Chapter 973: Chapter 973: Mixed Doubles
(Oh oh oh, a new month! A new month with double votes!! Comrades, hurry up and vote, or they will truly expire——by the way, how long does this double period last this month...)
After a moment of silence, the command hall below the bridge returned to the tense battlefield scheduling, while the silence continued on the officer platform.
Sandora looked around and, with a serious expression, faced me: "Ah Jun, something is not right, this clone... I feel it might not be the same as we initially thought, ’it’ may have gained more than just a part of your power."
"’It’ knows Earth well, understands ancient human texts, and even modern history. I suspect ’it’ might be very familiar with each of us. This teasing tone fits our interactions best," said Archbishop Lilina, who is adept at analyzing human psychology and has the talent to sense the mental inclinations of all life forms, as she stood on a chair stacked with a pile of books, barely maintaining the same height as everyone else. "’It’ uses a way of speaking that subtly reduces our vigilance, thus increasing our acceptance of ’it.’ However, I cannot be sure if ’its’ thought patterns conform to human standards, so I cannot confirm this yet."
"There’s another possibility," my sister said worriedly, glancing at everyone, "the clone might have Ah Jun’s memory... ’it’ knows every person present and knows what to say in which situation."
I felt a chill down my spine, while Miss Lin was holding her head and groaning; she might have accidentally "seen" that clone just now.
"Alright, if that’s the case, I don’t mind using violence," Sandora said, flexing her wrist with a very unfriendly tone, though her face remained cold, "if ’it’ really has stolen Ah Jun’s memory."
I scratched my head in distress, thinking that this is just another baseless speculation. Who knows what the real situation is? We can’t even be sure if the clone can walk upright...
However, there is one thing we can be 100% certain of and without doubt, this time, we must bring that test subject with us.
The Heavy Stealth Bomber, once it succeeds in an ambush, is an extremely dangerous warship. The massive explosive space compression warheads they carry can cause a space with a radius of several kilometers to suddenly collapse into a point, then expand back to its original state in a random combination. During this process, everything within the compression range will inevitably suffer significant damage, and even units with extremely high resistance to law anomalies from the Empire will have their structures displaced after encountering space compression. This is deadly for warships maneuvering at high speeds, as spaceship shields have no defense against such indirect attacks. Smaller ships will be torn in half, while large warships will suffer heavy damage. However, the Heavy Stealth Bomber is also an exceptionally fragile spacecraft. To carry massive warheads while maintaining stealth that can dodge any radar, as well as high maneuverability to stealthily attach to targets during fierce military conflicts, these strangely shaped ships possess tonnage that is completely disproportionate to their power, and their defense is alarmingly low. Without strong instantaneous firepower support, they are basically dead the moment they are exposed.
After the first successful surprise attack, the Stealth Bombers quickly turned and fled, leaving the follow-up attack to their sibling ships: Assault Ships and Escort Ships. Meanwhile, Pandora and Visca led a heavy ship detachment to flank the Fallen Apostles. During the chaos caused by the bombing and the disorganized formation, the two little madmen launched an all-out firepower assault that perfectly matched their style.
Hundreds of Floating Cannons formed a curtain wall, backed by larger and more intimidating heavy gunships commanding the Floating Gun Towers. Pandora’s combat strategy is as follows: first, we need a big cannon, then this big cannon should have many medium cannons, and if there is bandwidth and energy to spare, each medium cannon can also carry a bunch of small cannons. When the entire field of vision is filled with cannon barrels, this world will be filled with joy — and victory.
This is why Pandora and Visca can always create the scene of a fleet-level bombardment with just a few people. When they launch all their cannons towards the enemy formation, the commander at the rear of the Fallen Apostle might be shocked, thinking they are under attack from another Group Army.
Nothing is more fun than chasing behind a bunch of unresponsive spaceships, bombarding their engine nozzles and reactor chambers—Visca’s words.
I really want to describe the following battle in detail, but there’s not much to say. The Fallen Apostles were really unlucky. They and their Emperor plotted countless times, but in the end, they stumbled big time. Three research worlds were burned clean, and the rebellion they barely managed to chase down was not caught. The Imperial Army suddenly appeared. The Fallen Apostles, always ambushing others, were successfully ambushed themselves, bodies lying everywhere (this is a metaphor, grasp the essence). When the rebels feigning retreat suddenly turned around and counterattacked, the Fallen Apostles’ commander realized they were truly duped. Enemies surrounded them, heavy stealth bombers deployed numerous space dark mines on the flanks, with a large array of cannons chasing them from behind. If that wasn’t bad enough, add to it the bizarre situations constantly appearing in their ranks: inexplicable ship malfunctions, weapon control failures, friendly fire incidents—misfortunes emerged endlessly. Some ships slowed down suddenly, hit like sitting ducks. Some ships aged rapidly within a millisecond, torn to fragments. Even without suffering these misfortunes or enemy fire, some ships were shredded by energy explosions that appeared out of thin air. By the end of the battle, perhaps the Fallen Apostles’ commander would suspect they were under attack by law weapons—broadly speaking, they’d be right. Every member of the First Family has dealings with law weapons.
And until the end, the enemy’s commander probably wouldn’t understand why the test subjects, who escaped from their own labs and had never interacted with other Xyrin Apostles, invisibly and perfectly collaborated with the Imperial Army in this textbook ambush—in fact, even I don’t fully understand how it happened.
Lin Xue’s foreknowledge, Sandora’s arrangements, that clone’s sudden odd actions, and a bit of serendipity accomplished this remarkably successful complex operation. But after the dust settled, I felt dizzy, unable to understand why these events happened in sequence. It seemed explainable in process but always felt pre-designed. The entire flow was too seamless, losing its authenticity.
"The enemy is retreating. They’ve matched the breakthrough code for the gravity trap."
A commander reported loudly, and the starship mainframe transmitted the battlefield situation to the officer platform. The holographic projection showed the Fallen Apostles’ fleet formation nearing collapse, the dark minefield almost touching them and the heavy floating cannon array tightly pursuing them. Even the best fleet commander would be at a loss, and they couldn’t get support. Although this was the Fallen Apostles’ territory, Harlan stationed here might not sacrifice another batch of precious ships from the inland to save these fleets. As someone who has abandoned warrior’s glory and resorted to all means, he has over an eighty percent chance of making such a choice.
I turned my sight to Sandora: "Continue the pursuit?"
But she shook her head: "No, we can’t let them gain clearer information on the Imperial Army’s current strength, all fleets retract and prepare to retreat."
The distraught Fallen Apostle fleet, severely impacted by the ambush, couldn’t be bothered with whether the Imperial Army intended to pursue and chose a full-line retreat. They are indeed qualified warriors, but qualified warriors do not hesitate to retreat wisely. However, qualified warriors also do not easily relinquish their territory to the enemy. Therefore, before retreating, they still managed to do a very Xyrin-like, deranged thing—I don’t know exactly what they did, but a Fallen Apostle command ship sent a highly encrypted message. Then, the dark red universe where the Royal Fleet resided suddenly became abnormal. The bridge alarms sounded: "Warning! Current universe constants are in chaos, logical loopholes approaching threshold! World barrier strength continues to decrease, mainframe advises full fleet evacuation!"
"It seems they indeed have reserved the means to directly destroy the entire universe," Sandora’s eyebrows slightly arched, "The key constants that maintain the universe’s information balance are being reset. This world is about to disintegrate, surely the fleet requested an extermination order before retreating."
"If the defense line can’t hold, just go all out and destroy it all," I shook my head helplessly, "We knew from the start they’d leave us with nothing, typical ’tactics’ of the Xyrin Apostles."
Small warships returned to their mother ship’s Gnaku, large ships opened their void navigation shields, preparing the equipment for counteracting cosmic collapse during these last moments before doomsday. Meanwhile, another fleet roamed on the Imperial Fleet’s periphery—thousands of battleships, painted in black and red, exuding an abyssal aura that imbues these ships with an unsettling atmosphere beyond their appearance—always keeping every Imperial soldier on high alert. Now, the Imperial Fleet was retracting its formation while turning all main cannons toward these still ambiguous Abyssalized battleships. Conversely, those ships filled with abyssal aura aimed all main cannons into outer space while still chanting Mussolini is an idiot...
I say, isn’t that enough? Mussolini is so pitiful, having been dead for nearly a hundred years, yet still being top-post humiliated in another world. Isn’t there any humanity left?!
"They are indicating that they pose no threat and have sent various communication requests," the intelligence officer reported, "but these communication requests have a general level of encryption. To prevent the starship mainframe from being compromised, we have temporarily not accepted them."
This might be the strangest encounter we’ve had with a group of Abyssalized ships so far; everyone is being very cautious, including Sandora. Although we were fighting alongside those ships outside just a few minutes ago, the officers still maintain the necessary caution at such a time. After thinking it over, I nodded: "Temporarily disconnect the communication mainframe of the Imperial Admiral from the other arrays and see what the clone wants to do."
The intelligence officer complied, and after a few seconds, reported incredulously: "Your Majesty, the opposing flagship is requesting boarding permission—they wish to send a person to the Imperial Admiral, their Supreme Commander. The request includes a postscript: ’Guess who I am?’"
Sandora and I looked at each other, Lin Xue sighed heavily and waved: "I’m used to it—let that weirdo do as they please, accept the request. I can only say that there’s no danger."
There’s still some time before this universe completely collapses; before that, it’s good to figure out the identity of the other party. This was our initial goal, though the situation is a bit different from what we expected: what eventually appeared before us was not just a clone but also ’it’ leading a complete force of thousands of Abyssalized battleships.
Boarding permission was quickly sent out, allowing only one person, requiring them to land using a single person shuttle. Being cautious doesn’t hurt, especially when the other side might be a dual-category king of Abyss and Void. The process was very careful; the entire group army watched a single shuttle, with at least a hundred surveillance screens on the bridge showing the flying device steadily entering the fifth boarding bay of the Imperial Admiral from all angles. Detection showed that the shuttle itself carried an Abyss reaction, but it did not have amplification infectivity, and the member inside was actually clean: entirely unrelated to the Abyss. Soon, the boarder who walked through the hundred-meter-long detection corridor stood before us, met by the First Family with the fullest lineup for this extremely special visitor.
...
Now we can finally stop referring to this runaway test subject as ’it’ because the gender and appearance of the other party have been confirmed. Standing in front of me was a girl about 1.65 meters tall wearing a black long dress, looking a few years younger than Qianqian, with long hair falling over her shoulders, a bare face with a delicate feature. But just at the first glance, she seemed to have an aura of superiority as if nurtured by some remarkable family—moreover, there was an impression of being mischievous and willful—this final aspect came three-tenths from the leaping gaze in her eyes, and seven-tenths from her previous actions.
Everyone was somewhat unable to react. I was even more astonished, staring at the other person for a full three minutes, and then slowly, a strange feeling arose in my heart—of course, it wasn’t the rapid heartbeat of seeing a beauty; I wouldn’t go that far, given that the girls at home are all generally bubbling with beauty. Even with someone like Sandora, it wouldn’t be surprising to see her beauty overflow in some way. I just felt an eerie familiarity from this girl in the black dress standing in front of me: familiar, close, utterly non-threatening, even having a sense that I could boldly reach out and pat her head, just like looking at one of the little girls at home who isn’t over 1.2 meters tall.
Yet a few minutes ago, I insisted on believing that I would face someone who was three meters tall and broad as three meters, with a blue face, fang-like teeth, a mouth opened three feet wide leaving drool, left arm tattooed with tropical fish, and right arm tattooed with a quarantine certificate—always felt something coming out of the Fallen Apostle Laboratory shouldn’t look this delicate.
"Hey Ah Jun, why is it not a three-meter-tall, equally wide blue-faced creature with a three-foot-wide gaping mouth drooling, left arm tattooed with tropical fish, right arm tattooed with a quarantine certificate?" exclaimed a girl next to me who just snapped out of her daydreaming.
Alright, Qianqian has fully demonstrated that birds of a feather flock together, this girl and I were born to be a pair...
Lilina poked my knee maliciously (it’s the highest place she could reach): "Boss, it’s your clone."
Sandora looked over with a peculiar expression and joined in the fun: "Ah Jun, isn’t this deviation a bit too much? It’s a girl."
I: "..."
"A clone? Ha, looks like everything is indeed going according to plan," the girl in the black dress standing in front of us clapped her hands with a smile after hearing the chatter around, her voice sounded quite pleasant—but I still harbored a guess about the blue-faced fang-like creature, so I figured as long as she didn’t make the same noise as a dog fighting for a pen, I could hear a pleasant tune, "I’m not some clone, but I did indeed come out of that clone plan—without that plan, it wouldn’t have been easy to meet you all."
I paused, just about to ask something when she gave me a sweet smile: "Dad, let’s go home for dinner! I’m cooking today!"
The crowd was immediately in an uproar, Qianqian looked like she was about to shout, Miss Lin already had a frying pan in hand, and Lilina was ready to jot down some black history in a small notebook. Just then, the catalyst for all this turned her gaze to Lin Xue: "Mom—"
The shout was delicate and pleasant, adorable and polite, sounding just like a little girl on the street sweet-talking her biological mother, except the one addressing ’mom’ here looked likely just over three years younger than her...
Lin Xue held a frying pan, face twisted, as a virtuous maiden sometimes even shy to kiss her boyfriend in private, being called ’mom’ by a girl seemingly over three years younger than herself was a psychological impact you can imagine, that she didn’t pull out a Big Ivan right then counts as good composure. "This joke cannot be casually made—who exactly are you! Where did you come from, what do you want, and what’s your secret! Approaching Ah Jun for what reason and why do I feel like hitting you so much..."
The girl in the black dress shrank her neck: "Mom, could you put down the frying pan? I really won’t mess up this time—I got so scared looking at this frying pan that before I was fifteen, I always thought I was a bonus from your phone recharge..."
Everyone: "..."
Sandora nudged my arm: "Ah Jun, why do I feel that even if she’s not your daughter, just from that mouth she would be close kin within three generations?"
I: "..."
"Wood," Lin Xue’s sarcastic voice made me turn my head, and I saw that, goodness, she was fuming black smoke, pointing at the girl who was smiling evilly and claiming to be my daughter, even her voice was unstable, "If she can’t say something persuasive in a moment... a mixed-gender double strike!" (To be continued. If you like this work, welcome to Qidian () to vote for recommendations and monthly tickets, your support is my greatest motivation.)