58: Chapter 58: Firing a Shot Only to Be Met with a Barrage of Bullets

On the western defensive line, a machine gunner who was reloading his M249 suddenly lost the strength in both arms. The ammunition belt slipped from his sweat-slicked fingers onto the sand.

He fell to his knees, hunched over, suppressing a groan in his throat.

On the eastern defensive line, a Stinger missile operator had just loaded the second missile into the tube when his body jerked violently. The launch tube slipped from his shoulder, and he stumbled forward, collapsing against the bunker.

The sniper fell from behind the scope, his back hitting the stone wall. His eyes were tightly shut, his teeth gritted, and sweat poured from his forehead like an opening floodgate.

Five hundred people.

Five hundred people scattered at various tactical positions inside and outside the estate lost their combat capability in the same instant.

There were no screams, no wails.

Only the sound of guns hitting the ground and the dull thud of bodies collapsing onto the sand, mingling in the twilight.

The communication channel was full of noise.

"...Sir! The light from the spaceship... the heat is unbearable... weapons cannot be held... requesting..."

"...Reporting, Commander. The eastern defensive line has completely lost combat capability... not casualties, it's..."

Then the communication cut off.

It wasn't an equipment failure; it was because the fingers pressing the communication button no longer had the strength to hold it.

Keating was the first person inside the estate to be swept by the ring of light.

He was standing in the central courtyard. His tablet slid from his hands and shattered on the stone floor. He stumbled back, hitting the wall, biting down on a groan that was about to escape his throat.

A burning sensation surged from under every inch of his skin. His clothes clung to his skin, feeling like a towel just fished out of boiling water. The veins in his temples throbbed in the heat, and the edges of his vision began to blur.

But having spent twenty years in the intelligence system, his resistance to interrogation training was far beyond normal imagination. He managed to maintain a final shred of consciousness.

He twisted his body to the side, pressing the Glock he had just drawn from his waist against the edge of a stone table, and shouted into the communication channel:

"Miss... the spaceship's light..."

He didn't finish his sentence.

Beatrice was on one knee two steps behind him, her hands pressed against the stone slabs, her fingernails digging into the crevices of the sandstone. Her forehead was covered in sweat, and her lips were tightly pressed into a line.

She was fighting the burning sensation with a perseverance that bordered on self-abuse.

Harlan stood half a step in front of Diana, his muscles trembling all over. Sweat dripped from his forehead into his collar.

But he did not fall, nor did he make a sound. Instead, he used all his strength to turn halfway, trying to shield Diana completely behind him.

The commander's voice rang out on the communication channel for the second time, so urgent it almost cracked:

"Miss Diana! The opponent's technology exceeds our cognition!"

"All defensive lines have been pierced by the light shield. All combat personnel on the periphery have lost the ability to fight!"

"Please instruct the next move!"

"All of us, including me, are prepared to die for the Hopkins family at any time! Just give the order..."

There was only silence on the channel.

The commander waited for five seconds and shouted again.

Still silence.

When he pressed the communication button for the third time, Diana's voice finally came through from the other end.

Her tone was strangely low and slow.

"Stand by. Do not attack the UFO for now."

"Wait until we see their intentions."

The commander relayed the order.

He thought Diana was formulating some kind of "lure the enemy in" tactical strategy.

But what he didn't know was that Diana wasn't formulating a strategy during that silence.

She was completely stunned.

It wasn't the visual impact of seeing an alien spaceship that surpassed all known human aviation technology hovering above her head.

To some extent, the twelve objects from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team that she had looked at in the quiet room were reverse-engineered from such a spaceship, so seeing it was only a matter of time.

What truly pierced her cognitive defense line was another layer of logic.

She had speculated the sequence of events was like this:

She hadn't killed Edward and Musk cleanly -> The Deep State would hunt her down because of these survivors -> So she gathered five hundred troops at the estate to wait for them.

These three deductions held up in her mind.

But now, a circular UFO with a diameter large enough to cover the entire central courtyard was hovering above the scattered positions of her five hundred dead soldiers.

The organization that was "hunting her down," the one she had identified days in advance as the Deep State and prepared all defenses against,

was not human—it was an alien spaceship.

Could it be that the Deep State itself was not a human organization?

Was it an agent entity hidden behind the scenes by Aliens from the very beginning?

That ultimate power hidden at the very bottom of the Hoover Dam data chain, which had been ordered not to be investigated since her grandfather's time, was not a secret committee composed of cross-generational politicians and military elders at all,

but a presence that descended directly from these disc-shaped spaceships?

She could orchestrate the assassination of Walsh, blow up snipers, and command five hundred loyal soldiers,

but all of this meant nothing in front of an alien spaceship the size of a football field that could ignore all physical damage.

Under everyone's gaze, the spaceship hovering above the estate suddenly opened a vertical beam of light from its bottom.

The beam was not blinding; it was a cold white color between liquid and gas,

like solidified moonlight drawn into a straight cylinder, silently hanging down from the center point of the bottom of the spaceship,

reaching all the way to the central courtyard of the estate, to that stone floor that had been scattered by the thermal radiation beam.

Then, two figures appeared in the beam of light.

There was no mechanical platform descending from the spaceship, no ladder, no boarding device that humans could imagine.

It was just two greyish-white humanoid creatures, descending slowly from the top of the light beam, along the beam itself, as if stepping down an invisible ramp.

When their feet touched the ground, there was no sound, no impact, no dust.

Only a wisp of extremely fine water vapor, evaporated by the residual heat of the thermal radiation, twisted and dissipated beside their feet on the stone floor.

The shorter one walked in front.

He was about 1.2 meters tall, with a large head and black oval eyes that occupied one-third of his face.

His greyish-white skin, under the dual illumination of the estate's floodlights and the cold light from the bottom of the spaceship, had a matte texture that did not belong to any Earth creature.

His walking posture was strange. It wasn't a human gait, but rather his four limbs moved simultaneously in a subtle cooperative way, with every step looking like he was ready to switch to a four-legged running posture at any moment.

He wore a black glove on his right hand, with five distinct fingers, fitting tightly. The material was neither fabric nor leather, but more like a black carapace growing directly from the surface of the skin.

The taller one walked behind.

He was about 1.5 meters tall, half a head taller than the shorter one.

Same large head, same black eyes, same greyish-white skin.

But his gait was completely different.

He didn't maintain constant vigilance like the shorter one; his limb movement rhythm was slower and steadier, his head slightly raised.

Every step he took looked like he was inspecting the surrounding environment, like a lord patrolling his own territory.

He also wore the same black glove on his right hand.

All eyes in the central courtyard were focused on these two creatures.

Keating's posture leaning against the wall froze.

The arm that had been burned by the thermal radiation to the point of near-insensibility forgot its pain,

just staring blankly at the two figures that didn't belong to this planet as they walked out of the light beam.

Beatrice knelt on one knee on the stone floor, one hand supporting the ground, the other hand unconsciously gripping the collar of her shirt, her lips slightly parted, but unable to say a word.

Harlan stood half a step in front of Diana, his body leaning slightly forward, his right hand pressing on the handle of the Glock in his holster.

But his finger didn't pull the trigger, not because of cowardice, but because he knew this gun was useless against the thing above his head, and equally useless against the two creatures in front of him.

Those five hundred combat personnel all saw this scene.

Most of them, after the thermal radiation beam had swept over, had just scrambled back up from the ground.

Their guns were still scattered on the sand, not picked up, their sweat-soaked combat uniforms were still clinging to their skin, and the residual pain of the burns was still faintly throbbing in their blood vessels.

Then they saw the light beam, and saw the two greyish-white figures walk out of it.

Human cognition cracked at that moment.

It wasn't because of fear; fear came later.

What appeared first was a more fundamental, more underlying collapse:

The "humans are the only intelligent life on Earth" that you were taught from childhood,

every page of biological common sense you read from elementary science class to university textbooks,

the default premise of "we are facing human enemies" established when you were training on military grounds,

all ceased to be valid at this moment.

In less than half a second, that crack turned from cognitive collapse into fear, and from fear into an uncontrollable reaction.

On the western defensive line,

a former army infantryman who had just regained consciousness from the burns still had his M4 carbine lying on the sand, but he still had a Beretta M9 on his waist that he had forgotten to remove.

The speed at which he drew the pistol was faster than the speed at which his brain processed information.

Before he fully realized what he was doing, the first 9mm bullet had already fired from the chamber, trailing a thin light toward the direction of the short Grey Alien.

This shot was like throwing a match into a pool of gasoline.

Immediately after, at least two hundred guns fired at the same instant.

No one gave an order, and it wasn't a tactic.

It was a purely instinctive conditioned reflex generated after fear and cognitive collapse overlapped.

Dense trajectories sprayed out simultaneously from behind the scattered bunkers on the outer defensive line.

The bullets, dragging the light of tracer powder in the twilight, converged toward the central courtyard, all aimed at the two small, greyish-white humanoids.

The short Grey Alien raised his hand.

He just lifted his right arm slightly, spread out the right hand wearing the black glove, fingers slightly apart, palm facing outward,

and then, as if brushing away a wisp of smoke in front of him, he waved it to the side casually.

An atmospheric ripple, barely visible to the naked eye, spread outward from the position of the glove.

The air itself underwent local compression under the push of some invisible force field, and the refracted light caused the surrounding background scenery to distort slightly at that moment.

That force field collided precisely with all the incoming bullets, and at the instant of collision, the momentum of the bullets was perfectly reversed.

They were not deflected; deflection requires collision with a solid surface, and there was no collision here.

They were intercepted by an invisible gravitational lens, their forward momentum stopped, and then they were thrown back along the same path.

The speed remained the same, the direction was reversed.

More than two hundred bullets returned precisely to the positions of those who had fired them, following the trajectories from which they were shot.