CHAPTER 202: CHAPTER 202 - BAITING THEM IN

Jian and the others had finally decided on their game plan. He sat cross-legged on the floor, eyeing the glowing map on the table in front of them. The digital layout of the area blinked and shifted in front of his eyes—red dots marking enemy ships, blue dots representing what little manpower they had left.

He glanced at Xing Yu, who stood leaning over the table, seriously analyzing the route Jian had drawn out. The plan was reckless. Jian knew that. Two people couldn’t possibly take on an entire army of Graylings. It was bullshit and he had drawn it up knowing exactly that. But Xing Yu didn’t point it out. He just nodded and gave small suggestions here and there like he really thought it could work.

Jian sighed and rubbed his forehead. Honestly, he was hoping Xing Yu would reject it. That he would look up, frown, and tell him it was a stupid idea and suggest something else. Jian kept looking up at him, trying to silently beg him to say something.

But the man didn’t take the hint.

Jian cleared his throat and tried again. "Let’s keep my plan as Plan B."

Xing Yu looked up, his grey eyes sharp. "Alright."

Jian pressed on. "Can we do anything else... like... attack the ships that are still in the air? If we bring some of them down before they land, it’ll reduce the number of Graylings we have to fight on the ground."

Xing Yu smiled faintly, a look of approval passing over his face. "I was waiting for you to suggest that. That’s a great idea. But right now, I only have a limited amount of weaponry."

He reached under the table and pulled out what looked like a small black cube. With a simple press, the top slid open, and a faint blue light glowed from inside. He tilted it toward Jian, revealing rows of sleek, compact weapons nestled inside like precious artifacts. Each gun was shaped with smooth, dark metal and embedded with tiny cores of glowing blue liquid.

Xing Yu carefully picked out a few and laid them out on the table. Jian leaned forward, curious, and picked up one that looked like a mini gun. He turned it in his hand, watching the blue liquid shift inside.

"Don’t play with it," Xing Yu said firmly. He reached over and nudged Jian’s hand back toward the table. "That’s not just for show. That one is a destabilizer. If it hits the right place, it can destroy a mothership from the inside."

Jian’s eyes widened, and he immediately pushed it farther from himself. "Right," he mumbled.

Xing Yu chuckled softly under his breath. "These aren’t like Earth weapons. Small, but deadly."

"So... we just shoot them down one by one?" Jian asked, still staring at the weapons.

"No," Xing Yu said calmly. "We have to lure them into a trap. We can’t afford to waste ammunition, and if we’re surrounded, we won’t last. We draw in a few at a time. Isolate. Eliminate. Only then can we survive long enough to do any damage."

Jian bit his lip, thinking. "How long until the other ship gets here?"

Xing Yu’s smile faded. His eyes grew distant for a moment. "It’s subjective," he said softly. "Sometimes the black hole stretches space-time. It could take months. Sometimes it compresses it. Could be a few days. It depends."

Li Wang, sitting nearby with his arms crossed, scoffed. "You aliens really rely on luck a lot, huh? Can’t you calculate the way the black hole works?"

Xing Yu shot him a dull look. "Even we don’t fully understand black holes. They change behavior. Warp physics. Unpredictable. You humans aren’t that far behind us, honestly."

Li Wang raised his eyebrows, muttering, "Comforting."

Jian looked back down at the map. His heart was racing a little now. The plan wasn’t foolproof, but it was something. A small victory in a war they hadn’t asked for.

Xing Yu tapped the table. "So let’s prepare. We’ll move out at dusk. We’ll need bait at the signal tower and snipers on both surrounding ridges."

"But what do we use as bait..." Nansich asked the question that had been lingering unspoken in everyone’s mind.

Jian looked up from the map. Everyone was staring at each other, waiting, unsure.

"I’ll use myself as bait," he said finally.

Xing Yu’s head jerked up immediately. His eyes narrowed in a flash of disapproval. "Absolutely not."

His mouth opened to argue, but Xing Yu cut him off before he could.

"That is too risky. You’re not expendable. And more importantly..." Xing Yu’s voice trailed for a moment as his gaze swept over Jian’s features, softer now. "You’re not an ideal bait."

Before he could ask what that even meant, Nansich piped up beside him, arms crossed. "Then I’ll go," His voice cracked slightly. "Those fuckers killed my grandpa... I want to watch them burn and wither. I want them to feel it."

He wiped at his nose vigorously with the back of his hand, his other hand clenched into a fist so tight his knuckles had gone white. His jaw trembled slightly, and Jian could see the grief simmering just below the anger.

Before Xing Yu could even open his mouth to say no, Eren spoke up from the far side of the room, his voice calm but clear.

"You? They don’t fancy human meat much."

Everyone turned to look at him.

Eren slowly walked forward, holding something between his fingers. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes flicked between the group carefully. "But there is something else. Something they do respond to. Something better."

He reached the center of the table and held up a plain, gold ring. It glinted under the low lights above the map projector.

Jian blinked. "A ring?"

"No," Eren said. "Gold."

He placed the ring down beside the map.

"They go crazy for this stuff on Earth. Gold, especially in high-purity forms, emits a type of radiation their sensors pick up instantly. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tiny coin or a whole vault of the stuff—Graylings will chase it. They think it’s a rare mineral that affects their hatching cycles or something." Eren looked up, voice still steady. "We can use it to lure them in."

Li Wang leaned in, picking up the ring to inspect it. "This? This little thing is gonna bring in a shipload of Graylings?"

Eren nodded once. "Trust me. You don’t need much. It’s not the size—it’s the purity."

Xing Yu crossed his arms, considering. "We’ll need to boost its signal, make sure their scanners can detect it from long range."

"We can rig it into one of the frequency amplifiers," Varon offered from the corner. "Tweak the field to mimic the mineral resonance they track."

"Perfect," Xing Yu muttered, already turning back to the table, the wheels clearly turning in his head again. "We plant the gold at the signal tower, fortify both ridges, and wait for them to bite. When they come in to secure it, we surround them and strike. Fast and hard."

Jian glanced at Nansich, who was still glaring hard at the ring, nostrils flared. His shoulders were tense, lips pressed in a line like he wanted to object, but didn’t know how. He still wanted revenge. But even he had to admit gold made more sense.

"This’ll work," Jian said, trying to inject a bit of confidence into the group.

Eren sat down, arms resting on his knees, nodding slowly. "We just have to make sure they don’t figure out it’s a trap before it’s too late."

Xing Yu’s fingers moved swiftly over the control pad. The map zoomed in again, this time highlighting the signal tower and the two ridges surrounding it.

"We only get one shot at this. One mistake, and they’ll swarm us before we can even reload."