by <unknown>
The soldiers in crystal suits who made eye contact with him felt that they were hit by lightning. They all took a few steps back with the urge to vomit blood.
"Who asked you to kill anyone? Did I not inform you that all federal soldiers are brothers whom you should absolutely not attack for real?"
Zhou Hengdao waved his hand. One of the Exos, who was wearing a heavy-version Mystic Skeleton Battlesuit with a total weight of almost twenty tons, was drawn toward him easily until they were three meters away. He was locked onto and lifted into the air by his throat by Zhou Hengdao's spiritual energy!
The burly warrior who was as strong as a tower could not even struggle. He writhed in pain in midair while uttering meaningless syllables!
Zhou Hengdao looked at him coldly, showing no intention of letting him go.
"Iron Commander, it was an accident!" Another warrior was greatly shocked and shouted, "We were preparing the anesthetic ammo. They shot first. All the brothers can prove that they shot first!"
Zhou Hengdao narrowed his eyes. The redness in the crystal camera on his face slowly dimmed. It was not until one minute later that he snapped his finger and blew away the warrior in midair brutally.
Boom!
The burly warrior smashed into the mud and curled up like a prawn, struggling to catch his breath.
"Everybody here, you and them, is the most excellent soldier of the federation. You should die in the Blood Demon Sector in the battles against the demons, not under the guns of each other!" Zhou Hengdao declared. "I do not want such a thing to happen again. The federal army should not attack each other no matter what!"
"I… understand!" The burly warrior whose throat had been grabbed by Zhou Hengdao for a long time finally caught his breath. He coughed and explained in pain, "This is the last communication base. Now, from the Dark Desolate Domain to the north of the Grand Desolate Plateau, the fifty-two communication bases, including the sixteen main ones, are all under our control. Other than the accident here, the missions everywhere else went very well, with zero casualties.
"Very good." Zhou Hengdao nodded. "What about the signalmen?"
"They were treated in the same way. Locked up in barriers and given enough food and water," the burly warrior replied. "The barriers will be automatically deactivated in five days. They will definitely be safe and sound."
"Alright." Zhou Hengdao took a deep breath in relief. He wiped the rainwater off his face, somewhat helplessly, and stared at the bodies on the ground. "Keep the bodies of our comrades here carefully for now. Find a place and establish defense rune arrays. Do not let them rot in the rainwater or be gnawed by pests! Also, put a jade chip next to their bodies. Record thoroughly the process of their death. Point out that they held onto their posts and sacrificed themselves to resist us!
"I will sign the record!
"If our cause succeeds, we will find their bodies, destroy the jade chip, and hold a grand funeral for them as 'war heroes'. Their family will have the corresponding compensation.
"If… our cause fails, it will be the government who finds their bodies. They will still be great heroes who stood up against the Patriots Partnership. Everybody will remember their names. Their family will benefit from them, too.
"Do you understand now?"
"We do!"
In the darkness, the twelve Exos stood at attention at the same time and saluted the comrades who had been killed by them in the most solemn way.
After a moment of silence, Zhou Hengdao said, "Alright, prepare to act. It is too much of a burden to create such a super thunderstorm to block all the spiritual energy connection. The Thunder Weather Troop will not be able to persist for long. We have to seize every second and finish our operation before anyone realizes what is going on!
"Let's check the time. It's 3:12:35 a.m. at the moment. The 'Fog Plan' will be officially activated at 3:15!"
…
At 3:15, deep inside the Dark Desolate Domain, at the end of the Thunderous Sound Mountain, a highly-confidential weather troop slowly opened the waterproof cloth in the valley, revealing a weather rune array almost a hundred meters in diameter.
Nine Cultivators who were adept at communicating with nature were sitting at the nine nodes in the rune array. Sitting cross-legged, they mumbled spells, surrounded by electric arcs and mystic rays. Blood was leaking out of their mouths, noses, ears, and eyes while their vitality flowed into the rune array nonstop, making all the crystals that were embedded at the intersections of the spiritual stripes on the rune array glitter.
When all nine Cultivators were exhausted and about to fall down, a round magnetic field was generated above the rune array. The eight hundred and eight crystals embedded in the rune array broke apart at the same time. An invisible mystic ray soared to the sky like a pillar leading to the heavens, only to explode amid the clouds, attracting all the furious spiritual energy thousands of kilometers around like a huge magnet!
Boom! Crack!
Huala!
The Dark Desolate Domain was like a pot of seething oil that was added with a block of ice. The intensity of the thunderstorm was immediately multiplied, and the spiritual energy was more chaotic than ever. A deep, obscure fog was spreading out in the rainwater, expanding and consuming everything.
At 3:15 a.m., the thunderstorm died down a little bit, but the fog was even heavier than before. The entire Dark Desolate Domain seemed to be enshrouded in smoke, blurry and unpredictable.
At the center of the Dark Desolate Domain, where the fog was densest, as three rune arrays were detonated abruptly, a long, narrow gap appeared in midair out of nowhere.
Demonic energy was flowing out of the gap with all kinds of weird phenomena. It turned out to be a wormhole leading to the Blood Demon Sector!
At 6:19 a.m., a soldier in a broken crystal suit and soaked in blood staggered to the defense area of another legion. He fell to the ground before he reached the sentinels.
His crystal suit was covered in scars of the demon beasts' venom, and the right side of his breastplate had been pierced through by a tusk brutally!
At 6:33 a.m., every legion participating in the Furious Fist drill, including Burning Prairie, was informed of a piece of shocking news!
At around three o'clock in the morning, when the thunderstorm was most intense, a natural wormhole leading to the Blood Demon Sector was generated due to the collision of the magnetic fields deep inside the Dark Desolate Domain.
In the Dark Desolate Domain, the appearance and disappearance of wormholes were the most common natural phenomena. In most cases, the beast tides from the Blood Demon Sector flooded into the Heaven's Origin Sector through the natural wormholes, too.
However, when the wormhole was generated, a rapid response troop happened to be marching nearby.
Perhaps because the thunderstorm was too heavy, or maybe because the fog was too dense, the rapid response troop ended up entering the wormhole by accident and was teleported to the Blood Demon Sector!
They were under attack in the Blood Demon Sector. When they planned to retreat, the wormhole already disappeared. As a result, only one of the soldiers managed to escape back and tell everybody the news. The remaining 3,113 federal soldiers were still trapped in the Blood Demon Sector!
Chapter 1139: Ten Square Victory! |
In the Dark Desolate Domain, on the other side of the Thunderous Sound Mountain, the super warship Burning Prairie was struggling in the thunderstorm.
The clouds and thunders were not terrifying, but the turbulence of spiritual energy and the space gaps that occasionally appeared among it were like the fatal reefs in the shallow sea that Burning Prairie must avoid carefully. If the warship crashed into a space gap by accident and part of it was teleported to the other world, it would be the most horrible disaster.
Drowned in the endless night, Burning Prairie, which was dozens of kilometers long, was still nothing more than a canoe in the surging tides, unable to move fully at its own will. The lightning was hitting
the spiritual shields and raising dazzling brilliance.
It was partly because of the crew members' lack of experience and teamwork and partly because the mainframe crystal processor was jumbled recently and not stabilized yet.
But more importantly, Burning Prairie had never been a ground warship designed for the high-gravity environment within the atmosphere.
In the Flying Star Sector, other than Iron Plateau and Spider Den, everybody lived in the starships and world fragments. Heavenly Saints City, the largest city in the Flying Star Sector, was almost a metropolis made of countless star fortresses.
In the universe, gravity was not a problem. The only thing that needed to be considered was how to generate gravity stably from inside but not how to resist it.
Burning Prairie was produced in outer space. It was a classical starship that was adapted to the environment of zero gravity and high radiation.
The strong attraction of the Heaven's Origin Planet and the complicated environment in the Dark Desolate Domain were unseen before for Burning Prairie.
However, since a lot of resource planets would have to be developed on a large scale in the competition against the Imperium of True Human Beings and many battles might be fought in the orbits of the major planets where the warships would be under the influence of gravity and weather, Burning Prairie, as the first-generation flagship of the Burning Prairie Fleet, was determined to make up for the shortcoming and educate the crew members to fight in high-gravity environments.
Therefore, the Flying Star Sector had sent Burning Prairie to the Heaven's Origin Sector and even deployed it in such a complicated environment as the Dark Desolate Domain for practical training.
Such training was quite a challenge for the crew members of Burning Prairie. The warship that was as enormous as a mountain was fluctuating up and down in the thunderstorm.
But it was quite a different view inside the warship.
Since Burning Prairie was a warship designed to cross the universe, most of the crew members would spend their entire life on it. Inevitably, they would have to consider getting married and having children on the warship.
The Flying Star Sector was even planning to produce more super-large starships that could both support 'life' and 'battles' with Burning Prairie as a sample.
Such starships were not just meant to resist the Imperium of True Human Beings.
More importantly, should the resistance fail and the Imperium of True Human Beings occupied or even destroyed the Flying Star Sector, the Heaven's Origin Sector, and the Blood Demon Sector, those super-large starships would be able to carry as many people as possible and flee deeper into the universe, turning into another 'starship civilization', a bigger, nomadic Flying Star Sector.
Everybody was saving the future based on their own experience from their own perspective in their own way. The Flying Star Sector had always been a starship civilization. It was not strange that they came up with such a backup plan.
Therefore, the middle part and the rear part of Burning Prairie was an enormous living area, where all kinds of facilities, including schools, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment places, had been established. It was an out-and-out independent town.
Other than the crew members and the boy scouts of the Burning Prairie Fleet, five thousand ordinary people had also boarded on Burning Prairie and arrived in the Heaven's Origin Sector. They were mostly the families of the crew members, volunteers, and sociologists.
If possible, more natives of the Heaven's Origin Sector would be invited to live on Burning Prairie to run the social experiment of 'starship refugees' in order to create a more comfortable living environment.
After reaching the Heaven's Origin Sector, a lot of local entertainment facilities were moved to Burning Prairie, many of which were bizarre and new to the visitors from the Flying Star Sector. Therefore, the crew members after work and the boy scouts on holiday all liked to enjoy themselves in the living area.
Despite the thunderstorm outside, the living area was still peaceful under the control of the stabilization rune arrays.
In the living area, in an alley that was full of tubes and steam, more than ten teenagers were shouting even more passionately than the thunder outside.
"Six! Six! Six! Six!"
A transparent bubble was floating in midair, in which twenty dice, ten black and ten white, were flying, rolling, and crashing. Every once in a while, several dice would be blown away.
Two young men wearing the uniform of the boy scouts stood next to the dice. One of them was tall and strong. His arms were as thick as others' thighs, and his thighs were as thick as other people's waists. He looked ferocious and intimidating.
The other guy, however, was as slim as a skeleton. His hair was dry and yellow, his eyes were bloated, and he seemed to be dying of starvation. He was like a depilated mouse.
The two of them were like a troll versus a gremlin. They both bulged their eyes and stared at the bubble. One of them was rubbing his temples, and the other was twisting fingers and making seals quickly.
The dice in the bubble, under their manipulation, were fighting like twenty soldiers.
"Give up!" the muscular teenager shouted. Another several white dice were blown away, but the bubble suddenly exploded. The remaining dice all fell to a tray below.
All the bystanders craned their heads and observed. The black dice, which belonged to the muscular teenager, had eight left, while the white dice, which belonged to the slender one, had only three. In terms of numbers, the muscular teenager had fix sixes. He was a winner either way!
"Hahahaha!"
The muscular teenager burst into laughter and rubbed the slender guy's head hard. "Where does this one come from? You talked big, but your skills in the 'Ten Square Victory' are too bad! A losing streak of three! Come on. Do you still have any money? Do you want a comeback?"
Ten Square Victory had been a popular gamble game among the space pirates on Spider Den in the Flying Star Sector.
Both participants of the game would control ten special dice and attack each other in midair. The dice that were blown out of the bubble were considered 'dead'. When the time was up, the bubble would break, and the dice would fall. The numbers on the remaining dice would decide the final winner.
It was a game where skill really mattered, not just luck. For the beginners who just touched spiritual energy and telepathic thoughts, it was a great exercise, too. Therefore, the game had been rather popular on Spider Den.
However, Burning Prairie was the place to raise the future stars of the Flying Star Sector. Naturally, the gambling game among space pirates was strictly forbidden.
But a certain someone brought the game to Burning Prairie. In only half a year, it spread like an unstoppable wildfire.
Even the descendants of the noble families in the Burning Prairie Fleet, who were top-tier training geniuses, found it difficult to resist the temptation and often came to gamble in the living area during their holiday!
The muscular teenager was named Hei Xing. He was in the fourth level of the Refinement Stage despite his young age. He also had special skills to remotely control objects based on his family's secret arts. In only several months, he had become a top expert of the Ten Square Victory. His companions were too scared to gamble with him anymore.
Therefore, he often came to the living area and looked for the other boy scouts who were not familiar with him. After all, more than ten thousand boy scouts were on Burning Prairie in different areas. Nobody could know everybody very well.
As a disguise, he often pretended to have more brawn than brains to fool the fools.
Today, an idiotic boy fell into his trap again.
Everybody was shouting to let him continue the game. The slender teenager was hesitating, too, but his pockets were empty, and he could only scratch the glittering pendant on his neck subconsciously.
Hei Xing had been born in a noble family. He had seen through the value of the pendant. Otherwise,
he would not have bothered to gamble with such a poor boy. Seeing that the kid had been tricked, he laughed aloud. "Brat, get out of here if you don't have any money. Do you want to play or not?"
All the bystanders were cheering again.
The slender teenager was caught in a dilemma and almost cried out.
Hei Xing chucked and played with the dice. "How about this? I can tell that my level is slightly higher than yours. I'll be bullying you however we play the game. How about I use eight dice and you use ten? If I win, I will take away your Purple Sand Stone Pendant. If you win, you will take away this Silver Blood Dagger of mine and all the money here. How does that sound?"
The slender guy looked at him, the dagger, and the shouting bystanders around. Greediness beamed out of his eye, and even the air he breathed out was getting hot. He gritted his teeth and nodded!
"Excellent. Straightforward enough. A real man!"
All the bystanders were cheering.
A new game, eight black dice versus ten white dice, began!
The eighteen dice slowly popped up in the bubble. Both parties held their breath nervously, as if they were in a real battle. Sweat was popping up from their forehead, indicating that they were both doing their best!
But the legs of the slender teenager were shaking hard, and his teeth were clattering. He gave every sign that he would be the loser.
Right at the moment—
"Mouse Bai!"
The slender guy suddenly changed his face color and sneezed. Inside the bubble, a series of explosions were taking place at the same time. All eight black dice were crashed into pieces within a moment!
Hei Xing was dumbfounded!
All the bystanders were dumbfounded!
The slender guy, however, already crawled through Hei Xing's pants as quickly as lightning while snatching all the money, crystals, and the Silver Blood Dagger. In the blink of an eye, he dashed into the air and dived into a tube of spiritual energy.
"Thank you, brother. Generous and unhesitating. You are truly a man!"
