Jungle Planet Bhekar

April 17, 2490, 8:00 AM local time, colonist settlement - August.

This is a lush and verdant planet. Viewed from a synchronous orbit, its surface, radiating stellar light, is so smooth and pure, and the swirling rain clouds resemble tiny white spirals.

When the colony Fleets's flagship, the transport ship Sterling, first saw this planet, the Korhal people cheered with joy. They thought it was a gift and mercy from the goddess of fate, but they never imagined that it was a world of death that would bring endless terror.

Rick Kydd, dressed in a crimson CMC-250E Commander Power Armor, stood in the command center tower at the heart of the August settlement complex, surrounded by his Revolutionary Army officers, including several warrant officers.

Rick originally had three colonels and more than twenty senior commanders and staff officers under his command, but now many of their bodies are hanging from tree branches or left to rot in the wilderness.

Through the huge glass window in front of him, Rick saw the planet's azure sky, drifting clouds, and warm sun. In the distance lay a vast green jungle, where tall deciduous trees and palm-like plants formed a green ocean, and when the warm wind from the south swept through the jungle, it created ripples of verdant green.

Rick Kydd recalled the moment he first set foot on this planet; it all felt like yesterday.

Rick Kydd, the leader of the First Colonial Fleets, was once a member of the Heaven's Devils under Marshal Augustus Mengsk of the Revolutionary Army. He is an elite sniper with Psionics, but his Psionics talent is not enough to make him a Ghost operative.

On this green planet, named Bhekar by the Adjutant of the colony ship, ferns, small-leaved shrubs, trees, and a wide variety of herbs and vines cover Bhekar's vast lands. Rivers flow densely through enclosed jungles, and magnificent waterfalls cascade down between verdant mountains.

The air in Bhekar is breathable without any treatment, freshwater resources are abundant, and there are fewer types of bacteria and viruses harmful to humans than in the main colony worlds of the Koprulu Sector.

With stable sunlight and warm, pleasant temperatures for most of the year, Bhekar has never undergone any terraforming and boasts a primitive and fragile ecosystem where arthropods and primitive insects dominate this fascinating world, feeding on stems, leaves, or pollen from angiosperm flowers.

Rick's probes and scouts sent to the planet's surface discovered a gaseous resource resembling high-energy gas in some areas of Bhekar. This gas seeped from deep canyon fissures and cracked surfaces, displaying a distinct purple hue in sunlight, but in the areas where it appeared, even the most resilient plants could not survive, leaving only barrenness.

This caused some unease among Rick and the Revolutionary Army colonel, and the discovery of alien ruins a few weeks later only exacerbated this feeling. According to the scientists among the colonists, this might be the remains of a local advanced intelligent civilization or a colony abandoned by a race with interstellar travel capabilities, but the reconnaissance team found no signs of advanced intelligent life, nor had it been attacked.

Even though the planet's resource reserves have not yet been explored, compared to those miasma-ridden or lifeless rocky planets in the universe, Bhekar remains the most suitable near-Earth planet among the candidate colony Fleets.

If colonists were to abandon this settlement simply because of this, they would have to travel much more to find a habitable planet, and that planet might be far less habitable than Bhekar.

After much deliberation, Rick decided to awaken the colonists in the frozen dormant state of the colonial Fleets and hold a referendum among them.

This is a world extremely far from their home planet Korhal, but for these colonists who have awakened from hibernation, it seems like only a moment has passed since they closed their eyes and opened them again. Most of them are still grieving the destruction of Korhal and are unwilling to sail any further.

After a long wait, the colonists finally decided to settle on the planet Bhekar.

For the first three months, everything went smoothly.

Colonial ships, often a thousand feet (about three hundred meters) long, landed on the planet's surface. The Korhal colonists quickly dismantled their Mothership and used the ship's planks, hydraulic pipes, airtight doors, and any other materials they could find to build the initial city center, residential buildings, power plants, waterworks, and sewage treatment plants.

Soon, construction began on the first highway and the first signal base station on Planet Bhekar. Lights appeared in the jungle like the flames of civilization, just as humans lit a campfire for the first time on Earth.

Seven large settlements, each capable of accommodating 200,000 people, along with more than 30 small and medium-sized settlements scattered around them, appeared on the vast jungle landscape of Bhekar. Land reclamation and school construction proceeded in an orderly manner.

The colonists of Korhal named their new city after the Old Earth city of Korhal in honor of Korhal and their former home, and everything was thriving.

The colonists only realized the danger lurking in the jungle when a captain and his company, tasked with investigating alien ruins, disappeared into the jungle, and a Revolutionary Army died a gruesome death in his own house.

By this time, evacuating Bhekar had become impractical.

Over the next month, the colonists were slaughtered from the shadows. More and more people died on their way to explore new lands, and isolated colonies disappeared overnight. The vanished colonists were either killed or captured.

Rick had fewer than two thousand Revolutionary Army soldiers under his command, all equipped with Power Armor. The rest of the soldiers were even dressed in thin uniforms and lacked anti-stealth equipment.

Without knowing where the enemy was, they were unable to launch a counterattack. From the very beginning, the colonists were in a passive defensive posture, their territory constantly retreating to their initial landing points.

As more and more people were brutally murdered, Rick began to build high walls and watchtowers around the settlement and deployed large patrols to guard it, and the number of victims gradually decreased.

"We can't count on rescue from Augustus; they're probably in a war that's far worse than what we're facing." Rick murmured to himself, gazing at the sea of green jungle. Green, once a symbol of vitality, had now become a symbol of death.

Rick's men all looked somber and remained silent.

"Sir, this is Lieutenant Moser of the 10th Sterling Division. My soldiers have killed an attacker." Just then, a deep voice came through the command center's communications network.

"It is a humanoid creature."