At dawn, the sky over Sea City had barely begun to lighten, but the city had already been battered into exhaustion. The wind from Marina Bay swept through the streets, over the still-smoking wreckage, and across every firefighter cleaning up the battlefield.
The firefighters of Sea City had their work cut out for them, struggling to pry the charred wreckage off the ground.
After daybreak, nearby residents finally plucked up the courage to leave their homes and see what had happened to their neighborhood, only to be quickly driven back by the army.
The entire area around the "battlefield" remained under martial law.
Someone uploaded footage secretly recorded the night before to TikTok, but it was wiped clean almost instantly. Refusing to give up, he posted it on YouTube instead. This time, it was not deleted. It spread far and wide.
Different platforms had different political leanings, and their attitudes toward these videos were equally different.
Compared with the footage of the firefight, the most shocking scenes were undoubtedly those of the four Apache attack helicopters burned through by heavenly fire. The huge iron birds circling in the night sky were pierced one after another by the golden flames.
Zooming in on the footage even revealed Chinese characters flickering within the heavenly fire.
Reactions in the comments were deeply polarized. Plenty of people blamed the strange imagery on AI generation, but other users pushed back. To professionals, AI-generated footage was actually easy to identify.
Besides, the footage of the golden heavenly fire destroying the attack helicopters had been filmed from multiple angles. Some cameras were close, others far away; some were high, others low. The closest person filming had actually climbed onto an apartment building's rooftop, almost level with the helicopters.
That ruled out AI generation.
In 2028, AI had