"Mommy, I'm scared!" A delicate little girl curled up in her mother's arms, looking timidly at the armed men standing guard around them.
This was a makeshift camp. Several bonfires lit up an area a dozen or so meters across, with more than forty women and children in ragged clothes huddled around them, clinging to one another for warmth in the night wind.
"Don't be afraid. It'll be all right, it'll be all right! The government will send soldiers to save us!" The young mother held her daughter tightly, murmuring hollow words of comfort.
A bruise still marked her face, left by her resistance when she had been abducted.
Though she spoke reassuringly to her daughter, she could not even convince herself. This was the rebels' stronghold, after all. The civil war had dragged on for so many years without any sign of ending. How could anyone possibly come here to rescue them?
If her daughter had not been sustaining her will to escape, she would probably have given in to despair already! Yet the thought of the terrifying, unknown fate awaiting them still brought fear to her face.
Just then, a piercing whistle suddenly came from the sky.
"Look! What's that?" Someone beside her suddenly pointed at the distant sky and cried out.
The young mother looked up to see a huge fireball hurtling down from the sky with terrifying force, becoming the most dazzling sight in the dark night!
Boom! A tremendous impact shook the ground slightly, and a huge hole was smashed straight through a nearby three-story building.
Roaring flames instantly sprang up around the fallen object, and several armed men injured by the impact fled the crash site in terror.
Everyone stared in bewilderment at the blazing inferno, utterly unsure of what had happened.
A meteor