At about the same time that they had rescued Captain Case, about 200 kilometers away from their current location, in another clearing on the Ring, the Master Chief and a boatload of Marines stepped safely off the Pelican spacecraft and onto the solid surface of the Ring.

In the original plot, they were riding a small escape ship with poor control performance, and when landing, due to the failure of the deceleration device of the small spaceship, the landing speed was too fast, and the impact was too large, and all ordinary soldiers except the master chief were shocked to death.

But now, with the plot changed, these people are all intact on the Pelican and landed safely on this ring. As the highest-ranking person here, the Master Chief naturally assumed the command responsibility that was not in the plot, and as soon as he stepped out of the cabin, he motioned to all the other soldiers behind him to disperse to find cover, and he was very alert in this strange environment.

"Where are we?" After breaking up the formation, Master Chief asked Cortana, who was still connected to his brain. The surroundings are so unfamiliar, although the scenery from the ring is beautiful, and they can even see a large waterfall pouring water not far away.

But as soon as you look up, the beauty of the natural scenery and the strange sense of space within the ring are covered by the dark clouds of war. In the distance, you can see some moving points of light in the sky outside the ring, similar in size to the starry sky in the background. But those weren't stars, they were Covenant ships.

"I'm investigating, don't rush me to ......" Cortana immediately said "Sister is busy, don't bother me", which made the Master Chief quite speechless. However, although the tone was not very polite, Cortana was actually working intensively at this time, trying to do what the Master Chief Kuài had requested.

With the communicator on Master Chief Guò's armor, she is trying to remotely link and crack the communication network identifier of the Covenant warship in the distance. Due to the limited power and firing distance of the communicator that comes with the Thor's hammer armor. The Covenant's communication encryption system is also quite complicated, so even it will take some time for her to fully crack it.

Fortunately, although the equipment is not powerful and the encryption of the Star Alliance is also very strict, Cortana, who has specially strengthened the system invasion skills, still connected to the Star Alliance's ship communication network quite smoothly, and found some useful information from the Star Alliance's database.

"Good news. Captain Keith, they should still be alive, the Covenant has just lost an entire force in the battle for its crash landing site. Look back......" Cortana said as the Master Chief walked around the nearby shelter and saw a black smoke spot hundreds of kilometers behind them.

Due to the peculiarities of the ring structure, their maximum observation distance is greatly increased, unlike the target that will be blocked by the ground plane if they see too far on the earth, the curved surface of the ring is reversed, which means that the farther away the target is observed in the ring belt, the better the angle of view they will have.

Of course, their actual observation distance is still limited by their eyesight and the equipment they carry. That's why they didn't immediately locate the forced landing point of the Autumn Wind 200 kilometers away, when there was shelter nearby.

Due to the distance, they could barely see the shape of the Autumn Wind in the distance, even with their telescopes, but it was impossible to see if anyone was nearby, and Cortana's attempts to contact the other survivors were unsuccessful.

Although Captain Keith and the others were rescued by the expedition, as soon as they entered the forest, they were taken to the plane of their own control by Shen Chaolian's coaxing and deceptive Tongguò space-time gate. Since the people are no longer on the same plane, Cortana's attempt to contact them naturally fails.

At this time. Captain Case was sitting with Shen Chao at a makeshift dining table on a beach surrounded by a group of expedition members, while the UNSC soldiers behind him had been disarmed and taken to other areas for security checks and basic medical care.

Noble No. 6 was standing on the beach next to them as a background at this time, and he could actually accept Shen Chao's invitation to sit down and talk together. But feeling a little sorry for Captain Keith, he insisted on standing, after all, if it weren't for his strong agitation a few minutes ago. Captain Keith wouldn't have led someone through a space-time gate of unknown origin so quickly.

Shen Chao had always enjoyed the feeling of negotiating on the beach, with warm sunshine, clear sea breeze, and most importantly, a high success rate in negotiating in such a place. But this is not the case today, in fact. What should have been a simple negotiation turned into one of the most difficult deadlocks he had ever faced.

Almost 5 minutes ago, Shen Chao led Captain Keith and them collectively through the space-time gate, and explained his identity a little in the same place, and until now they sat down, Captain Keith still didn't believe his statement.

Just after the two sides passed through the space-time gate, there was a little "skirmish" on this issue. Stimulated Captain Case tried to force Shen Chao to "tell the truth" with a gun, but the result was naturally solved by Shen Chao, who was dozens of times faster than him, with a single move.

After he was disarmed, the soldiers from the UNSC behind him naturally did not agree, and also tried to raise their weapons to confront and protect their captain. However, the few who managed to lift the gun suddenly found that the Gauss rifle in their hand was suddenly unusable, and then they were knocked down by the members of the expedition who rushed over one by one with the butts of their guns, and all of them were disarmed. Until now, Captain Keith was holding two dislocated fingers of his right hand with his left hand.

Even though he was experiencing quite real physical pain, he still didn't want to believe the explanation that Shen Chao had given a few minutes earlier. Unlike ordinary people, Captain Case, as a senior officer of the UNSC, has been systematically trained to resist mental interference.

Like many senior UNSC officers, a neural chip is implanted in the back of the head to store classified information and high-speed command and communications. So theoretically, it is possible for the brains of these high-ranking officers to be hacked.

The most dangerous stage is when they fall into a coma while sleeping or fighting, in which case they can be forcibly connected to a realistic virtual world with advanced neurotechnology and replace their perceptual world with various realistic "hallucinations" to use this as an introduction to extract confidential information from their minds.

To this end, he has been specially trained and has entered many virtual worlds created by UNSC that can train his willpower and sense of secrecy in a completely real way. This kind of training is mainly to train people to resist external pressure and observe abnormal phenomena.

If someone really needs to hack into his brain to get information, then they have to create some pressure in the virtual world to force him to do so. This stress can be both physical and psychological, and the environment in which it is created can often be extreme and exaggerated.

Due to the failure of the previous Zhiyuan Star space battle, he has tensed his vigilant nerves, and the almost miraculous existence of HALO has made him begin to question the authenticity of the environment, and the pursuit fleet of the Star Alliance has formed a classic "pressure forcing mode" routine in the virtual environment.

Therefore, ten minutes ago, after Captain Keith landed in the upper belt, he had been thinking about whether he had been caught by the Star Alliance and released into the virtual world. This suspicion reached its peak after he was helped by Shen Chao and Noble6 who appeared out of thin air and completed his first plane trip.

Plane crossing was too contrary to common sense for him, and he was sure that Noble6 should still be in Reach. So much so that the current Captain Keith basically believes that he has been captured by the Star Alliance, and the enemy is trying to use the virtual environment to obtain the secret information he has.

Shen Chao also carefully considered the possibility of the other party behaving like this after disarming the other party, and finally determined that Captain Case should have misunderstood his situation, so he took off his helmet and handed it to the person next to him, and then beckoned a nearby waiter over, ready to rest and talk to Captain Case again with a new idea.

In many formal occasions now, the Space-Time Council no longer uses the server qì people as waiters, because they find that although the use of the machine qì people is more efficient, it is easy to make some guests who have just experienced dimensional travel feel psychologically insecure.

At this time, the waiter who was greeted by Shen Chao was a tall and thin young man from the Elysium plane. He looked to be in his early 20s, well-dressed, professional, and a professional waiter. It's hard to think that a year ago he was a disabled person who was scavenging in a garbage heap.

Half a year ago, he was discovered by the Samaritan, who had just taken charge of the Elysium plane, and arranged for him to be sent to a newly opened hospital for free treatment, healing his legs that had been amputated by the gangsters when he was a child, and since then, the young man has been determined to repay this "Council of Time and Space".

With little education and no strong physique, he finally decided to humbly repay the Council of Time and Space for his second life. Eventually, he became a staff member of the expedition's housekeeping service.

The personnel of this department are subject to strict political review and frequent safety checks, because they are the collective stewards of the expedition team in the camp, usually responsible for taking care of the busy team members, and other times acting as reception staff as they do now.

Most of the time, these people don't see scenes of violence, after all, under normal circumstances, the overwhelming force of the expedition is enough for any guest to stay in their zone. However, this is not absolute either, and not today. He had just witnessed the scene of a group of expedition members forcibly disarming another group of soldiers, which made the young waiter, who had not seen many big scenes, a little nervous. (To be continued......)

PS: This chapter is much slower than I expected, and the addition of the protagonist has made some changes in the plot that I didn't expect before, and there are a lot of things that I deduced from the official setting, which also increases the complexity of the plot.