137: Chapter 137: Winning the Game at the Start, Stealing a Wave of Damage First

When Prince Krol stepped back into the United Headquarters' war room, Major General Zhao Yu had already sent the evacuation order to the terminals of all trial squads.

Then, everyone watched as the shuttle from the Holy Alliance, marked with a gold-bordered white emblem, rushed out of the atmosphere in a near-panicked escape.

Immediately after, two dark green bio-plasma cannon shots grazed past from the horizon.

“Boom——!!”

The beams grazed right past the shuttle's tail, exploding in the thin upper atmosphere, creating two energy ripples over a hundred kilometers in diameter.

The small craft initiated an emergency warp in the final tenth of a second, the entire ship distorting into a streak of light and disappearing from the spot with a “whoosh.”

Li Yuan looked up at the gradually dissipating green trail in the sky and rubbed his chin: “Well, looks like we can't retreat for now.”

“Those brats from the Holy Alliance sure run fast!” Chu Xinghe cursed in the communication channel. “That support craft must have been prepared by that guy Ulysses beforehand! Look at that warp startup speed; if it wasn't pre-charged, I'll take your last name!”

Luo Lan's voice calmly interjected: “You have to admit, Ulysses' minor divination spells are pretty impressive. Sensing something wrong, he ran away immediately; sensing danger, he used spatial jumps to dodge the main cannon—that operation was smooth as silk, definitely worth learning.”

“Learn my foot!” Chu Xinghe retorted irritably. “We don't have that ability! What now? Prepare to resist the Zerg airborne landing?”

Li Yuan switched back to the command channel: “Chen Jingyi, can the base radar see the real-time position of the Zerg motherships?”

A few seconds later, Chen Jingyi's signature emotionless voice sounded in the channel: “Currently monitoring two standard Leviathans entering airborne combat orbit. One is below the horizon and cannot be directly observed; one is at a 46-degree elevation, approximately 120,000 kilometers from the surface.”

A holographic projection unfolded in the base's central war room, and the real-time image of that Leviathan was magnified.

It was a standard-sized leviathan mothership, looking like a space slug magnified billions of times, with a body length exceeding ten thousand kilometers, its surface covered in mountain-like undulating biological armor.

At this moment, its belly was opening millions of pores, each packed with dense clusters of spore sacs, enough to trigger trypophobia in anyone watching.

“While they're still preparing for the landing, let's concentrate all firepower and sneak in a shot,” Li Yuan suggested, rubbing his chin. “After the sneak attack, send out all unmanned combat units; take out as many as we can.”

Before Chen Jingyi could answer, Yimoku jumped up from the side: “Agreed! Hit them! I want to see if the Zerg's carapace is harder, or if our Mega Particle Cannon is stronger!”

“Chen Yao,” Li Yuan turned to look at the silver-haired girl who was debugging the communication equipment, “Notify the other trial squads gathered at this base to enter combat status, and prepare to intercept the descending Zerg units with full force. The goal is to reduce the pressure on the base's shields. If any of you need energy recharging, speak up now.”

Chen Yao gave an “OK” gesture, her fingers tapping out afterimages on the virtual keyboard. Three seconds later, the base's broadcast system began cycling the combat readiness notification in thirty-seven universal cosmic languages.

Meanwhile, Chen Jingyi had already completed the targeting lock.

“Target: leviathan mothership. Mega Particle Cannon main gun charging, Genesis array at full power readiness.”

The surface of the entire North Star Base began to vibrate.

Over two hundred armored plates slid open to both sides simultaneously, revealing bottomless launch silos underneath. Pale blue energy streams surged upward along the energy-conducting patterns on the silo walls, converging into blinding spheres of light at the openings.

“Fire.”

The moment Chen Jingyi finished speaking, a pure white beam of light over five hundred meters in diameter shot up into the sky from the center of the base—that was the main gun of the Mega Particle Cannon. Following closely behind were fifty or sixty slightly thinner golden beams; that was the volley from the “Genesis” gamma-ray cannon array.

The destructive energy beams tore through the atmosphere, plowing a visible vacuum channel in the sky. The clouds in their path were instantly vaporized, and even light itself was distorted.

The target Leviathan clearly hadn't expected a counterattack of this magnitude from the surface.

It had been leisurely preparing for the airdrop—the spore sacs on its belly had already expanded to their limit and could be ejected at any moment.

To save energy, its biological shield was only maintained at minimum power; after all, according to common knowledge, it was impossible for planetary surfaces to have firepower capable of threatening a Leviathan.

Then, common knowledge was slapped in the face.

The main beam of the Mega Particle Cannon hit first. That thin layer of biological shield didn't even last a tenth of a second, popping like a soap bubble. The beam slammed into the center of the Leviathan's belly without any obstruction, which happened to be the densest area of the spore sac storage zone.

The spore sacs hit by the high-energy particle beam instantly overloaded, expanded, and detonated in a chain reaction. Each spore sac contained at least five hundred various Zerg units, and these units were flooded with destructive energy the moment they hatched.

Thus, the Leviathan's belly began to set off fireworks.

Green, purple, red, blue—various colors of biomass plasma and energy residue sprayed out from the explosion breaches, blooming into eerie and magnificent flowers of death in space. The entire Leviathan writhed frantically in orbit like a fish gutted in the belly, with broken neural cords and energy conduits dangling from the wounds, spraying out even more viscous body fluids.

The “Genesis” array's beams followed, precisely delivering finishing blows deep into the wounds. The gamma rays had extremely strong penetrating power; they drilled into the Leviathan's body along the breach opened by the Mega Particle Cannon, burning through biological armor, melting internal organs, and vaporizing neural clusters along the way.

The Leviathan let out the most miserable screech of its life, a scream that acted directly on the mental level, causing even the people on the surface, separated by the atmosphere and shields, to vaguely feel a pain in their brains.

“Nice!” Chu Xinghe whistled in the channel. “That's what you get for not keeping your shields up! This planet is almost half-converted into a xihe-class, you idiot!”

However, the Zerg's reaction speed was astonishingly fast.

Just as the Leviathan was severely damaged, another mothership that had just completed its jump “flashed” in front of it. This newcomer deployed a small-scale legion shield, forcefully neutralizing the subsequent beam attacks with its shield energy.

Taking this opportunity, the injured Leviathan began to retreat slowly to the rear. A large amount of repair tissue squirmed out from the wounds on its belly, attempting to plug the breaches, though compared to the scars that had almost pierced through the Leviathan, the repair speed was somewhat pathetic.

Then, Li Yuan stared at the twelve blinding red dots on the radar map and was silent for a full five seconds. That's right, in the short time it took to pull off that sneak attack, another 10 standard Leviathans had jumped in.