99: Chapter 99 Two Thousand Reinforcements Defeated, Prince Captured (Second Update)

A full two thousand vessels!

It was an entire fleet of circular flying saucers, surging out at high speed from the depths of the spatial rift in an extremely orderly wedge formation.

In a very short time, their numbers reached as many as two thousand.

The diameter of each flying saucer far exceeded the total length of the flight deck of any aircraft carrier on Earth.

The bottom of the disk was covered with a layer of deep bronze chitinous armor, and its edge was embedded with a ring-shaped propulsion belt emitting a pale green cold light.

During high-speed maneuvers, they would drag extremely faint ion trails through the air.

After surging into Earth's atmosphere, the two thousand flying saucers paused for an instant in perfect unison.

The pale green halos beneath the fleet brightened simultaneously, becoming so bright that the entire night sky above the Hoover Dam was dyed in a bizarre layer of cold green.

Then, they opened fire.

It was not pulse beams, nor light spears, nor any form of energy projection from humanity's arsenal.

The bottom of each flying saucer simultaneously released dozens of pale green, high-energy vortexes composed of rotating ionic states.

Upon leaving the hull, the ends of the vortexes rapidly converged into extremely thin, long, and blindingly bright conical beams.

These beams, in a physical form completely different from pulse beams, slammed into the shields of the fleet of two hundred thousand.

The point of contact was not a silently dispersing sphere of plasma light,

but instead produced an extremely piercing, high-frequency shriek that sounded like tearing metal.

The energy shields covering the silver-gray hulls flickered violently the moment they were struck by these conical beams,

like candle flames whipped by a gale, before being torn, pierced, and dismantled layer by layer.

In the beginning, the fleet of two hundred thousand was beaten into a steady retreat by these two thousand alien flying saucers.

Attack wings cut into the front of the flying saucer fleet at speeds of over a dozen Mach, only to be shredded layer by layer by the intercepting fire of the vortex beams before making contact, their exploding debris falling like showers of fiery hail.

Under the focused assault of the intersecting beams, the battleships' shields overloaded one by one within seconds.

Once the shields vanished, the hulls themselves melted and burst under the continuous glare of the green conical beams, exploding into a vast, spreading cloud of high-temperature metal vapor.

But soon, the pale green ring-shaped lights at the bottom of the two thousand flying saucers began to flicker.

Energy decay!

The green halos, initially stable and uniform, began to dim from the edges toward the center, like an old oil lamp running out of its last drop of fuel.

Abnormal, dark-red superheated steam began to rise from the gaps in the chitinous armor on the deep bronze disks.

The vortex beams released by the flying saucers also dwindled from a dense network of crossfire into sporadic, high-resistance single shots.

Finally, even their pale green shields began to fail, leaving the exposed hulls to be struck directly by the pulse beams of the silver-gray fleet.

There was no suspense left.

Once the shields of alien technology were breached, what remained was a slaughter.

Under the concentrated fire of the two hundred thousand-strong silver-gray fleet, the two thousand flying saucers exploded in mid-air one after another.

As each one exploded, it would first expand into a massive dark-green sphere of light, then collapse into a burning mass of deep bronze fragments, trailing long plumes of black smoke as they plunged toward the wasteland.

Only a few scattered flying saucers, about ten or so, managed to break through a gap at the edge of the encirclement and escape.

The pale green halos at their rears were so dim they were almost invisible, and the surfaces of their disks were covered in bullet holes and scorch marks.

One of the flying saucers came to a sudden halt after breaking out of the combat zone.

The residual shockwaves from the silver-gray fleet still left a slight tremor on its bottom chitinous deck,

yet it remained perfectly still.

A very thin red beam rose from the top of the saucer, shooting straight into the sky and bursting in the night sky.

What burst forth was not light, but words.

Using a method that belonged to no human projection technology, the beam formed several lines of blood-red characters scorched by plasma afterglow across the canopy of the sky above the Hoover Dam.

Every stroke and line looked like a wound branded from within the atmosphere:

[Listen up, you lowly human bugs!]

[Prince Dao Dun is the honorable Fourth Prince of our Zeta Star!]

[If you do not hand over the Fourth Prince, when our million-strong Zeta army descends in the future, it will be the day Earth is destroyed!!!]

Those lines of blood-red words remained branded on the sky, refusing to dissipate for a long time.

The pale green halos at the rears of those few scattered flying saucers suddenly flared.

The space in front of their hulls warped and folded like crumpled cellophane,

and then, one by one, they plunged into the spatial rift, vanishing beyond the Solar System within a few blinks of an eye, completely untraceable by any detection equipment.

Everyone on the ground looked up.

Whether it was Musk's fleeing faction,

or Diana's evacuating faction,

whether it was Moran from the FBI,

or Heinlein from the CIA,

everyone froze in place the moment those blood-red words were branded onto the sky.

Musk looked at the sky, then at Edward who was still kneeling beside him. Suddenly, he brushed off the shrapnel debris clinging to his jacket,

and pointing from afar at Diana and the others who were scrambling up from the western side of the ruins to continue their escape, he burst into a fit of unrestrained laughter.

The laughter carried far across the open wasteland. He laughed until he was almost bent double, and tears welled in his eyes.

"Hahaha! You Longevity Faction... Your Longevity Faction actually captured Prince Dao Dun, the Fourth Prince of Zeta Star! Hahaha!"

"Prince Dao Dun is the Grey Aliens' Fourth Prince! Your boss literally bagged and dragged away a member of the alien imperial family! Hahaha!"

"You're finished! You're completely finished!"

Hearing this laughter in the distance, Diana paused for a fraction of a second, but her face remained as still as if she wore a porcelain mask that was never taken off.

The two streaks of dark-red blood, already dried on her cheekbones, looked from afar like thin cracks under the desert night wind.

She did not stop, continuing forward without snapping back,

but her tightly clenched fingers at her sides betrayed the turbulent storm in her heart.

She had thought that by clinging to the Deep State's Longevity Faction, the Hopkins Family could step over the threshold of The Pentagon and then push open the final palace doors of Washington.

Now she realized

that clinging to the Longevity Faction was not a stairway to the peak of power at all, but a cliffside cable leading straight to the abyss of hell!

Back in her manor's courtyard, Commander Bibi and Rabu had told her themselves that Prince Dao Dun was merely a "ground advance scout of the Canal Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squad."

But now, those blood-red lines scorched by the plasma afterglow on the sky's canopy told her:

He was the Fourth Prince!

She had to inform Northrop Grumman and all the remaining high-ranking members of the Colt Association of this news immediately!

Once the identity of Zeta Star's Fourth Prince was confirmed, the Longevity Faction would no longer be a shield, but a meat grinder that would drag the entire Hopkins Industries down to total annihilation!

Sterling Remington's cold, aristocratic arms-dealer face could no longer maintain any semblance of composure.

While supporting Augustus, who had been set down by the Giant Warrior, he leaned toward Diana and lowered his voice:

"Is it still too late for me to back out and not join the Longevity Faction?"