Chapter 23: The Meeting

Two in the afternoon. Task Force Training Base, Conference Room One.

A long, large conference table filled the room, and every seat around it was occupied by an officer in a white uniform.

Sang Ling surveyed the room and found that of the nearly twenty officers present, not one had brought a little assistant to a meeting the way Jiang Yunzhao had.

A Reservist in a black uniform like her certainly didn’t rate a seat at the table, so she had fetched her own chair and sat down behind Jiang Yunzhao.

Captain Zhao of Task Force Unit 2 sat directly across from Jiang Yunzhao.

A few officers had arrived late; according to Jiang Yunzhao, they were commanders of regular units rather than the Task Force, and had come over from other training bases.

The officers chatted among themselves—even Jiang Yunzhao was using the chance to trade information—while Sang Ling, from the moment she sat down, was quiet as a ghost.

She had no interest in this meeting. She couldn’t even be bothered to lift her eyelids, hoping only that these big shots wouldn’t notice her and would let her slide through unnoticed.

Unfortunately, teasing Pretty Boys was a time-honored virtue of military camp life, and before long a commander from a regular unit spotted her.

“Jiang Yunzhao, you come out to a command meeting and you still bring a little tail along?” she teased.

Jiang Yunzhao said, offhand, “She’s my bodyguard. What, you have a problem with that?”

Above the table, her expression was smooth as still water. Below it, her foot came down on top of Sang Ling’s boot, signaling her to give some kind of reaction.

Sang Ling raised her head, resigned.

The commander across the table froze for a moment at the sight of her face, then said, “That pale little face—is she ill? Jiang Yunzhao, is she protecting you, or are you protecting her?”

“If you’re really that short on people, I’ve got a few good prospects. Pick any of them for your Task Force—they’d all fight better than her.”

At these words, before either Jiang Yunzhao or Sang Ling herself could react, Captain Zhao, sitting across from Jiang Yunzhao, covered her face first, unable to bear it.

This commander had reminded her of herself—of the way she’d provoked Sang Ling on the arena just hours ago.

Her toes curled inside her military boots as she silently sent off the commander in her heart: Sister, may you rest in peace.

But Sang Ling and Jiang Yunzhao both remained unmoved.

Jiang Yunzhao, because this commander hadn’t attacked Major Jiang herself, and the two had no old grudges.

Sang Ling, because she was done proving herself to anyone.

On the arena just now, she had barely lifted a hand and broken her opponent—a rib, snapped.

She did not want to send a second person to the hospital today.

Neither superior nor subordinate reacted, but the commander wouldn’t shut up, recommending her homegrown talent with growing enthusiasm—

Until a brisk knock-knock at the door cut her off.

“She’s here.” An Alpha soldier entered first to announce.

Then, under everyone’s gaze, a woman walked into the conference room—not tall, slightly slender, blonde and blue-eyed, wearing thin-framed glasses.

The instant they saw her face, nearly twenty officers in that room couldn’t help wearing expressions—some like they had a toothache, some simply strange.

Sang Ling, keenly attuned to shifts in atmosphere, looked up—and found the reason.

A Beta woman.

How is there a Beta in the military?

Jiang Yunzhao, in front of her, didn’t even turn her head. She extended two fingers and beckoned.

Sang Ling leaned in, and Jiang Yunzhao lowered her voice. “That’s Major General Shen’s assistant. The only Beta soldier in the entire military right now.”

“Today she’s here representing Major General Shen.”

Major General Shen—Sang Ling had heard of her. Said to be the youngest Major General in centuries, only twenty-nine this year.

Jiang Yunzhao’s face twisted into something between a wince and a grimace. “Who knows what Major General Shen was thinking.”

“She has an entire army’s worth of fine Alphas to command—and she picked a Beta.”

“Damn those gender equity laws. No explicit clause forbidding Betas from the military, so she slipped straight through the loophole.”

Jiang Yunzhao was clearly a devoted adherent of Alpha-supremacism—and every officer in this room was the same. Hence the strange looks when the Beta appeared.

The Eldest Miss seemed to have lowered her voice, but really she had only made a token gesture of it.

The Beta on the platform had clearly heard every word—and showed no reaction whatsoever.

She took out her Light Brain and projected her materials onto the enormous display screen.

Sang Ling glanced over: a deployment map of the area around the First Commercial District.

“The subject of this meeting is the 4.13 Zerg Attack. Everyone present was a commander at the time—commanders who allowed a breach in our defensive line, letting at least forty Zerg into the civilian shelter zones, causing major casualties.”

The 4.13 Zerg Attack—the very attack Sang Ling had been caught in during her first commission with Su Qingyue.

The Beta woman wore no uniform—instead a black suit—and stood before the display, glasses on, surveying the room with a severe gaze.

“Now. Will any commander step forward and take responsibility?”

An officer immediately snorted a laugh. “Hah. Those who never see the battlefield certainly have loud mouths. And we’re supposed to take responsibility?”

That officer was powerfully built, promoted on personal combat record, a little short on polish and etiquette, and she said it outright: “You Betas…”

Jiang Yunzhao leaned forward at once and rapped her index finger hard against the conference table.

It was a warning. Whatever these Alphas truly thought of Betas, they would at least maintain surface decorum and abide by the Beta Equal Rights Act.

The officer fell silent at once.

Sang Ling kept her head down, eyelids lowered. From the sound alone she could tell: Jiang Yunzhao’s authority within the military ran deep.

Or rather, the entire Task Force’s standing was far above the regular army’s.

The silence in the room hadn’t lasted two seconds before Captain Zhao smoothly picked up the thread, her manner one of official friendliness, bearing no trace of the person who had provoked Sang Ling that morning.

“Miss Elle.”

So the Beta woman was named Elle.

“You have our complete dispatch records as well. If you can read them, you’ll know our command decisions were entirely sound. Not perfect, perhaps—but without error.”

“And yet your defensive line still developed a breach.”

Beta Elle pointed mercilessly at the deployment map on the screen. “Current military doctrine against Zerg attacks is saturation rescue. We committed three times the originally planned personnel—precisely to protect civilians and forge a defensive line like steel.”

“And you let the civilians pay for your dereliction with their lives.”

She swiped lightly on the display, and a photograph appeared: over a hundred dead civilians covered in white cloth, lying among the ruins. Beyond the cordon the soldiers had set up, grieving families stood weeping, motionless.

A brief silence fell over the conference room.

Sang Ling’s eyes moved slightly. She looked around and found no commander willing to speak first.

Then Jiang Yunzhao spoke up abruptly. “The Zerg came through the Eighth Highland.”

The two commanders responsible for the Eighth Highland flared up at once. “The Task Force’s reinforcements were late. That’s what happened.”

“The Zerg concentrated their force and slammed into the Eighth Highland, and the Task Force didn’t arrive in time. The line wavered—we already made the most rational personnel adjustments we could.”

“But our soldiers are human, not gods. You cannot demand that soldiers facing several times their own number of Zerg still win.”

Facing the two commanders’ furious attack, Jiang Yunzhao only lifted her eyelids. “Why not?”

The commander opposite nearly laughed with rage. “Is this your first day on a battlefield? Find me one soldier like that and show me.”

Sang Ling had a bad feeling.

Sure enough, the next second, Jiang Yunzhao turned sideways, revealing Sang Ling’s figure, and pointed at her.

“She held off two Giant Zerg without an exoskeleton. Your soldiers had exoskeletons, had squad support—and couldn’t even hold three minutes. The line lasted one minute twenty-seven seconds.”

Stacking the comparison. This is blatant, naked comparison-stacking!

Dragged out by Jiang Yunzhao to be used as a club against others, Sang Ling—who had only wanted to be invisible for the duration of this meeting—faced the two commanders’ hostile stares and wanted nothing more than to kill Jiang Yunzhao on the spot.

The Eldest Miss is flagrantly painting a target on my back!

One of the two commanders slammed the table. She didn’t believe a word of Jiang Yunzhao’s claim, and her indignation boiled over. “Jiang Yunzhao! To spite me, you’ll really say anything.”

Jiang Yunzhao said with hauteur, “I don’t need lies to target you. I state facts.”

The commander, livid, yanked out her exoskeleton activator on the spot and pointed it at Sang Ling. “You! Outside! Onto the arena, sign a life-or-death waiver—today only one of us walks away!”

How did this suddenly become a matter of only one of us surviving? Why do you Alphas shout for blood at the drop of a hat?

Sang Ling was thoroughly bewildered by how fast the situation had escalated, and her mood of lying low evaporated entirely.

The officers in the room heard only this pale-skinned youngster give a soft little tch.

The Alpha in the black rank-and-file uniform, silent through the entire meeting, suddenly rose. She walked to the display screen and stood studying the dispatch data shown on the deployment map for a while.

Then she turned, bowed her head slightly toward the short Beta, Elle, and asked with perfect courtesy, “Do you have the footage from the scene?”

A gleam flashed through the Beta’s eyes. “I do.”

Sang Ling took the Light Brain the Beta handed over and watched. The footage came mainly from the recorders carried on soldiers’ bodies and the fixed cameras already installed across the main urban district—not complete, but sufficient.

She had watched barely a few minutes when the commanders below began losing patience, shouting, “Hey! Are we fighting or not?”

The commander jeered, “Bare-handed against two Zerg—what a story! If you’ve really got that kind of skill, what are you afraid of now?”

“The two commanders’ dispatch decisions were not the problem.” Sang Ling, pale-faced, spoke up abruptly, her pace unhurried.

The commander: “See, I said—”

“But the execution failed.” The young Alpha’s words dropped like a bombshell.

Her eyes were lit from within as she pointed at the deployment map. “Here—Soldier A’s drop point was fifty meters off the plan. Here—Soldier B withdrew fifty seconds earlier than the plan required.”

Sang Ling had just reviewed the footage at sixteen-times speed, multiple windows at once, and the pattern had surfaced quickly.

On a battlefield, a gap between command orders and soldiers’ execution was normal. Imperfection was to be expected.

But she had quickly noticed that in these recordings, some soldiers’ deviations from their orders were deliberate.

As her finger moved across the deployment map and her unhurried explanation continued, the commanders below quickly saw it too: these seemingly trivial errors, combined, formed a route along which Zerg could pass unseen.

As if someone had quietly performed an undetected operation on the defensive line with an exquisitely precise scalpel—or as if someone were playing Moses, parting the sea to open a road for the Zerg.

The conference room was silent as death.

Since humanity had formed the Alliance in the interstellar age, there had been no war between humans and humans. And in the war against the Zerg, even with High-Tier Zerg Commanders directing them, Zerg tactics were still far from cunning.

These commanders had long grown accustomed to sweeping, open engagements—tactics discussed only in terms of personnel, logistics, and firepower, clear variables all. The very concept of trickery was foreign to them.

And beyond that, no commander would ever believe that soldiers existed who would open a road for the Zerg.

Why?

Jiang Yunzhao’s face was stern as iron—more solemn than Sang Ling had ever seen her. “Do you know what you’re saying? Do you understand what you’re implying?”

Sang Ling felt almost no burden in her heart. She said it plainly, directly: “A soldier has betrayed humanity.”

She looked at the faces of the dozen-odd commanders below and knew: most of them did not want to believe their own soldiers could betray.

That was normal. These commanders differed in personality and ability—but every one of them genuinely protected her own troops.

They refused to accept reality. But the Beta beside Sang Ling suddenly smiled.

“It’s a pleasure to see that the Federation’s next generation of soldiers has brains.”

Miss Elle inclined her head toward Jiang Yunzhao. “Major Jiang, congratulations. Your bodyguard discovered in five minutes what our Command Headquarters’ think tank needed a full week to find.”

“You’ve gained a powerful asset.”

Miss Elle turned to Sang Ling and nodded. Her rank was in fact far above Sang Ling’s, yet she treated her with conspicuous respect. “Your Excellency. Your future is boundless.”

Sang Ling: “I’m not smarter than they are. They’re simply too unwilling to suspect their own soldiers.”

Every Alpha in this world entered military schools from birth. In kindergarten they were already steeped in the creed: when you grow up, you will defend humanity and destroy the Zerg. They spent their entire lives marching beside their comrades.

It was their glory, their responsibility, their obligation—their morality.

Sang Ling was certain that right now, every commander-Alpha in this room was thinking: how could there exist in this world an Alpha who would betray humanity?

“I don’t believe it.” One commander shot to her feet.

“Neither do I.” Another rose in support.

Captain Zhao stood as well, facing Miss Elle. “Miss Elle, you’re a Beta. Perhaps you simply cannot understand an Alpha’s loyalty to humanity.”

More and more commanders voiced their positions, until only Jiang Yunzhao remained seated.

She said, “I need proof.”

Miss Elle said, “I can give you proof.”

“In this battle, a soldier of the Eighth Highland was gravely wounded protecting a child. She is still under care in the ICU.”

“Her condition has stabilized. She will be transferred to a standard Intensive Care Unit at four o’clock this afternoon.”

“Command Headquarters has determined: a soldier willing to risk her life to protect a child could not have betrayed humanity.”

“When she wakes, we will take her testimony. She will tell us what actually happened at the Eighth Highland.”

“We found no hard evidence in the footage. But someone who was on the scene may well have seen what the cameras did not.”

“For now, she alone holds the truth.”

The reasoning was imperfect—but it won the agreement of most of the commanders.

Then Sang Ling said, abruptly: “And if she never wakes up?”

Facing everyone’s eyes, she said, “What I mean is—if I were a soldier who had betrayed humanity, there is no possible way I would let this person wake up.”

“I would murder her.”

Jiang Yunzhao said flatly, “Then send someone to the hospital to protect her. Until she wakes.”

What followed was time for the commanders to discuss countermeasures. Sang Ling quietly stepped down from the front and started back toward her seat.

Beta Elle: “Send whom? Right now, we cannot confirm for any soldier in the military whether she still stands on humanity’s side.”

In an instant, every gaze in the room swung to Sang Ling, like a spotlight snapping on.

Sang Ling, not yet back in her seat, felt a fresh wave of foreboding, worse than before.

“You’ll do.” Captain Zhao said cheerfully. “When the Zerg attack happened, you weren’t formally enlisted yet—so there’s no way you were part of the betrayal.”

“Besides, you can fight, and you’ve got a certain guileless stupidity about you. Perfect for close-protection duty in a hospital.”

Sang Ling: ?

Beta Elle: “This task is confidential. We can’t announce openly that she’s going as protection.”

Jiang Yunzhao: “Have her enter the hospital as a Combat Medic. Combat medics do annual advanced-training rotations at civilian hospitals—perfect cover.”

She turned to Sang Ling. “Your sister Sang Chi was a Combat Medic, wasn’t she? A family tradition, then.”

What secrecy? What Combat Medic? What?

Sang Ling felt the situation careening downhill, her role decided for her in the space of a few sentences.

What is happening? How did I suddenly become a fake Combat Medic going to a hospital for advanced training, secretly guarding an unconscious soldier?

Isn’t this the kind of job you give a 007-style secret agent? Why is it suddenly mine?

But clearly, tasks did not bend to her will—especially not when every person present outranked her.

“Meeting adjourned.”

Beta Elle, her ruthlessness from the meeting’s opening entirely gone now that her objectives were complete, left in high spirits.

The other commanders left too.

Leaving only Sang Ling—who, on the first day of her reporting, in its third hour, having already fought one match, was suddenly thrown out of the base by Jiang Yunzhao, person and luggage together.

Even as Jiang Yunzhao drove her all the way to Gate Two of Capital Star First Hospital, she was still dazed.

“The hospital side is all arranged—Elle has handled the handover. Just go report in. From today, you’re a Combat Medic here for advanced training.”

The handover’s done already? What kind of terrifying efficiency is this?

A raging sea and ten thousand stampeding horses churned in Sang Ling’s chest—too many things to say, and no idea where to even begin complaining.

In the end, she could only say, wooden-faced, “Understood.”

Jiang Yunzhao continued the briefing. “Your protectee is named Li Zhi. She’s in the Intensive Care Unit now. Once she’s moved out of the ICU, she’ll go straight to Intensive Care Ward 102.”

“Task target: Li Zhi.”

“Operation time: after four in the afternoon.”

“The ICU is fully sealed—entering triggers an alarm. So wait until four o’clock, until she’s transferred to the Intensive Care Ward, then make your move. You must kill her.”

“Reportedly, it will be Ward 102.”

Lin Jinxu looked at the task details the Orchid Mantis had sent to her Light Brain, then at the time.

Three forty-three in the afternoon.

Seventeen minutes left.

The seconds on the Light Brain ticked onward. Lin Jinxu watched the leaping digits, and heard her own heart beating, one beat at a time.

In the hospital corridor, among the coming and going crowds, a slender, breathtakingly beautiful Omega stood quietly, the Light Brain in her hands displaying nothing but the moving time.

She carried a cheap fast-fashion shoulder bag, plain and unremarkable.

All the people shuttling through this hospital, longing for health, would never know what kind of lethal Injectable Solution lay inside that bag.

“Ding.”

The elevator arrived.

Sang Ling pressed the button for her floor as she pulled on the white coat she had just been issued.

She made the best of a bad situation. It was fine, really—protecting someone looked a lot more comfortable than being drilled half to death at the training grounds.

Her destination was the ICU on the seventh floor of the hospital.

The Alpha soldier named Li Zhi was being kept alive by a ventilator, the mist of her breath condensing on the mask over her face.

Her features were serene, as if she were having a good dream.

She would never know that outside, one person wanted her dead—and another wanted her alive.