Chapter 290: Against The Concordat (4)

The order was absolute.The two flanking Dreadnoughts shifted their orientation. The massive, city-sized ships groaned as their maneuvering thrusters fired.

Their prows opened like blooming mechanical flowers, revealing the terrifying, swirling light of their main cannons.

A low frequency of vibration rattled the teeth of every living being in the sector. The light gathering at the cannons was blinding, turning the dark sector into a harsh, artificial noon.

~VOOOOOM!~

Two beams of concentrated, white-hot destruction fired simultaneously.

They were not simple lasers. They were streams of coherent plasma and weaponized gravity. They merged mid-flight, forming a single lance of energy thick enough to engulf a moon, screaming toward the tiny figure of Adrian.

There was nowhere to dodge. The beam moved at light speed. The lock was absolute.

Adrian looked up. His blue eyes reflected the incoming apocalypse. The energy reading was off the charts. It was orders of magnitude greater than what he had just absorbed.

Adrian’s suit couldn’t tank this and his regeneration couldn’t outpace total atomic vaporization.

He was truly damned.

But he didn’t feel fear. His mind worked in overdrive, time seeming to dilate as he processed the incoming death. He needed a container. He needed a gravity well. He didn’t have one, so he would have to make one.

"No such thing as too much," Adrian whispered.

He dropped the Mana Gun back onto his belt holster since he couldn’t send it back to his inventory ahd he planted his feet on nothing, rooting himself in the void, and raised both hands, palms facing the incoming beam.

He didn’t try to block it. He tried to catch it.

[You’ve created a Technique! Void Distortion - Event Horizon]

The beam hit him.

For a second, the universe held its breath. The light engulfed him completely. The bridge crew on the World-Breaker cheered, assuming the target was atomized.

But the light didn’t pass through. It stopped.

At the center of the beam, a small, black dot appeared. It grew rapidly, swirling like a whirlpool. Adrian stood there, stripped of his defenses.

His Power Suit had disintegrated instantly upon contact. His skin was burning, flaking away to ash and healing in microseconds, a cycle of torture that would have broken a lesser mind.

He was screaming. Not in fear, but in effort. The strain was tearing at his very soul.

He was compressing the energy. He was taking the output of two Dreadnoughts and forcing it into a ball of compressed space between his hands.

"Compress!" he roared, blood and raw energy spraying from his nose and eyes. "COMPRESS!"

The beam began to bend. The straight lines of light curved, sucking into his hands like water down a drain. The Dreadnoughts fired harder, their captains panicked, pouring everything into the attack to overwhelm him.

But Adrian was an anchor. He channeled the concept of the Void; the hunger that eats stars.

The ball of energy between his hands turned from white, to blue, to a terrifying, unstable violet. It pulsed with a heartbeat that cracked the surrounding space.

"Return to sender," Adrian gasped, his voice raspy.

With a final, earth-shattering effort, he spun and threw the ball.

He didn’t throw it back at the ships that fired. He threw it at the Indomitable.

The ball of compressed destruction flew faster than the beam had arrived. It was a streak of black lightning against the white background. It struck the Dreadnought’s heavy shields.

There was no explosion.

The shields simply vanished. The ball hit the hull.

~SHLUUURP.~

A sound like the universe inhaling.

The ball expanded into a micro-singularity. The massive, 5-kilometer-long Dreadnought didn’t explode outward; it crumpled inward.

The nitanium hull, the crew, the atmosphere, the reactor core; everything was sucked into a single point of infinite density. The ship groaned, a metallic shriek that vibrated through the hull of every other ship in the fleet. Its spine snapped. The massive engines were dragged forward, crumpling like paper, before the entire vessel was swallowed whole.

Then, the singularity reached critical mass and evaporated.

It released the stored energy in a shockwave of silent light... a gravitational tsunami!

The shockwave hit the Silencer, the second Dreadnought. Its shields shattered instantly, and its main cannon array was sheared off the hull, leaving the ship dead in the water.

The World-Breaker took the hit on its broadside, listing heavily as stabilizer thrusters blew out.

Every single fighter drone in a fifty-kilometer radius was simply erased, turned to dust by the expanding wall of force.

The Indomitable was gone... completely.

Silence descended on the battlefield. There was no more firing. The guns fell silent. The pilots of the remaining ships were too terrified to pull their triggers.

Adrian floated in the void, alone.

He was a mess. His energy was almost depleted. His body was a tapestry of burns and regenerating tissue. His suit was gone, leaving him exposed to the vacuum, sustained only by his Void biology.

But he was alive.

He felt a gaze. A heavy, ancient weight pressing against his mind. He looked across the distance, staring directly at the bridge of the flagship, where he knew Valdis was watching.

The Arbiter stared back. On the bridge of the World-Breaker, Valdis watched the destruction of one of his prized ships with a look that was no longer bored. It was cold. It was focused.

He stepped away from the viewport, his cape swirling.

"You’ve played enough," Valdis’s voice echoed, not over the comms, but directly into Adrian’s mind. "I’ll handle you myself."

The airlock didn’t cycle. Instead, a section of the World-Breaker’s armored hull shimmered, turning translucent before Valdis stepped through it as if walking through mist.

He stood in the absolute zero of the void without a suit, anchored by a terrifying, white aura that warped space beneath his feet.

Adrian watched, his chest heaving painfully. He was running on fumes, his energy reserves scraped hollow and his body a rough network of raw nerves.

And from what he could sense from Valdis’s presence, there was no chance for him to win, especially in this condition.

Unless...

Adrian’s eyes darted to a jagged, almost invisible tear in reality. It was a wound left by the display of powers that had just occurred.

Although it was unstable, it was still Adrian’s only choice.

"Translocate," Adrian spoke outwards, and in the next instant, he was gone.