Homo Sapiens

Oceania.

The Northern Region, Alice Springs Town.

It was a quiet little town located south of the MacDonald Mountain Range—one of the few mountain ranges in the heart of Oceania—surrounded by arid valleys with little rainfall.

And about 18 kilometers southwest of Alice Springs Town was the globally famous, yet extremely low-profile, Pine Tree Valley.

In early October, Oceania was enjoying its pleasant spring season.

The residents of Pine Tree Valley were all Americans. They were employees of the Pine Tree Valley base, or rather, special agents of the American NSA.

The entire base housed over a thousand employees and their families, and no locals were permitted to enter.

The evening breeze carried the lingering warmth of the setting sun.

After a long day, Baki headed to the base’s only bar with a few colleagues, hoping to relieve his inner emptiness and loneliness.

After all, the base was surrounded by desolate mountains and deserts where even kangaroos were a rare sight. Coupled with the internal secrecy and the fact that nearby locals couldn’t enter, their only outlets for relieving their frustration were things like video games, sports, and drinking.

Pushing open the bar door, Horton, the bartender and owner, said, "Welcome... Hey, Baki."

"A Golden Years and a platter of grilled sausages." Baki pulled out a chair.

His colleague, Rogers, said dejectedly, "A Sky Blue, on the rocks. And a bowl of mixed nuts."

"Okay..."

Baki smiled and tried to console him. "So you broke up. Just wait until our contracts are up next year. There’s a whole world of hot girls out there."

"I can’t stand another second in this godforsaken place. It’s nothing but sand and rocks. A total nightmare. I really should have gone to Texas Instruments..." Rogers grumbled.

Just as Baki was about to speak, a series of massive explosions rocked the base. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The dozen or so radar arrays in Pine Tree Valley, along with the vast satellite dish receivers and the data building, all erupted in violent blasts.

Flames shot into the sky from the blast zones, followed by thick, rolling smoke.

"Fuck? What’s going on?" Baki instinctively dove under a table.

Rogers, terrified, shoved open the bar door. His eyes filled with disbelief and horror as he muttered to himself, "The data center... Jenny! Fuck you..."

Old Horton, pulling a rifle from behind the liquor cabinet, walked past Rogers. "The base is under attack. We’re on high alert. Baki, stop playing dead and grab a weapon."

As if waking from a dream, Rogers and an embarrassed Baki quickly retrieved revolvers, ballistic helmets, and body armor from a small hidden room behind the liquor cabinet.

Clearly, Old Horton was more than just a simple bar owner.

The three of them emerged onto the street to see residents in chaos and the base’s core area in the distance.

They soon ran into the base’s security detail. The captain, Cadillac, said with a grim expression, "Horton, get the residents into the shelters as fast as you can. Our communications have been cut. The enemy is most likely in the vicinity."

"How is that possible? Don’t we have satellite phones?" Horton’s face fell.

Cadillac explained, "You know that to prevent leaks, satellite communications here can only go through three specific ground stations. Those three stations have now been blown up, and the landlines and fiber optic cables have been cut too."

"Damn it!" Horton knew they were in deep trouble.

Pine Tree Valley was exceptionally important—an indispensable base for America’s global surveillance network.

The base was now completely cut off from the outside world. Even for help to arrive from the nearest town, Alice Springs Town, it would take about half an hour.

Cadillac prepared to split his forces. One group would rescue personnel and salvage facilities at the base, while the other would guard against surrounding enemies.

Meanwhile, Horton, as one of the secret intelligence chiefs stationed at Pine Tree Valley, led Baki, Rogers, and other able-bodied men to start moving the old, weak, sick, and young into the air-raid shelters.

...

In the mountains northwest of Pine Tree Valley.

A dozen or so Blood Blade Soldiers were maintaining a cloaked state. The only member of the Blood Blade team who was not a Soldier was Mangqing Shi, who had been recruited from the Burma Army.

He was also the person in charge of this operation. Through a pheromone organ embedded in his body, he had already received feedback from surveillance insects 7 kilometers away.

[Execute indiscriminate bombing protocol.]

Upon receiving the pheromone command, the Blood Blade Soldiers quickly wheeled out waves of modified drones from a natural cave.

Soon, the drones took to the sky.

After launching the drones, Mangqing Shi issued another order: [Recall a portion of the surveillance insects. Prepare for extraction.]

[Roger.]

Around the guard posts on the outskirts of Pine Tree Valley, Cadillac was directing the security detail to set up defensive positions, scanning the pitch-black night sky with a pair of infrared binoculars.

Suddenly, he thought he heard a faint sound.

Before he could make it out clearly, a violent explosion erupted from the watchtower directly in front of him.

BOOM!

"AHHH..."

"Enemy attack! Take cover!"

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

A barrage of explosions echoed all around as hundreds of electric drones, each with a mere 5-kilogram payload, used their infrared sensor systems to bomb the security detail and the militia.

Pine Tree Valley, already heavily damaged, was now reduced to a field of rubble and ruins.

The charred remains of wooden houses burned fiercely, while wrecked cars and appliances belched black smoke.

Hiding in a shelter, Cadillac gasped for breath, his heart still pounding. He had seen what was attacking Pine Tree Valley—it was a swarm of drones.

Unfortunately, the base’s electromagnetic jammers were unusable because the power generation system had been destroyed.

Even if they could be used, they wouldn’t have been effective. The drones’ systems had been treated with anti-jamming measures; they were disposable units with fixed functions.

And Pine Tree Valley’s weakness was that there were no cities or farms nearby. Even large wild animals were rarely seen.

The reason Mangqing Shi hadn’t launched the drone attack from the start was to give the old, weak, sick, and young a chance to get into the air-raid shelters.

The only people who hadn’t entered the shelters were the security detail and the militia, making them direct targets for the attack.

With no other large creatures in the area, the drones’ infrared identification systems could lock onto targets with extreme precision, preventing any accidental bombings.

More than ten minutes after the bombing ended,

Cadillac finally emerged from the shelter with a few surviving soldiers, looking utterly defeated.

Staring at the devastated landscape of Pine Tree Valley, Cadillac felt a despair beyond tears.

At the same time, a dozen or so American bases around the globe suffered attacks of varying degrees.

But the losses at the Pine Tree Valley base were by far the most severe.

The NSA wasn’t overly concerned about the loss of personnel, but the destruction of Pine Tree Valley’s facilities and the classified information stored in its data center was an incredibly painful blow.

This was also why Victor, on Xing Island, was currently scrambling to deal with the chaos.

The fact that two hundred Seals and the force of Converts they supported had gone completely dark on Cianlan Island was already a huge headache for him.

Now, Black Ship Headquarters had directly ordered all Black Ship branches around the world to drop their other tasks and focus all their efforts on investigating the attacks on the overseas bases.

To be able to launch such a dense wave of attacks simultaneously across the globe, this mysterious force had clearly become a major threat to America.

Until this force was found, neither America nor the City of the Summit behind it would let the matter rest.

Therefore, Black Ship’s intelligence assets all over the world were being redirected to investigate this incident.

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