Starting as a Wallfacer, his defection to the Three-Body Problem shocked the world.

Chapter 134 The Monkey in the Tree

"run!"

This was the shared thought in Zhao Xin and Li Wei's minds when they saw the water droplets rushing towards them!

"Captain, give the order immediately! Turn the Northern around, quick!"

Zhao Xin directly used his maximum authority to trigger the radar alarm on the Northern Ship, but even so, it only issued a level two alarm!

Li Wei, aboard the Wan Nian Kun Peng, acted even more decisively, directly ordering the weapon system to attack the water droplet that was heading towards them!

Instantly, everyone on the Wan Nian Kun Peng felt the ship beneath their feet being pushed backward slightly—the recoil force generated by the collective firing of the Gauss weapons.

Electromagnetic wave weapons have no effect on water droplets; only the most primitive kinetic energy weapons have the potential to attack them.

Its energy comes from an electromagnetic coil.

When a strong current flows through the coil instantaneously, the generated magnetic force will eject the ferromagnetic projectile, achieving a kinetic energy strike.

However, the kinetic energy weapons that humanity has always been proud of, when they hit the water droplets, did not even slow them down in the slightest.

The water droplet was like a red-hot iron, penetrating the kinetic energy projectile launched by the Wan Nian Kunpeng without any resistance.

Seeing this scene, Li Wei couldn't help but recall an experience he had gone through.

Before becoming a member of the Space Force, he was an army officer, primarily responsible for driving and testing main battle tanks.

That year, while conducting military exercises in a jungle in his newly developed main battle tank, he encountered a group of monkeys living in the trees.

The monkeys were terrified by this intruder and the steel behemoth he was driving, and they picked up stones and started throwing them at the tank.

However, the stones that were thrown didn't even leave a mark on the tank's paint.

"Look at these monkeys!"

Li Wei sat inside the tank, mocking the monkeys in the trees. In their eyes, the most prized weapon must be the stones they threw at them.

The scene before me was so similar to what I had seen back then, except this time... those monkeys were myself.

A bitter smile appeared on Li Wei's face as he slowly uttered a sentence.

"Look at these monkeys!"

The Infinite Frontier exploded!

The droplet destroyed it with ease; it was so easy that it was merely trying to pass by the Infinite Frontier, which just happened to be blocking the droplet's path.

The dazzling light illuminated the entire fleet, tearing away the veil that had been covering humanity's eyes, along with humanity's arrogance!

It used a deafening sound to tell humanity that this beautiful dream that had lasted for centuries should end.

The Northern was the first to react. Under Zhao Xin's warning, the captain of the Northern took the lead in adjusting the entire warship to forward position, attempting to break away from the fleet and escape into the distance.

Next was the Wannian Kunpeng, which was in an awkward position, as it was blocked by the larger Magellan. The only way for it to escape the fleet was to turn around.

"It's too late, Captain!"

By this time, the droplet had already destroyed three star-class warships. It had no intention of turning and just kept crashing straight into everything in its path, destroying any ships that stood in its way.

Seeing this, Li Wei took a move that could send him to a military court.

He immediately switched the weapon system and opened fire on the star-class warship that was blocking the way for the Wan Nian Kun Peng.

In an instant, the backstabbing from friendly forces prevented the warship from activating its defenses, and it was destroyed, exploding into several pieces from the inside.

If Taylor hadn't been hibernating, seeing this scene would probably have earned her a thumbs up for Levi's actions.

"rush!"

The Wan Nian Kunpeng accelerated instantly, broke away from the fleet, and headed straight into space.

The fleet continued to explode, and countless warships were turned into nuclear fireballs and dissipated into space before they could even react.

After the examples set by the Northern and the Wannian Kunpeng, the Proton, the Storm, and the Enlightenment also began to flee.

Some of them directly pointed their main guns at their own men, while others forcibly pushed their ships into "forward four" position.

Before they could reach deep-sea conditions, they went straight to the fourth stage of the advance, which ended tragically. The crew members were crushed into countless pieces of flesh in despair.

But some people chose to perish together with the water droplets—or at least, what they perceived as perishing together.

They directly used their forward fourth state to ram the droplet, and the only result was that they were smashed to pieces. The entire ship disintegrated into countless pieces in a burst of flames, and many of the fragments even severely damaged the surrounding friendly forces.

The water droplet struck like lightning, and within a mere ten seconds, it pierced through 30 star-class warships, including the Ganges, Proton, Columbia, Justice, Masada, Yandi, Atlantic, Sirius, Forward, Han, and Storm.

Each warship, after being penetrated, first turns red-hot, then is engulfed by a nuclear fusion fireball. After the fireball extinguishes, the molten warships are transformed into millions of tons of dark red metallic magma that erupts.

In this horrific destruction, the straight-lined battle fleet was like a fuse that had been lit and stretched for two thousand kilometers. After burning fiercely, it left behind a trail of ash that emitted a dark red glow.

In a warship pierced by a water droplet, the section of the ship centered on the perforation immediately turns red-hot.

But it only lasts for 3 to 5 seconds. The nuclear fuel fusion explosion will happen very quickly, and all life in the warship engulfed by the nuclear fireball will be vaporized in an instant.

However, this only applies to general situations during an attack. The droplets can usually hit the warship's fuel tanks accurately. Whether this is due to real-time detection of the fuel tank's location or the storage of a structural database of all warships provided by the Sophon is unknown.

However, for about one-tenth of the targets, the water droplets did not hit the fuel tank. During the entire process of the target's destruction, the nuclear fuel would not undergo fusion. It would take a considerable amount of time for the warship to go from a red-hot state to a conventional explosion. This is the most brutal scenario, where the personnel inside the warship would struggle in the high temperature until they were charred and died.

"Dodge, dodge! Spread out and don't worry about that damn formation."

Due to the speed and radar stealth of the droplet attack, the attacked warship's defense system was unable to react.

However, as the distance between the warships increased, the attack range of the droplets also increased, and at the same time, the defense systems of all warships were reconfigured according to the target characteristics of the droplets.

The USS Nelson intercepted a droplet for the first time during an attack. To improve accuracy against small, high-speed targets, laser weapons were used in the interception.

When struck by multiple laser beams, the water droplet emitted an intense glow.

Shipborne laser weapons all emit gamma-ray lasers, which are invisible to the naked eye, but water droplets reflect them and turn them into visible light.

"Holy crap, that's so damn bright!"

The radar invisibility of water droplets has always puzzled people because they have a surface with total reflection and a perfect scattering shape. Perhaps, this ability to reflect electromagnetic waves at varying frequencies is the secret to its invisibility.

The brightness of the light emitted when the water droplet was hit even dimmed the surrounding nuclear fireball, and all surveillance systems dimmed their images to avoid damage to their optical components from the intense light.

Looking directly at a water droplet with the naked eye can cause prolonged blindness.

When an intense light descends, it becomes indistinguishable from darkness.

The droplet, carrying its all-consuming light, pierced through the Nelson, and when its light faded, the space battlefield seemed to fall into complete darkness.

Later, the flames of nuclear fusion once again demonstrated their power.

The water droplets that emerged from the Nelson were still intact and flowed straight toward the Green, more than 80 kilometers away.

After realizing that laser weapons were ineffective, Green switched to kinetic weapons to intercept the water droplets.

One after another, kinetic energy projectiles were launched instantly under electromagnetic acceleration, but just like before, they were of no use, only slowing down the movement speed of the water droplets slightly.

"Li Wei, I've thought of a way!"

On the Northern Ship, Zhao Xin's eyes lit up as he watched this scene.

"Say!"

Li Wei had no time to deal with Zhao Xin at this moment. He was operating the weapon system of the Wan Nian Kunpeng to clear away the ship debris flying towards them. Otherwise, without the water droplets, these fragments alone would have been enough to destroy their ship.

Have you heard of Rupert's Tears?

"know."

Rupert's Tears are tadpole-shaped "glass teardrops" formed when molten glass is dripped naturally into ice water by gravity.

This glass has remarkable physical properties:

A teardrop is much harder than ordinary glass and can withstand 8 tons of pressure without breaking. However, if you grab its slender tail and apply a little pressure, the entire glass teardrop will instantly shatter and scatter, completely disintegrating.

The principle behind this is called "crack propagation," which stems from uneven pressure within the crack.

When molten glass drips into ice water, the glass surface cools rapidly to form a shell, while the glass underneath remains liquid.

When the glass in the core cools and solidifies, its volume decreases, and the liquid glass naturally pulls the already solidified outer shell to contract, causing the glass near the surface to be subjected to great tensile stress. When the outside is damaged, these residual stresses are released rapidly, causing the cracks to spread throughout the entire structure instantly, ultimately causing it to shatter into pieces.

“Look at the shape of this water droplet, doesn’t it look like a large Rupert’s Tear?” Zhao Xin said.

“It does look somewhat like it, and if you look at the tail of this water droplet, you can vaguely see a blue halo. I guess that should be where its engine is located,” Li Wei also gave his guess.

"A kinetic weapon, a super-sized kinetic weapon!" Zhao Xin exclaimed excitedly.

"Attack the tail of the droplet with a super-large kinetic weapon; laser weapons are ineffective!" Li Wei repeated Zhao Xin's words and immediately uploaded this important intelligence to the fleet's command system.

But Li Wei quickly calmed down again.

"Zhao Xin, it's impossible. Our kinetic weapons aren't powerful enough to damage the water droplets!"

"Don't give up. We were both soldiers of China. Do you remember what we said? Don't give up!" Zhao Xin said.

The droplet is still carrying out its "killing show," and what's worse, the other nine droplets are about to arrive. At that time, the entire space fleet will only be destroyed.

"Li Wei, I have one last idea."

This time, Li Wei didn't reply; he knew what Zhao Xin wanted to do.

The next second, the Northern, which had already gone far away, suddenly turned around and aimed at the Water Droplets that were killing in the distance, and started the ship's engines at maximum power.

"Northern, forward four!"

This was the last thing Zhao Xin said on the communication channel.

Then, immense pressure struck, propelling the Northern 4 forward without entering deep water, instantly crushing all the crew members into a pile of minced meat.

Vibrant blood blossoms bloomed inside the cabin. Under hypergravity, the blood was compressed into an extremely thin film, spreading over a large area, and eventually these blood blossoms merged into one.

Terror descended upon everyone's hearts. They did not die instantly, but could clearly hear their bones breaking bit by bit. Of course, that could also have been just a hallucination before their death.

Then, the overwhelming Grim Reaper kneaded their bodies like a lump of wet mud, and no one had time to scream. All that could be heard were the sounds of blood and internal organs being squeezed out and bones being crushed.

Later, this pile of flesh and bones was submerged in blood. The super-weight quickly settled the impurities in the blood, making it exceptionally clear. The powerful gravity made the surface of the blood pool as smooth as a mirror, completely still, as if it were solid.

In the end, it turned into a pile of bones, flesh, and internal organs that were no longer recognizable, as if it were sealed in a crystal ruby.

The Northern Spaceship, like a spear of Longinus, cleaved through space, embracing death in the darkness.

Sound cannot travel in a vacuum, so the last thing Li Wei saw was the Northern, which had turned into a nuclear fireball, and the water droplets that had been hit in the tail.

As Zhao Xin had predicted, the droplet's weakness lay in its tail engine. After being fatally struck by the Northern Ship, the droplet's trajectory was directly altered.

Accelerated by its own engine, it headed in the exact opposite direction from Earth.

"Success! Zhao Xin!"

Li Wei shouted excitedly over the communication frequency, but he knew that Zhao Xin could no longer hear him at that moment.

The monkey in the tree sacrificed itself to jam the tank's cannon!

Even a mortal can slay a god!

Based on the current trajectory of the water droplet, it will directly rush out of the solar system and then circle back.

Although it failed to destroy the water droplet, this was already the limit of what humans could do.

However, before Li Wei could be happy for long, a scene he would never forget appeared!

The water droplet, whose direction had already been deflected, suddenly turned at an extremely strange 15-degree acute angle and launched a counterattack.

"Ah……"

At the last moment, Li Wei couldn't help but let out a mocking laugh.

I don't know if he was laughing at his own wild ideas or at humanity's self-arrogance.

It doesn’t matter anymore!

The Wan Nian Kunpeng was eventually transformed into a beam of white light by the impact of the water droplet.