Chapter 101 The Flying "Ford"

"Th... Throwing it like a discus?!"

At the weapons console, Old Zhang's calloused hands froze in mid-air.

His eyeballs, bloodshot from staying up late to debug equipment, were bulging out bit by bit, and the muscles at the corners of his eyes began to twitch uncontrollably.

It wasn't fear.

It was fanaticism.

The kind of fanaticism where one would sell their soul to the devil just to watch a grand fireworks display.

Taking a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier with a full displacement of 100,000 tons—a peak of human industry—and throwing it like a piece of rusty iron toward a desert island three hundred kilometers away.

This couldn't even be called war.

This was performance art.

A divine aesthetic of violence.

"Yes! Captain!"

Old Zhang roared, his voice cracking from extreme excitement, sounding like a wild beast breaking free from its chains.

"Coordinates locked on the Desert Island Range!"

"Gravitational catapult track generated!"

"Spatial structure stress parameter calibration... complete!"

His ten fingers became a blur on the holographic screen, each tap sounding as if he were trying to smash the virtual keyboard.

As the final red confirmation key was slammed down by his rough thumb...

"Launch!"

Buzz—!

There was no earth-shattering explosion.

Only an incredibly low-pitched muffled sound, as if coming from deep within the Earth's crust.

It was the mournful cry of the atmosphere being instantly torn apart.

Ten thousand meters in the air, the invisible hand constraining the "Ford" suddenly shifted from "uplifting" to "whipping."

Like a wrath titan giant swinging his arm in a wide arc, he hurled the stone in his hand toward the horizon.

Creeeak—Bang!

Inside the "Ford", thousands of keels cast from special steel snapped simultaneously in an instant.

The sound was so shrill it made one's scalp tingle, like the death wail of a dying behemoth.

Inside the island superstructure.

Everyone who hadn't managed to tie themselves to a fixed object became, in that instant, chunks of meat inside a drum washing machine.

The massive G-force slammed them against the cabin walls like frescoes, the crisp sound of breaking bones drowned out by the noise of twisting metal.

No one could scream.

Because the air in their lungs was squeezed out in an instant by the terrifying acceleration.

This 337-meter-long steel beast, under the gaze of countless stunned eyes worldwide, turned into a grayish-black blur.

It tore through the clouds.

Trailing a shrill sonic boom cloud, it traced a parabola across the sky that was by no means graceful, but absolutely shocking.

It was the arc of destruction.

A flying aircraft carrier.

This scene completely shattered human understanding of gravity, mass, and the laws of physics.

Newton's coffin lid could no longer be held down.

...

Across the ocean.

The Pentagon, Supreme Strategic Command Center.

Dead silence.

Only the whirring of the central air conditioning vents echoed in the hall, sounding like the breathing of some monster.

The four-star general who had previously clamored to set Daxia back twenty years was now slumped in his expensive ergonomic chair.

It was as if his spine had been removed.

That crisp military uniform, covered in medals and representing supreme glory, now hung loosely on a walking corpse like a ridiculous clown costume.

"Ford..."

His lips trembled, making a sound weaker than a mosquito's wings.

Cloudy old tears slid down his furrowed cheeks, dripping onto the operational map already soaked by overturned coffee.

He looked at the large screen.

He watched the flagship that carried a century of American naval glory tumbling and falling through the sky like a soda can kicked by a naughty child.

That kind of despair wasn't darkness.

It was nothingness.

It was the void of throwing a punch with all your might, only to find your opponent standing in a dimension you could never reach, coldly watching your performance.

The Invincible Fleet.

Global hegemony.

The Beacon of Freedom.

All pride, all myths, became a joke in this unreasonable "throw."

The Secretary of Defense, sitting at the end of the long table, slowly took off his gold-rimmed glasses.

He pulled a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped the fog off the lenses with slow, mechanical movements.

Even after wiping for a long time, his hands continued to tremble uncontrollably.

Click.

He picked up the red secure phone in front of him.

It was a direct line to the Oval Office in the White House.

"Mr. President."

His voice was hoarse, as if he had swallowed a handful of coarse sand.

"I am... Robert."

There was a suffocating silence on the other end; clearly, they were watching the same live broadcast.

"I suggest... no, I request."

Robert closed his eyes, two lines of tears squeezing out from his tightly shut eyelids.

"Immediately issue the highest-level diplomatic note to the Daxia side."

"We surrender."

"Unconditionally accept all their demands... yes, all of them."

He took a deep breath, the stinging in his lungs making him slightly more clear-headed.

"Mr. President, please understand."

"What we are facing is no longer just a nation, or even a civilization."

"That is..."

"God."

...

BOOM—!!!!

The Earth seemed to skip a beat.

Following that was a delayed, ear-shattering roar.

Three hundred kilometers away from the joint fleet, at the Desert Island Range.

The "Ford."

This $13 billion superwarship, after tumbling in the air for a full fifty-eight seconds, finally completed the fastest and final journey of its life.

At a near-vertical angle, bow-down, it slammed itself hard into the desert at the center of the island.

Hundreds of millions of Joules of kinetic energy were released in an instant.

The hard rock foundation was instantly vaporized, and millions of tons of sand and soil were hurled into the sky, forming a sandstorm that blotted out the sun.

In the center of the originally flat desert, an abyss-like crater over a kilometer in diameter appeared.

Through the Daxia military's high-definition reconnaissance satellite, which had "thoughtfully" lowered its exposure, the whole world saw the scene at the bottom of that pit.

It was a monument.

That twisted, deformed section of the stern, billowing thick black smoke, was thrust straight up in the middle of the sand pit, pointing toward the sky.

Just like an upright middle finger.

And also like a rusty cross.

It hadn't exploded into fragments, nor had it sunk into the sea to feed the fish.

It just stood there.

In an extremely absurd, extremely black-humored way, it announced the end of the old era.

...

"luan bird one", bridge.

After a brief silence, a wave of sound erupted that almost blew off the ceiling.

"We won!!!"

"Did you see that! Did you see that! The faces of those Anglo-Saxon pirates!"

"Hahaha! Good throw! I give that discus throw a perfect score!"

The usually steady and calm technical officers were now flushed with excitement; some were frantically pounding the tables, some were tightly hugging the comrades beside them, and some were hurling their military caps into the air.

Li Na stood in the crowd, trying to remain calm and maintain her professional poise as a liaison officer.

But her tears wouldn't listen, pouring out like a broken dam.

These were tears from a hundred years of suppressed frustration.

From the helplessness of the Yinhe incident, to the fires of the embassy, to the tragic South China Sea mid-air collision.

Generations of forbearance, generations of blood and tears.

Finally, today, ten thousand meters in the air, through this hegemony-shattering "throw," it was all completely vented!

They had won.

A total victory, a thoroughly satisfying win.

However.

In the center of this sea of celebration, the man sitting in the captain's seat seemed out of place.

Lin Yuan was not laughing.

Even his previous playful expression had vanished.

He leaned back in his chair, hands crossed over his abdomen, his gaze passing over the jubilant crowd, over that smoking "tombstone" on the holographic screen, and toward the view outside the porthole.

It was the pitch-black, deep universe.

The starlight was cold, silently watching this noisy blue planet.

A strange sense of emptiness washed over his heart like a tide, submerging him.

Is this victory?

What kind of victory is it to beat down a group of self-righteous primitives still waving wooden clubs?

Lin Yuan's pupils contracted slightly, his vision seemingly piercing through the endless void to see that dark realm only he could perceive.

There, the monster known as the Void Devourer was feasting, devouring one brilliant civilization after another.

There, the SOS signal broadcasting Earth's coordinates to the entire universe thirty years ago was still spreading outward at the speed of light, like a drop of blood in a shark tank.

And there was the ultimate nightmare from which even Psionic civilizations like the Eternal Flower and Machine Cults like Titan Heavy Industry could only flee in despair—

The Ultimate Wither.

Compared to those things, what did the Eagle count for?

Nothing more than a few monkeys fighting until they were bloody over first-class seats before the Titanic hit the iceberg.

"It's not over yet..."

Lin Yuan whispered softly in his heart, his fingers unconsciously tracing the cold metal surface of the armrest.

That "discus" throw had smashed the shackles on Earth.

But it also meant that Daxia, or rather humanity, had completely lost its "newbie protection period."

From this day forward.

They would have to face, alone, that truly cruel, dark, and malicious...

Sea of stars.