143: Chapter 146 The Hongpao is for playing billiards.

The battle axe frigate completed its rough test fire in the pitch-black vacuum.

The pungent smell of semi-vulcanized gunpowder and plasma coolant was forcibly filtered by the onboard life support system.

On the holographic radar screen, the red dot representing the last Scavenger warship did not escape.

The opponent had just completed a 180-degree turn, and its engines were in a highlighted state of full-power overload.

Li Cang had no intention of letting it go, tapping a finger on the pursuit preset link of the main console.

The Servitors at the base of the Macro-cannon array immediately began frantically cranking the massive manual ammunition feed turntable.

Heavy metal friction echoed in the bow as high-explosive warheads, cast from ice-cap scrap metal, slid down dark rails into the thick barrels.

Before Li Cang could even push the firing lever all the way to the bottom...

At the extreme edge of the radar panel, an exceptionally dazzling crimson halo suddenly erupted.

This was not a spatial ripple that a frigate-class vessel could produce.

The red light was not only ridiculously large but also accompanied by extremely high-intensity psychic interference, instantly turning the half-radar the battle axe frigate had just scavenged into a screen full of snowy noise.

A heavy Cruiser, over three kilometers in total length, stepped directly onto the afterglow of a spatial warp, appearing out of thin air at the edge coordinates of the Battle Royale stage.

A visible layer of dark-gold force field shielding flowed over the hull; space debris from the previous explosions was deflected and slid away the moment it touched the shield, without causing even a single ripple.

The all-channel communication interface was suddenly forcibly overridden.

Without any static noise, an extremely clear synthetic electronic voice echoed inside the operations cabin.

"Advanced energy core reaction detected."

"Unregistered kit-bashed frigate discovered."

"Executing Erase and Recover protocol."

The opponent did not request communication or negotiations, directly judging the battle axe frigate to be mobile loot.

The Cruiser's broadside armor plates flipped outward, and an array of twelve thick, high-frequency lance batteries completed their warm-up lock-on.

With this level of fire density, if it truly slammed into the battle axe frigate's current battered hull—held together by repair gel—it would be sliced into a pile of burning space junk in three seconds.

Li Cang's pupils contracted slightly.

He bypassed all air-defense alarm protocols.

His finger slammed onto the red execution button for the Macro-cannon fire.

Boom!

The ship's hull jerked backward violently once again due to the massive recoil.

Three high-explosive shells of exaggerated caliber, trailing dazzling orange-red flames, headed straight for the newly warped-in dark-gold Cruiser.

These three shells exploded violently the moment they contacted the dark-gold shield.

The expected satisfaction of tearing through armor did not occur.

High-energy explosives lost their potency before a deflection shield of this level; the explosion's energy and shrapnel were forcibly refracted by the deflection field, sliding into space along the ship's curvature.

The Cruiser itself did not shift even a single millimeter.

The technological tier of this thing and the defense level of its shield were more than two ranks higher than those of the Scavengers' junk ships.

The opponent's lance array began to converge energy toward the center.

The omni-directional alarms inside the operations cabin had already screamed themselves out of frequency.

The battle axe frigate's bottom keel let out a desperate groan, and the red lights in the engineering bay flashed in unison.

At this critical moment...

A blood-red border suddenly popped up on the holographic tactical table in the center of the operations cabin, occupying half the screen.

This was not a warning from the enemy ship.

This was the highest-level underlying rule broadcast built into the Epoch system for this mandatory stage.

[Server-wide Announcement: Phase One Safety Period has ended.]

[Spatial Collapse Protocol activated.]

[Physical Erasure Boundary is advancing from the perimeter of the competition area toward the center coordinates.]

Li Cang abruptly shifted his gaze to the external panoramic monitor.

In the pitch-black space less than a hundred kilometers from where the two ships were exchanging fire...

A scarlet band of light, with no end in sight, was pushing forward at a constant, emotionless speed.

Wherever the red light band swept, even starlight was completely devoured.

That wasn't a shield; that was the toxic boundary of the Battle Royale format.

A meteorite several hundred meters wide floating near the edge of the light band was barely grazed by it.

There was no explosion or burning.

The hard rock eerily dissolved into basic atomic dust, its traces of existence erased by the system on a physical level.

This was a red line of rules that even a high-ranking Archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus would not dare to touch.

And right now, this red line was positioned behind the flank of Li Cang and the dark-gold Cruiser.

Li Cang took a deep breath.

He ignored the lance muzzles already aimed at the battle axe frigate.

He didn't even try to operate the battered gravity engine to evade.

He directly patched through to the lowest hold's intercom broadcast.

"Numbers One through Five, go to the ballast hold."

"Dismantle all those abyss alloy scrap bricks used for counterweights."

"Forget about the high-explosive shells in the magazine."

"Stuff those metal bricks into the Macro-cannon barrels!"

Ballast Hold.

Five Astartes, covered in the blood of aliens, did not hesitate for a second.

Heavy magnetic boots stepped directly onto the abyss alloy blocks, weighing over a hundred tons each, used purely to maintain the ship's center of gravity in gravitational environments.

They didn't even use cutting torches.

With their overload states fully active, the five giants used mechanical servo-arms to forcibly snap the adamantine chains securing the alloy bricks.

These metal blocks had no explosive properties and no armor-piercing design; they had only one physical characteristic.

Dead weight.

Exaggerated, extreme dead weight.

The hundred-ton pure alloy blocks were hauled by brute force into the Macro-cannon array's loaders.

The Servitor's mechanical arms emitted the sharp crack of snapping gears due to the overload, but they still pushed these dead-heavy iron blocks into the dark, smoothbore barrels.

The dark-gold heavy Cruiser's lances finished charging.

Twelve streaks of dazzling white light, capable of slicing through galactic asteroid belts, headed straight for the battle axe frigate's bridge.

Li Cang didn't dodge.

He was calculating the advancement speed of that scarlet spatial collapse light band.

Ninety kilometers.

Sixty kilometers.

Thirty kilometers.

One second before the lances were about to hit the black battle axe hull...

Li Cang firmly pulled down the manual pressure-firing lever.

Three Macro-cannon barrels filled with dead weight simultaneously erupted with a violent blast three times larger than the previous test fire.

The battle axe frigate's bow armor plate was instantly torn apart by this recoil force that defied all common mechanical logic.

Crude fixing rivets shot into the ship like bullets.

But those three abyss alloy dead-weight bricks, weighing over a hundred tons each, were blasted out by high-pressure gunpowder at a speed invisible to the naked eye.

This was not a weapon.

These were three meteorites launched purely for the sake of throwing mass.

The three alloy bricks slammed into the heavy Cruiser's arrogant dark-gold deflection shield.

An excruciating physical collision sound, in the airless vacuum, transformed into high-frequency resonance that shattered armor seams.

deflection shields could refract energy and slide away the shaped-charge blasts of high-explosive shells.

But it could not digest this extremely pure, skill-less kinetic impact of several hundred tons.

The shield didn't break.

It absorbed the entirety of this massive kinetic energy and then transmitted it to the ship's keel inside the shield.

The heavy Cruiser's lance array, which had been locked onto the Battle Axe, suffered a slight muzzle deviation under this overwhelming lateral impact.

Twelve lethal white lights grazed past the battle axe frigate's starboard side, only shearing off several layers of thick, kit-bashed plating and leaving behind a deep, glowing, high-heat trench.

Li Cang didn't die.

And that heavy Cruiser...

Under the impact of those several hundred tons of dead-weight shells...

Its originally stable hull was like a cue ball struck with great force on a billiard table.

It underwent a lateral parabolic slide of over ten kilometers in the vacuum.

The alien Commander in the violently shaking command tower frantically issued ignition commands for the reverse thrusters.

But the kinetic energy was too great, and the distance too short.

As the Cruiser was pulled by inertia, just as its rear engine armor lit up with the fire of the reverse thrusters...

The entire rear half of the hull...

...plunged straight into the scarlet system spatial collapse dead-line, which had already advanced to less than ten kilometers away from it.

It was like pushing a block of butter into a red-hot iron plate.

There was no explosion.

There was no alarm.

The half of the Cruiser's hull that touched the red line had its physical data erased by the system's laws in an instant.

The break was as smooth as a mirror; even the cross-section of the reactor was clearly visible, yet not a single drop of coolant leaked out.

Immediately after...

...the crippled Cruiser, having lost half its hull and power circulation system, was dragged entirely into the erasure boundary of the Battle Royale rules.

A heavy battleship in its prime, possessing high-tier shields and firepower that had driven Li Cang to despair...

...was hit like a billiard ball into the poison zone by three iron ballast bricks, vanishing completely into this cold rift of the universe without even leaving a scream behind.

Inside the Holographic Operations Cabin...

The system's battle settlement interface lagged for half a second, overwhelmed by a sudden surge of massive data flow.

[Judgment: Environmental Kill Assistant — Nameless Civilization (Black Box State).]

[Obtained Over-level Kill Points.]

[High-tier loot drop detected.]

Li Cang stared intently at the top right corner of the screen.

There...

...at the safe edge of the scarlet poison zone's red line...

...a blueprint card, shimmering with an intense purple light and even faintly revealing dark-gold patterns, was bobbing up and down in space with the weak ripples from the earlier engine explosion.

[Advanced Ship-borne Void Deflection Shield Module Blueprint].

This was what you called skimming grease from the hands of the Reaper.

Li Cang turned the battle axe frigate's hole-riddled flank around, aiming it at the edge of the poison zone.

"Number One, take a long rope and go outside."

"Before we get swallowed by the red line, grab that blueprint back for me."