The Birth of a Traitor

Li Yao thought of something and realized that Ding Zhengyang was referring to the claw fleet that Heiye Lan had been in and the battle in which Ding Lingdang had led a federal fleet to Firefly's rescue.

Opening his fingers, Ding Zhengyang held his head and said, his voice shivering, "Before—before the battle, I had never seen the army of the Imperium for real. The only impression that I had of the army of the Imperium was from the memoirs and notes of the heroes before me or from the self-fooling movies. In both the memoirs and the movies, the army of the Imperium were always made of a bunch of weak, stupid guys who only tried to drown us with their sheer advantage in numbers.

"Therefore, in the decades previously, I had always longed to encounter a real troop from the Imperium and to participate in a breathtaking, brilliant battle so that they would witness the toughness of the last defenders of the Star Ocean Republic!