Chapter 86

Besides disaster relief news, people ceaselessly attempted to rebuild and repair the city. The media broadcast accusations from the victims’ families and images of destroyed homes around the clock, occasionally interspersed with calls for a public trial of Horne, and sometimes the despair of those awaiting death.

Without the protection of the electromagnetic net, they had no power to fight back if the aliens came again. The new bases were still holding on bitterly for now; once they collapsed, or if the aliens bypassed them, no one could do anything—tomorrow and death were merely a matter of probability.

The residents quickly divided into two factions: the rebuilders and the doomers.

At the same time, the rebuilders swiftly rallied behind Ganal’s government, because they had made the wisest decision long ago: arming every person.

The doomers consumed far more resources from the city defense district, as they began firing guns recklessly, ignoring all laws and morals to cause destruction until they were subdued by force from the city defense district, imprisoned, or shot on the spot. After all, whether they lived a little longer or shorter was just a matter of this short time—better to do the things that the law normally forbade while they still could.

Pa! The plate shattered across the floor, glass exploding everywhere.

Hels silently cleaned up the mess once more, went downstairs, prepared another serving, and carried the steaming food back up.

“Eat a little…”

“Scram!”

“Horne…”

“I said scram—can’t you understand?!”

Hels felt as if his heart had been pierced through with a bloody hole. He stood silently at the bedroom door.

The steam turned into a cold, rotten stench.

Pa! Another smashing sound rang out—Hels didn’t even know what it was this time; he simply went over quietly to clean it up.

The bedside lamp lay shattered in pieces. After Hels swept it up, he carefully checked the entire room to ensure not a single shard of glass remained.

Horne lay on the bed in a daze. He didn’t know what he was thinking—perhaps nothing at all.

“Brother.” Hels called to him softly.

Sometimes Horne responded, sometimes he didn’t, and sometimes he got angry—it was unpredictable.

Horne stared at the ceiling. After Hels called to him, he stiffly sat up.

Hels sat beside him and tentatively placed a hand on Horne’s shoulder. Seeing no resistance, he pulled Horne into an embrace, but in the next second, Horne struggled violently.

“Get away! Don’t touch me!”

Hels closed his eyes, his tone nearly pleading. “Brother, don’t do this—I’m hurting.”

Horne still shoved Hels away fiercely and yelled for him to get out. Then came a bang as he slammed the door. He leaned his back against it and slowly slid down to the floor.

“Brother! Open the door!” Hels pounded on it frantically. “Brother, don’t shut me out!”

The tremors from the door traveled through his back. Horne hugged his knees, buried his head in his arms, and his body convulsed as his arm muscles went rigid.

“Horne!”

Bang bang, bang bang! The knocking continued nonstop, but the door never opened.

“Horne, Horne, let’s run away—to the snowfield, away from Loch City,” Hels pleaded almost desperately. “To the place I came from.”

Later, he stopped knocking. He sat down too, his back against the door, the back of his head pressed to it, staring upward in silence.

“I’m sorry. I’m too useless. I didn’t protect you enough.”

The human world had no right to exist. If he could, he would destroy the city where this species lived.

In the days that followed, Horne completely shut himself away. From the shouting, random smashing, and outbursts of the first couple days, he shifted to silence—silence—and then, when he looked up, his face was streaked with tears.

“Am I really the problem?” The instant he asked that, Horne heard something crack.

Hels knelt before him, wiped the tears from his face, and said hoarsely, “No.”

“Whether I remember correctly or not, I caused the control tower explosion, didn’t I?”

Soullessly, he asked, “How many people did I kill? Do I really deserve to die?”

“No!” Hels cut him off immediately.

“What about Han Ya and Wen Yu? Where are they? I want them back—I miss them.”

“They temporarily… can’t come back.”

“Why not? I need them. I need them. Why aren’t they here? Tell them to come back!” His breakdown grew more urgent, his words spilling faster and faster. “What about Ben Yian? Where is he? Make him go public—publicize the data! No, no, that’s wrong…”

Horne muttered almost to himself. “Now it doesn’t matter if it’s publicized or not. Publicizing it would instead… instead…”

Cold sweat beaded densely across his back.

Instead, it would elevate Ganal’s government to divine status.

With so many dead, if the xenomorph particles could revive people and grant eternal life, then in this extreme situation, they would become saviors.

Everything was chaos—total chaos.

Was this the mistake he needed to be proven wrong on? If he was wrong now, then Ganal’s government could only be right.

Hels held him, but Horne had no strength left to hug back. He simply leaned limply against him, his eyes fixed on some point, seeing through it to the ruined wasteland outside.

Half the city. Half the population.

–

A month and a half after the incident, the entire city received notice of Horne’s arrest: (Former) Colonel Horne Zema Lin, suspected of seriously violating military defense regulations by unauthorized activation of the control tower self-destruct system, resulting in severe destruction to Loch City, the deaths of over one hundred thousand people, and constituting a crime against humanity. He was now under arrest and to be transferred to a military tribunal for trial.

On the day Horne was taken away, many residents emerged from the ruins. They blocked the vehicle and demanded that Horne get out. The city defense district formed a human wall, allowing the car to pass through smoothly.

No more information surfaced about what Horne had done in the past.

From the day Horne was imprisoned, Hels vanished from Loch City.

All of Hels’s connections ran through Horne. Once Horne’s terminal was banned, the people at the new base could no longer reach Hels.

“What the hell do we do? Doesn’t Hels have any other friends?” Han Ya fumed frantically at the new base. “Why, with Horne gone, is he untraceable too?”

Wen Yu had people search everywhere, but there was no information. When she asked Ben Yian, he was busy. As Horne’s adjutant, they had all been investigated.

Loch City entered a phase of reconstruction. They hoped to rebuild the control towers. The technology wasn’t the issue—it was time. What they needed to do was hold off any alien attacks until the new towers were complete—if there were any attacks.

As for whether human cities could be rebuilt, that was unknown—or at best, a slim hope.

Two months later, the tribunal confirmed Horne’s punishment. The residents demanded a public trial, held on a high platform in a street district to the north—a place Horne had once visited.

That day, high-ranking government and military officials were all present. Strict security checks were enforced to enter the high platform area.

The trial had not originally been intended to be public, but the survivors firmly opposed a closed-door verdict. They needed to know the criminal’s fate.

The sky was gray, as it had been ever since the control tower explosion—no blue skies for a long time. The frost in the snowfield grew even colder, like an ice pool.

He had never been so gaunt. His hair had grown down past his shoulders, unkempt. That reddish-brown hue was the only warm color on him. He wore an oversized ordinary black T-shirt; the stains on it were indistinguishable as blood or something else. His lips had turned purple from the cold, and he was injured—though from what, no one knew.

When the city defense district guards brought him out, he kept his head bowed the whole time, his eyes devoid of emotion. Only when the person behind shoved him onto the trial platform did he slightly raise his head. His ice-blue pupils coldly swept over the surroundings, across the crowd below the platform, into the sea of clamor.

He thought, ‘Hels should be here. Where is he watching me from?’

“After a long and detailed investigation, collection of evidence, and verification, this tribunal publicly tries the case today and issues the following verdict.”

There were too many people cursing him; he couldn’t make out the words clearly.

“The tribunal finds that the defendant, Horne Zema Lin, as the former colonel of the Loch City military district army, held important responsibilities and bore the sacred duty to protect the city and the lives of its residents.”

It had been so long since he’d seen Hels—so many years without being separated for this long. He really wanted to know what had happened to him.

“However, on the day of the incident, when emergency contingency plans were still available, the defendant unauthorizedly activated the control tower self-destruct system. This completely destroyed three control towers, paralyzed the entire defense system, and directly led to the tragic deaths of over one hundred thousand residents. The city suffered severe damage, and its living environment and safety lines faced an unprecedented destructive blow.”

He had considered some ways out—escaping, resisting, all sorts of ideas—but in the end, he did nothing.

He could die, be misunderstood, be disbelieved by everyone, but he would hold his final inner bastion. Die then die, but he would never flee.

He had spent his life fighting—tangible battles, intangible ones, self-imposed, forced upon him by others.

He was tired.

“And it inflicted irreparable trauma on humanity. We firmly oppose such behavior and mentality that disregards human lives.”

In the end, he even wondered if he had pressed the middle button or truly pressed the wrong one, and if the prompt from his Resident Chip had simply been overlooked in his tension, mistaken for an ordinary notification that he confirmed without thinking.

He shouldn’t have been so tense—or maybe he was. Who knew?

Life was always like that. Occasionally, there was some unwillingness.

Now they could fuse humans and aliens without restraint, if cooperation could be achieved. Could it? Whatever.

“The defendant insists he committed no crime, but all evidence clearly and unmistakably shows that the self-destruct system’s activation command originated from the defendant’s own Resident Chip and operations. Multiple surveillance records and control tower system logs, verified independently from multiple sources, show no signs of tampering or forgery.”

That day, Horne stood on the high platform, overlooking the tens of thousands below. His gaze swept across each face in turn—not to remember them, but to search for one person.

He saw Ben Yian, saw Bai Yin, saw Woody, saw the recruits he had trained, saw passing vendors, saw many familiar and unfamiliar faces—his past, his future, his entire life—but he didn’t see that one person.

“Therefore, the tribunal rules that the defendant’s actions, whatever the reason, constitute serious negligence and an irredeemable crime against humanity.”

It didn’t matter if he wasn’t there.

In that moment, a wish formed in Horne’s heart: May that little boy who came from the snowfield to Loch City live well—whether in his current identity or a new one, it didn’t matter.

He hoped he could find stability, forge connections with this world that weren’t so extreme, and no longer worry about him. May he love and be loved, find peace, and guard his own heart.

Above all, may he live on.

“The defendant, Horne Zema Lin, is stripped of all military ranks, honors, and personal privileges; stripped of citizenship and all basic rights; sentenced to death, to be executed immediately.”

He had always been meticulous, never so disheveled under the gaze of so many eyes. It was best that he wasn’t there to see it—they would all feel a little better.

He also hoped Loch City could slowly recover, that human cities would rebuild. His mistake couldn’t destroy humanity’s will to continue. As for what future humanity would face—or whether it would still be humanity—that no longer concerned him.

A blast of desolation from the ruins swept over him. Horne stood tall, like a tree straight in the wind, unmoved. He simply breathed a sigh of relief.

It didn’t matter.

“Verdict concluded.”