As soon as the Zerg Overlords vanished from the battlefield, the sheer number of Hydralisks meant no Spore Crawlers had been built to defend against air attacks or detect cloaked units. This immediately cost the Zerg both their anti-stealth capability and the ability to continuously spawn new troops, as the larvae starved without the Overlords' vital nutrition!
In this dire situation, Ul'aki immediately seized the advantage! He urgently dispatched three Arbiter vessels, completely drained of energy, onto the field.
Though these three Arbiters were out of energy and thus unable to use their signature abilities—Stasis Field or Recall—their terrifying passive trait remained: they could refract light, cloaking all Protoss forces in a vast radius around them, a trick that required zero energy!
Faced with this, the Zerg forces had no choice but to desperately attack the only visible targets: the Arbiters. But the Arbiters could fly, and they were guarded by an astonishing number of invisible units. By the time the three Arbiters were destroyed, the main Zerg army had suffered devastating casualties, nearing total annihilation.
Under such brutal pressure, the Zerg defenses finally collapsed completely!
The Protoss forces surged forward like an ocean tide, washing over the Zerg base and destroying the Hive before the Queen of Blades could return. The outcome was sealed; even if the Queen of Blades dared to join the fight now, facing the sheer mass of Protoss troops would only result in a futile sacrifice.
Next, the Protoss began constructing a bizarre structure atop a high plateau behind the Zerg base. It resembled an Energy Crystal magnified several dozen times, requiring nearly a hundred workers laboring densely to build it simultaneously.
It was evident that their remaining Pandoran Crystals were being consumed at an astonishing rate: one thousand units, two thousand units, eventually draining completely—three thousand units of Pandoran Crystals and rare Vespene Gas—to finally form something resembling the Oriental Pearl Tower, crafted from glowing crystalline material.
Ul'aki then ascended this hundreds-of-meters-tall crystalline spire. Under his booming chant, a distant mountain peak suddenly collapsed, revealing a dark, drab, triangular object about three meters high. It looked simultaneously like a totem and some ancient marker.
To the eyes of Fang Senyan and his company watching from afar, the object resembled a gravestone weathered and diminished over millennia, symbolizing a glory long extinguished in the depths of time, yet still harboring an indescribable, sinister power!
The chanting from Ul'aki did not cease. As the sustained ritual continued, two other distant mountain peaks also crumbled, revealing two more identical artifacts.
These three totems occupied the corners of a vast area. Viewed from high above, they formed a perfect equilateral triangle, enclosing ground spanning at least twenty to thirty square kilometers.
Under Ul'aki's intensely fervent chanting, the surfaces of these three triangular totems—which seemed to have stood for ten thousand years and were destined to stand for ten thousand more—were suddenly covered in countless fissures. Then, just like shattered, ice-cracked stone, they began to peel away, revealing a smooth, golden radiance within. They exposed the Protoss’s signature sharp lines, their breathtaking edge!
Ul’aki’s eyes, ears, nose, and mouth were overflowing with a large amount of blue ichor; his body swayed precariously, yet he gritted his teeth and endured.
Within the sound of the chanting, the three triangular totems began to tremble violently. Then, visible rings of sonic wave ripples rapidly spread outward in all directions. The ground between them began to shake and crack. First, a single fissure opened, then the cracks widened, growing more numerous until the entire ground convulsed and collapsed as if struck by a magnitude twelve earthquake. Billowing smoke and dust threatened to obscure the heavens... Then, as the haze cleared, almost everyone held their breath!
For the previously barren land had sunk away, revealing a colossal void hundreds of meters beneath the surface. Within that cavern rested a magnificent Protoss metropolis, covering dozens of square kilometers. While many sections were ruined walls and broken remnants, much of it remained intact, and observers could even make out troops seemingly caught mid-advance.
A city was buried here!
An ancient, magnificent Protoss city from their zenith!
From the current appearance, it seemed trapped in the throes of civil war, somehow frozen in time until this very moment when it was revealed to the world once more!
At this point, Ul'aki slumped down, his face etched with alarm and terror. He seemed to struggle to speak, but the effort only made the blue ichor pour from his mouth faster and more violently. As soon as he collapsed, he dissolved into specks of blue light that drifted away on the wind.
With Ul'aki gone, the Protoss naturally did not descend into chaos. A High Templar, wreathed in crackling electrical energy, immediately took his place and projected a powerful psychic command:
“Forward! Warriors of the Protoss! Let us reclaim our ancient strength and glory!”
At this command, all Protoss forces charged toward the ancient metropolis. But as they drew near, they discovered a vast, impossibly faint membrane of light enveloping the entire city—this was likely what had kept the city suspended in time.
Facing this unknown barrier, the advancing Protoss units clustered tightly but refrained from firing, awaiting high command. Still, the rest of the Protoss forces crowded around, forming a dense perimeter stretching for at least several kilometers.
However, just then, a dark cloud rapidly approached the horizon on the opposite side of the light barrier.
It was two to three dozen newly hatched Zerg Overlords. They had clearly upgraded their movement speed. Even if the Protoss forces strained to circle the massive barrier to attack them, or even tried to fly directly over the Protoss ground troops, it was evidently too late!
Those two or three dozen Overlords began deploying the vast number of troops they carried onto the ground. The moment these troops came into view, even Fang Senyan felt a tremor of dread. They were blood-red monstrosities.
These creatures were encased almost entirely in blood-red muscle tissue, but upon closer inspection, traces of human combat armor could still be vaguely discerned. Two tentacle-like wing bones sprouted from their backs.
Their movements were astonishingly swift, as if Terran Marines had been injected with performance-enhancing drugs! Then... they charged sequentially and violently against the light barrier, resulting in violent explosions!
This was one of the special units developed by the Zerg: the Suicide Unit!
The Zerg Queen could infect a severely damaged Terran Command Center with parasitic bio-toxins. Once the Command Center was completely infested, its former owners could be transformed into mindless, suicidal warriors. Their bodies contorted and deformed, generating extremely unstable chemical compounds that, upon spotting an enemy, could be detonated to release terrifying power.
In game metrics, the power of a Suicide Unit was equivalent to that of an atomic bomb! Both inflicted 500 damage! (The nuke delivered 500 damage or 2/3 of the target's maximum health, whichever was greater.) This illustrated the obscene destructive power of the Zerg suicide tactic!
And these twenty to thirty Overlords had brought at least thirty Suicide Units—this meant the light barrier was about to endure the bombardment of nearly thirty atomic bombs!
What made Fang Senyan feel like he had ‘lifted a rock only to drop it on his own foot’ was the undeniable fact that these Suicide Units had been created by the Queen of Blades using the Command Center left behind by Pantan. If they hadn't intended to use the Terrans as a weapon against others, the Queen of Blades would never have obtained a Terran Command Center in the first place!
When the eleventh Suicide Unit slammed into the light barrier and detonated, the entire membrane collapsed. The ensuing moment was indescribable, like a terrifying super-hurricane instantly blasting outward, sweeping across the world with unimaginable speed and horror!
If Fang Senyan hadn't immediately ordered his transport ship to land on a nearby slope, using the thick mountain mass to shield against the terrifying shockwave the moment he saw the Suicide Units appear, the transport might not have exploded, but it would certainly have been blown into outer space... Even shielded, Fang Senyan witnessed chunks of rock, weighing at least several hundred tons each, floating weightlessly just ten meters above his head, seemingly too light to land unless they traveled for dozens of kilometers!
Earlier, while focused on hunting the Overlords in the Zerg base, Pantan’s air force had also suffered attacks from anti-air ground units like Hydralisks, losing half their strength. In this horrific storm, another dozen Ghosts failed to execute immediate retreat orders and were simply torn apart in the air. Consequently, Fang Senyan and his remaining contingent consisted only of four Ghosts and about fifty Marines carried within the four transport ships...