Chapter 133 One-Third of the Fleet Destroyed by a Single Shot

"Alarm! guanghan palace shield efficiency has dropped to 37%!"

"Crustal structure collapse in sector three, backup power lines disconnected!"

"Enemy fire density exceeds 120,000 rounds per second! The lunar surface has been shaved down by an average of five hundred meters!"

Inside the command hall of the Heavenly Court fortress, red alarm lights spun wildly, casting a blood-dripping hue onto everyone's faces.

On the screens, the satellite that had accompanied Earth for billions of years was currently experiencing the most brutal death by a thousand cuts since its birth. Three thousand mechanical warships, like rabid wild dogs, poured all their light spears, plasma cannons, and gravity missiles onto the moon as if they were worthless.

Without the buffer of an atmosphere, every explosion left a shocking scar on the lunar surface. Rocks instantly vaporized, kicking up dust clouds reaching tens of thousands of kilometers high. From afar, the moon looked like an overturned hornet's nest, smoking all over.

"We can't hold it!" Academician Wang looked at the data plummeting like a cliff, his fingers trembling. "That is a nano-shield generated by the planetary terraforming device, not a magical barrier! If they keep bombing us like this, the moon will shatter itself before we even get a chance to fire!"

"Stop shouting." Lin Yuan sat in the command chair, even crossing his legs.

His gaze was locked onto the red dots on the holographic star map representing the enemy ships. They were closing in, like a pack of sharks that had smelled blood, scrambling to tear apart this "shield" that was blocking their path.

"Four thousand kilometers until the optimal firing sector." Lin Yuan's voice was so calm that it didn't sound like he was commanding a war concerning the survival of humanity, but rather like he was haggling at a vegetable market.

"Four thousand kilometers? That's a matter of an instant!" Chen Weiguo roared. "Lin Yuan, what the hell are you waiting for? We could take out hundreds of them if we fired now!"

"I don't want just hundreds." Lin Yuan licked his somewhat chapped lips, a flash of bloodthirsty light flickering in his eyes.

He was betting.

Betting on the arrogance of that High Priest.

Betting on that mechanical brain thinking that humanity was merely cowering in defense.

Thirty astronomical units away, the flagship "doomsday".

The High Priest watched the teetering satellite on the holographic screen, its crimson electronic eyes filled with mockery.

"Stupid."

A cold, synthesized electronic voice echoed across the bridge.

"Do you think you can stop the army of God with just one satellite? Increase fire! At this distance, blow that rock and the Earth behind it into cosmic dust!"

It did not order a deceleration.

In absolute computational deduction, the satellite's shield would collapse in 47 seconds. These 47 seconds were the final countdown for human civilization.

Three thousand warships formed a dense offensive formation, like a black dagger, stabbing fiercely into the "death pocket" Lin Yuan had pre-set.

Four thousand kilometers.

Two thousand kilometers.

Five hundred kilometers...

"Now."

Lin Yuan stood up from his chair abruptly. The aura that erupted in that instant made Li Na feel as if she were facing a ferocious beast about to strike.

He grabbed the communicator and roared only one word into the lunar base channel.

"Shed!"

On the far side of the moon, in the Aitken Basin.

If anyone could stand there, they would witness the most shocking scene of their life.

The lunar surface, originally pitted and covered in a thick layer of rock camouflage, suddenly seemed to come alive. Hundreds of millions of nanobots received the command and instantly released their solidified state, sliding away in all directions along the gravity like a layer of massive quicksand.

The camouflage faded away.

Revealing the hideous, cold-glowing metal abyss beneath.

That was no crater.

It was a black gun barrel with a diameter of five hundred kilometers and an unfathomable depth.

Around the muzzle, twelve titan-class ark reactors were pulsating wildly like hearts, tightly restraining the terrifying energy from the sun, along with the violent antimatter sphere at the core, within the firing chamber.

The Mechanical Papacy vanguard fleet that was charging suddenly froze in unison.

Even the lowest-level AI could read the energy level contained within that "abyss" through its sensors.

That was not a shield.

That was a gun pointed at their foreheads.

"What is this?!" The High Priest's logic core instantly overloaded, emitting a piercing shriek. "Evasive maneuvers! All units disperse! Disperse quickly!!!"

Too late.

At this distance, for a light-speed weapon, this was point-blank fire.

Inside the Heavenly Court command hall, Lin Yuan watched the enemy fleet on the screen descend into chaos, a cruel curve forming on the corner of his mouth. He slowly raised his right hand, made a pistol-shooting gesture, parted his lips slightly, and provided a playful sound effect:

"Bang."

Chen Weiguo slammed down that red firing button.

There was no sound.

In this moment, the entire Solar System seemed to have been pressed on the mute button.

A beam of light.

A beam of light so pure to the extreme, even appearing a deep, dark blue due to the excessively high energy density, erupted from the abyss on the far side of the moon.

Its diameter even exceeded that of many asteroids.

That was not a laser, nor was it a plasma beam.

That was a torrent of antimatter accelerated to sub-light speed by a magnetic field.

The moment this torrent rushed out of the muzzle, space itself wailed, and the surrounding light was distorted, forming a ring of visible colorful light.

It did not need to aim.

It was just like using a high-pressure water gun to wash away a group of ants gathered together.

The beam of light swept across the pitch-black space like a lightsaber wielded by God, casually slicing across the left flank of the Mechanical Papacy fleet.

No explosion.

No fire.

Not even wreckage.

The first warship swept by the beam, along with its proud phase shields, heavy alloy armor, and the mechanical crew inside, directly annihilated within 0.0001 seconds of contacting the antimatter flow.

Matter and antimatter neutralized, releasing pure energy.

The warship disappeared into thin air, replaced by a flash of light billions of times more blinding than the sun.

Following that was the second, the third, the hundredth...

This was simply a silent magic show.

The originally dense fleet formation was like a line fiercely erased from a blackboard with an eraser.

In the area swept by the beam, nothing remained, not even a screw, except for the afterglow left by the energy explosion.

A true physical transcendence.

Dust to dust, earth to earth, atoms to nothingness.

On Earth.

It was the middle of the night in the Western Hemisphere, and countless people stared at the sky in astonishment.

In the originally pitch-black night sky, a blue sun suddenly lit up.

It was even more dazzling and colder than the sun during the day. It illuminated the entire night sky as if it were daylight, making even the shadows of the clouds clearly visible.

"Is this... our power?" At the entrance of a shelter, a soldier covered in coal ash looked at the sky, his rifle clattering to the ground.

The space battlefield.

The beam lasted for a full five seconds.

When the lunar fortress stopped outputting due to energy depletion and heat waves visible to the naked eye rose from the muzzle, that patch of starry sky was already empty.

The left flank fleet, completely annihilated.

Three hundred and seventy-two warships evaporated from the world in this one shot.

Even the hundreds of warships that were on the edge of the explosion and lucky enough not to be directly hit were washed into scrap metal by the gamma-ray burst generated by the energy explosion, floating in the vacuum like dead fish, their circuits completely destroyed.

One shot.

Just one shot.

One-third of the Mechanical Papacy's proud main fleet was lost.

Dead silence.

Whether on Earth or the enemy flagship, everything was plunged into a deathly silence at this moment.

Lin Yuan slumped into his chair, his whole body as if he had been fished out of water. Mental exhaustion combined with the extreme tension from earlier made it difficult for him to even move his fingers now.

But he still laughed.

Laughed loudly, arrogantly, even a bit crazily.

"Hey, you iron-head." Lin Yuan opened the full-frequency broadcast, his voice hoarse but filled with mockery.

"Are these fireworks pretty?"

"We are in the middle of nowhere, so we don't have anything good to entertain you with. Consider this my welcome gift to you all."

Inside the "doomsday" flagship.

The High Priest stood rigidly before the throne, its mechanical hand that had been gripping the scepter trembling violently.

It was not fear.

It was anger.

It was the extreme humiliation and wrath of being bitten hard by an ant, and having a chunk of flesh bitten off at that.

Its calculations were wrong.

This indigenous planet, with only a 0.7-level civilization, actually possessed an antimatter weapon of this energy level.

This was blasphemy!

This was a provocation against the truth!

"Damn it... Damn it... Damn it!!!" The High Priest let out a roar like metal scraping against glass, and it violently swung the scepter, smashing the console in front of it to pieces.

In its crimson electronic eyes, the light of reason was fading, replaced by a crazy program called "Destruction".

"You... are unforgivable." The High Priest's voice became deep and distorted, as if it were an evil spirit crawling out from the depths of hell.

"Originally, I wanted to give you a quick formatting."

"But now, I want to let you watch your own planet being chewed up bit by bit and turned into excrement."

It turned around, facing a huge, black chamber at the back of the bridge that had always been in a closed state.

Inside that, it held a taboo that the Mechanical Papacy never easily deployed. Because once that thing was released, even they themselves could not control it.

"Open the Pandora Seven gate." The High Priest issued the command, its tone carrying a trace of chilling fanaticism.

"Release... 'Star Eater'."

In space.

The severely damaged flagship suddenly split open from the middle.

It was like a black cocoon being torn apart from the inside.

A nauseating aura, which could make one feel that shudder from biological instinct even across the vacuum, emerged.

A huge shadow squeezed out from the crack.

It was not a warship.

It was a... living creature?

It looked like a deep-sea monster magnified billions of times, its body covered in pitch-black chitinous armor, with green acidic liquid flowing through the gaps in the armor. Thousands of tentacles waved in the vacuum, each one covered in mouthparts like meat grinders.

Its volume was even a size larger than the flagship.

"What is this monster?!" In the Heavenly Court command hall, Academician Wang shouted in terror. On gaia's sensors, it showed that this thing's vital signs were as strong as a planet.

"A star-beast?" Lin Yuan's pupils shrank. The moment the monster appeared, it extended a huge tentacle and wrapped it around a damaged friendly warship nearby.

In everyone's horrified gaze, that several-kilometer-long warship was like a cracker, stuffed by it into the abyss-like mouth full of sharp teeth on its main torso. Snap. Sparks flew everywhere. The monster was actually chewing the warship alive!

After swallowing the warship, an eerie red light lit up on the monster's armor, and its size visibly expanded by a circle.

It rotated its hundreds of turbid yellow eyes and slowly looked toward Earth. In those eyes, there was only pure, endless appetite.

"This is... a biological weapon cultivated by the Mechanical Papacy, the 'Planet Eater'." gaia's trembling voice sounded; it had retrieved top-secret data from the titan database. "They evolve by devouring planetary core energy... They will gnaw the Earth empty like eating an apple!"

Lin Yuan looked at the terrifying giant beast on the screen that was still growing and crawling toward Earth, and the joy of victory from just a moment ago vanished instantly.

One shot wiped out the fleet.

And the enemy turned around and pulled out a monster?