91: Chapter 91 Fleet Clash, Tearing the Sky

Joshua sneered, his blonde hair glowing faintly in the flickering light of the burning ruins, and retorted:

"A low-class hick is still just a hick."

"If the whole world were like your Longevity Faction, human civilization would still be shivering in caves."

"Outside the cave, there are wolves, tigers, leopards, lions, and venomous snakes—there's the danger of death. Why did humanity choose to leave the cave?"

"Because outside the cave, there is hope! That is enough."

"And you, the Longevity Faction, only bring despair!"

Zhang Long's mouth twitched, his tone laced with undisguised mockery:

"Hope? A trick to fool fools."

"You manufacture hope behind the scenes, letting those big fools charge forward, because it's not you who ends up dying anyway."

"What are you acting like a saint for in front of me?"

Joshua looked at him, not retorting again.

The two stared at each other for a moment, then Joshua shook his head slightly, as if sighing over an opponent he knew long ago could not be persuaded.

Zhang Long also fell silent.

The rift between them was no longer something that could be bridged by words, and both sides had exhausted their patience.

Both raised their blue-gloved hands simultaneously and pointed at the sky.

Two extremely thin blue-white electric arcs shot out from their respective fingertips, piercing straight through the churning thunderclouds overhead, and striking deep into the dark zone at the edge of the upper atmosphere.

The arcs exploded in the high night sky, not flashing and vanishing like ordinary fireworks,

but rather like two stones dropped into the depths of a pool, simultaneously sending out ripples of blue-white energy spreading outward in a radius of over a thousand meters above the sky.

When the two ripples each reached a semi-arc, they suddenly paused for an instant,

and then the entire sky began to change drastically.

The normal night scene composed of the moon and clouds overhead was torn apart from both ends by some kind of violence, and the stars and moon were completely swept away.

The vault of the sky shifted from deep blue to an unnatural, hazy layer of interwoven iron-gray and dark red, swallowing even the lingering phantom of Jupiter that had just risen above the horizon.

Immediately after, the space on both the left and right sides of the firmament began to vibrate violently.

The structure of space itself, as if gripped by two hands from both sides, began to compress and tremble inward, and two massive, visible, transparent sources of fluctuation appeared above the ruins still filled with smoke.

Then, space shattered.

Two rifts tore open simultaneously from both ends of the horizon, not irregular cracks like in rock, but perfectly circular openings as if cut by laser rings,

inside which was neither night nor dawn, but a completely alien, ink-blue void mixed with countless non-stellar cold lights.

The first thing to emerge from the space rift on the left was the bow of an entire mothership,

a massive silver-gray geometric object. Its surface lacked any radar towers, bridge portholes, or formation markings common to human ships; it possessed only an alloy hull so smooth it felt almost like liquid, shimmering with a dark metallic luster under the cold light at the edge of the rift.

It was guarded in the center of the formation by many battleships arranged in an equilateral triangle, with groups of frigates interspersed on the periphery.

The ejection hatches at the bottom of the mothership were all opened,

and small attack craft ejected around the mothership at intervals of less than half a second, assembling into multiple trapezoidal attack formations, each one devoid of any colored light markings.

At the same time,

another completely symmetrical fleet surged out from the space rift on the right,

also with a giant mothership in the center, and battleships, frigates, and attack craft formations unfolding in turn.

There were no identifying insignias, only the hull color itself, distinguished by a slightly deeper cold-blue hue compared to the left fleet.

The two fleets deployed across the vast sky above the entire Hoover Dam,

with the attack craft groups arranging themselves in three successively deployed trapezoidal wave fronts in front of their respective motherships. Once the diagonally intersecting planes of each wave front overlapped, they obscured most of the southern sky.

One hundred thousand on the left, one hundred thousand on the right—together, the entire sky was packed densely with two hundred thousand silver-gray combat units,

so that even looking up from the ground, one could only occasionally catch a glimpse of the dark red residual light at the base of the clouds through the gaps between the ships.

Zhang Long looked up at the fleet above him, then withdrew his gaze, looked Joshua straight in the eye, and delivered his final sentence in a cold and resolute tone.

Joshua also withdrew his gaze from the sky, not refuting him again, but responding with a very short sentence.

The content was unimportant;

everyone on the ruins knew what they meant.

Since reason wouldn't work, then completely destroy the other side!

The two raised their blue-gloved hands simultaneously.

From the center of the bottom of the two motherships overhead, a massive, cylindrical, silver-white beam of light shot down vertically from the extreme heights, enveloping Zhang Long, Joshua, and the two Men in Black behind each of them.

When the light beams retracted into the ships, all that remained on the ground was a patch of rubble scorched to a faint white, and a few wisps of high-temperature white steam still rising.

The ruins were quiet for less than two seconds.

Then Musk was the first to rush out from behind the blast wall, his voice screaming until it almost cracked:

"Everyone! Retreat! Retreat toward the tunnel!!"

"The two hundred thousand-strong fleet above isn't here for the scenery! That's a total war between two Deep State factions!!"

"Once they start fighting, we won't even know how we died, and we won't even be able to recover the liquid zero!!"

Before his words had even faded, the battle in the sky had already begun.

Without any warning, and without any gradual process,

the first wave of attack craft from both fleets completed their acceleration simultaneously in front of their respective motherships, immediately forming two trapezoidal wave fronts in opposing directions that collided head-on.

Energy weapons cannot be described by ballistic arcs;

they were thousands of pulsed light beams lighting up simultaneously, each traveling at the speed of light, slamming into shields and exploding into plumes of plasma fire with irregular edges.

The fierce confrontation between the first batch of attack craft exploded into hundreds of simultaneously expanding incandescent fireballs in mid-air, like a whole lake of fireflies spreading crazily.

Then the two motherships moved, instantly vanishing from their original positions and reappearing at a higher zenith,

releasing several straight cutting beams from both sides of their hulls simultaneously.

These were aggregated light spears capable of slicing through the crust of an entire city, held firm in mid-air by shields jointly released by the opposing battleship groups, exploding into a searing white sea of fire covering dozens of square miles.

The entire earth shook violently in the aftermath of the impact,

and above the ancient riverbed of the Colorado River, sand and stone flew everywhere, blown by the scorching shockwaves.

The wreckage of carrier-based aircraft, dense enough to almost fill the entire sky overhead, had already begun to fall,

burning debris trailing black smoke as it pierced through the clouds, carving out countless falling trajectories of dark red, glowing flares.

The wreckage from just the first wave of fire rained down like an apocalyptic meteor shower, smashing into the wilderness around the Hoover Dam...