"Launch the gifts we've prepared for the Lord of Frey!" Marshal Chu Xuan said coldly.
"Yes!"
At a single order,
these slung weapon launchers fired object after object, like shells, toward the Frey First Planet.
These shells flew very fast!
During this time, the Frey civilization's starships spotted these special missiles too and used every kind of weapon to intercept them.
Some interceptions succeeded.
But more broke through their defenses and rushed on toward the Frey First Planet.
"Now you may open fire. Any enemy starship that enters range, fire on it with everything; don't let them hinder our advance!" Marshal Chu Xuan said earnestly.
"Yes!"
Battle broke out between the Fierce Dragon fleet and the Frey civilization's defenders.
At first, naturally, the Fierce Dragon fleet's side attacked and advanced like a hurricane sweeping dead leaves.
The Frey starships, wholly unprepared and only just told the news, had no chance at all to parry.
The most important reason, of course, was the ten T3 Blizzard-class Light Interstellar Battlecruisers charging at the very front!
With these ten T3 Blizzard-class Light Interstellar Battlecruisers charging at the front, it was simply as if ten butcher's knives were hacking at the enemy, slicing off chunk after chunk of the enemy's flesh without mercy.
——————
On the Frey civilization's First Planet,
an off-road vehicle stopped on a road; ahead on the road were written the words Restricted Military Zone.
Inside this off-road vehicle it was very simple; apart from a portable communications set, there were no other nonessential electronics.
On the center console there was even a device set out, its red light flashing all along.
It was a jammer.
Before they had this device, they could have been watched by the Frey regime at any moment.
After they had this device,
so long as they were within its working radius, every means of surveillance and eavesdropping could be blocked.
Only that had given them a breath of respite.
"These are the right coordinates. But what's here besides the military base ahead? They can't expect us to charge into this military base, surely," the masked man in the passenger seat said with a shrug.
"Don't be in a hurry. Wait." The man in the driver's seat was comparatively calm, and went on sitting there waiting.
"If we wait here too long and the Frey government's patrols spot us, we're finished. Though those fellows of unknown identity gave us technology, can we really trust them entirely?" the man in the passenger seat muttered.
Just at this moment,
in the night sky overhead
a red dot appeared and was gone in an instant.
"What was that?" The man in the passenger seat pointed at the night sky.
"What are you talking about?" The man in the driver's seat raised his head; he had not noticed the red dot that vanished in an instant.
"Just now, at that spot, something seemed to explode."
"You must have seen wrong."
Just as the two were looking at the night sky,
three or four red dots appeared in the night sky.
This time both of them saw them.
This time they could be sure that something was certainly happening in outer space.
Only, because the spot was too far from them on the ground, all they could see were red dots the size of grains of rice.
"Wait! I remember there's a telescope in the car." The man in the driver's seat thought of something, opened the door and got out, and from the trunk actually found a long-tube telescope, the kind one could use to look at the stars.
He aimed it in the direction of just now, adjusted the settings and put his eye to it.
This time he saw it!
He saw that it was a fleet, an interstellar fleet never seen before.
And those red dots were in fact the flames from Frey civilization starships exploding.
"Someone is attacking the Frey fleet!" the man said incredulously.
"Could this be the signal that man spoke of?" the other beside him muttered.
They recalled that meeting; the man had said
that when the signal for action came, they would know it,
and as for what to do, they would naturally know that too.
But just from seeing this scene, they still did not understand what they should do.
"Wait, is that a meteor shower?" The man who had got out of the passenger seat now pointed straight at the starry sky.
At this moment, with the naked eye, hundreds of objects like meteors could be seen plunging at high speed under the night sky.
And where they were landing was this planet beneath their feet.
Several of them seemed to be falling straight toward where they were.
"Damn! They're coming at us; find somewhere to take cover!" the man who had got out of the passenger seat shouted in panic.
But the man who had got out of the driver's seat did not panic; he had a premonition.
This might be the thing that mysterious man had spoken of.
He stared hard at the meteor falling toward them.
It drew closer and closer to them:
over ten thousand meters, a few thousand meters.
At last, a few hundred meters above the ground, the thing slowed sharply,
and finally came down on the ground.
The blast of its landing was strong, but it had none of the force they had imagined of a meteor striking the ground.
"Get in the car, quick!" The man went straight back to the driver's seat and started the vehicle.
The man in the passenger seat came back too.
"This is the signal that mysterious man meant?" the passenger said, already somewhat worked up.
"It should be," the driver in the driver's seat nodded.
The final landing point was a few hundred meters from where their car was parked.
He started the car and charged straight over.
When he arrived,
he saw a container standing upright there.
This container had already come apart and opened by itself.
Inside could be seen weapons of every kind:
infantry exoskeleton combat armor, infantry rocket launchers, and every sort of firearm, drone weapons and so on.
It was nothing less than a small arsenal.
And these weapons they knew!
For these weapons had all been written up before in the weapons manual the mysterious man had given them.
All of them were extremely simple to operate.
Weapons… a military base… a chance?
At this moment the pieces of information linked up, and they seemed all to understand.
That mysterious power had contacted them, told them part of the information,
and then given them coordinates and a rough time,
all so that when the action came, they would work alongside it on their own initiative,
taking up these weapons to fight.
That way, they could cause the Frey government enormous trouble.
"Look, quick. There's writing on top!" The man who had got out of the passenger seat pointed at the top of that small arsenal; there was a line of words there too.
The secret you want to know is all inside the restricted military zone.
At this moment
what little hesitation had remained in their hearts was shattered by this one line.
The Frey civilization's secret?
It was what all these underground forces of theirs had been digging for.
Though some had already guessed roughly what it was, there was still no hard proof.
"Tell our people to get here at once. We're attacking this military base!" The man from the driver's seat stepped straight onto a quick-donning rig for infantry exoskeleton combat armor.
He stood on it with both feet, and in under five seconds
this suit of infantry exoskeleton combat armor was fully on.
Just at this moment,
four or five missile trails appeared in the sky, all coming at this position of theirs.
This was surely the Frey government, having spotted the threat of these "meteors," trying to destroy them.
But unexpectedly, from the top of the small arsenal a small close-in gun extended.
The small close-in gun aimed at the sky and opened fire, shooting down those missiles one by one.
"The mysterious power behind this has thought of everything," the man said with feeling.
At this point he heard the sound of gunfire already coming from other directions around the military base.
The meteors that had fallen here had not been only this one; it seemed others who had got weapons and equipment had already attacked the restricted military zone!
"Attack, quick!"
"Everyone take your weapons; do it the way we trained before."
"Charge in; the secret the Frey government has hidden is in here!"
Around the restricted military zone appeared great numbers of people from who knew what powers.
They held weapons of every kind and attacked this military base.
There were many defensive weapons inside the military base too.
But they could not hold against so many attackers.
After a fierce fight, a gap was soon torn open in the military base.
"Cover me; I'm going in!" A man over two meters tall charged in, shouldering a laser heavy machine gun.
Around him were several other fighters; some held an energy shield in one hand and a weapon in the other.
They formed a battle team and charged into this restricted military zone.
All along the way, they pushed forward under covering fire.
Gradually
the air began to fill with the smell of blood.
"Strange, what's that smell? It feels like blood," someone muttered.
"It seems to be coming from over here." A fighter pointed at a shut blast door; on the door was writing they could not read.
It was Frey script, which only the Frey themselves could read; the local natives were not allowed to learn it.
"Ram it open!" said the big man.
Several of them heaved together and rammed the sealed door open.
Once it was open, inside were rows upon rows of hexagonal cells, packed close, and in every cell something lay curled up.
Someone went closer to look, curious.
"Aaaaah!" This man screamed and fell to the floor, his face full of terror.
"Hell, what are you screaming for? You scared me to death," the big man said, badly startled.
"Boss, it's people! There are people in all these containers!" The man pointed at the containers, trembling, and said in terror.
People?
The big man went closer in disbelief, and the next second his face, never pale to begin with, went darker still.
Inside the containers were people, curled up like infants, one after another.
These people had no clothes on.
Men and women, young and old, all were there.
Several transparent tubes were stuck into their bodies, and in these transparent tubes something red was flowing at this moment.
Thinking of the smell of blood filling the air, and of these people's bodies withering before their eyes,
one could imagine what was being drawn out through these tubes.
"How dare these Frey do this!" the big man roared in fury.
"Could these people all be ones locked up for some crime or other!" a woman in the team took out a device.
She walked a few steps among the containers and chose one whose face could still be made out.
She scanned the face with the device, cross-checked it against the civil records they had stolen long before,
and very soon found the match.
Male, 27, from such-and-such a city, a food-delivery worker; for running five red lights, sentenced outright to life imprisonment.
Female, 23, from such-and-such a city; for writing boys'-love fiction, sentenced outright to life imprisonment.
Male, 13, a pupil at such-and-such a school in such-and-such a city; for failing to do his homework several times, sentenced outright to life imprisonment.
Male, 19; for viewing banned videos online, sentenced outright to life imprisonment.
Looking at these records one by one,
the woman could not help covering her mouth.
Though some of these acts truly were not very good, for these acts alone to be sentenced outright to life imprisonment, and in truth to have one's blood drawn here until death:
this was going much too far.
"Then my family who were arrested must all have ended up like this!" a man, a team leader, said, clutching his head, close to breaking down.
"Let's keep going and look further." The big leader went on ahead, gritting his teeth.
After a few hundred meters, a railing blocked the way ahead.
Because there was no light, all that could be seen was a very deep atrium before them.
"Light." The big leader took out something like a stick, struck it once and threw it out.
In an instant the stick lit up, lighting the whole space,
dropping fast from high in the atrium.
And the scene in the atrium left everyone in the big man's team dumbfounded.
For in the atrium was layer upon layer of structure,
every layer just like the one they were on,
at least several hundred meters deep.
And if every layer was like this,
it was hard to imagine just how many people were in this space.
"Bastards, bastards, bastards. These Frey bastards!" The big leader's eyes were bloodshot as he roared and howled.
"Leader, calm down a little. This is only part of the truth. We have to find out what the Frey are collecting so much blood for! We have to uncover the whole truth!" the woman team member said.
The big leader took a deep breath, nodded hard, and said, "You're right. Since we've come this far, we have to find out what they're up to here, what secret is hidden here. Everyone turn on your recorders, and share them across the team. So long as one person gets out alive, find a way to make public everything we've seen here! We have to let everyone know just what the Frey government is doing to us!"
"Yes!"
The team looked at the tubes.
The tubes leading out of each container all converged into one great pipe, which ran off toward the depths.
All the team followed that thick pipe overhead and kept going.
The big leader's finger was already on the trigger; right now he truly hoped to see an enemy.
His fury was already stuck in his throat, about to burst out.
If there had been a Frey before him now, he would have shot that Frey full of holes without a second thought.