Chapter 617: Fourth Pixel War

The Fourth Pixel War had begun.

A horde of mosaic-pixel creatures, astride bizarre black-and-grey pixel-horned horses, brandished wooden knives and charged! The ground, already incredibly solid on this high-gravity planet, still yielded to these fearsome creatures, leaving deep indentations with every step.

A thunderous rumble! The ground seemed to boil, kicking up thick clouds of dust.

At that moment, everyone researching the pixels froze, dumbfounded on the battlement walls of the stronghold.

"Holy crap!"

"Monster siege!"

"The people from the pixel village?"

"Oh my god! This world isn't friendly to us at all! Aren't these pixel tribes supposed to be able to trade supplies with us amicably?"

"Exactly! Logically, these NPCs should be mindlessly walking around their villages, leaving their doors open for us to just walk in, rummaging through every single chest that's inexplicably present in every house, and taking whatever we want, right?"

Boom! Their footsteps vibrated the ground. They were all stunned, their faces contorted with terror and panic.

"This is brutal! According to Archimedes' principle and Fermi's principle, we can calculate that each of them weighs an average of three hundred kilograms! That's terrifying! Each one is equivalent to the weight of a Siberian tiger!"

"Humanoid beasts, oh no! We're going to die!!"

Three hundred people stood on the city wall, and from thousands of meters away, they could already feel the ground being crushed by countless iron cavalry; the momentum was simply astounding.

Bai Xiaojun's expression remained calm as he glanced around.

"Brothers, our blood boils! We, three hundred warriors, what's one battle to us!?"

"Others thought we were cowards, mere idiots! But those were just a few rotten apples spoiling the broth! We are all utterly righteous warriors! We are upright and passionate!"

He raised his wooden longsword high. "Though they are strong, though they are cavalry, what do we infantry fear? Follow me, let's charge out!"

"The northern winds carry the sound of the watchman's clapper, cold light gleams on iron armor. Generals die in a hundred battles, brave soldiers return after ten years!"

He roared. Those behind him roared in unison. Countless others, holding longswords and clad in crude wooden armor, showed their burning fighting spirit, their faces filled with fierce determination.

"The northern winds carry the sound of the watchman's clapper, cold light gleams on iron armor. Generals die in a hundred battles, brave soldiers return after ten years!"

The city gates swung wide open. Instead of defending the fortress, everyone was determined to fight out with ferocity.

At that moment, countless faces were grim. The three hundred, like the Spartan 300, showed their resolve to die, and charged out with immense vigor.

From above, billowing dust was all that could be seen as the two armies charged before the fortress: one side, iron cavalry; the other, infantry. The disparity in combat strength was immense.

The screen recording had already begun!

"Uru! Lu!—" the leading tribesman roared, a flicker of disdain in his eyes. Since their mutation, they had become these granular creatures, their bodies possessing the heavy and hard structure of their Mother Planet, the Earth. These other beings were too small; a single charge would likely crush them to death!

However, the leading tribesman felt a touch of admiration; their courage to charge against them showed the tribe's resilience and defiance, which was indeed worthy of respect.

"Uru Lu!—" He issued the command: charge at full speed! In the next second, they would be completely overrun!

Crunch!

But in the very next second, as they charged, they entered a stretch of grassland ahead, and suddenly, the ground seemed to collapse beneath them. The entire iron cavalry unit instantly plunged underground.

Beneath the collapsed ground were countless sharpened wooden stakes, densely packed and erected on wooden planks.

"Uru! Lu!"

It was a trap!!

In their final moments, one of the pixel tribesmen's leaders roared, commanding the entire tribe's warriors to retreat. But it was too late. To unleash their full charge and overwhelm the enemy, they had propelled their warhorses forward at maximum terrifying speed. The greater their weight, the harder it was to brake. They were now like heavy trucks, helplessly hurtling towards a cliff filled with sharpened stakes, unable to stop!

Booming! A mass of horse-mounted riders, seemingly suicidal, crashed thunderously into the abyss.

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

Sharp stakes pierced through their chests. The entire army vanished in an instant.

Moments later, Bai Xiaojun and his group walked over, directing a team of people.

"Locate the injured!" Bai Xiaojun commanded.

Soon, a group searched within and found the leading chieftain, barely clinging to life on the spikes, his vitality so tenacious he refused to die.

"Drag him out!"

It took Bai Xiaojun and his team immense effort to drag out the minor chieftain.

"This monster is probably a high-tier fifth-stage creature, weighing a full thousand kilograms! Absolutely inhuman!" Bai Xiaojun felt a shudder. "In a vacuum world, there are only a few ways to communicate... mouth on the ground for vibrational communication... pheromone communication... and spiritual sense communication." Clearly, these creatures communicate via pheromones. Could their ancestors have been insects?

But for him, it didn't matter. As a fifth-stage powerhouse, he could still use a form of spiritual consciousness communication, transcending language barriers. Compared to this indigenous civilization, they possessed vast knowledge.

Beside him, someone exclaimed, "Indeed, our moats with ground spikes are very effective. We covered them with turf and dug them all around the city... Normally, our weight wouldn't trigger them, but these monsters are different."

"This encircling trap is simply brilliant!"

"Sure enough, the game didn't lie to me; this kind of trap is truly powerful!"

Everyone around them was joyous. Their acting was also very convincing; otherwise, how could they have tricked them into a full-speed charge? If it hadn't been a full-speed charge, at most only the frontmost mosaic knights would have been unable to stop, and it certainly wouldn't have been a complete annihilation.

But of course. Given their ability to survive and their shrewd development, combined with their inherent intelligence, how could they not have anticipated preparing for barbarian attacks? Thousands of years have passed from ancient warfare to modern warfare; their accumulated experience in this field was more than enough to crush these primitive planetary natives.

What was this called? This was called intellectual dominance!

Whoosh!

"Can you hear me?" Bai Xiaojun's voice resonated in the spiritual sense.

"Uru?"

"Hello, my name is Onii-chan."

"Uru?"

"Can you speak?"

"Uru?"

"Your mother is dead!"

The barbarian pixel tribesman flew into a rage. "You insult our planet, the Mother Goddess! Sooner or later, you'll be my wife and bear my children! Let me go, if you have the guts, fight me head-on!"

Become your wife? Bai Xiaojun was utterly appalled! Where did this guy get his information? Why would he so casually expose such a painful weakness? Or perhaps the pixel planet has such extreme tastes? Is the reproductive system of these pixel creatures so unusual? So wild and bloody, and insulting someone's mother somehow implicates the entire planet?

He had a vague feeling that something was off.

"Don't blame us for being ruthless; blame yourselves for your lack of ingenuity and your ignorance of the laws of physics!" Bai Xiaojun began to negotiate.

"As barbarians, you believe weight is an advantage, allowing you to form iron cavalry units. It's precisely this unique advantage, I'm sure, that has allowed you to dominate this planet. But it's also your weakness... It has made you feel invincible, eliminating the need to think about wisdom and strategy, leaving you perpetually savage."

"Your intelligence is too low!" Bai Xiaojun took a step forward and said coldly, "If your barbaric planet grows complacent, failing to prepare for danger, it will be conquered by creatures from other planets. Your entire planet, your entire race, will be enslaved!"

"Uru??"

"Do you understand the Law of Universal Gravitation?"

"Do you understand relative motion?"

"Do you understand the proportional formula for mass and velocity?"

The voice in his mind continuously echoed, taunting and provoking the minor chieftain. Indeed, this time, the opponent was utterly bewildered!

He couldn't hold back. "You killed our weakest tribe, but you will all die eventually! There are seven other tribes nearby, far stronger than us!"

These indigenous barbarian tribes truly didn't have high average intelligence, lacking even a developed language, but as soon as they heard this, everyone's scalp tingled with dread. The first wave of attack could be handled with intellectual dominance, but what about later?

Everyone fell silent, then erupted in uproar.

"There's another wave of monster attacks coming? That's too difficult!"

"Is this some damn tower defense game? Farming, developing technology, and resisting wave after wave of attacks?"

"We need to try and persuade this guy to become a traitor, then research their bloodline and genes."

Days passed, and the traps were reset and cleared. Meanwhile, they continued their research into workbenches and furnaces, aiming to climb the true technological ladder. And they studied the pixelated life structures of this planet.

"Their brains are also pixel blocks, made of the same structure as their limbs!"

"No cell differentiation? Their entire bodies are made of the same mysterious granular cells?"

"Yes, logically, without brain cells, and with their brains being entirely granular, it should be impossible for consciousness and soul to form. But these particles are very peculiar; one particle can perform the function of all cells, including brain cells, and their souls are still stored."

A group of mad scientists began their research.

However, this time, the tribal barbarians returned.

"Uru!"

And this time, they brought cylindrical logs. People continuously moved ahead, tapping the ground to slowly clear a path forward, like defusing mines...

Crunch! Their turf-covered traps were instantly discovered.

"Uru!"

They began to lay out the logs, arranging them flat on the ground to serve as a bridge, preparing to cross over. Everyone fell silent, a chill rising straight up their spines.

"What the hell?"

"The second wave, they're using logs now? They're going to build a bridge to cross?"

"These guys aren't as stupid as we thought! Someone must have been observing the last battle and reported back about our traps."

"Their intelligence is quite high. When brute force alone couldn't defeat us, and they realized their military might wasn't supreme, they started learning from us!"

"The natives of this planet had been complacent, but now facing crisis, their growth rate has exceeded our expectations."

At this moment, they understood the taste of fear.

With a surge! In an instant, all the pixel creatures crossed the moat, bridged the gap, and climbed over, launching an attack on the stronghold.

"Second stage activated!" Bai Xiaojun ordered.

Clank!

On the stronghold, massive wooden ballistas were pushed out. Countless bolts could be fired in rapid succession, each loaded with nine colossal arrows, resembling a Gatling gun's rotating mechanism. These were precision ballistas, crafted by them according to modern optimized designs. Against these solid, high-density pixel creatures, bows, firearms, or even gunpowder, were less effective than these ballistas.

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

A deluge of wooden arrows, dense and continuous like spring rain, blanketed the entire area. In an instant, these pixel creatures who had crossed the bridge suddenly found their retreat cut off. The bridge behind them was narrow, and they frantically scrambled back, crowding onto it. The entire fan-shaped area within the moat became a sitting duck; no aiming was needed.

"Did they think getting into the moat meant victory? This is called 'shutting the door and beating the dog!'"

"Doesn't this feel a bit like Plants vs. Zombies? Resisting wave after wave of native attacks?"

Countless people on the wall remarked. They successfully weathered this siege as well.

A few more days passed... To the utter astonishment of this group of players, the pixel tribesmen launched another attack. Extremely persistent. Incredibly stubborn. This time, they again sent scouts to detect traps, identifying the moat's boundaries. Then, they erected logs to bridge the gap. Simultaneously, on their wooden knives, they now had new equipment:

Super-sized round shields. Thick and massive, they even required two pixel creatures to move. Working in pairs, they slowly pushed the round shields, steadily advancing, much like heavy shield-bearers in ancient warfare.

"What the heck?"

"They're evolving that fast?"

"They can even use shields now to block volleys of arrows!"

"This is a troop type from the city-state era, for crying out loud!"

Everyone was utterly stunned. The intelligence of these natives was definitely not low; they kept devising various methods to continuously approach them.

Now, traps were useless... Ranged attacks were useless... The enemy was practically an iron block. Were they just going to watch them climb the city walls? Be overrun?

"Don't panic," Bai Xiaojun took a deep breath. They still had measures to resist the enemy's attack. "Execute the final plan."

CRACK!

In an instant, the entire massive city wall, which had been bound by cylindrical logs, suddenly disintegrated. All the natives looked up. A colossal shadow fell from the sky, engulfing everything. The thick city wall transformed into a massive slab, crashing down with a roar. The entire attacking native force was covered and crushed into a bloody pulp.

"Boss, you're brilliant! To have thought of such a move!"

"That's amazing!"

Those nearby couldn't contain their excitement.

Bai Xiaojun commanded, "Pull the lever, raise it up." Someone immediately pulled the massive wooden rollers connected to ropes, and the section of the wall that had fallen slowly began to rise...

"Next time, we're probably doomed." Bai Xiaojun ignored the cheers around him, his expression growing troubled. "They'll likely find a way to overcome the wall next time, but we're almost there too. Once they attack again, we'll completely pull the rug out from under them..."

But in the very next second, his expression drastically changed. Because he saw a new group of tribesmen suddenly emerge from the shadows!

Uru! They began rushing towards the wall, which had not yet fully risen, preparing to climb inside.

"Holy crap!"

Everyone's scalp tingled with dread. These natives? These pixel creatures? Were they really so stupid? At this very moment, with the wall having fallen and now rising, this was the defense's fatal weakness—an opportunity to climb inside. They had assumed this weakness would be discovered in the next wave, but they hadn't expected the enemy to be so much smarter this time, hiding a team in the shadows and now seizing the moment to decisively attack.

"This time, are we going to be caught?"

"We were so close to finishing by the next attack, who knew..."

The players watched, wide-eyed, as a group of natives roared and rushed into the city wall, wielding stone knives. They climbed inside. Their eyes were bloodshot and gleaming with excitement. It was a look of raw, primitive savagery. As if the many fallen comrades were inconsequential. Red-faced, frenzied, and exhilarated, as if ready to enjoy the spoils of victory. It was like a band of eager men bursting into a pleasure house, having spotted their prize.

"What... what do you want?" Their minds a blur, they instinctively blurted out the question.