Chapter 172 Tearing apart a warship with bare hands, a traditional skill

When the alarm sounded again in the command room of the "dragon sparrow", Chen Weiguo had just brought his half-cup of cold tea to his lips.

"What is it now?" The old general's hand shook, spilling tea all over his crotch. "Did that bunch of charlatans from the 'Tribunal' arrive early?"

"It's not the Tribunal." The radar operator looked at the dozen or so red dots that had suddenly popped up on the screen, his expression a bit strange. "The identification code shows... it's the Second Plunder Detachment of the Black Shark pirate group. It seems they just finished an external mission and are returning."

On the big screen, a dozen starships covered in scars and painted with skull emblems had just finished jumping, plunging into the lingering smoke like a pack of wild dogs that had smelled blood.

These unlucky fools clearly hadn't figured out the situation yet.

In the communication channel, a rough voice accompanied by heavy metallic static came out arrogantly:

"Yo! Pretty lucky, huh! Ran into a big fat sheep right at the door just as we got back?"

On the flagship of the pirate detachment, the one-eyed captain had his hairy legs propped up on the console, greedily staring at the azure planet in the distance.

In his field of vision, the location that used to belong to the Black Shark Fortress was now just a pile of debris floating in the sky. His peanut-sized brain automatically filled in the gaps—this wandering planet was just a piece of bad luck that had bumped into a Void Energy turbulence and was now in a semi-crippled state.

"Little ones! Block the road for me!" The one-eyed captain slapped his thigh excitedly. "Boss Black Shark must have gone to the Zurich Nebula for a vacation; there's no one home. We're going to pocket this deal all by ourselves! Unload all the power cores on that planet, sell the men to the mines, and as for the women... hehe."

In the Earth's command room, there was dead silence.

Chen Weiguo set down his teacup and looked at the screen with the eyes of someone watching an idiot: "Do these people... not go online usually?"

"This star sector has severe signal shielding. I guess they just crawled out from some even more remote corner." gaia's voice carried a hint of schadenfreude. "Boss, what do you say? Although these dozen pieces of junk don't have great firepower, mosquitoes are annoying when there are too many. The main cannon needs thirty seconds to charge; should I just vaporize them?"

Lin Yuan leaned back in his chair, not speaking, but instead let out a long burp.

"Burp—"

This burp was earth-shattering, even vaguely carrying the charred smell peculiar to antimatter energy.

He had swallowed three antimatter missiles in one go just now. Although the crisis was resolved, he now felt like he had just eaten ten pounds of barbecue buffet and was forced to drink two bottles of Erguotou; his stomach—or rather, his Subspace stomach—was uncomfortably bloated.

Those violent energy factors were rampaging through his blood vessels, making him feel hot all over, wishing he could find a place to vent fiercely.

"Don't fire the cannon." Lin Yuan stood up, moved his neck, and it made a few crisp cracking sounds. "Once the main cannon fires, that's tens of thousands of tons of fuel gone. We are drifters now; we have to learn to be thrifty and meticulous."

He walked to the porthole, looking at the dozen or so reckless pirate ships approaching, a cruel arc curling at the corner of his mouth.

"Perfect, I'm too full. I'll go down and digest."

Chen Weiguo was stunned: "You want to go out in the flesh? This isn't inside the atmosphere!"

"Old Chen, your perspective is too narrow." Lin Yuan waved his hand, his figure instantly blurring in place. "For me now, those tin cans are not much harder than paper."

...

In space.

The pirate detachment was surrounding them in a fan shape, and several frigates had already opened their missile silos, performing final fire control locks.

"Warning! High-energy reaction ahead!"

The one-eyed captain was having a dream of getting rich when the radar operator suddenly let out a terrified scream. "There is one... there is an unidentified object approaching at high speed! The speed is too fast! Fire control system cannot lock on!"

"Unidentified object? A missile?" The captain sat up straight, cursing. "What are you panicking about! Just turn on the shields and..."

Before he could finish, he saw a beam of light.

It was a dark golden stream of light, not like a technological creation, but rather like a meteor traveling against the current.

The next second, this "meteor" did not slow down at all, slamming straight into the frigate charging in the front.

Boom!

There was no explosion of fire, only the teeth-aching sound of metal tearing.

That three-hundred-meter-long frigate was like a block of tofu pierced by an armor-piercing shell, instantly pierced through from bow to engine.

The dark golden light point rushed out from the stern, its momentum undiminished, even drawing an extremely arrogant Z-shaped zigzag in the air.

Bang, bang, bang!

Three muffled sounds followed.

The other three wingmen didn't even see where the enemy was before their keels were snapped in the same way. The hulls broke into two pieces in the vacuum, the breaks as smooth as if they had been cut by a laser.

"What... what kind of monster is this?!" The one-eyed captain was so scared he swallowed the cigarette in his hand, his throat burning. "That's a person?! That's a person?!"

In space, Lin Yuan's figure stopped abruptly.

He hovered among the wreckage of the warships, his combat suit burned to rags by the high-speed friction just now, revealing his lean upper body. On the surface of his skin, countless dark golden patterns flickered like breathing, emitting a heart-stopping pressure.

"Huff... much better." Lin Yuan spat out a breath of turbid air.

That brutal collision just now had allowed a lot of the accumulated energy in his body to vent. This pleasure of fighting with fists and hitting steel plates with his face was much more satisfying than sitting in the command room pressing buttons.

"Hey, you one-eyed dragon over there."

Lin Yuan's voice exploded directly in the minds of all the pirates through mental vibration. "Who did you say you were going to unload the power core of just now?"

The one-eyed captain had already peed himself in fear.

He was a pirate, not a fool. In interstellar legends, there was only one name for such a monster that could traverse the void with its flesh and hit warships head-on—a Catastrophe-level life form!

This level of monster usually only existed in the guard teams of those god-level civilizations; how could it appear in such a remote backwater?!

"Misunderstanding! Sir! This is a misunderstanding!" The captain roared frantically into the communicator. "We... we are here to send warmth! Yes! Send supplies!"

"Send supplies?"

Lin Yuan looked at the remaining destroyers that wanted to run but dared not move, grinning. "Sure, then I won't be polite. But I don't like it when others deliver goods to my door; I like to take them myself."

He slowly raised his right hand and grabbed violently at the void.

Hum—!

The space for hundreds of kilometers seemed to freeze at this moment.

Countless black Void Energy poured out of Lin Yuan's body, rapidly condensing behind him into a giant hand that blotted out the sky. That palm was entirely composed of pure gravitational waves, with clear palm prints, and every line seemed to contain the power to destroy stars.

"This move, I just learned it too."

Lin Yuan's eyes narrowed, and the giant Void hand followed his movement, gripping fiercely toward one of the largest destroyers.

【Void · Squeeze】.

Creak—!

That heavy destroyer, capable of withstanding nuclear explosions, was as fragile as a soda can in front of the giant hand.

The shields collapsed instantly, the hard alloy armor collapsed inward, and the air inside the hull was instantly squeezed out, triggering a chain of secondary explosions. The pirates inside didn't even have time to scream before they were pressed into meat paste.

A few seconds later, Lin Yuan let go.

A ball of smoking scrap metal drifted slowly into the distance.

The remaining pirates completely collapsed.

Where was this a big fat sheep? This was clearly a Tyrannosaurus Rex in sheep's clothing!

"Surrender! We surrender!"

"Don't kill me! I'll give you everything! I have an eighty-year-old mother..."

"That's my private money! I'll give it all to you! All to you!"

The sounds of crying and begging filled the public channel, and the remaining warships turned off their engines, flashing white signals indicating surrender.

Lin Yuan's figure appeared instantly outside the bridge of the pirate flagship.

Through that thick explosion-proof glass, he looked at the pirates kneeling all over the floor inside, his eyes as calm as a pool of stagnant water.

"Surrender?"

Lin Yuan's voice was not loud, but it clearly drilled into everyone's ears.

"When you said you were going to sell people just now, did you ask if those people were willing to surrender?"

The one-eyed captain knelt on the ground, trembling as he raised his head and looked at the figure outside the window like a demon god: "Sir... that's the rule... this is the rule of this trade..."

"Rules, huh."

Lin Yuan nodded, gently placing his palm on the explosion-proof glass.

"In my rules, if you want to rob, you have to be prepared to be killed back. Since you picked up the gun, don't expect me to treat you like civilians."

"Also, remember one thing."

The Void runes in Lin Yuan's palm suddenly lit up with dazzling light.

"Earthlings do not accept trash."

Bang!

The explosion-proof glass shattered.

The vacuum instantly poured in, rolling the people inside out like rag dolls. And in the last moment before they suffocated, the scene they saw was that man turning into a black whirlwind, rushing into the fleet.

It was a one-sided massacre.

No flashy tactics, no evenly matched tug-of-war.

Ten minutes.

Just ten minutes.

When the last lifeboat was thrown into a space rift by Lin Yuan for recycling, this star sector returned to silence.

Except for the debris all over the ground, it was as if this pirate detachment had never appeared.

Lin Yuan stood on a piece of burning wreckage, patted the dust off his hands, and felt the bloating pain in his stomach finally disappear, replaced by a refreshing clarity.

"gaia, let A Ji take people out to clean up the mess."

Lin Yuan yawned. "Same old rule, take everything that can be used, and if it can't be used... forget it, take everything that can't be used too, melt it down later to make bullets."

...

Half an hour later, the engineering ships cleaning the battlefield shuttled between the wrecks like diligent worker bees.

The footage of this one-sided battle had already been "accidentally" leaked to several public channels in the Orion Arm by gaia at Lin Yuan's instruction.

The video title was plain and simple: 《Precious Footage of a Certain Unknowing Pirate Group Trying to Rob Earth and Being Torn Apart by Hand》.

This was not just to establish prestige, but also a warning.

Although Earth was running away, this did not mean that anyone could step on it.

However, just as Lin Yuan was preparing to return to the dragon sparrow to take a nap, A Ji's voice suddenly came through the communicator, his tone changed.

"S... Sir! You have to come and see this!"

A Ji was currently standing in the cargo hold of a pirate transport ship. The ship was probably specially used to carry "contraband," so the protection was done very well, and miraculously half of the hull remained under Lin Yuan's bombardment.

Lin Yuan teleported over, his brows slightly wrinkled as he landed.

The radiation value here was a bit wrong.

Not that kind of nuclear radiation, but a cold fluctuation that made people's hearts creep and goosebumps rise all over.

"What's wrong?" Lin Yuan walked to A Ji's side.

In the middle of that pile of messy gold and silver treasures, there was a black metal box with a strange design.

The box was not big, there were no seams on the surface, and the material looked like stone yet also like metal. It was covered with twisted, blood-red runes that seemed to be constantly squirming.

Just by looking at it, Lin Yuan felt a stinging pain in his brain, and the system even popped up a yellow warning box:

【Warning! High concentration of Abyss pollution source detected.】

【It is recommended to destroy it immediately.】

A Ji was holding a Geiger counter, the value on it was jumping wildly, but his pale face was not filled with greed, but fear.

"This thing... how could this thing appear here?" A Ji's voice was trembling.

"Do you know what this is?" Lin Yuan narrowed his eyes. He could feel that the thing in the box was very dangerous, more dangerous than all those warships combined just now.

"This is a 'Cursed Object'..."

A Ji swallowed, pointing at the box with his one arm, and took two steps back. "This is something that flowed out of the Land Abandoned by Gods! Only that star sector of death abandoned by the gods could produce this kind of metal with an ominous aura!"

"Land Abandoned by Gods?"

Lin Yuan's heart skipped a beat.

That was the path they had to pass through for their escape.

"These pirates haven't even entered the Land Abandoned by Gods, how could they have things from inside?" Lin Yuan squatted down, tentatively touching the box with his mental power.

Hum!

Countless noisy whispers flashed through his mind, like tens of thousands of people whispering in his ear, and like something was frantically scratching his nerves.

"Sir! Don't touch it!" A Ji screamed. "Legend has it that any spaceship that has touched this thing will disappear inexplicably in the mist of the Land Abandoned by Gods, not even leaving a wreck! This is a signpost! A signpost pointing the way for those unspeakable things!"

A signpost?

Lin Yuan retracted his hand abruptly, his eyes instantly becoming sharp.

If this thing was a signpost, then this pirate detachment carrying it around was equivalent to sticking a "Come and eat me" label on their foreheads?

More importantly...

Lin Yuan looked toward the deep, dark starry sky; that was the direction of the Land Abandoned by Gods.

They hadn't even entered yet, and the things inside seemed to have already stretched their tentacles out.

"Interesting."

Lin Yuan stared at the box, the corners of his mouth slowly curling up, and the dark golden light in the depths of his eyes lit up again. This time it was not violent, but an excitement of discovering new prey.

"A Ji, seal this thing up, pack it separately, don't let it contaminate our spaceship."

"S... Sir? You're not throwing it away?" A Ji was dumbfounded.

"What a pity to throw it away."

Lin Yuan stood up and clapped his hands. "Since it's a signpost, that's perfect."

"We were worrying about not being able to find the way after going in. Having a local specialty to lead the way saves us from wandering around blindly."

"As for the curse..."

Lin Yuan sneered and turned to walk towards the cabin door. "That's aimed at the living. Which one of us on this ship isn't a demon who has jumped back and forth at the gates of hell?"

"Take it, and let's go."