Once the fleet that had originally belonged to the Unified Army descended from space onto the planet, Xiao Ran left swiftly in a small aircraft under the Hückebein's protection, still wearing a puzzled expression amid the busy Fleet Defense Force personnel. He left behind the senior officers awaiting transfer, as well as tens of thousands of people trapped inside warships whose systems had already been locked down, watching the densely packed bugs crawling across the ships' exteriors in terror.
The people of the 25th Fleet had long grown used to contact with the bugs. No matter how many bugs they saw, they did not find them frightening. There were even quite a few people in the military capable of communicating with the bugs, so asking them to help keep watch over these Earth Unified Army people did not seem wrong in the slightest.
But to those Earth Unified Army personnel, the densely packed bugs spreading over the warships' Outer Armor and crawling everywhere—red, green, yellow, bugs everywhere—were terrifying. At the same time, they cursed those useless bastards back on Earth for sending them here to die. They had been captured without even firing a single shot.
Most soldiers and low- to mid-ranking officers saw it that way, but the senior officers and true upper echelons had entirely different thoughts. "Damn it, who the hell provided that intelligence? This is only a few bugs? Even two more fleets wouldn't be enough to feed them all!"
That was right. These densely packed bugs that had surrounded and even covered the fleet were indeed only a portion of the bugs currently remaining on the planet. It was not only the Earth Force that had badly underestimated the number of bugs; even Xiao Ran himself had miscalculated their numbers.
Both the Earth Unified Army