Fifteen minutes past twelve at night.
Fifteen kilometers outside Hulmatu City, inside an abandoned farm, Song Heping's temporary command center was set up here.
Song Heping was not staying inside an oppressive command vehicle but had moved a folding chair to sit under the shadow of a half-collapsed earthen wall. In front of him, a battle map crowded with annotations was spread on an ammo box, with an emergency lamp and an encrypted military laptop nearby, along with a satellite phone.
He was holding three intelligence summaries from different sources, his gaze sweeping back and forth over the differently colored annotations and slightly contradictory data.
One was transmitted through encrypted channels from the Persian ally Avanti, in which Avanti confidently claimed that the defenders of Hulmatu had increased to seven thousand five hundred people, with at least one battalion of elite "foreign mercenaries" already arrived.
