Chapter 521: The Blood-Red Moon! Genetic Wave Strike! The Undying Insects!
Soon, the Trisolaran fleet's monitoring officers also detected the advance of the MegaCorp fleet, as well as that celestial-scale megastructure—the War Moon—sweeping toward their position.
A planet-sized body, actually moving at sub-light speed—this was something completely beyond the Trisolarans' expectations.
It wasn't until the MegaCorp fleet fired a beam strike at them that the Trisolaran commander suddenly realized—they had been tricked!
But by then, it was already too late.
The leading Dreadnought fired a beam strike carrying gravitational shear right into the center of the Trisolaran formation. The first to be hit, Trisolaran warship #777, was instantly annihilated and vaporized.
The two to three hundred warships around it were damaged to varying degrees by the gravitational shear at the array's core. The ones closest to the field center were twisted apart, shredded into wreckage.
A single shot had dealt the Trisolaran fleet immeasurable damage and chaos.
This was the MegaCorp's newly-developed battleship cannon, fusing gravitational technology with beam strikes—using the beam to pry at the folds of cosmic space, disrupting gravitational balance, plunging the surrounding field into brief chaos.
Matter caught at the center would be torn into fragments in an instant.
This new strike method alone was enough to deliver one clear point of information to Trisolaris:
The MegaCorp had mastered law-level weapons!
As long as they wished, the MegaCorp could wipe out the entire Trisolaran fleet with ease.
The Dreadnought's gravitational beam strike, like firecrackers exploding during Spring Festival, instantly triggered a chain reaction within the Trisolaran formation.
The warped space sent light scattering in confusion. Many Trisolarans saw their bodies moving forward, while their heads remained fixed in midair.
Only after a while did they realize—their heads and bodies had been forcibly torn apart by an unknown gravitational force. The turbulence of spatial folds even disrupted their visual system.
Things that had already happened would only appear to them a full three minutes later.
Confronted with these bizarre events one after another, even the slowest of minds would have caught on by now. The Trisolaran commander glared furiously at the monitoring officer beside him, demanding:
"What are you even doing here—why didn't you report this to me sooner!"
The monitoring officer ignored the commander's scolding. Its smooth, mirror-like face reflected its own inner fear as it pointed to the data on the display and stammered:
"A blood-red planet… it's coming straight at us!"
Though Trisolarans communicated via brainwaves, their information-processing ability still had limits. They couldn't handle multiple complex events at once.
When too many brainwaves came in simultaneously, even the commander could only parse one or two.
And that was precisely why it hadn't noticed the monitoring officer's signal in time, only realizing something was wrong once the MegaCorp's strike had already landed.
"A fleet of no less than a thousand super warships… a blood moon that moves on its own…"
The Trisolaran commander was both furious and terrified. It had expected the MegaCorp's War Moon home base to harbor some hidden trump card—but at most, perhaps an AI drone swarm.
Who could have imagined they had concealed an entire elite fleet until now?
The commander's brain was essentially crashing at this point. They no longer needed radar signals—just looking out the viewport was enough.
A colossal blood-red moon, trailing a long tail of blazing blue flame, was bearing down on them.
From beginning to end, the Trisolarans had never truly understood the MegaCorp's origins. According to humanity's own account, the MegaCorp had been human wanderers two centuries ago.
They supposedly discovered the relics of other lost civilizations in some distant galaxy cluster, and from that developed to their present scale.
To the Trisolarans, such a tale was like humans listening to One Thousand and One Nights—something to enjoy for amusement, nothing more.
But now, faced with this vast steel armada, unimaginable law-level strike devices, and a moving blood-red moon, the Trisolaran commander finally realized just how catastrophically wrong it had been.
Humanity's enemy had never been the tiny Infinity-class Carrier or the cloaked War Moon.
It was a higher civilization, one that wielded the power of law-level technologies!
They had been duped.
At this moment, the commander sank into utter terror. Over the past two centuries of strategic and tactical space planning, humans and Trisolarans had run countless war-gaming simulations of extreme scenarios.
But never had they accounted for the sudden appearance of a third party in this civilization war.
By now, even the dullest fool would not believe the MegaCorp was really just that two-century-old human faction. This had to be some ancient humans long predating them—or else some alien civilization impersonating humanity.
There was simply no other way to explain all of it.
The War Moon pressed closer and closer, seemingly intent on cutting off their retreat. Over a thousand warships encircled them from all directions. The disordered, panic-stricken Trisolaran fleet had clearly lost its ability to strike back.
To force their surrender more quickly, the War Moon once again unleashed a wave of AI drones, each one deploying antimatter bombs to cripple Trisolaran ships.
Victory wasn't the point—containment was. All they needed was to pin the Trisolaran fleet within this sector, and leave the rest to the negotiators.
But the Trisolaran commander was still obstinate, refusing to send any signal of surrender or negotiation to the MegaCorp.
In that case, the AI drone swarm showed no mercy.
They swarmed like locusts, unleashing antimatter bombs that gnawed great holes out of Trisolaran warships, tearing apart hulls that drifted as wreckage across the vast battlefield of space.
"Activate full defense systems! Engage the enemy where we stand!"
After a brief moment of shock and dread, the commander steeled itself, ordering the fleet to resist. It was the same dilemma as always.
They had already sacrificed too much for this day. To surrender now was no different from annihilation.
Better to die fighting with honor in foreign skies, than perish in shame at the enemy's hand.
The star's gravity would cradle their bones, fusing them into fine cosmic dust, to be carried back by stellar drift to the Trisolaran system—returning home at last.
At the commander's order, the Trisolaran warships all entered defensive mode.
A perfectly smooth mirror coating instantly sheathed their hulls, every viewport sealing shut, making each vessel look like a giant droplet of water.
Clearly, this was strong-interaction material at atomic thickness—able to resist conventional matter strikes, while maximally reflecting laser attacks.
It would minimize fleet losses.
And sure enough, when the Dreadnought fired another beam strike, the Trisolaran fleet's mirror surfaces reflected the beam away.
The beam traveled all the way to Jupiter before finally dissipating.
One had to admit—the Trisolaran civilization was still formidable when it came to countering laser-type weapons.
Relying on strong interaction material technology and microscopic technology, this civilization had indeed distributed its limited resources to the extreme of rationality.
The sophons provided an informational advantage, helping the Trisolarans exploit intelligence gaps, while strong interaction materials ensured that the Trisolarans were not outmatched in conventional firepower.
This kind of tech specialization was practically a god-tier build.
If not for the appearance of the Universal Megacorp, the Trisolaran civilization would absolutely have gotten the kind of protagonist's script given to someone like Xiao Yan.
Seeing the Megacorp dreadnought's beam cannons bounce harmlessly away, the Trisolaran commander regained part of his confidence. As long as they could withstand the Megacorp's cannon barrage, the remaining AI drones were nothing to fear.
"Full turn! Take the War Moon!"
The commander barked the furious order. Since the opponent had already revealed itself and thrown down all its cards, it naturally wasn't going to show mercy.
Once they captured the Megacorp's War Moon, turning back to deal with the Asian Fleet and Earth would be no problem.
After concentrating fire to clear out the first wave of AI drones, the Trisolaran fleet wheeled into formation, shifting their objective from Earth to the War Moon.
However, before the Trisolaran fleet could complete the maneuver, the Megacorp released another massive wave of fighters.
Cheap, fast, and each loaded with a large stock of antimatter missiles, these fighters turned into swarms of steel locusts, gnawing madly at the Trisolaran fleet.
Supported by the Megacorp's colossal industrial system, the cost of these inexpensive TIE fighters had been driven down to the equivalent of one hundred bottles of energy drink.
And there was no need for live pilots to operate them. Each warship's onboard AI could remotely control the fighters.
So long as they didn't stray too far from their carrier, the fighters could execute flight and attack missions under AI control even more smoothly than human pilots.
The antimatter missiles mounted on the TIE fighters kept striking Trisolaran warships in bursts of explosions. Although the Trisolarans' mirror armor was made of strong interaction material, against antimatter—their natural nemesis—they were helpless, forced to keep using close-in defense cannons to try and shoot down more of the TIE swarms.
In truth, the Trisolaran fleet hadn't had that much strong interaction material to begin with. On each warship, only a small portion could be plated with this precious substance.
But in the course of their two-century voyage, the fleet had scavenged quite a few related compounds in deep space. And with more than half their warships destroyed in the dust cloud belt, those wrecks couldn't be wasted—the commanders ordered the recovery of their remnants to strip away the strong interaction materials.
By cannibalizing their own fallen sister ships and repurposing whatever they could manufacture themselves, they gradually refitted vessels that were originally mere transports into warships with first-class defenses.
Yet even with such formidable armor, it was all but impossible for the Trisolarans to withstand the harassment of the fighter swarms.
Every Trisolaran warship had to fend off the attacks of hundreds of TIE fighters at once, their close-in cannons forced to fire nonstop just to avoid being sunk.
And the Megacorp seemed to be deliberately toying with the Trisolaran fleet. They could have unleashed hundreds of thousands of TIE fighters in one go to instantly devour the invaders—but they chose not to.
"These damned bugs, why won't they ever end!"
The Trisolaran commander cursed in rage. The TIE fighters' harassment wasn't exactly fatal—as long as they were shot down promptly, no real harm was done.
But the problem was that these fighters stuck like dogskin plaster, refusing to let go. Every so often, an unlucky warship would have its fuel bay hit by an antimatter missile, meeting the same fate as the earlier stellar-class battleships—becoming a nuclear sun.
On this battlefield of the star domain, the Trisolaran fleet was shrouded by a dense black cloud, the TIE fighters gnawing at them until the crews were miserable.
At last, they personally experienced the truth of humanity's saying: insects have never been truly defeated!
While the fighter swarms held the enemy in check, the Megacorp's warship formation deployed four blade-shaped Wanderer-class dreadnoughts. They quickly combined into a disc-shaped mechanical structure, aiming at the Trisolaran fleet.
Four blades forming a disc—this bizarre transformation looked, at first glance, like some kind of mysterious ancient ritual.
But in reality, it was the ultimate attack program of the dreadnoughts.
In the past, the dreadnoughts could use this formation to unleash a devastating gravitational rift field, instantly shredding enemy warships.
After modifications by the Megacorp's Science Nexus Department, the Wanderer dreadnoughts now possessed an even more novel attack method.
It was an entirely new high-frequency resonance wave genetic weapon—a hybrid of Quintessa's genetic bio-tech and physical attack systems.
By using a specific frequency wave to trigger ultra-powerful ionization, it could remotely disrupt the DNA double-helix of enemy lifeforms. As long as the target was carbon-based, there was basically no escape from this wave attack.
Such methods were not unheard of in medicine, where they could be used to precisely kill cancer cells. But with its power amplified, it became a weapon capable of killing unseen and unheard.
Carbon-based organisms struck by the wave would quickly experience convulsions and weakness—their cells collapsing, their energy channels shut off.
Muscles dissolved, organs shut down, and the body ultimately liquefied into a puddle of blood.
Of course, the wave's output wasn't set to maximum. Each discharge would only kill the crews of two or three hundred Trisolaran warships.
Together with earlier casualties, this meant the Trisolaran fleet had already lost half its personnel. At this point, even a fool of a commander should have realized it was time to surrender.
At the very least, both sides ought to open negotiations—not continue this pointless one-sided slaughter.
But as the Wanderer dreadnoughts' disc device locked onto them, the Trisolaran commander was suddenly overcome by a terrible foreboding.
Even a fool could see this was the prelude to an ultimate strike.
What form it would take, no one knew. But everyone was gripped by fear.
"Quick—evasive maneuvers!"
The commander gave the urgent order. Yet it could not be carried out, for the TIE fighters had already clamped onto them.
If they attempted a sudden sharp turn, those damnable flies would seize the chance to crash straight into their fuel bays.
In short, whatever choice the Trisolaran fleet made, within the confines of this starfield, they could only pick between two blades.
Either endure the dreadnoughts' combined strike head-on—or be blown apart when the TIE fighters' antimatter missiles set off their fuel bays.
One way or another, there was always a death waiting that fit them.
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