IWYTBW - Chapter 53
Chapter 53
The Eagle and the Pigeon.
Longhua Star, Space Garrison Base.
“Navigation route clear.”
“Checkpoints clear.”
“Local space sector clear.”
The interstellar radar displayed a placid, tranquil light blue. Truthfully, garrison duty wasn’t exactly a cakewalk, but it was generally safe. The most frequent task for this thousand-strong legion was handling disputes between the contestants. Less than a week into the competition, they had already apprehended several hundred participants attempting to violate the rules by attacking eliminated players.
“Did you catch the livestream last night?” With nothing pressing and no superiors making rounds, a reconnaissance trooper casually asked his partner to the right. “Seems like some decent newcomers have popped up on this planet, too.”
“Nah,” his companion shot him a knowing glance. “I was busy watching Yaoji’s stream.”
The trooper cracked a sly, ‘I get it’ grin. “Ah, Goddess Yaoji… hot favorite for the finals. You’ve got good taste, kid. How many times did you have to change your pants last night?”
The data analyst nearby pushed up his glasses, cutting into their crude banter with deadpan seriousness. “I watched the Raging Lion’s stream. So young, yet his potential is immense.”
“Who, the youngest A-rank?” The trooper pondered for a moment. “Right, a genius hitting A-rank at seventeen, that’s actually terrifying… When I was seventeen, I was still sweating whether I’d even get into the National Defense Military University!”
His companion clicked his tongue in admiration. “With results like that, he might just be the next Rainbow Alice, or maybe the next Saint Quadrivirtue.”
“Yaoji is also quite good,” the data analyst stated matter-of-factly. “However, reaching A-rank at twenty-one makes her less prominent among the true prodigies. The Bronze Gorgon is more worthy of attention.”
A brief silence fell before a fourth person chimed in, “The Bronze Gorgon… isn’t he supposed to be the highest-ranked contestant in this Hero Tournament? A twenty-six-year-old A+ pilot, and rumor has it he’s close to reaching S- rank?”
“Who can say for sure? Speaking of which, the Empire’s youngest S-rank is still Great Dark Sky. He became an S- pilot at only twenty-five, utterly shocking… though he hasn’t made many public appearances these past couple of years.”
The atmosphere was relaxed as others joined the discussion, idly sharing their military perspectives and predictions about the competition. It was a rare, uneventful morning, and spirits were high.
Suddenly, the radar shrieked a piercing alarm. All relaxed expressions vanished as everyone scrambled towards the monitoring consoles. A data analyst yelled, “A new warp signature just appeared near Longhua Star!”
“Report coordinates!”
“Relative to Longhua Star origin: 23-17-46-11!”
“Damn it! That sector’s blocked for standard FTL anchor points! How could warp data generate there?!”
The deputy commander, arriving hastily, wore a grim expression. “Unless,” he stated coldly, “it possesses unrestricted Imperial navigation clearance, allowing it to bypass the anchor point blocks and generate warp data directly.”
“Sir!”
The deputy commander waved dismissively. “What color is their transponder beacon?”
The analyst replied, “Yellow!”
Yellow. Not hostile, but not a recognized friendly either… As the officer pondered, a wormhole ripped through the vacuum. Emerging from it was an enormous cruise liner, heavily damaged – more than half destroyed – yet desperately pushing through the warp exit before it disintegrated completely.
The garrison’s legion commander had already scrambled his fleet, surrounding the teetering luxury vessel. The deputy commander’s brow furrowed in astonishment. “The Dragon Palace? That ship is the Dragon Palace?”
—The exhibition site for the priceless treasure, Tannhäuser’s Crown, was aboard this very Dragon Palace, renowned as the largest and most heavily fortified cruise liner ever built!
What could possibly have happened to leave the Dragon Palace—a ship rumored to be tough enough to withstand orbital bombardment—half-destroyed and forced into such a desperate warp jump?
One: they ran into a Leviathan and were dragged into a cosmic storm.
Two: they encountered pirates. And not just any pirates, but one of the galaxy’s infamous major syndicates.
The deputy commander snatched the communicator. “Camus! I’ve scrubbed the Dragon Palace’s warp signature and used my authorization to open a secondary jump point. Get the survivors transferring now. Stay sharp!”
“Roger that,” a cheerful male voice responded. “Still getting easily flustered, Deputy Commander? Not a great habit on the battlefield, you know.”
The deputy commander’s lips thinned. In his urgency, he hadn’t used the commander’s rank, instinctively defaulting to how they’d addressed each other as students. In the strictly hierarchical military, it was a minor slip-up, but the legion commander wouldn’t hold it against him. Just as, for years, he himself had maintained the image of a stringent, by-the-book officer, while that grinning fool only seemed capable of overlooking minor infractions from subordinates, always peppering his briefings with some cheesy drivel about oaths and burning passion, leaving everyone slightly bewildered.
But this incident felt different… A faint throb started at his temple. His mental power manifested as a Three-Tailed Jumping Pigeon, a sensitive creature capable of perceiving magnetic field changes from thousands of miles away, allowing it to accurately predict conditions at a destination.
Since successfully manifesting the Three-Tailed Jumping Pigeon, the deputy commander had developed an acute sensitivity to danger—especially sudden, unexpected danger.
“This isn’t a joke!” he stressed again. “Pick up the pace! I’ve already sent a distress call; the nearest garrison fleet will arrive soon. Until then, I just need you to move faster!”
“I know,” the man’s tone turned serious. “When have I ever ignored your suggestions? The Dragon Palace’s lifeboats started launching the moment you spoke. Estimate full transfer completed within three minutes—”
He suddenly stopped.
The jump point they had just closed, its signature wiped, silently tore open again! The wormhole dilated, expanding to more than ten times its previous size, like an abyssal gate to hell yawning open before mortal eyes, the gaze of some world-ending demon swirling within, watching the mortal realm.
The Dragon Palace was immense, comparable to a small city floating in space, capable of housing nearly four thousand people for leisure and residence. Yet, compared to the colossal dark shadow looming up behind it, the Dragon Palace seemed like a clumsy sea turtle thrashing near a shark’s maw, moments away from being shattered by razor-sharp teeth!
That nation-sized, dark behemoth sliced through the vacuum, unhurried. Its prow was sharply angled, forged into the shape of a massive stag’s head. The creature, often seen as a gentle, beautiful spirit of the forest, was rendered here as a demonic, savage effigy, its proud antlers drenched in vivid, blood-like crimson.
Deathly silence gripped the space garrison base. Everyone stared, utterly stunned into speechlessness. Even the corners of the deputy commander’s eyes twitched. The Dragon Palace, the military fleet sent to rescue it—before this titan, they were nothing more than a single fish and a swarm of plankton.
He hissed, “The Golden Hind… pirate syndicate.”
The largest, most prolific perpetrators of terror attacks, and simultaneously the most feared pirate group in the known universe: the Golden Hind.
They took their name from the infamous pirate ship of the Age of Sail, the Golden Hind. Her captain, Francis Drake, set sail from the Atlantic in 1577, navigated the Strait of Magellan, crossed the Pacific, traversed the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and returned to Plymouth, England in 1579, leaving mountains of sunken Spanish ships and plundered treasure in his wake. Millennia ago, the Golden Hind completed one of history’s most notorious circumnavigations of plunder. Millennia later, the Golden Hind pirate syndicate inherited its name, and with it, its ancient, bloody legacy.
Their supreme leader’s true name was lost to history; bounties bearing his likeness fluttered across every major star system. A man infamous for his cruelty and violent temper, he was a world-renowned Super S-class powerhouse who called himself the Scourge of the Seven Seas. His mecha, Purgatory of Immolation, ranked S+, placing him on par with the Azoth Empire’s current strongest combatants.
Now, it had arrived, jaws dripping blood-red, antlers menacing. The priceless Tannhäuser’s Crown was like a rich, sweet lure, drawing it here to dominate this space, ready to turn the planet below into a corpse-strewn graveyard.
The deputy commander leaped to his feet. He was a staff officer, yet he drew his sidearm with the defiant air of a pilot and bolted from the command center, sprinting towards the mecha hangar bay below.
The path ahead seemed all but sealed, yet he couldn’t give up. He had to fight alongside that idiot. He was the brains, Camus was the blade. Only the seamless coordination forged through countless battles could carve out even the slimmest chance of survival!
Only half the passengers had evacuated the Dragon Palace. Seeing the Golden Hind closing in, the lifeboats descended into chaos, scattering like headless flies. The captain, still on the bridge, apparently panicked; without even closing the side egress hatches, the Dragon Palace wrenched into a sharp turn, engines flaring at maximum power as it plummeted towards Longhua Star’s atmosphere.
With the Dragon Palace fleeing frantically, the last buffer between the Golden Hind and the military fleet vanished. The legion commander wasn’t smiling anymore. His face was pale, his dark eyes holding the reflection of a nation of the dead, ready to defy a galaxy.
He raised the communicator and issued what might be his final command: “All units, immediate reverse course! Return to the nearest garrison base and report! I repeat, all units, immediate reverse course! Return to the nearest garrison base and report!”
“Sir, what about you?!”
“That’s an order! Cut the chatter!” he suddenly roared. “Go! Go now!”
His subordinates instantly understood. The military had dealt with pirates for years; they knew the unwritten rule of engagement: when leaders met in contested space, if one chose to stand alone, the other was obligated to send a combatant of equivalent rank to face them first.
He was buying time for everyone else.
The legion commander piloted an A+ class mecha, the Long-Winged Eagle. As a versatile pilot, he was confident he could secure enough time, enough of a chance, for his people.
He stood alone in the infinite black vacuum, awaiting the inevitable judgment, the retreating lights of his fleet shrinking rapidly behind him.
On the prow of the Golden Hind, the stag head’s lower jaw slowly descended, revealing an opening. Someone was about to emerge. The commander’s eyes sharpened. He controlled his breathing, his hand resting on the hilt of his energy sword, poised for the draw.
The Long-Winged Eagle suddenly emitted a soft, almost lively chirp, like a sound of joyful recognition. Hearing the alert, the commander’s breath caught. He whipped his head around, and sure enough, there was the familiar silhouette.
The A- class Short-Tailed Pigeon, the deputy commander’s mecha.
“What are you doing here?! Didn’t you hear my order?!” Veins pulsed on his forehead as he roared at the newcomer. “Get out of here, now!”
“Shove off. Generals afield dictate their own orders,” the deputy commander retorted coolly, unmoved. “If you don’t want to die, coordinate with me. Maybe we can actually hold out until reinforcements arrive.”
“You—!” The commander was furious, about to unleash another tirade, when he sensed a disturbance behind him. He spun around warily and froze.
There’s no sound in vacuum, but light travels. Right now, rhythmic pulses of light, like drumbeats and thunderclaps, emanated from the Golden Hind, resembling an exploding nebula. It was as if they were heralding the arrival of a god wielding absolute power, a spectacle for which no degree of grandeur could be considered excessive.
The enemy accepting the commander’s challenge finally emerged, flying slowly from the Golden Hind. The towering mecha wore a Serpent-themed Demon Mask. Its blue and red paint scheme, far from gaudy, gave it an ancient, ferocious aspect, like a demon god riding wind and thunder. It shouldered a massive saw-blade; the coarse teeth lining its edge, once spinning, could shred even a behemoth like the Dragon Palace into space debris.
—S+ class mecha: Purgatory of Immolation. The personal machine of the Scourge of the Seven Seas.
Neither man spoke.
In the dead silence, the legion commander spoke first, his voice surprisingly calm. “You were right. Facing an enemy this strong, we really do need to work together… Though against this, our odds aren’t exactly great.”
The deputy commander actually laughed then. Things had reached this point; what difference did laughing or not laughing make?
He nodded in agreement. “Yeah. Our odds aren’t great. We just can’t afford to miss any sliver of an opening.”
The commander drew his energy sword. “It’s been good knowing you, Yeyun.”
“Same here, Camus.”
The two mechas shot forward like streaks of light, converging on the Purgatory of Immolation! The deputy commander barked, “Pincer from above and below! Take the chance—!”
The Long-Winged Eagle abruptly changed course, slamming into the Short-Tailed Pigeon and knocking it violently off trajectory. The deputy commander’s pupils contracted. He saw only a heaven-rending flash of white light, so ferocious its horror defied description. Light travels at roughly 300,000 kilometers per second in vacuum, and as the Purgatory of Immolation swung its blade, the edge and the light were almost perfectly simultaneous.
Like a fragile flower torn apart by the wind, the Long-Winged Eagle silently split in two.
In that instant, Camus had somehow perceived the Purgatory of Immolation’s strike fractions of a second before the light reached him. It was as if he’d burned his entire life force in that moment, just to violently shove the Short-Tailed Pigeon away. But he was only A+ rank… how had he possibly managed that?
The mecha’s wreckage drifted silently. Blood is invisible to the naked eye in the blackness of space—or perhaps there was no blood, no body, not even ashes remaining. That faster-than-light strike could vaporize an entire ocean; what chance did the physical body of an A+ pilot stand?
The deputy commander stared at the scene unfolding before him. War in space was like this: one second, magnificent grandeur; the next, utter silence and death. Explosion and annihilation, both so extreme, so swift, so cruel. Just like that idiot, Camus, who had burned through his entire existence only to buy his friend a few fleeting seconds of life.
The Three-Tailed Jumping Pigeon could always foresee the grandest rains, evade the fiercest storms, find sanctuary on the safest branch. It could leap beyond droughts, leap beyond the claws of predators, time and time again. They were undying spirits of reincarnation, unable to choose when life began, but free to choose when the end would come.
At this moment, his eyes reflected only the death before him. Only death.
He slammed his mecha’s throttle to maximum. Wings blazing with the light and color of a shooting star, he hurtled towards the Purgatory of Immolation. The vacuum was cold, silent. In that instant, his tears burned hot as he unleashed a lion’s roar of pure, unadulterated rage.
From within the Purgatory of Immolation, it seemed someone let out a bored scoff. The saw-blade swung again, a universe-spanning chasm that cleaved through all color and heat, slicing the falling meteor in two.
“Leave no one alive.”
The Scourge of the Seven Seas issued the death sentence in a hoarse voice.
—Longhua Star Space Garrison Base: Legion Commander and Deputy Commander, both killed in action. The entire legion, annihilated. There were no survivors.
*
The Golden Hind pirate syndicate, pursuing the Dragon Palace and the Tannhäuser’s Crown it carried, shattered Longhua Star’s defensive cordon, seized the garrison base, and took control of the entire planet! As a planet partaking in the Heroes’ Tournament, millions of lives are at stake!
This explosive, once-in-a-century headline flashed through the surrounding star systems instantly. The Emperor was frantic, cabinet ministers worked through the night, the court splitting into factions advocating war and peace. Grand Duke Norst Rauðr Dreki, usually hawkish and aggressive, argued for negotiating first, as his most prized family descendant, Natalia Rauðr Dreki, was on Longhua Star; ensuring the contestants’ safety had to be paramount. Conversely, Toran Hall, the “Little Prime Minister” known for his shrewd maneuvering, pushed for immediate military intervention, as his grandson, Eugene Hall, was also trapped on Longhua, and every moment delayed increased the danger to the contestants.
On the StarNet, one-twentieth of the twenty livestream zones went unprecedentedly dark; the Golden Hind had destroyed the orbital satellites. Over 1.3 million contestants were trapped. The eyes of the entire Empire were fixed anxiously on that black screen: the Longhua Sector.
“Sir, intelligence confirms the Scourge of the Seven Seas is personally commanding the Golden Hind flagship. They tracked Tannhäuser’s Crown straight to Longhua,” Yista Roland reported urgently. “They possess a ’‘Star Ring’ device capable of rapidly inverting a planet’s magnetic field, generating a particle belt that envelops the world and renders all conventional technology inert scrap. Only pirate operatives with keyed authorization can function normally…”
Luo Ruileo murmured, “Once fully armed pirates land on Longhua, those contestants will have no way to resist. They’ll be like lions descending on a pack of declawed, defanged wolves… It will become a one-sided slaughter.”
Rong Hongxue strode forward, silent, his emerald eyes dark and heavy. A third adjutant, flipping through his own datapad, spoke quickly in a low tone, “The Rauðr Dreki family has already deployed the Executioner of the Black Dragon to retrieve Natalia Rauðr Dreki. The Imperial family is also preparing to dispatch Rainbow Alice as support. Sir, going to Longhua now… it will draw far too much attention…”
Rong Hongxue stopped walking.
Before them stood a pitch-black mecha. A destiny wheel hovered above its head. It had no wings upon its back; instead, ports shaped like lightning and fire were embedded in its shoulders. The conspicuous gold inscriptions were gone; only when light played across its surface did hair-thin lines of gold tracing flash with a faint, deeply shadowed fire.
What Yi Zhen had seen that day was not the Great Dark Sky in its complete form.
“Utterly useless, all of them,” Rong Hongxue stated coldly. “Open the hatch.”
-------
-------
Comments
Post a Comment