In the military regulations of the Krypton Code, there exists an emergency provision:
When the commander-in-chief develops irreversible negative thoughts.
Or when mentally deranged and their behavior jeopardizes the survival of the fleet as a whole.
The first-ranking lieutenant has the authority to execute decisions and forcibly reclaim sovereignty.
Therefore, as long as Faora takes a step, she can suddenly leap up within three meters...
This knife can easily sever Zod's central nervous system in a second.
But... should I kill him?
Then what?
Faora's eyelids twitched involuntarily.
Should she kill Zod and take over this desolate ship with its engines half-destroyed and energy depleted?
Then, with these dozens of warriors, they drifted aimlessly in the void, where there were no interstellar landing points or supply depots.
Finally, like a shipload of space debris, will it turn to ashes in the gravitational well of some star?
The home planet has been completely destroyed.
No matter how crazy Zod went, he was still the only anchor on the ship, the last pillar in the hearts of these remaining soldiers.
Without passion and enthusiasm, no one might even survive a single stellar cycle.
Since the entire civilization has already fallen...
Perhaps, burning one's life is the most dignified funeral for a soldier.
Thinking of this, Faora closed her eyes.
The moment I opened my eyes again, all the doubts deep in my pupils had vanished.
Only perseverance.
She released the knife handle and strode out of the shadows.
Boots stepped up, stopped, and stood at attention.
His right fist slammed into his chest:
"General!"
Behind the faceplate.
The woman's voice was as calm as still water, without the slightest ripple.
"Atmospheric entry angle has been calibrated, World Engine first-stage release lock has been released, and it is ready to carry out surface coverage strike missions at any time."
"Very good, Faora..."
Zod, standing on the platform, laughed and suddenly pressed his right hand down.
The master push lever was roughly pushed to its lowest position!
"Boom----!!"
The entire 3.8-mile-long warship roared loudly.
All twelve tail thrusters overloaded and ignited within a second, spewing out tens of kilometers of dark blue flames.
The colossal object, dragging a dark shadow that blotted out the sky, plunged straight towards the slowly rotating blue planet.
The depth-of-field lens vibrates slowly in stillness.
The enormous canvas slid open from both sides, violently extending into a vertical giant screen that opened up the entire field of vision.
The cold, dark depths of space.
At the Earth-Moon gravitational point, 380,000 kilometers away from near-Earth orbit.
Space is distorted.
In the blink of an eye, an unpredictable distortion occurred.
Light rays that cannot be viewed directly with the naked eye are bent into several invisible concentric rings under extreme gravitational lensing.
"..."
Soon, the mothership of " Black Zero " burst out from the folds and crevices of the wormhole in the void.
Under the slanting light of the yellow star, the chitinous exoskeleton and the cold titanium-lead composite armor gleamed with a dark brown hue reminiscent of dried blood.
On the ship's belly, two massive keels resemble prehistoric mosasaurs, rough and ferocious.
Silently plowing through a straight band of dust, crushed into particles by gravity, in a vacuum.
And just as it completely slid into near-Earth orbit.
The Earth's fragile magnetosphere has unfortunately been breached.
Then, it started to zoom in.
It is 2:14 PM Eastern Time in North America.
Manhattan, Wall Street.
The 32-degree Celsius heat was kept out by the double-glazed windows.
Inside Goldman Sachs Securities ' proprietary trading floor.
The traders had four to six narrow-bezeled monitors in front of them.
The red and green candlestick charts, along with the distinctive yellow codes of the Bloomberg Terminal, danced wildly on my retina like crazy.
"Damn it, twenty million! Short the S&P September contract! Take it all! Take it all!"
"Still no reply from London? Let that idiot who only knows how to drink afternoon tea with Dick solder the phone line to his ear!"
"Press Enter! Don't hesitate, send this order to Deutsche Bank!"
The keyboard slammed shut like raindrops.
A large amount of sweat slid down the trader's temples and splattered onto the hot scroll wheel mouse.
Two fifteen minutes and three seconds.
That real-time curve that climbs wildly on the giant screen, affecting market capitalizations of trillions of dollars.
But it seemed to have crashed, abruptly hovering in mid-air.
It's like a film reel that's been paused, frozen in place on the coordinate axis.
"Clatter."
A young trader's finger hovered above the Enter key, pausing for half a second.
In the center of the screen, the cursor even stopped blinking.
"Hey Mike? The quote card is stuck!"
He turned and shouted down the aisle.
"Damn! My Bloomberg server is down too!"
The middle-aged trader next to him kicked the computer case hard.
"What kind of stupid network fluctuations are you talking about? What a joke! We have a dedicated line!"
Fiber optic leased lines with rental fees of thousands of dollars per second!
"Stop yelling and switch to the backup intranet immediately!"
The supervisor stubbed out his chewed-up cigar in a paper cup and ripped open his sweat-soaked collar.
He grabbed the internal landline and frantically pounded on the answering spring.
"IT department! Get the backup server up and running! We're shorting!"
Doka is losing two million dollars a second! Are their brains just for being used as inflatable dolls?!
But all I heard from the receiver was a hollow "beep-beep" sound.
Then, even the dial tone disappeared.
Next second.
A high-frequency howling sound suddenly erupted from all the audio equipment on the entire floor without warning.
"Sizzle----!!"
The magnetic sound travels along the auricle and penetrates directly into the human central nervous system.
Hundreds of traders wearing noise-canceling headphones simultaneously screamed in pain, instinctively ripping off their headphones and throwing them to the ground.
Immediately afterwards, the screens throughout the trading hall began to flicker.
Red and green candlestick charts, Fibonacci retracement, currency exchange rate dashboards...
All the images disappeared.
Instead, there is a layer of viscous, ghosting gray-white noise.
Not just computers.
Even the LCD TVs hanging on the load-bearing columns and the tiny digital displays on the vertical thermostats showed off their snow-white specks.
"A hacker attack! This is definitely a national-level cyberwar!"
A hedge fund manager stood up, his face ashen.
"Damn it... is it Russia or East Asia? Regardless of which side's hackers are on, a complete internet outage signifies a sovereign credibility crisis."
Department of Justice! Go to the safe and get my satellite encrypted phone. Contact Chicago for me!
Use over-the-counter options to buy gold and military stocks with your entire portfolio!
"Can't get through, boss..."
The intern standing nearby held up the satellite phone, his hands trembling like a leaf.
"The satellite handshake signal has disappeared; in the sky... none of the seven communication satellites in space can connect."
"Impossible! All those satellites in the sky are Pentagon military relay stations, how could it be..."