Hulmatu happened much faster than he imagined.

Without artillery, the 1515 Armed Forces inside Hulmatu City became sitting ducks.

Song Heping ordered the "Liberation Forces" to deploy all technical soldiers and modify the "suicide" drones overnight.

The previous operation opened a new world for him.

Turns out drones can be used like this...

Although these things fly slow and aren't very high.

But they are cheap and relatively stealthy in flight.

Infantry with guns find it difficult to shoot them down.

Even if shot down, the loss is minimal.

In the following days, the 1515 Armed Forces hiding in the city enjoyed the "treatment" of drones flying overhead daily, searching house by house.

As long as any house showed signs of 1515 personnel coming and going, it wouldn't be long before a drone carrying explosives would fly there, crashing inside.

In just two days, more than three hundred drones were used, blasting over three hundred hidden spots of the 1515 Armed Forces.

Although there were over twenty thousand 1515 militants in the city, three hundred drones killed only about a thousand people, but the fear brought by this mode of combat was unprecedented.

The 1515 extremists hiding in the city were panicked, not even daring to send out patrol squads, because in just 5 days, more than a dozen patrol squads were attacked by drones during their vigilance patrols.

Those drones seemed to hover in the air like ghosts every day, pouncing on any 1515 members and sending them to meet their Allah.

What was more fatal was the evolving drone technology organized by the "Liberation Forces."

Initially, they just dropped mortar rounds, later they developed to directly tying explosives or hand grenades and installing simple trigger mechanisms, crashing and blasting both people and houses sky-high.

On the third day.

Samir came to the command headquarters to report to Song Heping, saying someone inside Hulmatu City raised a white flag, seemingly wanting to surrender.

Song Heping told Samir to check it out and accept if it was surrender.

Subduing the enemy without fighting is the best strategy.

By evening, new news came.

The 1515 Armed Forces inside Hulmatu had indeed surrendered.

Samir sent a battalion inside and quickly reported back. There were only a few thousand 1515 soldiers left; the rest of the twenty thousand had been fleeing continuously at night for the past two days. Their fighting spirit had completely collapsed.

In the afternoon twilight, after everything was arranged, Song Heping led the main troops to enter the city formally.

Entering the city, Song Heping's first feeling was - this place is worse than Hell.

He rolled down a slit of the bulletproof car window, and the mixed smell of gunpowder, burnt flesh, and corpse stench immediately wafted in, making him frown sharply.

Damn it, this smell was like mixing a powder magazine, a crematorium, and a garbage dump all together, then fermenting under Illiguo's blazing sun for three days and nights.

"Chief, should we close the window?"

The driver couldn't help but ask.

"No need."

Song Heping waved his hand and his gaze scraped like a knife across the streets on both sides.

Hulmatu was finished.

It once could be considered a peaceful small town by the Tigris River.

Now?

Calling it a branch of Hell on Earth would be flattering.

Looking around, not a single intact building, all were ruins with broken walls and debris scattered everywhere.

The Hummer tires gingerly rolled over the ruins, occasionally needing to avoid the craters created by the precise drone bombings or the patches of already coagulated and blackened blood pools - that color, a dark red so bright it shone, glinting eerily under the sunlight.

Quiet, deathly quiet.

"Damn, this smell..."

Jiang Feng sitting in the front passenger seat mumbled, pulling the multifunctional field scarf on his face higher, almost covering his eyes, "It's even stronger than the manure pit baking in the summer back home!"

No one laughed at him.

Everyone in the vehicle had tense faces, even their breathing was light.

Not out of fear, but disgust.

The aroma in the air was too complicated -

The smell of sulfur from burnt gunpowder, the burnt odor of charred wood and stone, the sweet and putrid stench of bodies rapidly decaying under high temperatures, and most infuriating of all, a...

Like the charred smell of overcooked roasted meat, the "masterpiece" of burning human protein.

All these smells mixed together, thick like a solid, stuck to the face, invaded the lungs, impossible to wash off.

The convoy slowly advanced along the Main Street entering the city.

The scene in the city center was even more weighty.

"The area heavily favored by flying shells."

Song Heping coldly snorted in his heart.

Alongside the roads, those once arrogant armed pickups now lay askew, twisted into heaps of scrap metal.

Some were directly hit, leaving nothing but a scorched black chassis frame, the mounted guns, ammunition along with the occupants, probably blown to bits.

Tangled metal frames protruded, resembling abstract sculptures in a modern art museum, exuding a sinister deathly aura.

Scattered on the ground were not only shattered glass and shell casings but many metal tubes with fins attached -

The "masterpiece" of modified drones, the wings that once sent shells flying, now war debris.

But these pale in comparison to those "people."

Or rather, things that were once human.

Song Heping's eyes glanced behind a broken wall.

A guy lay there clutching an AK tightly, but his upper body was gone, torn into minced meat by shock waves and prefabricated fragments, red and white splattered across half of the wall.

Another guy even more absolute, curled up in a crater in the corner, thinking he'd found safety, but was blasted into pieces along with his cover by an attack from above, leaving only some unidentifiable fragments.