Chapter 131: Chapter 109: One City Against the World

After the declaration of war was announced to the entire world, the mobilized forces of the major financial groups began to close in from all directions.

Under these circumstances, anyone with a god’s-eye view would see Night City as a lone skiff on a storm-tossed sea, in constant danger of being capsized and lost.

Hundreds of thousands of troops, nearly a million strong, had Night City completely surrounded.

They cut off nearly every path of retreat.

It was truly one city against the entire world.

Before the war even began, the outside world widely assumed the citizens of Night City would flee in droves. Several neighboring cities even prepared to drive away the anticipated refugees.

Yet, contrary to all expectations, under the mounting, terrifying pressure from the outside world, the people of Night City did not scatter like loose sand.

On the contrary, not once in the centuries since the city’s founding had the people of Night City been so tightly united.

Its nearly ten million inhabitants were bound together as one.

They stood firmly behind the Emperor of Night City.

…

This unprecedented, world-sweeping conflict came to be known by outsiders and later generations as the Sixth Company War.

The previous major conflicts had not been far apart. The Fourth Company War, which took place two hundred years ago, was a war between nations and corporations.

At that time, the world’s national governments had not yet completely withered away. They mustered all their strength in an attempt to overthrow the corporations and preserve their rule.

Through their control of various advanced technologies and immense capital, the corporations mobilized an army of nearly a million. With that one war, they utterly defeated the governments, bringing an end to the era of nation-states ruling the world.

The Fifth Company War occurred a century ago and was a war fought between the corporations themselves.

That war was even more brutal than the fourth. The entire world was plunged into conflict, and it was from the ashes of that war that today’s Ten Major Financial Groups rose to power.

And now, with the Sixth Company War, the fate of the world had clearly arrived at another crossroads.

An irreconcilable conflict had erupted between the group of rogue Transcendents, represented by Night City’s Yunxiao Group, and nine other major corporations, led by the Advanced Technology Group.

To preserve the supreme, unchallenged global dominance of capital and the financial groups,

Night City had to be dismantled.

The path to systematically cultivating Transcendents had to be controlled by the corporate bloc. If it could not be controlled, it would have to be utterly destroyed.

To any outside observer, it was undoubtedly a fight with no hope of victory.

After all, compared to the forces commanded by the belligerents in the previous two wars, Night City’s strength was simply far too meager.

It seemed pathetically weak in the face of the ravenous corporate alliance.

While the major groups weren’t quite so dismissive, they still didn’t believe Yunxiao Group could make any significant waves against the overwhelming tide.

Thus, after mobilizing nearly a million troops to encircle Night City and ensure that not even a fly could escape, the major groups began their probing attacks.

Squadrons of drone fighters took off, flew over Night City, and dropped load after load of precision-guided munitions.

RUMBLE…

BANG!

Violent explosions echoed through the air.

Fortunately, before the drone-launched missiles could hit the ground, they were intercepted by Night City’s prepared anti-aircraft weaponry.

The interceptors exploded one after another in the sky, looking like bursts of fireworks from a distance. Shattered shrapnel and components rained down on the city below.

Dozens of large drones, each worth tens of millions, were shot down by the city’s surface-to-air missiles.

Yet the heads of the major groups didn’t even bat an eye.

Such a small price was not even worth mentioning in the effort to conquer an industrial metropolis of nearly ten million people, one that was counted among the domains of the Ten Major Financial Groups.

More and more drone fighters activated in the sky, while on the ground, robots controlled by a super-AI began the first charge, weapons in hand.

Modern warfare was no longer decided solely by population numbers.

Instead, it was a contest of technological sophistication, the number of available technical personnel, and most importantly—wartime industrial capacity.

While population still represented a portion of a belligerent’s combat strength,

its importance in modern warfare had long since diminished; it was certainly no longer the decisive factor it had been in the age of pre-modern warfare.

So the question was.

Was Night City—a city that had absorbed countless researchers from all over the world and built hundreds of factories—really so weak in the face of war?

No, Night City’s combat strength was not weak at all.

If its enemy hadn’t been a coalition of the Advanced Technology Group and eight other corporations, it was likely that no single financial group in the world could have conquered and dismembered Night City on its own.

In other words, it wasn’t that Night City was weak, but that the combined power of the corporate coalition was simply too strong.

And for that very reason,

to be on the safe side, the major groups used only unmanned assets for their initial probing attacks.

They hoped to use these attacks to feel out Night City’s capabilities. Once they had a grasp of some of its trump cards, they would send in human troops for the real fight.

Unlike human soldiers, robots are not subject to issues of morale.

This made them perfectly suited to serve as cannon fodder for probing the enemy’s defenses in the early stages of the war.

Their thinking was correct, because the people in Night City were thinking the exact same thing.

As if on the same wavelength, both sides simultaneously dispatched their own forces of robots and supersonic drone fighters to unleash a furious bombardment upon each other’s territory.

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