166: Chapter 170 I won't wait in line, I'll just unplug your internet cable.

The deep-space ruins known as "Starfall Wail" had just completed their tenth hour of physical dimension-reduction precipitation on the great map.

The star map brightness of the entire sector had already been pushed to its limit by the terrifyingly vast array of engine plumes.

This wasn't a purge involving just a few hundred ships.

This was a grand resource-dividing assembly that only star zone giants were qualified to attend.

The radar of Mining Planet No. 3 could just barely pierce the edge of the mist.

Surrounding the halo of those massive, distorted ruins were at least four super-civilization joint fleets ranked in the top hundred on the great map.

Among them was the Eternal Star Crown Federation, which Li Cang had previously poisoned and which had now brought in a fresh batch of giant ships to hold the line.

There was also the Dark Red Star Zone's Mechanical Monastery, which had its high-level arbitration tower broken before but had now deployed a flesh-and-blood mecha formation as massive as a star.

Tens of thousands of diverse warships, glowing with blinding Energy Shields, had established an incredibly smooth and gapless mutual-locking monitoring radar network along the outer layer of the ruins.

This was a public protocol restricted zone filter.

They had even established a temporary seat in the deep-space channel called the "Civilization High-Dimensional Resource Negotiation and Allocation."

Several factions were engaged in a high-profile war of words, involving both computing power and politics, over the ownership of the highest-sequence drops from the ruins.

As for the small and medium-sized civilization players on the periphery hoping for scraps, they had long since been incinerated by the light-energy anti-aircraft belt established by these giants. The admission ticket to these ruins was inscribed with the words "Elite" and "Respectable."

But as Li Cang stood in the oil-leaking cockpit of his battle axe heavy cruiser, the thought of writing an application never even crossed his mind.

"At a feast of this scale, if I wait outside for their leftovers before going in, there won't even be a scrap left."

He looked at the tight formation map scanned by the radar.

This radar network, cobbled together by multiple high-level civilizations that guarded against each other while reluctantly cooperating, had a fatal natural flaw.

To prevent their allies from seeing all their trump cards.

At the extremely thin borders where their respective radars and communication relays met, there was inevitably a "computing protocol blank buffer zone" lasting less than a few microseconds.

This was the perfect breeding ground for Warhammer units, whose philosophy was "no hacking, only destruction."

Inside a small, abandoned stealth shuttle, Li Cang directly input the coordinates for this border gap.

Twelve Executioner Assassins, devoid of any armor and covered only in a layer of death-gray phased living skin, hung in the shuttle bay as silent as twelve cold corpses.

"Go. Cut down those communication poles glowing with all those halos for me."

Li Cang didn't give any complex infiltration instructions.

In this stretch of starry sky covered by the firepower of tens of thousands of warships, where various anti-stealth light waves fell like rain.

The shuttle was discarded like trash in an asteroid belt ten thousand kilometers outside the joint defense zone.

Twelve ghosts ejected along weak gravitational waves in absolute silence.

Ten minutes later.

The Third Joint Relay Tower, located at the border between the Federation fleet and the Dark Red Monastery's defense zone.

This was a massive holographic neural tower responsible for linking the fire control scanning base codes of both sides, surrounded by sixteen high-frequency laser sentries performing second-by-second polling for a gapless death-ray sweep.

The extremely thick core neural bundle at the top of the tower was emitting a soft blue light.

Right next to this neural bundle.

In the void, an extremely inconspicuous transparent shadow, seemingly caused by cosmic microwave radiation, flickered slightly.

An Executioner Assassin who had been lurking for ten minutes extended his left hand—which was completely optically assimilated with the surrounding space and whose mass had even distorted into nothingness—directly through the detection blind spot of the high-frequency laser sentries.

He didn't use a virus to decrypt it.

He didn't use a terminal to analyze the password lock on that thick neural cable.

The assassin directly hacked down with a specialized corrosive short blade coated in the potent poison of an Abyssal Star Beast.

The foul-smelling physical toxin instantly vaporized the outer bulletproof casing of the fiber optic cable.

With the short blade stuck halfway in, the assassin used his mutated, inhuman strength to violently rip out the high-dimensional signal tube, which was as thick as a human leg!

Pshhh.

The blue light instantly flared and then died out.

Simultaneously, eleven other equally important formation junction antennas and secondary fire control radars suffered identical, brutal physical removals.

No need to understand code; you just have to snap the internet cable.

The four super fleets' originally flawless, mutually locking joint scanning network...

...was, in that instant, like someone having both eyes stabbed out with a dagger.

The center of the radar went completely black for thirty seconds.

During those thirty seconds, as the Commanders of the four major powers cursed frantically, suspecting their allies of treachery and sneak attacks, with main guns nearly firing point-blank at each other...

Thirty seconds, for a Warhammer brute that had completely abandoned defense and was pushing its engines to the absolute limit...

...was enough!

From the direction of Mining Planet No. 3.

The dormant dark-gold engines of the battle axe heavy cruiser roared to life, spitting out violent plumes that vaporized the vacuum into nothingness.

A four-kilometer-long black behemoth, its body covered in bone spikes and rusted armor plates.

It didn't activate any deceleration arrays in space at all.

It pushed its speed to the limit where the main keel was nearly falling apart.

Taking advantage of the blinded radar network and the brief window where the fleets hesitated to pour heavy fire into the junction zones due to mutual suspicion.

The battle axe heavy cruiser was like a giant black battering ram fired from a cannon.

Accompanied by the smoke from hundreds of point-defense Macro-cannons firing blindly to clear the path.

It charged directly through the gap between the flagship fleets of the Eternal Star Crown Federation and the Dark Red Monastery, amidst a cacophony of terror and curses.

It forced its way through with extreme brutality.

Several destroyers at the edge of the gap, unable to react in time, were scraped by the black behemoth's hull, sending out blinding sparks a thousand meters long and causing them to instantly lose balance.

Before the lords could react and surround this damned stray dog.

The ramming prow of the battle axe heavy cruiser, carrying overwhelming kinetic energy...

...crashed right through the weakest layer of the blue space-time barrier surrounding the so-called "Starfall Wail"!

A second before countless high-level beams—fired in frustration by those who failed to intercept it—slammed into its shields.

Li Cang's Warhammer giant ship was swallowed whole by the intensely distorted ruins' halo.

The cockpit went completely dark.

The external sounds of gunfire and the server-wide curses and pursuit orders in the communication channel were completely cut off by an incredibly ancient silence.

Li Cang didn't look at the engine gauges, which were glowing red-hot.

He looked at the radar screen.

Here, the external scans were completely blind.

But what appeared on his battle axe heavy cruiser's deep-probe scanner wasn't some floating continent of ruins in space.

Instead, it was a geological map of a continent that, due to the warship's intrusion, was pulsing wildly like a giant heartbeat and spewing disgusting fleshy spores.

This wasn't a tomb at all.

"This entire ruin..." Li Cang excitedly pressed down the "All-Out Assault" Boarding Card, "...is a flesh-and-blood fortress monster that's been dead for who knows how many years, but its bones are still breathing."

The first rogue to break in.

No need to wait in line; he was ready to dig into the feast.