Inside the Tianshu Command Center, several staff officers looked up at once, their eyes lighting up.
"Physical fragments work!"
"The shields don't defend against every type of attack. They're geared toward energy defense!"
The stifling tension hanging over the hall finally eased.
Han Niba showed no joy. He merely raised a hand.
"Armor-piercing shells. Keep going."
"Roger!"
The last two deep-black armor-piercing shells entered the orbital path one after the other.
The first deliberately exposed itself early to the point-defense network, drawing out some of the blue-white beams along the Plasma Bug's flank.
But this time, the Plasma Bug had clearly wised up.
It no longer emptied every firing sac along its flank at once. It activated only a third of its firepower, and blue-white beams swept across the missile's path like a row of red-hot blades.
The first armor-piercing shell was shredded on the spot.
But in that area, a large number of firing sacs remained silent.
The moment the second armor-piercing shell entered, another reserve group of Close-In Defense Beams immediately filled the gap.
Hiss!
A glowing red gash scored the projectile's casing. Intense heat spread along the armor's edges, but it failed to detonate the warhead.
The onboard AI forcibly corrected its attitude. Its tail thruster flashed three times, directing all its remaining kinetic energy toward the fleshy sac in the Plasma Bug's midsection.
The translucent shield appeared again.
This time, the shield did not deflect it completely.
The warhead passed through the ripples as though boring through a viscous film of water, then smashed through the black-purple carapace and drove hard into the edge of the fleshy sac.
A second later, the Plasma Bug's kilometer-scale body shuddered violently.
Large quantities of dark-red slime sprayed from the gaps in its carapace. Electric arcs ran wild inside, and