"Instructor Xia, something terrible has happened!"
One day, Pan Long was discussing with his colleagues how best to interpret several concepts according to their original meanings when the conference room door flew open. Big Horn rushed in, shouting in a panic.
Everyone was startled. Someone even jumped to his feet.
"Calm down! Calm down!" Pan Long frowned. "What happened to get you so worked up? Has an alien army attacked?"
He was joking, of course, hoping to ease the tension.
But Big Horn nodded repeatedly. "Something like that."
"What?!" Pan Long nearly jumped up himself, his voice rising. "An alien army really has attacked?"
"I said something like that," Big Horn replied. "They aren't aliens, but an army really is coming."
Pan Long froze.
Someone immediately pressed him. "Whose army? Are you sure they're here to cause trouble?"
It was a fair question. When the Nine Provinces Construction crews had arrived, many people had mistaken them for an invading army.
Tens of thousands of workers and thousands of vehicles had rolled in through clouds of dust. They truly had looked like an army on the march.
All of Zion had panicked a little then, but fortunately, the misunderstanding had soon been cleared up. It had been a false alarm.
Perhaps this time would be the same.
Under everyone's expectant gaze, Big Horn sighed deeply.
"This time is different," he said. "It's been confirmed. They're troops from the Slavic Empire."
Before Pan Long could grasp what that meant, someone cried out, "The Slavic Empire has always considered people with Psychic Infection a blight on society and persecuted them mercilessly. Its relations with Zion have always been poor. It even expelled Zion once... If those are its troops, they're probably not coming with good intentions!"
"Of course! No matter whose army it