"Charge through! Charge through! Tear them apart! Tear them apart!" The fighter squadron commander looked utterly crazed as he roared and shrieked, unleashing terrifying bolts of lightning while charging at the forefront. Their objective was not to dogfight the Zerg aerial units, but to escort the three landing ships. There was no need to fight the Zerg to the death—and in truth, they no longer had the confidence to do so. Even if, by all appearances, the Zerg casualties were ten times those of the Alien Dust!
The landing ships pushed their speed to the limit. The Zerg lunged at them madly, only to be intercepted by fighters and gunboats. Finally, five minutes later, the first landing ship neared its target!
"Deploy! Commence the ship-seizure operation!" The landing ship captain roared and slammed down the launch button. Launch bays all across the vessel opened. Landing ships designed for ship-seizure operations were naturally different from planetary landing ships. The disc-shaped craft released by planetary landing ships scattered and deployed upon reaching a planet's surface, but the assault landing ship's launch pods were like enormous crossbow bolts—ten meters long and two meters wide, each carrying fifty soldiers. An assault landing ship could launch a hundred of these bolt-like pods at once. Their noses were fitted with exceptionally sharp drills; once they neared the target, the wildly spinning drills could easily pierce the enemy's energy shields, then bore a passage into the target vessel for the landing troops to enter and exit.
"Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh..." One hundred launch pods fired in succession, hurtling at the Zerg Hive warship at tremendous speed. The secondary cannons aboard the Zerg Hive warship bombarded them relentlessly, but these bolt-like pods had only one design principle: speed. After one barrage from the secondary cannons, fewer than ten pods