"WARNING! Anomalous activity has been reported coming from a nearby planet!"
Ding!
"Due to the observation of strange activity, you have been awarded the function, Zoom, ahead of the completion of the survey."
Ding!
"Due to the observation of strange activity and the constraint of the ongoing project, you have been awarded the function, Multitasking."
"First, please find the location of the anomaly."
The multiple notifications coming all at once forced the group to return to reality. Something indeed went wrong! Just like they thought it would. Huh, I wonder who gave them that idea…
So, under the direction and instruction of the game, Ran used two fingers to zoom out and unlock the camera from the homeworld.
Actually there wasn't much; everything was pretty much covered in gray fog since the survey hadn't progressed to that point. There were pretty much two things that they could see. The first one was the homeworld, the very same planet they were on right now. The second was another planet just behind it—not to scale of course.
And technically, considering they hadn't even gotten a year into the progress of the survey, they probably shouldn't be able to see this planet; yet, they were. I guess you can consider this a plot-hole—I mean the game giving them a break… Yes, that's it.
Anyway! This almost made them contemplate life as they knew it. The reason being that they just never knew it existed. What if life existed on that planet? Then… Well that doesn't really mean anything to them, as it has little to no use in their everyday life, but you get the point. They were surprised as well as curious, but they had to continue playing the game or else… (I don't know, any of you have ideas?)
And so, the game highlighted and directed towards the only other planet they could interact with, as if it didn't give enough credence to their intelligence to figure it out themselves.
The planet itself was terrestrial in nature. From the outside, the planet was rocky and barren with small craters scattered on its bluish-gray surface. Earthquakes were a normal occurrence here and many of its volcanoes erupt regularly. Yet, it does, or did, have something in common with the group's homeworld. And that was the distorted space that surrounded the planet.
The inside wasn't much different actually, except its solid core was considerably bigger than the homeworlds. But upon a closer look at the surface of the planet, one would immediately be stunned silent.
Right underneath the warped, stretched space, a swarm of space invaders blanketed the surface for miles—millions, no, tens of millions of them. Even more of these freaks dropped down from the warped space continuously.
When they were gathered in such a way, in such numbers, the collective glowed a pale blue while the very ground around them started slowly disintegrating into less than dust.
Worse yet, when they found themselves on a barren and lifeless planet, they shrieked in a very disgusted and warped fashion, such that it felt as if they had auto-tunes… but worse. Yeah no, we're not talking about rapper auto-tunes, but more like Black Ops zombies kind of auto-tunes.
Thus, they then all marched towards the warped space near the hole on the planet. While this one only had one hole and thus, one machine, the space created actually had two destinations; this actually meant four individual stretched spaces, one for each direction—to and fro.
Two of them were for some unknown location, while one of them was supposed to be going to their homeworld. However, since the connection between the two was broken, the tunnel-like space was cut off. Unfortunately, it automatically stabilized itself to the space nearby, otherwise it would pose a serious threat to the invaders.
So, just like that, the space invaders entered the space and traveled through it at incredible speeds for a bit before exiting through the stabilized hole. It was like a rail gun, making them go at speeds not normally possible, and they were heading straight for the homeworld.
"WARNING! Space invaders have been detected heading towards your home. Please eliminate them before they arrive, or it's game over!"
"Game over?" The group, reading those words, turned pale. Though there was no sound or voice to accompany those words, it still sounded threatening. What would happen if they failed? They didn't like it one bit.
Moreover, it was already crazy that the enemy had somehow been able to bypass the golden serpent's protection. However, it only took a second for them to understand what had happened.
That crown fucker had fucked up! He said it himself how estranged this system was compared to other places by not only saying it, but having to look through its information from some bygone era. But that was the thing; he looked through the information, but just not enough!
If he had researched a little deeper and investigated their homeworld's surroundings, it would be easy to figure out that the system had more than one warp drive.
Ugh! It was just so frustrating for them, and they didn't even know why. They supposed because the game, allegedly, was almost like a history game about their homeworlds origin… or whatever. That and the fact that it felt more like a recording with its graphics had led them by the nose. So, they were already attached to the game in some form or another and seeing this carelessness set them off.
But that doesn't really matter and honestly, it was unnecessary to include, so I'll just move on.8