61: Chapter 61 A Thunderous Blow, Gray Skin Suffers a Crushing Defeat

Then, Commander Bibi's fingers clenched inward sharply.

Diana's windpipe was crushed in Commander Bibi's palm.

Her lips turned purple rapidly, her head fell limply back against the outside of Commander Bibi's thick, short forearm, the focus of her vision began to scatter, and the struggle of her limbs changed from rhythmic to scattered, unconscious twitching.

And Harlan Croft moved.

He did not draw his gun.

Because at this distance, the bullet would very likely pass directly through Diana's neck.

He chose to slam into him with his body instead.

A sprint of less than five feet, at full speed.

He struck the joint of Commander Bibi's arm.

Even though the opponent's physique far exceeded that of Earth creatures, this impact still caused the hand Commander Bibi was using to grip Diana to tilt by half a degree.

Rabu's reaction was faster than anyone had anticipated.

His black-gloved hand swept out.

A repulsion wave, compressed to the extreme, struck Harlan on his lower right ribcage, the impact lifting his entire body from the ground, arching it, and catapulting it backward.

He smashed through all the partition walls of the long corridor between the east and west wing rooms behind him.

In the center of the through-hole of every wall, a blurry human shape with limbs stretched backward was perfectly preserved, the edges as neat as if pressed into soft clay with a mold, while dust and debris slowly permeated both sides of the wall holes.

By the time the flying debris settled slightly, the fifth wall at the deepest part of the corridor had been pierced through to the exterior of the back wall.

Harlan's body collapsed into the pile of rubble and stopped moving.

Commander Bibi looked down at his own arm joint that had just been struck by Harlan.

That spot, which had only been grazed by a human shoulder.

There were no scratches, no bruises, no physical damage whatsoever on the surface of the grayish-white skin.

But in his oval-shaped black eyes, a look of pure disgust appeared, as if his arm had been stained by some unclean thing that required immediate disinfection.

"I said I would treat you with courtesy just now; is this how you low-level species respond to the hospitality of a higher civilization?"

He gave a forceful flick, violently throwing Diana aside.

Diana's body hit the stone floor and rolled half a turn, her hair disheveled, her face covered in dust, and hoarse gasps came from her throat.

Commander Bibi didn't even glance at her, his gaze sweeping over the row of wall holes Harlan had smashed through, then sweeping over the armed death squads kneeling and trembling in the courtyard, and finally landing on Rabu.

"Within a radius of a thousand miles, let not a blade of grass grow, let not a chicken or dog remain!"

Rabu lowered his head and responded in that same precise, almost mechanical, serious tone:

"Yes, Lord Commander Bibi!"

Then he raised his right hand, which was wearing a black glove, rubbed his thumb and middle finger together, and snapped his fingers with an extremely crisp sound.

At the bottom of the circular spaceship hovering above the manor, the circular halo that had originally gone out lit up again.

This time, the halo was not the diffusing thermal radiation beam from before, but energy rings converging inward from the edge of the spaceship, one after another, each ring brighter, denser, and rotating faster than the previous one.

The air began to vibrate.

Tiny sand grains on the stone floor jumped up in a humming, low-frequency resonance.

The wind in the desert suddenly poured into the center of the manor from all directions, whipping up a cloud of grayish-white dust.

The energy density of that halo was climbing geometrically, and everyone could feel it.

Not by seeing with their eyes, but by feeling it in their bones.

The pressure inside their skulls was rising, their eardrums felt stifled by the low-frequency vibration, and even the stone slabs on the ground began to develop fine structural cracks.

Diana had just propped up half her body from the ground when she saw this scene.

Keating stood behind her, his lips moved, and the words he spat out, he wasn't even sure if they counted as a complete sentence:

"...If that halo expands one more time, all of us..."

Beatrice did not speak.

She stared at the halo crazily accumulating energy above her head, her hand pressed on Diana's shoulder, the temperature of her fingers already as cold as a dead person's.

On the periphery of the courtyard, among the armed personnel still kneeling on the ground, some had already begun to pray.

Some buried their faces in the sand.

Some repeatedly called the code names of the outer outposts on their communicators, but all channels were crushed into white noise by the spaceship's electromagnetic interference.

Then, the sky cracked open.

The sky above the manor, illuminated pale by the energy ring, suddenly tore open with a dozen thick, blue-white lightning bolts, starting from a point due north.

The thunder did not roll; it exploded, as if the entire atmosphere had been pierced in the same instant.

The branches of those lightning bolts extended crazily between the clouds and the ground.

One of the thickest lightning pillars struck the side of the spaceship, which was currently accumulating energy.

The spaceship's energy convergence was pierced by the external high voltage at that moment, the halo flickered out of control a few times, and the entire disk tilted, losing its hovering stability, trailing black smoke as it rolled once and a half, then crashed into the empty sandy area outside the west wing of the manor.

The ground shook violently upon impact, rubble and dust were blasted into the air, and the debris falling onto the courtyard stone slabs was like a dry gray rain.

Rabu looked up and saw the scene of the spaceship being shot down by lightning, and for the first time, a luster of fluctuation that did not belong to the confidence of any higher life form appeared in his large black eyeballs.

He turned his head to Commander Bibi, his voice carrying a layer of something that had never been there before:

"Lord Commander Bibi! It's ion-state directed discharge! There shouldn't be anything on this planet capable of piercing our shields..."

Commander Bibi did not answer.

He stared at the lightning trajectory that still had a lingering tail of light in mid-air, his black eyeballs contracting slightly.

Diana propped herself up from the ground, one palm pressed against the dust-covered stone slab, the other hand holding the arm Beatrice extended.

A dark red fingerprint from Commander Bibi's glove still remained on the side of her neck, and her throat still hurt as if it had been scrubbed with sandpaper when she spoke, but she still pushed the question out from her chest.

"What kind of thing... can blast an alien spaceship down?"

No one could answer her.

Then the answer walked into the courtyard by itself.

Two more lightning bolts struck straight down from the churning thunderclouds overhead, landing in the center of the courtyard.

The lightning exploded on the stone slabs, cracking the ground into two radial scorched marks, the dust mist rolled up by the air wave tumbled in mid-air, and then, from the afterimage of the lightning that had not yet fully dissipated, two Men in Black walked out.

Black suits, white shirts, black ties, tall figures, cold faces, expressions unmoving.

They looked almost exactly the same as they had in the underground garage in Las Vegas, except for a blue glove on their right hands.

The material of those gloves did not look like fabric, but rather like some kind of cold flame solidified into a solid, with a layer of extremely faint blue electric arcs on the surface, slowly wandering along the direction of the fingertips.

They stood in the center of the courtyard, beneath their feet were the stone slabs scorched by lightning, behind them was the lingering charm of electricity that had not yet fully dissipated, and the air was filled with the smell of ozone and scorching metal.

And Commander Bibi and Rabu, who had just been high and mighty in front of five hundred armed death squads, casually choked Diana in front of Diana, and waved their hands to order "let no chicken or dog remain" in front of the entire manor, now, upon seeing these two Men in Black, simultaneously showed a kind of primitive and pure fear that everyone present could read.

That was not alertness, nor was it astonishment; it was thorough, absolute fear.

It was the kind of fear engraved in genetic instinct after being targeted by a prey's natural predator.

"Zeta Civilization's... No!"

Rabu's voice finally completely snapped the composure of that higher life form.

He took a step back, the black glove on his right hand subconsciously blocking in front of Commander Bibi, but his heel slipped on the sand.

For an existence that could deflect bullets with a wave of its hand, this was already a complete loss of composure.

"Ion-state directed discharge? How could this technology possibly exist on this planet! This absolutely shouldn't appear here... Lord Commander Bibi!"

Before Rabu had finished speaking, Commander Bibi had already turned.

Not turning to face the enemy, but turning to flee.

He dropped to all fours, returning to that primitive posture of quadrupedal running, his grayish-white figure bounced off the stone floor, and he rushed toward the direction of the manor's outer wall at a speed far exceeding that of a human.

Rabu followed closely behind.

The two gray creatures, one in front of the other, darted out at a speed that was almost flying close to the ground.

While running, Rabu was still shouting at Commander Bibi: "I'll cover the retreat! Lord Commander Bibi, you go first! Their technology is higher than ours..."

He did not finish.

Because the two Men in Black simultaneously turned into two bolts of lightning.

That wasn't running, nor was it jumping, but the entire person dissipating into a straight-piercing thunderbolt in an instant.

Within half a second, they pierced through the entire courtyard, exploded behind Commander Bibi and Rabu, and condensed back into human form.

Then, the Man in Black on the left waved his right hand wearing the blue glove, a crisp and clean frontal strike.

A blue-white lightning pillar, thick enough to ionize all the surrounding air, exploded from his palm.

That lightning pillar struck Commander Bibi's back directly.

Commander Bibi's entire body was blasted away by the lightning, flipped twice in the air, then fell heavily onto the stone floor, a large patch of lightning strike marks that were scorched black and still crackling at the edges appearing on his grayish-white skin.

Immediately after, the other Man in Black performed a low sweep kick from the side, lightning extending from the fingertips of the blue glove, forming an arc blade that swept directly onto the outside of Rabu's knee bend.

Rabu's entire body was rolled up and turned half a circle by the electric current, then smashed into the long stone table abandoned on the stone floor in the center of the courtyard, the stone slab cracking into three pieces upon impact.

"You... our Canal Expeditionary Force... our mother planet will..."

Commander Bibi struggled to climb up from the ground, raising his right hand wearing the black glove in an attempt to counterattack, but the Men in Black did not give him any window to charge up.

The blue glove struck down again.

A thunderbolt directly nailed Commander Bibi's glove, which had just been raised, along with his arm, to the ground.

The current spread upward along the grayish-white skin, burning a circle of scorched black patterns onto Commander Bibi's entire shoulder.

Rabu climbed up from the rubble, only to be knocked down again.

He had started by trying to use the black glove to release repulsive force, but the repulsive force field was meaningless in front of the blue glove.

The blue glove's lightning pierced the repulsion field barrier directly, then sent him flying to crash into the sandstone wall on the periphery.

When he fell, he dropped into a pile of metal fragments and broken glass scattered in the corner of the wall when the spaceship crashed.

"Lord Commander Bibi..."

His voice began to show a desperate tremor that should not belong to the executors of a higher civilization.