"Enemy attack!"
"Enemy attack!"
"Damn it, how did these things get here!"
"All fighter pilots, prepare to launch at once, prepare to launch at once!"
Noise filled his ears.
The scene before Zhao Chen's eyes, pitch-black at first, grew brighter by degrees.
At last he made out his surroundings.
It seemed to be some kind of airfield runway, and on it a number of fighters could be seen readying to take off.
At the same time, black cracks appeared in the sky, as though a hole had been torn in it.
From those black cracks, black flying creatures poured in without end.
Zhao Chen raised his head and watched the battle in the air.
When the black flying creatures were hit, they were blown to nothing in the burst of the ordnance.
But when a fighter was destroyed by a black flying creature, it either burst into a fireball in midair or fell to the ground.
Some of the black flying creatures dived groundward, trying to attack the ground.
Fortunately, there were a good many anti-air weapon turrets around this airbase; they rose out of the ground, then swung about, their muzzles trained on the black flying creatures in the sky.
Dense beams of laser fire struck at the black flying creatures, keeping them from reaching the fighter base on the ground.
But as the black flying creatures in the sky grew more and more numerous, and certain powerful kinds appeared.
This anti-air fire began to fail.
Zhao Chen saw with his own eyes a huge black creature, beating two wings, nearly a hundred meters long, dive groundward and spit out a black column of light that destroyed one of the black turrets on the ground outright.
"Zhao Chen, what are you standing there for!"
Just then someone clapped him hard on the back.
Zhao Chen turned his head.
A middle-aged man in what looked like ground-crew clothing was handing a tactical helmet into Zhao Chen's hands,
then quickly checking over the gear on him.
"How many times have I told you? You must carry your light-blade! You're a fighter pilot, yes, but what if you need the thing!" The ground crewman, finding no light-blade at Zhao Chen's waist, glared at him.
Then hurriedly took a light-blade from the weapons store beside them and pushed it into place at Zhao Chen's waist.
It was a thing like a sword hilt, with a button on it.
As Zhao Chen looked at it, scattered fragments surfaced in his mind.
He knew how to use this thing.
One had only to grip it and drive one's will into it, and a blade of light would spring out.
The light-blade's power was great; it could even cut open the shell of most battle mecha.
"All set. Hurry aboard and get ready to fight. And let me warn you, boy! You've still got a disciplinary mark on your record. But this is a good chance for you to win merit and wipe it out." The ground crewman clapped Zhao Chen on the shoulder and pointed at an interstellar fighter rising slowly on a lift some way off.
The data on this interstellar fighter surfaced by degrees in Zhao Chen's mind.
T… T5… Dragon-Fang-class Medium Interstellar Fighter…
And he… was a mid-grade fighter pilot…
Zhao Chen, rank of sergeant, presently a fighter pilot, mid-grade fighter pilot.
Experience flying thirteen different models of fighter, 3,000 flight hours in all.
Took part in thirty-two wars against the alien kind.
Killed one grade-four alien, twenty-seven grade-three aliens…
Suspended from duty for the offense of reckless flying…
Zhao Chen put a hand to his head, his face pained.
"What's wrong? The mad lad who used to have such nerve doesn't dare go up now?" The ground crewman noticed something off about Zhao Chen and frowned.
"Hey, hey, hey. Hurry up; if you haven't the nerve to fight, boy, I'll fly this one myself!" Another fighter pilot urged him impatiently just then.
Zhao Chen's heart jumped.
The words came out of his mouth without thinking: "I'll fight!"
Zhao Chen did not know why he had said it.
But he ran off at a quick step toward that T5 Dragon-Fang fighter.
He climbed aboard quickly and sat in the cockpit.
This ought to have been an interstellar fighter Zhao Chen had never seen.
But sitting in the cockpit and looking it all over,
he found it all very familiar.
He put on the tactical helmet, and a set of battlefield data appeared inside it.
"Runway three, get that fighter up! Stop dithering. You've already passed your emergency-scramble time; you know that means a court-martial!"
Over the command channel came air control's rebuke.
Zhao Chen said nothing, and at once worked the controls.
Soon the T5 Dragon-Fang fighter came alive; it rolled slowly out of the hangar and began to accelerate.
In that second,
Zhao Chen felt his state of mind suddenly made new.
All that time before had felt like a dream.
But now Zhao Chen felt he truly existed in this space.
All of a sudden!
A violent explosion sounded behind him.
Zhao Chen looked back and saw, to his shock, that the hangar he had just come out of was now a sea of fire.
A black column of light had come down from the sky, carving a trench in the ground.
That hangar had had the ill luck to lie right in its path.
Zhao Chen's heart ached.
"Old Chen."
In his mind was a stretch of memory: Old Chen might look slapdash.
But he was in truth very good to the young ones; a ground crewman he might be, but his knowledge of fighters was not a whit behind the pilots'.
He would often point out faults in how they flew, and when he was cross he would kick at them.
But no one was ever angry about it.
Old Chen was only a master sergeant.
Yet even the officers who came down from above would salute this old master sergeant respectfully,
because not a few of them had come up under his hand.
And in that attack just now, the old master sergeant had most likely little chance of living.
But this was no time for Zhao Chen to dwell on it.
The T5 Dragon-Fang fighter he flew had left the ground now.
He looked at the black creatures in the sky.
He felt an unaccountable familiarity,
as though he had seen them somewhere before.
All of a sudden, all the information in Zhao Chen's head seemed to explode at once.
The Owl Dragon legions, the Owl Dragon Interstellar Empire, the Emperor, Charlotte, Lilith, the children…
The Hive Nest campaign, the spatial collapse…
Zhao Chen remembered it all.
And these black creatures before him, were they not very like the Pitch-Black Legion under Order?
Zhao Chen was astonished.
Could it be that he… had crossed over again?