Chapter 40 — The Calm Before the War
Chapter 40 — The Calm Before the War
Tartarus Radiation Blind Spot, Deep within the Wasteland Camp.
This night was quieter than any night before.
Starting three days ago, Lyra had monitored minute changes in the high-micro-particle radiation field at the periphery of the blind spot—those were the gravitational ripples produced when large fleets' high-dimensional engines propelled themselves in the distance, like the low tremors transmitting through the water before ocean waves reached the shore. Not easy to perceive, but very real.
She had already reported this data to Elias.
Elias hadn't said anything. He merely nodded, returned to his spot huddled in the shadow of the rock wall, and began to sharpen his knife.
The camp's bonfire burned with low, orange-red flames, casting interplay of light and dark upon the rough wasteland rock walls.
The camp wasn't large, but since Elias and veteran Caleb had led everyone to retreat into the blind spot, it had gradually taken on the appearance of a true "camp." From initially not even having a shed to block the wind and rain, to now having a makeshift bivouac area, emergency food storage, and sentry observation posts built from waste lead boxes and broken armor plates, this place was condensed from everything constructed by everyone using the crudest materials and the most vigorous will to survive.
There were living people here. People who still wanted to continue living on the wasteland.
Elias sat on a rock at the outermost edge of the bonfire, his legs slightly bent. His right hand held the knife hilt, his left hand held a whetstone peeled from a piece of old armor plating, and he sharpened the cutting knife that had never left his waist since he entered the blind spot, stroke by stroke.
The friction between the metal and the whetstone was very low, but in this silent camp night, every sound was heard clearly.
His movements in sharpening the knife were very slow, very focused, as if he were doing something extremely important.
In fact, it was.
This knife had accompanied him to survive in the wasteland for a long time. He had used it to cut ore, to sever wires, to slash through the armor of Divine Envoy Gar during that confrontation that shook the entire Sky Sentinel fortress, and he had used it to recover his calm at every life-and-death juncture—it was not just a weapon, but the way he gripped this world.
He sharpened it slowly, without speaking.
Most of the other people in the camp had already entered dormancy—these miners who had survived the lowest-level camps of the blind spot wasteland possessed the ability to fall asleep anytime, anywhere, because sleep was the cheapest way to recover in this world. From the casting cabin side, the low sound of old craftsman Barnaby's hammer still drifted over occasionally. He was always the last person to stop working. Even on the eve of battle, he was still checking the weld seams of every prototype warhead, running his callused hands over the contours of the projectiles over and over again.
Lyra was guarding the Orbit-breaking Astrolabe at her post. She hadn't changed shifts for two rotations now, but Elias knew she wouldn't volunteer to rest, at least not until the peripheral ripples disappeared.
Every single one of them was dealing with this matter in their own way.
Elias sharpened for even longer.
Sometimes he would think of Aira—his sister's face, that face that evaporated in the final light of Tartarus.
He didn't recall it every time, because things like memories gradually blurred in extremely high-pressure survival states—not forgetting, but the brain would automatically press the heaviest things into the deepest parts, because if one thought about it every day, they wouldn't be able to keep doing things.
But on quiet nights like this, when the movements in his hands became slow and even enough, that face would slowly float up from the deepest depths.
Aira wasn't afraid of death. Her personality was softer than his, but her core was harder than he thought. He remembered the last time she looked back at him, in the deepest part of the mine shaft, in the moment before the high-dimensional storm arrived. There was no fear in her eyes, only a calm, comforting something, as if to say: You go, you go and live, that is enough.
He didn't get away. He ran, but he didn't save her.
He survived, but he didn't know if that was the right thing.
He just knew, he couldn't just live like this.
He had to do something she would never have the chance to see with her own eyes—he was going to make those divine officials of the Divine Court, those things sitting in high-dimensional palaces treating mortals as fuel and ore, face what they had done.
On the other side of the bonfire, a little further away.
A black silhouette leaned against a makeshift wall stacked from waste lead boxes, arms crossed, the hood pulled down slightly, seemingly ready to fall asleep from boredom at any moment.
But her eyes were open.
Violet pupils, quietly resting on the knife-sharpening boy at the boundary between the firelight and the pitch-blackness of the blind spot.
The God of Darkness, Umbra—currently lurking in the camp under the identity of Vespera—had leaned in this position for nearly half a physical hour.
She hadn't slept. Nor was she contemplating any profound questions. She was just... looking.
She observed his speed—stable, even, without the impatience of emotional fluctuation, nor the numbness of mechanical repetition. Every sharpening stroke carried a clear-headed focus, the posture of a person who truly understood what they were doing.
This mortal boy's way of sharpening a knife—she couldn't find a suitable word to describe it. She could only say that his manner made her feel a certain something she had almost forgotten in her long divine age: a solemnity toward the act of living itself.
He knew there might be war ahead.
He knew that with their current strength, any battlecruiser from Aries could physically evaporate all of them.
He also knew that if that day came, the knife in his hand was essentially a bamboo skewer in a war of that magnitude.
But he was still sharpening it.
Umbra's gaze lingered on his knife-sharpening hands for a long time.
The night wind blew in from the depths of the blind spot, carrying the faint sulfur scent unique to the radiated wasteland, tilting the flames of the bonfire a few degrees.
Veteran Caleb walked out of the bivouac shed, holding half a block of hard synthetic food refined from high-energy slag, chewing as he walked toward Elias, plonking his butt down on the rock next to him.
"Still not sleeping?" Caleb broke off a piece of the synthetic food and handed it to Elias.
Elias took it, took a bite, and continued sharpening his knife. "Can't sleep."
"There's movement on the periphery," Caleb said, his tone flat, as if talking about the weather. "I saw the monitoring data from Lyra's end too."
Elias nodded.
"The ripples of high-dimensional engines are getting closer and closer to us." Caleb chewed his food, silent for a moment. "What's your plan?"
Elias stopped sharpening, placed the whetstone on the rock next to him, turned the knife over in the firelight, and checked the reflection on the blade. The edge was even, the curve standard, with no chips.
"First, move all supplies deeper into the blind spot," Elias began, his tone calm, as if he had been thinking about it for a long time. "Clean up the traces on the periphery. Have Lyra continue monitoring; the change in direction of the high-dimensional ripples will let us determine the fleet's line of advance. Over at Barnaby's, put all the cast prototype shells into storage, ready for battle."
"And then?"
"And then..." Elias sheathed his knife, "Wait. See their speed of entry, judge whether their intent is comprehensive purification or reconnaissance. If it's reconnaissance, we have a window; if it's comprehensive purification..."
He didn't finish the sentence.
Caleb finished chewing the synthetic food and didn't press for that unfinished ending. He just patted Elias's shoulder and stood up:
"Alright, go to sleep early after you finish sharpening. A clear head is more important than anything."
Elias looked up at him, a rare trace of warmth in his eyes: "Got it, Caleb."
The veteran's figure submerged back into the darkness of the shed.
The camp quieted down.
The flames of the bonfire grew lower and lower, the orange-red halo gradually shrinking, ultimately leaving only a ring of residual warmth from the dark red coals.
Elias remained sitting in his original spot, not moving.
His gaze fell on the sheathed knife in his hand, pausing for a long time.
Then he raised his head and looked at the night sky of the blind spot.
This starry sky was special. After Tartarus fell silent, this region was wiped of normal star-track calculations by Umbra's dark lunar eclipse, so the starry sky here was not rendered by the LinBoo Astrolabe—it was not that picture of perfect order meticulously arranged by the Divine Court, but a real, chaotic, primitive starry sky without any destiny trajectory markings.
No one could read any prophecies of fate from the starry sky here.
Perhaps, this was the reason they were still alive.
In the shadows in the distance, Umbra saw him lift his head, saw him looking at that dead-silent starry sky that was extremely familiar to her, and saw a microscopic curve appear at the corner of his mouth, one that only an extremely careful observer could detect.
It wasn't a smile. It was something more complex than a smile.
Deep within her heart, in some corner she hadn't opened for a long time, a subtle, indescribable change occurred.
She was an absolute logician. She had seen countless mortals over her long divine age—she had seen heroes, cowards, devout believers, and absolute nihilists; she had seen miners draw knives on their own brothers for a breath of gas, and she had seen old people give their last remaining resources to a stranger in their final moments. In her analytical system, mortals were a "highly predictable species"—their behavior could almost be accurately predicted given a large enough sample size and a precise enough astrolabe model. Therefore, she could carry out the act of "silencing": not because she was cold, but because she calculated the result, and merely executed it.
But this boy named Elias caused a deviation in her prediction model every single time. This deviation was absolutely not the extreme error produced by violent emotional fluctuations, but the kind of microscopic deviation that made precise high-dimensional instruments emit an extremely faint, slight hum.
The ossification of the Divine Court wasn't a matter of a day or two. Umbra knew very well that the Divine Court needed major surgery. This boy might just be the sharpest scalpel.
In her divine logic, this was neither noble heroism, nor absolutely the optimal rational survival strategy.
But for some reason, under these exact circumstances, it paradoxically revealed an unbelievable "rightness."
She was very unaccustomed to expressing things with vague emotional inclinations like "a feeling of rightness," which completely deviated from the coldness and rigorous rationality she had always prided herself on as the Proxy of Darkness. This extremely subtle wavering made her a little irritable, but it also caused her divine core, after being dormant for several epochs, to experience a nearly novel, peculiar tactile sensation for the first time.
She didn't speak, but merely retreated her body further into the shadows.
She just gently pulled down the edge of her hood again, thoroughly hiding those beautiful eyes glowing with violet light into the darkness, allowing that slightly scrutinizing and probing gaze to continue resting quietly on that blond boy under the cold wasteland night.
This abandoned blind spot wasteland, the last night before the war, quietly burned in the last wisp of ashes of the bonfire in this slow and heavy manner, and then completely extinguished.
All the miners and warriors in the camp knew clearly that when the faint light of dawn pierced through this radioactive dust fog, the shadow of war would likely arrive right on schedule.
But at least on this special late night, no destructive major event happened.
In this dead corner thoroughly cut off by the Divine Court and almost isolated from the laws of the universe, the fact that nothing happened was in itself an unaskable luxury. And to that Supreme God of Darkness leaning against the waste lead boxes, drawing her cold gaze deep into her hood, having such a faint mortal flame to gaze at on this cold, silent night... perhaps it wasn't a completely unendurable thing either.
There was only the distant sound of mechanical repairs and the breathing nearby in the camp. Everything waited in this silent darkness for the next violent swing of destiny's pendulum.