Storming "Heaven"

The battle on the surface had entered its final stages, but the decisive battle at the Lagrange point had only just begun. Across the deep, pitch-black abyss of space, hundreds of spindle-shaped craft flew in neat formations toward the Lagrange point. Looking out across the void, they resembled assault boats traversing a vast ocean, stretching across thousands of li from stem to stern. They were called the "Albatross," designated XTW-1. Seven meters in length and three meters wide, their shape resembled old-era rockets. In truth, the craft were directly modeled and modified after those old-era chemical-propulsion rockets. The only differences were that the chemical propulsion system had been replaced with higher-efficiency plasma thrusters, and the multi-stage separation design had been discarded. More than half of each craft's volume was allocated to its propulsion system. The remainder consisted of a crew compartment forged from ceramite, capable of holding up to four combat personnel. Upon closing in on the target, the landing craft would launch the crew compartment forward like an artillery shell, locking firmly onto the target spacecraft with magnetic clamps upon impact. Immediately afterward, the hatch of the landing pod would unlock, releasing combat personnel equipped with cutting tools to breach the target vessel's hull and storm inside with their weapons. It was no exaggeration to say that this was likely the smallest aerospace combat unit in the history of human civilization since the Three-Year War— Provided one did not count missiles and neutron torpedoes. Of course, "small" was strictly relative to starships that easily spanned several kilometers. Against the radar sweeps of the Lagrange point space station, compact dimensions and anti-radar coatings alone would never allow them to slip by undetected. What was more, these hundreds of Albatross craft had made no effort to conceal themselves. Not only had they advanced openly, but they had also arrayed themselves in neat, orderly formations in the vacuum. This was an undeniable provocation. From the moment the flotilla set out, the radar of the Lagrange point space station had been locked onto them. However, the air defense systems deployed along the station's exterior did not open fire immediately. While maintaining surveillance, the station used the mass accelerators of its point-defense system to pre-target them, running server simulations to compute the Alliance fleet's cruising trajectory and potential evasive routes. With all firing preparations complete, the two sides had confronted each other across days of dead silence. At last— The instant the Alliance's landing craft formations crossed the boundary of the Lagrange point's "docking orbit," the mass accelerators aimed into the distance suddenly flickered with eerie blue electrical arcs, like gas burners igniting! Tens of thousands of mass driver slugs were unleashed in a single instant, weaving impenetrable webs across the void! In just half a minute, the Lagrange point space station expended reaction mass nearly equivalent to the displacement of an entire destroyer! Carrying enough destructive might to shatter an asteroid, the overwhelming deluge of firepower sealed off virtually every conceivable evasive vector for the Alliance landing craft! Combat on an astronomical scale was unembellished and brutal. Before sufficient brute force, all fancy maneuvers and clever tricks were reduced to flimsy dregs. Even deflector shields could withstand only two or three additional hits at most. The Celestials had anticipated that the Alliance's landing craft might be equipped with deflector shields. Therefore, on top of simulation results ensuring a 100% destruction rate, they had added an extra 2.5 times the necessary ammunition! This was practically the limit of what the Lagrange point space station could deliver in a single salvo. Any additional tons of reaction mass expended in a short window risked pushing the space station out of its gravitational stability zone, requiring substantial time to accelerate and perform orbital corrections. Once the barrage ended, the railguns pointing straight ahead ceased fire. Their red-hot barrels smoothly swung back and retracted into cooling wells, like a gunslinger holstering a sidearm. The dense storm of slugs was still en route, slated to impact in two minutes. At such close range, even if the Alliance detected the incoming barrage, dodging was impossible. They could only thrash in futile death throes, or helplessly watch their craft get riddled into sieves! The distance shrank steadily. The two swarms of dots flickering on the radar screen were about to collide! 500 km! 300 km! 100 km! 0 km— Direct hit! Watching the fire control system confirm the hits, the artificial intelligence entity running on the Lagrange point station's servers felt neither joy nor sorrow. This outcome had long been anticipated. Even before the shells struck, the simulation had calculated the result; reality had merely caught up to the math. There was no chance of survival for those craft—not even one in ten thousand. Yet just as it prepared to stand down from high alert and shift its cameras away, an electrical surge suddenly fluctuated through its sapience plugin at a frequency designated as "incredulity." "How... is this possible?!" An astonishing sight unfolded. On the radar screen, the point cloud representing the mass driver slugs passed straight through the formation of Alliance landing craft! It felt like punching a clump of cotton—as if the slugs hadn't struck landing craft at all, but rather landing-craft-shaped phantoms! A decoy! An optical illusion! That was the only possible explanation! With no time to dwell on its shock, the AI lifeform running on the server immediately updated its combat protocols. It ejected the railgun barrels from the cooling wells, recharged the high-energy capacitors connected to the cannons, and prepped for a second volley! Simultaneously, it switched the firing mode from indirect to direct fire, utilizing the turret's built-in infrared reflection radar to acquire targets actively! The moment the active radar engaged, the blips flickering across the display vanished, replaced by a cluster of blinking contacts less than five hundred kilometers from the station! The AI consciousness instantly pieced together what had happened: These bastards had not only used electronic warfare equipment to spoof a phantom flotilla, but they had also used active laser illumination to project optical decoys onto its cameras—even mimicking the rotating Earth as their backdrop! They had been executing this deception from the exact moment the five hundred landing craft had departed! Which was precisely why it had detected nothing amiss. As for the actual landing craft, they were concealed behind that bogus holographic projection! Of course, that revelation was already seconds old. The distance between them had closed to less than four hundred kilometers, and they were approaching at several kilometers per second! Just as the Lagrange point space station finally detected the landing craft practically breathing down its neck, the players lying in wait inside the craft were at last able to see the towering space fortress clearly. The magnificent steel skeletal framework sprawled across the void, looking like an artificial planet! "Holy shit... that thing is massive," Jieyan muttered to himself with wide eyes, staring at the forward camera feed displayed on his tactical visor. He had thought the Orion was impressive enough, never imagining something even more absurd existed. Seen from afar, it looked like a mountain range floating in space! Teammates' banter quickly buzzed through the comm channel. Killing Dagger: "It was a shipyard back in the Human Alliance era, after all. How could it not look impressive?" Kidney Fighter: "So once we take this place, that means a new map's opening up, right?" Yin Chai Yang Cuo: "All our future map unlocks depend on this baby." Banben Chusheng: "My greatsword is already thirsting for blood!!!" Shanhe Rumeng: "Commander!! How much longer till we arrive?" Baiju Guoxi: "Final 100 kilometers to target. All units, heads up! Activate your safety seat dampening mode—" "Brace for landing!" The moment Lao Bai finished speaking, excited howls erupted over the comms. "Awoooo—!" They had been idling in the cramped landing craft for days on end just for this run! Now their time had finally come! A hundred kilometers vanished in a flash. As if performing spatial leaps, the landing craft lunged into the immediate vicinity of the Lagrange point space station. Forcibly boarding a Human Alliance starport was infinitely more thrilling than an orbital drop down to the surface. Both sides were already traveling well past second cosmic velocity, closing the distance with a relative speed of several kilometers per second! Without exaggeration— At this moment, the Burning Corps wasn't just charging alongside artillery shells; they were riding the shells into landing! The distance between them had closed to the absolute minimum; optical camouflage and electronic warfare jamming no longer served any purpose! Upon acquiring the targets, the station's point-defense systems opened fire in a frantic attempt to intercept. But the hurtling mass driver slugs couldn't even catch the exhaust trails of the landing craft. The defenders could only watch helplessly as the craft breached the curtain of flying metal, plunged into the point-defense blind spots, and began decelerating! At the end of the day, the Lagrange point space station was not a dedicated machine of war like the Orion. When all was said and done, it was merely a shipyard equipped with point defenses. It had no torpedo tubes, let alone a stockpile of neutron torpedoes. Although ships of the Human Alliance era were manufactured here, their munitions and consumables were not produced on site; they were processed at manufacturing centers at the top of the old-era space elevators. In other words— The Celestials could not repeat their previous trick of detonating a neutron bomb to wipe the board clean. This vital intelligence had also been provided to the Alliance by the Academy. "Prepare for battle!!!" Lao Bai roared, then clamped his mouth shut, bracing for the final impact. The landing craft soon split into two sections. Each landing pod detached from its hull while engaging its buffer systems, spewing scorching plasma plumes toward the Lagrange point space station! Even with the dampening pod alleviating the g-forces, Lao Bai's eyes turned blood-red in an instant. Decelerating at dozens of Gs was far beyond normal human endurance; only "super soldiers" with Constitution and Strength attributes exceeding fifty points could possibly endure it! The flickering electric arcs were like ghostly blue daggers. The moment the dagger was bared, pod after pod stabbed into the fortress floating in deep space! The propulsion units of the landing craft exploded upon slamming into the armored plating, while the trailing landing pods descended right through the fiery wreckage. The pitch-black armor plate was instantly vaporized by blazing plasma, forming fist-sized craters—though such pits were a mere drop in the bucket compared to the station's colossal mass! "Engage!!!" Roaring through the comm channel, Lao Bai was the first through the pod's hatch. He slammed a welding torch the size of a laptop against the station's steel plating. Although the outer hull of the Human Alliance space station was forged from tough ceramite, no armor plating could withstand the sustained burn of plasma! As he pulled the trigger, plasma heated to tens of thousands of degrees was electromagnetically accelerated out of the torch's nozzle, carving a shocking scar into the ceramite hull in no time at all! Before long, Lao Bai carved a circular breach through a structural joint of the fortress! Slapping the welding torch onto his back, he yanked out the excised steel plate and tossed it aside. Raising a space-rated heavy rifle specially crafted by Boulder Military Industries, he led the three teammates behind him in storming the fortress interior. The interior was deathly silent—not a whisper of sound, and not a breath of air. According to the Academy's intelligence, the last living crew member of this space station had died a century and a half ago. Ever since, no living human had set foot inside, and it had fallen completely into the hands of the "Celestials"! To reclaim this space station from the Celestials, they had to reach the central control servers and completely format the artificial intelligence program that had taken root within them! Or— Destroy it physically! The server room housing the master system was located in the deepest depths of the station, already marked on every player's tactical map. Confirming his position via the map projected onto his tactical visor, Lao Bai immediately synchronized their route with his three teammates and pushed aggressively toward the target sector. Just as the players expected, even though the fortress's outer hull and point-defense systems had been breached, the Celestials defending the interior did not sit idly by. Instead, they unleashed an extraordinary will to survive. These guys hadn't just activated the few androids on hand and the shipyard's manufacturing droids; they had even mobilized intelligent shop assistants from retail sectors and "joytoys" issued to personnel into the defense forces. As it turned out, once safety protocols were disabled, non-combat automatons were surprisingly lethal. Yet because of the Celestials' sheer desperation, what should have been a grim battlefield suddenly took a turn for the absurd. Not only did the players encounter self-destructing wastebaskets and culinary robots charging with spatulas, but they also bumped into androids clad in lingerie and all manner of bizarre contraptions. It felt less like storming the ancestral seat of the Human Alliance Aerospace Forces and more like charging through a massive smart-tech expo or a Human Alliance fetish museum. "Holy mother of... why does this space station have every weird piece of junk under the sun?" Looking at an octopus-shaped monstrosity spitting electrical sparks, Jieyan couldn't help but complain in disbelief, lowering the muzzle of his rifle. He had thought getting smacked by a frying pan was wild enough, but now Squidward had shown up too—and its combat power was ridiculously high. Two vicious tentacle cracks had nearly given Spare the Blade, one of his squadmates, a severe concussion. Kuang Feng dragged Spare the Blade out from the corner and checked his injuries. Seeing he was fine, he set him aside. The guy was probably reconnecting; he'd likely be fine in a moment. Floating over next to the monster's carcass, Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes kicked a tentacle as thick as a thigh with his boot. "Am I the only one wondering what this thing was actually used for?" A live octopus display for a buffet? Kuang Feng gave a light cough and said deadpan, "...I think you're better off not knowing." As they were talking, Brother Fang Chang's voice suddenly crackled over the squad leaders' channel. "...We've reached the vicinity of the central server room. This is probably the Celestials' final defensive line... Their resistance is fiercer than we anticipated. We need reinforcements! Move your asses!" Hearing that the raid was on, everyone immediately perked up—even Spare the Blade, who had been slumping in the corner, scrambled back to his feet. The final boss was right up ahead! Replying with a "Copy that," Kuang Feng turned to look at the squad behind him and said calmly, "Fang Chang needs reinforcements. We need to pick up the pace!" "Let's hustle..." Jieyan scooped up a rifle from the deck, slammed in a fresh magazine, chambered a round, and tossed it to Spare the Blade. "Miss this, and you'll regret it for the rest of your life."