By this point, whether they were discovered or not no longer mattered.
Because at a time like this... let alone a large civilian airliner, even a fighter jet would be doomed once it was locked onto!
The missile had already reached an astonishing speed of Mach 3.5—1,200 meters per second. At a distance of 5,000 meters, it would take just over four seconds.
The moment the aircraft's autopilot detected that it had been locked onto by a missile, it reacted immediately. The plane executed a sharp diagonal dive, while its tail began releasing a massive number of infrared decoys.
But the missile's active radar had already found the target, and Er Dan's subprogram was acting as an insider within their aircraft, continuously transmitting the latest positional data to the missile.
Let alone infrared decoys, no variety of countermeasure flares could affect the missile's judgment. Unless they released an electromagnetic pulse bomb directly behind them, nothing else would work.
The hypersonic missile completely ignored the dazzling infrared decoys in the sky, streaking straight through them toward the massive aircraft.
In the final second, Sephora saw the missile reaching the plane's tail through the rear-facing external camera automatically activated by the system before her.
"No!" Sephora let out an instinctive, meaningless cry of terror, but the next second, the missile slammed viciously into the aircraft's tail.
With a thunderous boom, the massive aircraft—which, including modification costs and internal equipment, was worth close to a billion dollars—instantly turned into an enormous firework in the sky. The rapidly expanding flames blew the entire plane into countless fragments.
The satellites that had been monitoring the area from space immediately captured the scene. An optical satellite had been taking a continuous series of high-speed shots ever since the missile activated its active radar.
After the explosion