Chapter 37

“Beep! Beep! Beep!” The alarm of the Third Corps had never been this active, each sound more urgent and anxious than the last.

“Report!” The person answering the call, seeing Zhou Xing’s increasingly grim expression, braced himself and reported, “Captain Lu has killed another person in Battlefield 23!”

This time it wasn’t a student dormitory but a battlefield!

Since the black hole hadn’t refreshed yet, the battlefield wasn’t under lockdown. Zhou Xing had just returned from a meeting at Corps headquarters a few days ago.

He was originally scheduled to return by early tomorrow morning.

Who knew he would come back early and witness such a dramatic scene!

And it wasn’t over.

“Report!”

“Report!”

“Repor—”

“Bang!” Ji Fulooked up and saw Zhou Xing, his face livid, stand up and flip the table.

Lu Bingyun’s special status meant that when the Corps sent people to “invite” her after the incident, she outright refused.

She was extremely capable, matching the information Ji Fu had gathered about her.

It seemed that once Lu Bingyun caught the first assassin, she went on a killing spree.

As she continued her investigation, the more she discovered, the more shocking it became, leading to this chaotic situation.

What Ji Fu didn’t know was that Lu Bingyun wasn’t just in a killing frenzy; she was completely enraged.

She never expected that in such an important setting, there would be so many assassins infiltrated.

Absolutely insane!

When she found the third suspicious person, she had intended to keep them alive, but before she could capture them, they committed suicide.

The anonymous tipper had also provided detailed addresses for each assassin. As she checked each one, the assassins must have realized they were exposed.

Thus, the professional assassins either went berserk and prepared to attack or planned to escape.

Infuriated, Lu Bingyun deployed her mecha.

As a star-level mecha soldier with extensive combat experience, frequently seen in the Third Corps, her release of such a powerful mecha was not something the surrounding soldiers dared to interfere with.

She was seen driving the mecha at high speed within the Third Corps.

In just fifteen minutes, she killed four assassins.

When Lu Bingyun went berserk, not even the rest of the Third Corps could restrain her.

It was Zhou Xing himself who had to stop her.

He managed to stop her and brought her back to the office where Ji Fu was, only to hear the alarm blare again!

The announcer, seeing his commander’s darkening face, was on the verge of tears but continued his duty.

“Report… there’s been a murder in Battlefield 8. The attacker is… Zhou Lu Hai from the Interstellar Academy.”

As soon as Zhou Lu Hai’s name was mentioned, the entire room fell silent.

The veins on Zhou Xing’s forehead were about to burst.

Since taking over the Third Corps, nothing this absurd had ever happened.

A female student from the Interstellar Academy, an uncontrollable Lu Bingyun, and now Zhou Lu Hai!?

What was Zhou Lu Hai doing?

Lu Bingyun was also taken aback. Seeing Ji Fu was surprising enough, but Zhou Lu Hai too?

Ji Fu paused. Did she also inform Zhou Lu Hai?

She didn’t recall doing so, at least not like she had with Lu Bingyun.

Upon realizing the person was an assassin, she had connected to the external network of the Third Corps from the dormitory.

The Corps’ external network was open to students during the training.

The assassin targeting her was in the same location, using the same network.

She used the network interface to find their control system.

Before they realized the system was compromised, she created a map and sent it along with the information to Lu Bingyun.

As for Zhou Lu Hai…

He had messaged her while she was in the dorm, asking if she wanted some chocolate.

How did she respond at that time?

Oh… “Haizi, there’s a pervert stalking me. I’m so scared.”

It wasn’t deliberate, just a convenient message.

She had originally intended to use that information to justify killing the assassin.

But after discovering there were seven assassins, she changed her mind.

She didn’t know when Zhou Lu Hai saw the message or how he responded.

As people in the office were still reeling from one shock after another, someone else rushed in.

This time, there was no alarm, as the announcer had unplugged it.

The person entering was from the Corps, who said, “There’s been another incident in Dormitory 9.”

“The attackers were two students from the Interstellar Academy.”

Students! Students! Again with these students from that damned school!

Everyone in the office was speechless.

Ji Fu suddenly thought of something.

Shi Xueying from Class S, being quite slender, looked about 70-80% similar to her from behind.

The next moment, the person solemnly said, “It was soldier Li Yunyi and a student named Shi Xueying.”

…Just as she suspected.

Shi Xueying had also become a target.

Lu Bingyun, upon hearing this, actually sighed in relief.

According to the anonymous information, besides the four she killed and the one Ji Fu killed, there were still two more outside.

Under Zhou Xing’s repeated insistence, she had to let her subordinates handle the remaining two assassins.

So before entering, she was somewhat worried, but now she was completely relieved.

Seven assassins in total, none missing.

She needn’t have worried. Based on the intercepted information, the assassins’ orders were to act during the training tomorrow.

By passing the information to Lu Bingyun, she trusted Lu Bingyun to deal with all of them before the training began.

Despite the unexpected events, things had progressed smoothly.

“Captain Lu,” Zhou Xing’s face was cold, “Please provide a reasonable explanation for today’s events to the Third Corps.”

The Corps had its regulations, and Lu Bingyun’s actions were indeed excessive.

But she wouldn’t be Lu Bingyun if she weren’t excessive.

Zhou Xing was aware of her ways but never expected someone could so brazenly wreak havoc within the Corps.

As Zhou Xing remained furious, several people from Class S were brought in.

His cold eyes met Zhou Lu Hai’s calm gaze, who was unfazed and looked straight at him.

Wearing handcuffs, Zhou Lu Hai even smiled at him and called out, “Uncle!”

Now everyone knew the commander’s nephew had also committed murder.

The secretary in charge of the interrogation couldn’t help but glance at Zhou Xing.

What a mess!

It had started with just a female student committing murder, but now it had turned into a major incident involving the elite of the Interstellar Academy, key members of the Alliance, and the Zhou family.

Remembering Ji Fu’s earlier words, it was indeed not just her alone.

This fire is nearly reaching the heavens!

The atmosphere in the office was tense, and Zhou Xing’s expression had gone beyond mere displeasure.

Seeing the team growing larger, Lu Bingyun suppressed her slight guilt immediately.

As a core member of the Alliance, she knew that behaving like this within the corps could result in a direct order for her execution.

Of course, with her star-level mecha, she couldn’t be easily executed.

But causing such a mess in the corps, a colossal entity, indeed wouldn’t end well.

She was aggressive but not stupid.

Standing in front of the students, Lu Bingyun said sternly, “The corps has its regulations, but my duty is to protect these students participating in the training.”

“The students’ lives were in danger, so I had no choice but to eliminate those assassins directly!”

Zhou Xing glared at her coldly, “How did you determine that the people you killed were assassins?”

It was, of course, based on the investigation following the tip-off.

But she couldn’t say that; doing so would put her in a passive position, and she might even be accused of having ulterior motives.

Having been in the Alliance for years, Lu Bingyun wasn’t insensitive to such nuances.

So she simply stiffened her neck and confirmed her reckless, aggressive approach: “Based on intuition!”

Alright, alright.

Based on intuition.

The people in the corps’ office were almost amused by her audacity.

Relying on her high talent and strong capabilities, she felt the corps couldn’t really do anything to her, so she spoke freely.

Lu Bingyun continued, “Among these people, many were professional assassins. If one were highly vigilant, it would be impossible not to notice.”

As if to corroborate her words, the corps’ inspection team provided their findings.

Ji Fu sat there, knowing that those who brazenly planted people in the training must have had some backing.

However, the situation had escalated beyond easy resolution.

Ambushing during the training, intending to kill students, and involving three people from Class S.

With the joint entrance exams approaching, this was treading on the Interstellar Academy’s explosive point.

Even though the Interstellar Academy lagged behind among the three major military schools, it was still one of the top three.

Today’s events required the corps to produce results.

Sure enough.

Among the seven assassins, four were from the school, three of whom were impostors, and three were from the corps, with their status as impostors not mentioned.

The entire corps’ office fell silent, the corps’ personnel sensing an impending storm.

Zhou Xing directly ordered, “Investigate thoroughly!”

His voice, filled with suppressed rage and authority, commanded, “I want results by the end of the day.”

Zhang Huan finally looked a bit relieved.

Then he turned around to see Ji Fu, amidst the tense atmosphere, calmly raising her hand like a well-behaved student in class, smiling as she said:

“Report!”

Everyone in the office looked at her.

With a light tone, she said, “I have important evidence to present.”

The room fell silent.

Why hadn’t she presented it earlier?

It was just a wrist computer.

Tan Hui’s, the one who tried to kill her.

Other assassins also had wrist computers, but those generally had self-destruct programs, destroying themselves upon the assassin’s death or under certain conditions.

Even if not destroyed, those with deep connections could easily erase or alter the data on them.

When Tan Hui died, she disconnected and removed his wrist computer, storing it in her own.

She didn’t know if the other assassins’ wrist computers had been tampered with after leaving the sight of Class S and Lu Bingyun.

But Tan Hui’s had not, its self-destruct program disabled and its network disconnected.

Now, what she held wasn’t just a wrist computer.

It was their death warrant.

Forcing a full data extraction from all wrist computers was possible for her, and both the corps and the Interstellar Academy could do it too.

In the presence of academy representatives, the corps’ high command acted swiftly.

Within hours, they identified the contacts and detailed interactions in the wrist computer.

Involving two soldiers and a squad leader, the information was delivered to Zhou Xing, who didn’t even glance at it, coldly ordering, “Execute immediately!”

At dawn.

As Ji Fu left the corps’ office, she heard three gunshots.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Echoing through the sky.

Lu Bingyun commented, “What an unlucky start to the morning.”

The academy’s others were speechless.

How could she talk about bad luck after killing four people yesterday?

Lu Bingyun sidled up to Ji Fu, asking, “But Ji Fu, how did you think of putting the wrist computer inside another wrist computer?”

She smiled as if casually asking.

Lu Bingyun didn’t know who had reported to her, but she admitted yesterday was indeed exhilarating. After years in the Alliance, she had almost rusted.

However, the reporter’s methods were extraordinary, from the tip-off to precise location tracking.

She was very curious.

“Isn’t it like nesting dolls?” Li Yunyi laughed upon hearing this.

Ji Fu chuckled, took out some candy from her wrist computer under Lu Bingyun’s gaze, and handed it to her.

The wrist computer’s storage space could even hold a mecha; storing some odds and ends was perfectly normal.

“And some candy.”

Lu Bingyun was momentarily stunned, then took the fruit candy, putting a piece in her mouth, tasting its sweetness.

She smiled; this kid was quite cute.

At the crossroads, Ji Fu yawned and headed towards Dormitory 75.

She had only taken two steps when Zhang Huan called out.

“Where are you going?”

Ji Fu: “Back to rest.”

Zhang Huan: …

“Training is about to start. What rest are you talking about? And from today onwards, you are to stay within the boundaries of Class S’s base. You’re not allowed to go anywhere!”

She had only been away for a short while and had already killed someone, yet she wanted to go back?

She might as well kill him first.

Zhang Huan forcibly confined Ji Fu to Class S, ensuring these troublemakers stayed under his watchful eye to prevent them from causing more chaos.

Despite this, the group still received widespread attention after leaving the corps office.

Usually, the Interstellar Academy had a low presence in the joint entrance exams, consistently ranking at the bottom, with the other two military schools barely acknowledging them.

This year, before the training even began, blood was already shed on the Interstellar side.

And it wasn’t the blood of alien beasts but of humans.

The student who killed walked out of the corps office unscathed.

The shock of this news was greater than if the Interstellar Academy had won a championship.

Because the students from the three major military schools were all on the same local network, a regional forum was created to monitor each school’s scores, causing the news to spread rapidly.

However, after a few days, Class S’s prominence was overshadowed by the rapidly increasing scores of the other two major military schools as training began.

A week into the training, Ji Fu had already accumulated enough points due to her forced attachment to Class S.

The atmosphere in Class S was much more harmonious than in Class Special A, with clear divisions of labor: mecha engineers and mechanics handled logistics, while mecha soldiers fought on the front lines.

Ji Fu… fell into a category of her own.

She was leisurely drinking juice when Wan Die asked Shi Xueying, “Aren’t the points enough? Why is everyone still pushing so hard? Do these points affect the entrance exam results?”

Shi Xueying glanced at Tan Xi, Li Yunyi, and others on the battlefield, her expression complex. “Training points are the gateway to the joint entrance exam, but they don’t affect the exam results.”

“However, the Alliance has a rule that the military school with the highest training score will receive ten percent of the total loot from this training.”

Hearing this, even Ji Fu turned her head.

Ten percent might sound small, but it was actually a substantial amount, considering the loot accumulated over three months from the Black Hole operation, including, if she remembered correctly, an appearance of an S-level alien beast on the battlefield.

And that was just for the Interstellar Academy. Adding the other two military schools…

The rewards were incredibly high.

Wan Die nodded immediately. “Then we should indeed work hard.”

She quickly drank her nutritional liquid, filled with determination.

“Not that easy,” Tan Xi said, coming back for a rest. He chuckled with a hint of mocking and said seriously, “Three months, ten percent of the rewards, and they go directly to the students. Just that alone is enough to make many people fight to the death.”

“And this is before the joint entrance exams, with this extra batch of materials benefiting every military school.”

Wan Die was even more puzzled. “Doesn’t that mean we should fight even harder?”

“Fighting is one thing; being able to win is another,” Tan Xi said after finishing a nutritional liquid. “The Empire and Han Hai’s stars T-1992 and 1993 have a fifty percent higher frequency of alien beast appearances than ours.”

The room fell silent.

Li Yunyi, also resting nearby, added coldly, “And they are not high-level difficult-to-deal-with alien beasts.”

In front of these three star systems, the corps were fighting, and high-level star beasts wouldn’t be placed in the students’ battlefields.

“The most common alien beasts in those two star systems range from A to C level.”

In the past, the elite classes of those two military schools participated in the training, and even with the top 100 added this time, they would still dominate.

Safe and high-scoring.

How could this not be considered a natural scoring tool?

Moreover, Ji Fu knew something else.

The joint entrance exam results of the three major military schools would directly affect the positions and proportions of their graduates within the Alliance and the corps in the future.

A positive cycle for the good, and a negative one for the bad.

The aristocratic families could always stay on top.

Li Yunyi opened the light screen and pulled up the total score list of the three major military schools.

A week into the training, the Empire and Han Hai had already pulled ahead of the Interstellar Academy.

With differences in talent and environment, they were already leading by nearly 30,000 points.

The Interstellar Academy students still had the motivation to chase points now, but as time passed and the gap widened to hundreds of thousands or even millions of points, seeing no hope, they would give up.

The total score difference was stark, and everyone present fell silent.

Zhou Lu Hai stood aside.

He was different from everyone here. No matter which school he attended, it wouldn’t affect his future path.

If he wanted, he could even ask Zhou Xing to switch the star systems where the military schools were located.

But the problem was, for the current Interstellar Academy students, star systems with frequent A-level beast appearances were also high-risk areas.

Randomly switching might not be good and could bring trouble.

While he was thinking, he saw someone with bright, clear eyes smiling and saying, “Since that’s the case, then let’s rob them.”

Zhou Lu Hai looked at her, a strange look in his eyes.

Although the training rules had changed this time, nothing much had changed compared to before. The first place was still the eternal Empire Military School.

In just one month, the Interstellar Academy had completely fallen behind.

They were nearly 500,000 points behind the first place Empire Military School and 300,000 points behind the second place Han Hai Military School.

Everyone, including the corps and people from the three major military schools, believed the result was already decided.

After all, the gap wasn’t just a few points but hundreds of thousands of points.

Who would have thought that just when everyone believed the outcome was decided and began to relax, things started to go wrong in the second week of the second month.

First, on the same day, in the two star systems of the Empire and Han Hai, apart from the main star where the elite classes were located, all other planets saw the appearance of unknown starships.

That day coincided with the start of another wave of alien beasts, and by that time in the training, everyone was quite exhausted.

When these starships appeared out of nowhere, many people didn’t react in time.

By the time they did, the starships had already begun spreading a strange substance everywhere.

Once this substance was released, all alien beasts in the air, on land, and in the water went crazy.

First, they swarmed to one place, then started raging wildly. At the height of the chaos, the starships began dropping bombs.

… All S-class mechanical cannons!

Directly blasting the alien beasts in the head, the alien beasts that the two major military schools would have fought for a week were completely wiped out by the starships in half a day.

This ridiculous operation left the students present dumbfounded, thinking it was some bizarre tactic devised by the elite classes.

When they opened the scoreboards, they almost fainted.

On the total scoreboards of the three major military schools, the Interstellar Academy, which had been in last place, saw a dramatic increase in points, all of which came from their Class S.

That same Class S that had killed someone at the start of the training.

Their points were skyrocketing like someone had stepped on a power switch.

The students of the two major military schools quickly realized that Class S had been plotting something big for two months to steal their resources.

For years, each school had focused on their own training, so why were there suddenly robbers?

The students of the two major military schools couldn’t tolerate such an affront.

They immediately planned to retaliate, using mechs to activate defense systems and blasting the starships on sight. The problem was, these starships would self-destruct upon taking any fire.

The explosion was comparable to a nuclear blast, catching them unprepared and damaging many of their mechs.

Reluctantly, they had to drive them away, but these things would explode unpredictably.

The non-elite students of the two major military schools had never encountered such bizarre machinery.

They were forced to deploy high-level mechs to individually destroy each one.

High-level mechs significantly reduced the starships’ impact.

But before the students could celebrate, the starships switched to deploying three top-tier mecha warriors: Tan Xi, Li Yunyi, and Zhou Lu Hai from the Interstellar Academy.

Though Zhou Lu Hai used an S-class mech, his exceptional skills allowed him to effortlessly smash through their defensive systems.

They used high-level mechs to defend against explosions, while the Interstellar Academy used top-tier mechs to fight violence with violence.

These were stellar mechs, going berserk immediately and able to, within half an hour, tear through all the alien beasts on a planet alongside the starships.

They would leave right after, not staying a second longer.

The two major military schools were furious, feeling their territory had been turned into a playground. They couldn’t believe the Interstellar Academy dared to come and go as they pleased.

In past trainings, the elite classes of the two major military schools didn’t take things too seriously, as their consistent scores didn’t require much effort.

But they hadn’t expected the Interstellar Academy’s unexpected moves, targeting the non-elite students for maximum points in the shortest time.

The elite classes of the two major military schools came from high-status backgrounds, making it hard for ordinary people, including their own schoolmates, to approach them.

Fortunately, the non-elite classes still had many students from prominent families. Provoked by the Interstellar Academy, they started preparing ambushes for the three rampaging stellar mechs.

They set up defenses, waiting for another attack.

Unexpectedly, the three mechs didn’t show up but returned to their own star system, wiping out all the alien beasts there.

By the time the two major military schools realized what was happening, they saw the Interstellar Academy, in two weeks, jumping around and targeting them, overtaking Han Hai in points and only trailing the Empire Military School by 200,000 points.

Although the gap was still significant, this was the closest the Interstellar Academy had come to the top in years.

And it wasn’t over.

Following this, the Interstellar Academy released dozens of starships at once.

Seeing the starships again, the students of the two major military schools immediately deployed S-class mechs to single them out.

But no one expected these starships to be non-combative this time, breaking apart upon contact.

When they shattered, they rained down drones across the entire planet.

Later, even if they didn’t attack, the starships would still release drones whenever they opened their hatches, filling the skies with thousands of drones.