Marvel Magic Case Files

Chapter 1242 The Evil Witchcraft (First Update)

The Fire Knights' organizational structure is highly adaptable to the battlefield. A tactical squad of 10 Fire Knights is the smallest organizational unit in the legion. A knight captain can command two tactical squads led by sergeants, a tactical support squad equipped with individual heavy weapons, an anti-gravity jet motorcycle assault team, armored personnel carrier crews, knight adjutants, and guards.

Each Knight Company Commander can lead ten Knight Captains, plus company guards, special operations squads, reconnaissance squads, flight squads (various assault transport boats), medical squads, and mechanic squads (including five automated mechs and a quartermaster), etc. Since the Fire Knights are all mechanized units, armored vehicle crews, tank crews, self-propelled artillery crews, and anti-aircraft vehicle crews are also integrated under the command of each Knight Captain and Knight Company Commander. The First Knight Company Commander, Aparisha, has more than 800 combat personnel under his command, which is equivalent to the size of a reinforced battalion of a regular army.

Such an army is sufficient to conquer a city. Once the new genetically modified soldiers complete their secret training and psychological adjustment, the First Knight Company Commander, Aparisha, will be promoted to First Battle Group Commander. The ranks of officers at all levels will also be adjusted. The number of combatants will increase several times over, enabling them to handle even more challenging situations. The extremely flexible combat groups can adapt to most battlefield environments; therefore, less than half of the First Fire Knight Company was airdropped into combat, with the other half awaiting orders at the Skysword Space Station. Each knight captain can exert a strong sense of initiative. Aside from the pre-war strategy, knight captains do not need to completely obey orders from superiors during frontline combat; the individual abilities of the genetically modified soldiers are trustworthy.

A squadron of knights, equipped with self-propelled artillery and anti-aircraft vehicles drawn from the entire company, landed in the town where Camilla's squad had departed. There, they established a military blockade and provided artillery support to prevent any events that might affect the battlefield. After completing their missions, the flight formations either returned to SkySword Space Station and the temporary airfield to await further orders, or conducted patrol missions. The Mars Foundry engineering squadron, which landed after the first phase of operations, began constructing fortifications and an airfield at the company's base as a base for subsequent attacks, and continued ammunition resupply began to be delivered to the front lines via transport aircraft.

Inside a standard company command post constructed from electromagnetically shielded prefabricated panels, in addition to the towering figures of officers at all levels, holographic projections of officers who were not present could also be seen. The commander of the Imperial Guard, Constantine, as the host of the meeting, was about to issue the next phase of instructions to officers at all levels. In fact, these basic orders had already been sent to the information database of each officer's powered armor through combat codes. Therefore, the meeting to reiterate the combat orders lasted no more than ten minutes. All officers raised and resolved their questions and reaffirmed their tasks.

Harassment fire, electromagnetic pulse bombs, and non-lethal irritant gas bombs.

Even though Fire Knights rarely carry non-lethal weapons, they usually carry a few for tactical purposes. For example, the dense smoke produced by non-lethal irritant gas bombs can last for twenty minutes, rendering enemy troops hiding in well-ventilated shelters without gas masks largely incapable of fighting. Electromagnetic pulse bombs can paralyze enemy command centers, turning them into information islands, and other means can be used to intensify psychological pressure.

The Fire Knights were giving the Trinity mercenaries and the Kukulkan Order very little time. Each time the Fire Knights fired their shells, it startled the soldiers holding out at the ruins. The ensuing power outages and tear gas forced them to seek shelter in a drafty, safe place. Their warnings hadn't had any effect yet, but the Fire Knights hadn't stopped. Assault tanks and self-propelled artillery were on their way to deal with the impending massive target. The torrential rain slowed the work down considerably, and the sudden earthquake caught the Fire Knights' engineering platoon somewhat off guard. Fortunately, the earthquake in Paititi wasn't strong, and all the personnel quickly adapted and began reinforcing their fortifications.

At 1 p.m., the downpour intensified, and the entire rainforest seemed to be submerged in a white curtain of water.

The few mortal officers in the Fire Knights company had to wear fully enclosed breathing masks and goggles, otherwise they would be drenched in the torrential rain, unable to open their eyes or breathe properly, and almost everyone would feel like they were swimming on land. At the same time, the engineer squad began to increase the number of drainage ditches, and they even dug a reservoir to drain the water from the position.

However, as time went on, one reservoir became insufficient. Then, a sudden and violent earthquake caused the waterproof barriers and rocky hillsides to collapse and break. The engineering squad had to resume their work, using the mine-clearing buckets installed on the front of the Antaeus armored personnel carriers to push away rocks and silt to prevent them from blocking the road to the target.

At 3 p.m., the torrential rain that had lasted for more than five hours finally stopped, but then a series of earthquakes followed.

The violent shaking caused rocks to collapse on the mountainside, but before the engineers could blast or remove the soil and rocks, another earthquake struck, even more violently. Aparisha stood grimly in the prefabricated command post. The engineering team had forcibly dried the outer concrete with the heat released by the fusion weapon, which prevented the command post from collapsing like the other temporary buildings.

Before him, reports from the Wakanda Earthquake Observatory and the Immortal City Earthquake Observatory poured into his command dashboard. Aparisha could clearly see the earthquake epicenter moving towards Paititi, from deeper to shallower, getting closer and closer to the surface. He had seen the dossier of the burrowing worm; the waveform diagrams used to represent the magnitude and epicenter looked to him like a giant worm wriggling in the earth's crust, slowly approaching them from underground. The constantly ringing, faint alarms sounded to him like a long, sticky malice, lingering in his mind, impossible to shake off.

The General Staff and the Immortal City's research department compared the data from the burrowing worm incident with this earthquake, discovering that compared to the previous earthquake on the East Coast, this earthquake had a larger area, a stronger magnitude, and a deeper epicenter, as if it had emerged from the Earth's mantle. The earthquake spread outwards from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, as if the kinetic energy from the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs was being released again after hundreds of millions of years. Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia all experienced earthquakes of varying severity, and the astonishing rainfall caused numerous floods, as if disaster was spreading across the land of South America.

Furthermore, earthquakes also struck Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Florida, in particular, was still recovering from the previous major earthquake on the East Coast. This earthquake, coupled with torrential rains, turned almost all resort areas into disaster zones, forcing the state government to issue a tsunami warning and urge all residents living in the surrounding areas to evacuate inland and avoid flooded areas. The federal government had no time to concern itself with Emperor Latvian's visit to Cuba; all departments of the United States were currently preoccupied with their own problems. Faced with the immense power of nature, humanity remains consistently small.

Although the General Staff had a contingency plan for emergency evacuation in the event of a natural disaster, Aparisha was still uneasy.

He clearly realized that the current situation was absolutely not something that the alien giant insect that caused the massive earthquake on the East Coast of the United States and its race could have accomplished. Although the Sky Battleships had killed the alien creature with their laser cannons last time, what they were facing this time could not be so easily eliminated. None of the records contained any creature capable of causing torrential rains and earthquakes across half the Earth. The fact that Paititi had not yet been submerged could only be attributed to the land's flood control capabilities.

Witchcraft, it can only be witchcraft.

Please vote for me!

(End of this chapter)