Chapter 21 — Resonance of Fury

Dusk on the wasteland was always long and tragic. The pale purple, ionized toxic mist slowly settled under the heavy atmospheric pressure, painting a mottled, eerie halo over the rusted starship wreckage towering around the Embers Camp.

The dilapidated hover-car, "Rust," let out overwhelmed creaks. Its treads crushed the scrap iron corners covered in highly radioactive crystalline dust, slowly driving into the concave plaza at the center of the camp. Black scorch marks from carburization and pits from high-temperature melting remained on its anti-radiation lead armor, silently telling the thrilling tale of that decaying Deadzone.

By this time, the concave plaza was already densely packed with over two hundred surviving mortals.

Due to the extreme lack of water and biological life-support gas over the past few days, everyone's cheeks were deeply sunken in, their skin presenting a sickly, deathly pale gray. Dozens of young children huddled in their mothers' thin, ragged embraces, emitting weak, parched cries from their throats. Strong, veteran miners were like wooden puppets stripped of their souls, leaning against collapsed iron beams, staring blankly at the falling ash in the sky. The heavy aura of despair, thirst, and waiting for death permeated the air.

Clang!

A deafening crash of heavy metal tore through the dead silence in the plaza.

Caleb reached out his thick, mechanical iron arms and heavily slammed down several heavy, lead-sealed crates from the hover-car's trunk. Crates of high-purity deuterium crystals and micro-pressure life-support array components hit the ground, kicking up a large cloud of cold, pungent lead-gray dust.

"Heads of each boarding house! Bring your people over here to move these components!" Caleb raised his head and shouted roughly, his military-grade electronic prosthetic eye drawing an extremely sharp scarlet light under the pale yellow lamps. "The kid Elias and I dug up the mineral veins in the Deadzone! The air purifiers are to restart at full power right now, and double the daily ration of biological life-support gas tanks! From today on, not a single person in the Embers Camp has to fucking worry about dying of thirst or suffocating!"

This rough roar was like a ten-thousand-pound boulder dropped into a stagnant pool of dead water!

A brief, violent gasp of shock erupted from the originally despairing crowd. The mortals looked at each other, their pale eye sockets revealing unbelievable ecstasy and bewilderment. Over the past few days and nights, they had even silently divided up their final rations in their gloomy tin shacks, prepared to quietly wait for death in this forgotten corner of the Divine Court. They never expected that Elias and Caleb could actually bring back enough life resources from the depths of the peril-ridden decaying Deadzone.

Several despairing mothers even threw themselves by the lead-sealed crates, stroking the freezing yet life-breathing purifier valves, bursting into loud sobs.

However, before the mortals' cheers could fully spread, Elias, standing on the high platform atop the hover-car, slowly raised his right arm.

The plaza instantly fell back into a deathly silence.

Everyone instinctively raised their heads, looking at the boy in the bloodstained tactical cloak. The blood on Elias's cheeks had dried and congealed, drawing dark red scars. But deep in his deep, lake-green eyes, there was not the slightest ease or joy of having saved the masses. Taking its place was a bone-chilling coldness and a piercing heaviness that sent a shiver down one's spine.

Behind Elias, the astrologer Lyra bit her pale lower lip tightly, her eyes welling with tears. Her hands skillfully operated a high-dimensional holographic projector, roughly polished using optical lenses from a Deadzone warship. As she carefully sprinkled a pinch of silver dust shimmering with a faint blue light into the high-energy array lens, the high-dimensional data chains and absolute echo images decoded from the black box, accompanied by a low, high-frequency hum, were suddenly projected onto the massive scrap iron background wall of the Embers Camp!

Hum—!

An extremely blinding high-dimensional beam of light pierced the night, illuminating the entire wasteland plaza as bright as day! Even the ionized mist suspended in mid-air was briefly torn open by this high-energy beam!

On the massive scrap iron background wall appeared the true, macroscopic image of the night Tartarus was destroyed. In the unreserved holographic light and shadow, the mortals saw the ten-thousand-fathom golden holy rift forcibly tearing the sky apart. They saw Astra, the God of Light—proclaimed by the Divine Court as a "merciful savior"—arrogantly injecting oceans of holy light into the planetary core, causing the violent gravitational oscillations of the over-pressurized, collapsing core. And even more so, they saw Umbra, the God of Darkness, descending from the sky as the incarnation of the boundless, pitch-black high-dimensional law of annihilation!

The pitch-black dark energy swept past like rolling apocalyptic waves, instantly evaporating the entire bustling mining continent into microscopic, zero-dimensional ash! Countless mortals didn't even have time to utter a final moan or plea in the death-light of annihilation before they, along with their homes, their pasts, and their children, were cleanly erased by the high-and-mighty gods like wiping away a stain!

In the footage, one could clearly see the tragic details of countless mortals raising their hands high to pray to the sky, only to instantly melt into stardust!

"That's... that's our home..."

An elderly scavenger tremblingly dropped the copper bowl he used to scoop water, muddy tears mixing with the black ash on his face to form two blinding streaks of filth.

"Dear God... didn't Tartarus collapse because the planetary core naturally melted down and decayed? The proclamations descending from the Sanctum clearly said it was a natural disaster!"

"What bullshit natural disaster! What do the gods take us for? Are we worse than the mud on the ground?!"

"My daughter... my daughter was only seven! She was just waiting at the window for me to come home... and she was evaporated by that black light!"

Grief, shock, despair, and endless fury exploded rapidly among the over two hundred mortals like a madly contagious plague!

In the past, the Divine Court's totalitarian propaganda blamed all disasters and suffering in the world on the "inevitable wear and tear of order" and the "sins of mortals." Using hypocritical karma theories, they made the exploited mortals completely incapable of harboring even the slightest thought of rebellion in their despair, able only to numbly pray for the gods' forgiveness and alms. But now, the absolute truth left behind by the black box was like a red-hot blade, viciously slicing open this veil of hypocrisy covering everyone's eyes, nakedly exposing to the world the cold, arrogant, and ugly nature of the Divine Court that viewed mortals as garbage!

They saw the aloofness of the gods; they saw the cruel reality that they were disposed of at will like "computational waste"! The internal suspicion and hatred born from scarcity instantly melted away in the face of a shared, class-based blood feud!

"Everyone shut the fuck up!"

Caleb's angry roar exploded across the plaza like heavy artillery! He roughly leaped over a scrap iron crate and took a few strides onto the high platform. His military electronic prosthetic eye drew sharp, bloodshot scarlet lines in the void. "Cry! What the fuck is the use of crying?! Will crying bring back your kin who died in the death-light, or will it make the gods in the sky bestow their bullshit pity?!"

The violent roar forcefully suppressed the sobbing and clamor in the plaza. The mortals clenched their fists tightly, their eyes bloodshot as they looked at this scarred veteran on the high ground.

"Ten years ago, my mother planet was leveled just like Tartarus, using the same bullshit excuse of 'maintaining the astrolabe's balance'!"

Caleb's voice carried a heavy stench of blood and hoarseness, every word exploding from the depths of his lungs. "I was a warship's chief engineer back then. I watched my home shatter under the holy light with my own eyes! I was a coward, I was useless! I didn't even have the guts to draw my blade; I could only crawl into an escape pod like a dead dog and survive until today! I thought if I accepted my fate according to the Divine Court's rules and willingly became a scavenging cripple, I could just muddle along until I died! But the result?! Tartarus is gone too! If we continue to accept our fate here, in five days, everyone will suffocate in these tin shacks like dogs!"

Caleb reached out his thick, steel mechanical arm and smashed it heavily against his own metal chest, emitting a clanging, ear-piercing crash of metal. "I don't want to survive like a dog waiting to die anymore! If I'm going to die, I'm going to bite a piece of meat off the gods before I do!"

"Bite the gods' meat off!"

"Rebel! Fight these high-and-mighty dog gods to the death!"

"Count me in! I'd rather die than be waste material!"

The mortal fury suppressed for eras completely and violently erupted at this moment! The soundwaves shook the anti-radiation armor on the hover-car, causing it to hum continuously!

Elias slowly stepped up beside Caleb.

The boy's posture was as straight as a pine. His gaze passed over the madly shouting crowd, calmly and coldly falling on the face of every mortal in the camp.

"The Divine Court views us as waste and garbage because, in the past, we only knew how to wail and beg for mercy." Elias's voice was low, yet it carried a heavy power that struck the soul. "But from today on, the Embers Camp is no longer a dead corner for refugees."

He slowly drew the heavy, serrated industrial cutting knife from his waist. The blade flashed with a sharp, cold gleam under the pale yellow lights:

"We will use the scrap copper and rotten iron discarded by the gods to arm ourselves! We will use high-energy waste ore and electromagnetic coils to forge weapons capable of tearing apart the gods' shields! We will let every god above the heavens know—mortal blood and lives are absolutely not data that can be erased at will!"

"From now on, in the name of the Mortal Vanguard, we swear our oath—this isn't an official military formation, but a battle flag to gather all the mortals on the wasteland who refuse to kneel. Once we truly tear a hole in the Divine Court's astrolabe, then we'll talk about formations and designations!"

"Mortal Vanguard!"

"Mortal Vanguard!"

"Blood for blood! Slay the gods to the end!"

The fanatical, freezing shouts echoed madly in the wasteland's night sky, breaking the silence of this forgotten Deadzone that had lasted for eras! The mortals' eyes changed; their original numbness and dead ashes completely vanished, replaced by a fanatical faith thoroughly ignited by a shared blood feud and the hope for survival!

Deep in the shadows on the outskirts of the crowd.

"Vespera," wearing a rough cloth dress, leaned quietly against an abandoned utility pole, her thin dress fluttering slightly in the biting night wind.

The high-and-mighty God of Darkness, Umbra, coldly observed this fanatical rally initiated by low-dimensional mortals.

Under the Divine Court's totalitarian governance system of tens of millions of years, what the high-dimensional rulers disdained the most was the "emotion" and "sympathy" between mortals. In the face of an absolute gap in power, the anger of a mob usually only triggered chaotic disorder and self-destruction.

However, in this rally before her eyes, that off-track boy named Elias used an extremely cold, precise method to forge the pervasive grief and despair into an incomparably solid chain of conviction, tightly locking these two hundred mortals—who were originally harboring their own selfish and cowardly thoughts—together.

"Using hatred as a bond, reconstructing decaying waste into sharp weapons..." Deep in Umbra's eyes, the high-dimensional dark gleam flickered slightly. "This class cohesion that breaks the order of the astrolabe's algorithms... is indeed interesting. Perhaps mortals, creatures dominated by low-dimensional emotions, truly can tear open a future in the dead corners that even the gods cannot predict."

She felt the scalding, pure killing intent from the depths of Elias's soul continuously transmitting through the "karmic buffer" within her.

That wasn't blind fury, but an ultimate resolve that gambled all hope and future on the edge of a blade. That scorching heat interwoven with body temperature and obsession, once again rippled through the secret channel, spreading an unerasable, faint ripple in the deepest depths of her freezing divine core.

The night grew deeper, and fury howled and burned in the chest of every mortal in the Embers Camp. The clanging of hammers striking metal and the electrical sparks of welding began to light up in the dark night like stars. And this mortal spark of rebellion, quietly struck in the dead corner of the night, was about to whip up the first destructive, violent storm across the Divine Court's freezing astrolabe.