A few minutes after the aircrafts ascended to fight the Bair fighters’ weird contraption, the order was given out to fire all of the artillery that had been set up long in advance. To everyone watching, this fight would decide which side would be able to be victorious. The fighting was fierce, one plane was shot down after another, one artillery destroyed in the same way. Despite all of the losses that the coalition was taking, they were making some form of progress in the way that there were fewer shells and bullets coming out of the mysterious plane every minute. It took quite a while, but it seemed that the enemy plane had sustained quite a bit of damage and was in fact slowly losing altitude. This could be it, this could be how they triumph.

After another few hours of this combat, the contraption was already at half of the altitude that it was when it first showed up, but it seemed to get closer to the base. All of the coalition’s military aircraft were given the order to fire everything they had at it. They continued to make progress until they nearly brought it down. Just as it hit 1 kilometer in altitude, it dropped something that everyone knew was something not to be trifled with. It was the “Little Boy” that had been used against Madam Zheng in the previous tournament. There was nothing they could do but witness the absolute destruction that it caused before the thing finally fell, by its’ own bomb no less.

This was a cause for celebration, they seem to have taken out their most powerful enemy, not all that remained was for them to fight each other for control of the first spot in the competition. However, none of the top brass could believe that the Bair fighters were gone just like that, it was just way too easy. If they weren’t there to defend their bases, and they weren’t there to command that giant airship, then what could they be doing at a moment like this?

The top brass was quite concerned about this and it kept them from calling off the coalition temporarily. As shameful as it was to admit, many of them were not able to hold a candle to the Bair fighters, and even the ones who did not have the blueprints to take them head-on. This was a tricky opponent and it would require so much more than this coalition to bring them to their knees. What could they do now except wait for the enemy to make their next move? Although this was the thought process of a very few select top brass members, the vast majority of the other strategists genuinely believed that they have beaten the Bair fighters.

Who could really blame them? After all, the territory of the Bair fighters had already been taken over by the coalition. The seemingly final weapon that they had up their sleeve had been taken out. Could they really have prepared for all of this in advance?

Even after one month of waiting, there really was nothing out of the ordinary. They had not been attacked, they had not even seen the Bair fighters at all during all of this. Perhaps their reasoning was lacking in some ways, but none of that mattered as many of the strategists were getting antsy over having to stay still and not fight for so long that they were getting rather rowdy. To appease this majority, the top brass of each faction finally called off the coalition to return to their own territory with the added bonus of carving the Bair fighters’ territory up 4 ways.

After a few months of consolidating their own forces, every faction began to do battle with each other all at once. This was possible due to all 4 factions bordering each other whereas before they were only bordering the Bair fighters and two other factions. As expected, the two most prominent factions, the Yellow Wang faction and the Sun Alliance faction came out on top after doing battle with the others for the better part of a year. The reason that it took so long was due to the fact that there was a lot of land in each factions’ territory and it would take massive amounts of resources and manpower to fully take over another faction.

The first one to fall was the coalition faction named the Leftovers as they had the least synergy between them. Even then, the top strategist of that bunch tended to contradict each others’ orders and eventually, that became their downfall. Most likely, they would have split up if any of them had any confidence in going head to head with the other remaining factions. In a few risky plays, the Yellow Wang faction was able to take out the Leftovers faction relatively shortly. On the other hand, it took the Sun Alliance quite a bit to take over and completely destroy the Middle Kingdom faction.

Now that there were only a few of them left, it made absolutely no sense to fight in an area so big. So they all decided that it was best to shrink down the map to a fifth of its size. What was once a 250 kilometer squared simulation map, instantly turned into a 50 kilometer squared map. It was now time for the final lap of the Sun Alliance tournament.

Despite all of this though, Lian Po, Wang Jian, Bai Qi, Li Mu, and a couple of elders from the Sun Alliance were still not able to shake off the fact that there was still something more than the Bair fighters could be hiding from them. Of course, their gut feelings were not really based on any concrete evidence, but they felt like it was best to be on guard if anything were to occur. It would be a real shame to have come all this way, fighting for a couple of years, to just lose at this point.