Chapter 17 Chapter Seventeen

There were 37,000 troops when they left Lake Hamana, and less than one-third of those who returned here survived. "I'm afraid China can't do it either." Katie announced on the snowy lakeshore, in the simple camp that the Yamatai army hastily set up, "The king of Jin has 400,000 troops and is fighting with the ET group in North China. Messenger has also joined, but the situation is not optimistic. The battle in East Africa is moving towards Lake Victoria, and the enemy force is increasing. The Uluru station in Australia is urgently awakened. The enemy signal network is detected in Bruce Mountain."

Yayo glanced at the King of "Envoy" and immediately looked away.Wang's face was extremely thin, and the armor on his body was also full of scars. Under such circumstances, he was not seriously injured, which is simply incredible—no, it should be impossible that he was not injured. "My lord, how are you?" "I recover quickly." Wang drank a large glass of wine in one breath and said.Miyo took his hand. "Take a little rest, whether it's a day or a night..." "There is no time to rest. This battle cannot be lost. This is the last battle."

"Can't your lord go back to the past?" "No. This era is the confrontation point of time strategy. We, who have been victorious since 100,000 years ago, and the ETs who came back while wreaking havoc on the future, are destined to have a showdown here. If we fail here, ET will grow exponentially, swallowing us up in the past—but..." There was a slight change in Katie's calm tone. "O...have you considered the infinite repetition of time travel?" "Don't think about it!" Wang threw the cup far away and shouted angrily, "Are you going to write off the bitter struggle of 100,000 years and start over again in another 100,000 or a million years? A time branch, but do you want to rebuild the trunk itself? Can you do this kind of thing?!"

"If we start from scratch, we must start with the reproduction of antimatter. Our energy source is almost exhausted." "We only have this place. There is only one way to stick to this place!" "Oh, is this for Mi Yu?" Wang's face changed, and Katie's tone seemed to be pressing, "Is it because of Mi Yu's presence that you are stubborn in this era?" "Katie, what are you thinking?" Wang said every word, as if clenching his teeth tightly. Katie said in a flat voice: "Re-examine the most fundamental strategic goal...Maximize retreat and reorganization. Go to other star system building strongholds. In order to achieve this goal, all the remaining antimatter of this era is needed. Even you part of the..."

"Do you want to fight on alone, sacrificing us all?" "That's an option too." Katie.Sac's voice was cold, "If there is no time army to come to support, then I will build it myself - referring to the current situation of the time branch, I am studying the possibility of this option." "You try it. I will notify all the messengers to join forces to kill you." "I can issue an order to freeze all your messengers." "Stop talking!" Yayo could no longer bear the confrontation between two people facing each other.She held Wang's hand tightly.

"Stop arguing! Have you forgotten the "Emissary" written by yourself? Don't you think you can defeat monsters without working together?!" Both Wang and Katie were silent. Gan's voice came from outside the tent.Miyu responded, and Gan poked his head in, first glanced at the king, and then said in a heavy voice, "The envoy sent to Yamatai has returned. Master Yizhima said that the reinforcements will not be sent until spring." "What a pity." Gouyu's tone seemed to be talking about something else.Miyo glared at it fiercely.Katie probably said this after considering Yamatai's national conditions, but hearing it in his ears at the moment, he felt very unhappy for some reason.

There was an explosion in the distance.Wang grasped the sword and stood up.Yayo grabbed his arm. "etc." "I will return." Miyu stared at Wang.On his face, that uncatchable smile that he had seen before was back.It was a lifeless, exhausted expression. Takahaya heard the voice of the soldiers scolding one by one. Yayo's right shoulder started to hurt again.Where Musashino was injured, he was healed by the king with incredible magic.But Yayo also understood that rapid recovery would cause even more unbearable burning and pain. How much pain did the king of "Envoy" suffer, who was injured almost every day?

Miyo stood up. From now on, no matter how many injuries I suffer, I will never say a word of pain again. Time Branch 004/410 Laetori 98579 BC The sky was overcast with clouds.Two columns of footprints stretched across the volcanic ash of the savannah, one large and one small.That is the footprint left by the distant past.It is also a footprint that will be passed down to the distant future. At this moment, a tall man was carelessly leaving a third set of footprints with his boots. "Katie Sack, can you hear me? This is Orwell, I'm back." "Welcome back, Orwell. We have ninety-seven percent of our 1943 combat strength remaining here. Are you all right?"

"I have fought 406 times, won 36 times, and retreated 370 times. The remaining combat power is 4%." "Congratulations on surviving. Condolences to the other twenty-four couriers." Orwell could feel his comrades mourning.Orwell dug a pit on the volcanic ash soil with a hot sword, and carefully buried the relics of Kunqi and others. "—Back to the confrontation point again." "I received the battle records from the subsystem. According to the approximate calculation results, the total number of humans you rescued from each time branch is about 26 billion. Congratulations."

Orwell was about to say "don't say anything insincere", but immediately remembered that she was very sensitive to numbers, so she must have sincerely admired it. "Now I will tell you about the battle situation on this branch of time—or should I rest for a few years before talking about it?" "It's okay, let's talk now." "So……" "Wait, Katie, listen to him first." Alexander's voice broke in.For Orwell, it was a familiar voice heard again after hundreds of years.But for Alexander, it may be a few years at most. "Messenger O, you came back alive. Others think that you will never come back, but I still believe in you. Well, tell us, what kind of journey you have gone through."

"Well, it's all in the records." "Who wants to see what battle records. I want to hear from you." "And write it into a fairy tale?" When Orwell said this, the codes for smiling came from various messengers.A little embarrassed Alexander said: "There is also this reason, but it's not the only one." "Well, I'm also very happy that I can come back alive. But ah, just find a time to recall the past, let me understand the battle situation first. Maybe the enemy will appear in five minutes." "What a workaholic. Now that I've come to this point, let me tell you. Africa is now our fortress. All over the world, including the space on the side of the moon facing the earth, has also set up a warning and attack net. The distribution of combat power—— " ——Mainly concentrated in the north of Tanzania.Lake Victoria in the middle of the Great Rift Valley is the stronghold of the Messenger Army.Cutty Sak used all the resources at hand to build a strong military base here.Although the place is small, there are also mines and factories, which continuously manufacture letter bees and various weapons.Although it cannot be compared with the combat effectiveness when it set off in the 26th century, and it is not even comparable to the production capacity of Germany in 1943, but in the current era, it is obviously the strongest stronghold in the world. Around this facility that turned out to be out of nowhere, figures of creatures chasing wild beasts appeared frequently.Orwell learned from his comrades that they are the future masters of the messenger.However, from the outside, these shabby-looking guys really have nothing to match the future humans - except that they all walk upright on two legs.Orwell was at first dismayed by this, but after meeting a few by the lake and spending a few nights with them, he grew fond of them. In this era, their language only has a few hundred words. They are warlike and lustful.But these same guys also have the gentleness to take the remaining prey back to distribute to the weak, and they also have the courage to fight head-on without fear when encountering ferocious carnivorous beasts.The most rare thing is that they like Orwell very much, and they always ask him about everything in their immature language, from which they can glimpse the germination of great curiosity and wisdom. They are indeed people who love and hate and can think.Orwell thought that they were the ones who created themselves a hundred thousand years later, and he couldn't help but feel that the energy that had been exhausted in the long battles for a hundred thousand years had returned. "The whole earth monitoring system was completed and it took six years." Shortly after Orwell's arrival, Katie reported.Originally, if there were enough satellites and satellites, this work could be completed within a month.Simultaneously, the construction of freezing stations around the world is also over.The messengers dispersed, went to their respective stations and fell asleep, waiting for the ET that would arrive sooner or later. Enemies are coming one after another.Either in the form of a propagule, or in the form of a mature combatant.On the earth on this branch of time, around 1.7 million BC, the species known as the Old Man started the first journey out of Africa, and established small-scale tribes in various places.Neanderthals, Javanese Man, Peking Man... However, most civilizations have not yet developed enough to hinder reconnaissance activities, and ETs can be easily detected once they appear.Once the sirens sounded, the couriers would wake up and meet them.Basically all can be solved easily. Based on the strategy of not changing history as much as possible, the policy adopted in this period is to interfere as little as possible with the activities of the new man, that is, human beings.Even so, their burgeoning brains seem to have had a non-negligible impact from the presence of the messenger. Sowing agriculture appeared in 20,000 BC, long before official history, and not in Mesopotamia, but in Ethiopia.At the same time, humans began to go out of Africa for the second time. The bravest group of them crossed the Bering Strait and established a huge tribe that could be called a country.Giant wooden structures appear as if from the sky on the tributaries of the Mississippi River, built by tribes in the Kentucky area.They are also the ones who first invented the wheel. The Phoenicians, who had been traveling through the Mediterranean Sea for a long time, boldly challenged the Atlantic Ocean and successfully crossed it, starting the early maritime exchanges in the New World that were unmatched in official history.In the South Pacific, the medical art of using a certain type of mold to treat wound infections was somehow discovered - it seems that someone found a strain containing antibiotics in the mysterious ecosystem of the tropical jungle - which gave them a new way to conquer the land of malaria. The strength of Guinea.They freely manipulate boulders and giant ships, and continue to expand their ocean empire.From Peru in the east to the east coast of Africa in the west, they have left their footprints everywhere.They should have left mysterious megalithic ruins all over the South Pacific and then disappeared, and they even show a tendency to continue as the mainstream of the current branch of time. With the expansion of human power, the struggles of human beings themselves have also increased.Fighting is inherent in human beings, and it is impossible to correct it.The messengers can only set rules in the most indirect way possible: There will be a catastrophe in the world, and the catastrophe will come sooner or later. You must work together to prevent the catastrophe, eliminate demons and demons, and strive for self-improvement. In the end, strong help will come to help.This passage, known as the Emissary, was passed on to all cultural communities. As time passed, the enemy army began to increase, and the number of fallen couriers continued to increase.Even if not directly knocked down by ET, the impact of the causal effect is gradually manifested.The messengers fundamentally changed the course of civilization, which in itself would of course lead to the disappearance of those who would have appeared in the future to create the messengers.Except for Orwell, who has closely interfered with each time branch and has almost surpassed the source time branch, most of the messengers are not immune.On the other hand, the number of derived messengers has not increased. Is it because this branch of time will perish sooner or later, or is it because the future prosperous civilization did not create messengers?The battles were repeated, and the branches of time kept forking, and Orwell and the others could no longer find the answer. In the first millennium BC, a relatively large-scale ET appeared in the New Kingdom of Egypt, which replaced Phoenicia and controlled the entire Mediterranean Sea.Orwell led reinforcements from the Kingdom of Axum to the Nile Delta.At that time, the Kingdom of Axum had included the entire East Africa, from Ethiopia to Mozambique to Madagascar.The messenger responsible for the defense of Egypt was Alexander.Orwell teamed up with him to destroy ET. Not long after the battle ended, Cutty Sack sent a shocking message. "Successful communication with enemy ET." When the news came, Orwell was celebrating his victory with Alexander at his Cairo residence, which stood in the distance from the six Giza pyramids.Alexander was speaking of his ambition to have his writings in the Alexandrian Library.Suddenly hearing Katie's report, both of them were surprised. "I sent a probe to Tegarden—of course, not now, but about a hundred thousand years ago when it arrived at this time branch. It was an ultra-small machine that could neither be propelled by antimatter nor nuclear power. Fusion propulsion, using light sails. It took about 72,000 years to fly twelve light years away, and the remaining 25,000 years or so have been monitoring the galaxy. Then I met the messenger force from the ET side." "ET's messenger?" Alexander repeated in a low voice, startled, "What do you mean?" "To be precise, the retrograde team of the creators of ET. They come from the distant future-about 120 million years later. Alexander, your speculation is correct. Tegaton is indeed the home of ET. But , that's in the future." "The time system is too confusing. Make it clear." "Okay, let's use the time series of the Western calendar to illustrate. At about 120 million years in the Western calendar, the creators of ET, which evolved from chemically synthesized bacteria, developed a time retrospective theory to investigate the past and study why their planets There was an ecological destruction event in the 2500s of the Western calendar. The investigation found that the cause of the destruction came from extraterrestrial aggression-the unmanned observation base set up by the earthlings there. The trace pollutants released by the base disrupted the local ecosystem, As a result, the flora of bacteria that had just been born at that time decreased drastically. After the creators of ET found out the reason, they decided to take revenge." "Revenge for an accident that happened 200 million years ago?" Orwell couldn't help muttering to himself.Cutty Sack said emphatically: "They are quite different from oxygen-breathing humans, and their way of thinking is completely different. But we can try to empathize-if those simple and uncivilized people on the shores of Lake Victoria encounter foreign What do you think about star race killing?" "……so?" "So, the creators of ET formed a time-traveling army to launch a pre-emptive attack on humans. This is the origin of ET: a mechanical army that can reproduce and act autonomously." "Could it be that the 26th century we live in has also been changed?!" Orwell exclaimed.Katie Sack said yes. "Yes. Contact with ET was unsuccessful for this reason too—they were angry." Orwell couldn't help feeling an indescribable sense of fatigue.Unbelievable, unbelievable.Alexander whispered in a hoarse voice: "Anger...resentment, revenge? This...this kind of reason? Such a legitimate reason...Katie, how are they different from humans? They are too fucking human!" He laughed hysterically.Orwell looked at him with weary eyes. "Katie, it's the first thousand years BC. What's the purpose of the guys from Tegaton? Oh, could it be that they protect their ancestors like us?" "Exactly. They were going to sabotage my scout plane. The reason I was able to avoid this and talk to them was because of my report—or rather, my rebuke: rebuke them for destroying the 26th century Earth; rebuke them for sending ETs to relentlessly attack; rebuke them for killing hundreds and thousands of human beings throughout Earth's history than the 26 billion people Orwell saved; rebuke them for taking Backtracking in time to attack this extremely cruel behavior. Then I asked them: Are you satisfied with this?" "You're angry too..." Although Orwell said so, he didn't resonate in his heart. Although ET killed hundreds of billions of human beings, didn't Katie, a strategic intellectual body, also ruthlessly abandon them? "What about the other party's answer?" "That's not enough to repay, they say. They believe that an accident in the twenty-sixth century delayed their evolution by twelve million years. Their vengeance will not be over without dealing an equal blow to the stagnation of human evolution. Here it goes." So far, reconnaissance aircraft have sent reports to the solar system via meteor trail communication, but it appears to have been sabotaged afterwards." "The envoy who took a hundred thousand years to send was finished with spit all over his face." "No, it still works." Although Katie said so, Orwell was not in the mood to ask questions at all.Cutty Sack went on talking on her own, with an incomprehensible optimism in her tone. "I have identified the enemy's time strategy. As long as the central stronghold of Tegaton is destroyed in the general history, a complete victory can be achieved. Even if you don't do this, you can negotiate with the enemy on this condition. Of course, it is difficult to do so Big." "What are the odds?" "Unknown. The first premise is that humans set up the Time Army." "It doesn't help the current situation at all." "There is another result: the enemy has proved the effectiveness of retroactive attacks for us."

---

Notes: