North Terrace City Radar Monitoring Station
The green glow of the screen reflected off the young strawberry soldier's face.
He had been on duty for eight straight hours and was dozing off.
The radar screen was flashing with densely packed dots of light.
Not one, not ten, but hundreds. They were coming from the west, blotting out the sky like a flock of migrating birds, like a plague of locusts.
He rubbed his eyes, thinking he had seen wrong.
When he opened them again, they were still there.
Those dots were getting closer.
His lips began to tremble as his shaking fingers pressed the alarm button.
A piercing alarm exploded through the radar station.
He grabbed the communications device and shouted in a thick Taiwanese accent:
"Command Center! Command Center! This is Beitai Radar Station!
"The radar, the radar is covered! It's packed! Hundreds, hundreds of hostile targets!
"They're coming! They're really coming!"
Before he could finish—
BOOM!!!
A blinding white flash swallowed the entire radar station.
A DF-17 hypersonic medium-short-range conventional ballistic missile came hurtling in from three hundred kilometers away.
With an error margin of no more than 0.3 meters, it wiped the reinforced concrete building and everyone inside it off the map.
North Terrace City, downtown, 10:20 p.m.
The air-raid sirens went off.
Woooo—Woooo—Woooo—
Their mournful wails tore through the night sky, jolting countless people awake.
Some rushed barefoot to their windows and saw flashes of white light in the distance, followed by muffled explosions.
One after another, like firecrackers during the New Year—but the vibrations were utterly different.
They rose from deep underground, felt in the very bones.
"What's happening?! What's happening!!"
"They're attacking!!"
"The alarm's going off! Can't you hear it?!"
The entire city erupted into chaos.
Convenience store doors were smashed open as people