"What happened?" Zhao Qing sat up and warily scanned the darkness. The icy air drained the warmth from his body, and tendrils of cold crept over his skin.
Bang-
The warship lurched violently! Zhao Qing instinctively gripped the edge of his Stasis Pod to steady himself. His gut told him the warship might have hit something!
But there should have been another ten-odd seconds before impact. Had his sense of time been thrown off between virtual reality and the real world?
The warship hadn't been destroyed! Its systems had failed!
Zhao Qing jumped out of the Stasis Pod, his bare feet landing on the cold, hard floor. Relying solely on his familiarity with the pod, he retrieved a dry towel, clothes, and an emergency backpack from its lower compartment.
Zhao Qing quickly pulled on his clothes.
A hiss came from another Stasis Pod opening.
"Who's there? This is the vice captain!"
The sounds of more Stasis Pods opening meant that more people were emerging from the effects of virtual reality.
The Homeward Bound monitored the combat zone, while the Replica quietly watched from the sidelines.
The Replica watched the unknown, saucer-shaped object weather the ferocious barrage and launch an attack that destroyed the human warship's main propulsion engine.
The distance between the two sides rapidly closed.
The Luo Qi Replica also saw the Armed Landing Craft, like fireflies, land on the disc and fall silent.
The Replica also saw the human warship shut down all its engines and quietly await death, while the disc-shaped craft fired a solid object at it.
As expected, the rapidly moving solid object struck the human warship, but the anticipated massive explosion never came.
Instead, it stuck to the human warship's surface and actually merged into it. Like a hunter firing a poisoned dart,