Chapter 42 — An Alliance Across Species

Wasteland Camp of the Blind Spot, in the most remote metal-plate protective shed.

The air was thick with the pungent smell of waste-lead dust and the sour scent of neutralizer. Orion was laid flat on a medical platform welded from broken spaceship steel plates, his tall, imposing body making the makeshift steel bed creak under his weight. Although a thick waste-lead blocking blanket still draped loosely over his lower half to ensure his divine energy fluctuations wouldn't dissipate outside the blind spot, the crisscrossing wounds on his bare, bronze chest were still shocking to behold.

The young astrologer Lyra stood by his side, her hands covered in silver ointment and sparkling star-marrow powder. Her slightly messy black hair was tied back casually with a rubber band, fine beads of sweat seeping from her forehead. Her little canine tooth, usually prone to joking, bit down tightly on her lower lip. Frowning her delicate eyebrows, she carefully applied the prepared neutralizing mud onto the wounds that were deep enough to show bone.

"Elias, his divine physical structure is completely different from us mortals." Lyra turned her head and looked somewhat defeated at the blond boy who pushed the door open to enter. "Our antibiotics and sutures have absolutely no effect on him. His wounds are rejecting any low-dimensional physical medium. As soon as the ointment touches them, it gets evaporated into exhaust gas by the causality rejection mechanism operating automatically within his divine body. I can only use the trace amounts of star-marrow powder left in the remnants of his clothes, mix it with anti-phase waste-lead powder, and forcefully paste it over those shattered divine markings to barely stop the divine blood from continuing to vaporize. If his divine core circuits cannot complete their physical self-healing within the next three physical days, he will die from the desiccation of his divinity."

Elias stepped forward and looked down at the heavily breathing demigod on the platform, whose eyes were half-closed. The Orion tattoo on Orion's collarbone was currently like a red-hot piece of charcoal, radiating a dim crimson heat, slightly scorching the waste-lead powder pasted around it. Although that high-dimensional vibration was weak, it carried a searing heat that made one's skin sting.

"He is tougher than we thought," Elias said in a low voice. As he spoke, he reached out and gently pressed the edge of the medical platform. Through that cold steel plate, he could faintly feel the intense, struggling rhythm, like a trapped beast chained to death in an abyss, frantically slamming against the bars of destiny.

At this moment, a noisy commotion faintly drifted in from outside the protective shed. The whispered conversations of the mortal warriors filtered through the crude tin plate walls.

"Did you hear? That monster they carried back from outside... it bleeds pale golden blood!" "That's a god of the Heavenly Court! Is Elias crazy? He actually dared to carry one of those demons who slaughtered us into the camp to care for it!" "He's going to get us all killed! Once the Aries Lord's battlecruisers lock onto us by following the scent of divine blood, we won't even know how we died!"

Those low, terrified mortal whispers, laced with despair, passed through the cracks and drifted clearly into the shed. Every single word was like a heavy block of iron, pressing down on veteran Caleb's already painfully taut nerves.

"But he is also a massive problem!" The door curtain was roughly pushed aside, and veteran Caleb walked in, his face covered in frost. His mechanical eye emitted a harsh sound of grinding gears, displaying its owner's extremely irritable mood at this moment. "Elias, the morale of the Vanguard is already scattering! A few squad leaders from the First Assault Company just came to me jointly. They heard we carried back a living 'god with golden blood', and now everyone is going crazy! They were just slaughtered like bugs by divine envoys in the mine purge not long ago, and after finally escaping into the blind spot, you've now brought their nightmare directly into the camp!"

Caleb's steps were extremely heavy in the cramped protective shed. He stared dead into Elias's lake-green eyes, his voice sounding somewhat hoarse from being deliberately lowered: "We are resisting, but resistance does not equal suicide! The Aries Lord's fleet could lock onto us at any time. Once this demigod's divine marking energy surges for even a few microseconds, the Star-network's algorithm will bite onto it like a hound! You must give everyone an explanation, otherwise, we won't have to wait for the Divine Court to attack, the camp will collapse from within first!"

Facing the veteran's overwhelming pressure, Elias stood by the medical platform, his figure unmoving. His handsome yet callused face was as calm as a deep pool without ripples.

"Caleb, do you think that even if we throw him out, the Divine Court won't come?" Elias spoke slowly, his steady voice making the restless air in the shed sink slightly. "Lyra, project the astrolabe scanning frequencies from the last twelve physical hours."

Lyra froze for a moment, then quickly lit up the holographic projection screen next to her.

The screen displayed an orbital trajectory of the star sector outlined in dark red lines, and on the periphery of the blind spot, several massive and bright scarlet physical nodes were wedged tightly like nails into the only three remaining physical jump channels of the blind spot.

"These are... the frequencies of the main battlecruisers of Aries?" Caleb's mechanical eye instantly shrank to a tiny point.

"Correct." Elias pointed at those scarlet nodes and said coldly, "Twenty-seven heavy battlecruisers, forty-six rapid reconnaissance carriers. They have already started locking down all the exits of the blind spot. The Aries Lord is not here for this demigod at all; they are here to execute the Inner Cabinet's blockade order because a Null Error appeared on the Star-network. Even if we cut off Orion's head right now and hang it on the ruins, the main cannons of those twenty-seven battlecruisers will still evaporate this blind spot all the same."

Caleb fell silent. The knuckles of his mechanical arm cracked loudly, and the muscles on his rough face twitched fiercely a few times. "Since it's death either way, what can keeping him change?"

"He can tell us the formation flaws of these twenty-seven battlecruisers, he can tell us the energy cycle of the Divine Court's high-tier fleets, and he can tell us about that unknown political rift within the Divine Court." Elias's voice wasn't loud, but every word struck solid ground.

Just then, Orion on the platform suddenly let out a low sneer.

He slowly opened his eyes, a glint of approval flashing in those pupils as bright as the morning star. He struggled to sit up, the heavy waste-lead blanket slipping from his scarred, bronze chest, revealing the Orion tattoo burning like magma on his collarbone.

"Interesting, mortal boy." Orion panted, his mouth splitting into a wild and arrogant curve. "You have much more brains than those Chief Gods in the heavenly realm who only know how to stare blankly at astrolabes. That Aries Lord, that crude warlord with a brain full of magma, doesn't care at all about the data anomaly of a Null Error. The reason he pulled his main battleships over to blockade the blind spot so quickly is because he is afraid his scandal will be exposed."

"Scandal?" Elias's eyes narrowed.

"Hmph, that crude Aries Lord has been secretly intercepting the [High-Density High-Dimensional Star-Marrow Ore] produced in the Tartarus mining area for the past hundred years." Orion sneered. "He secretly hid these minerals in his own treasury, using them to secretly expand his own private army. He kept this matter hidden from God King Jupiter of the Divine Court Inner Cabinet and the Lord of the 6th House, Asclepius. That divine envoy Gar you butchered earlier was sent by him, overstepping his authority, to the blind spot to find the 'black box' that recorded the ironclad evidence of his accounts. Once that black box falls into the hands of those civilian bureaucrats of the 6th House Lord Asclepius, the Aries Lord will face being stripped of his divine core and impeached for heavy crimes. That's why he didn't hesitate to mobilize the entire Sky Sentinel fleet to silence everyone at all costs. If you want to live, there are interest rifts between him and the Divine Court civilian officials all over the iron net of those twenty-seven battlecruisers."

Orion caught his breath and continued, "Among those twenty-seven battlecruisers, three are the escort shield ships of the Aries Lord's direct flagship, the 'Golden Ram Imperator'. Their defense circuits use the resonance frequency of the 11th House Sky Sentinel. As long as you can melt down the gravity gun circuit of that Gar you killed and make anti-phase polarized shells, I can point out the energy nodes of those three shield ships for you on the battlefield. As long as you knock them out, the Aries blockade cage will leak a physical loophole."

"Resonance frequency?" Lyra, standing to the side, suddenly took a step forward. A bright light flashed in her clear, watery eyes, her fingertips dancing rapidly on the holograph beside her. "If it's based on the frequency of the 11th House Sky Sentinel, then its shield does indeed have a physical anti-phase trough! When I dismantled the wreckage of Gar's gravity gun earlier, I found a set of unactivated polarization resonance grids in its crystal core. If we melt that thing down, combined with the waste star-marrow slag we collected earlier, we can absolutely manage to manufacture 'anti-phase polarized shells' capable of neutralizing that kind of shield before the battle starts! This is technically feasible!"

Caleb's mechanical eye stared at Orion, then at the excited Lyra, his tone still holding suspicion: "Why should we trust you? You are a god, and we are mortals. In your eyes, we are nothing but 'fuel' to keep the astrolabe running."

Hearing the word "fuel," an extremely terrifying, scarlet killing intent suddenly erupted in Orion's bright eyes. His tall body leaned forward slightly, his wild aura instantly dragging down the temperature of the entire protective shed by a few degrees. "Fuel? The Heavenly Court treats us demigods with mortal bloodlines like dogs, locking my body in a death tribulation to torture me for a hundred years! My Sea God bloodline and human bloodline fight against that damn star-track law every single day! If I can twist off the Aries Lord's head and smash it on the big desk in God King Jupiter's assembly hall, I don't mind betting this broken life on the ship of you mortals!"

In the protective shed, for a moment, only Orion's heavy panting and the hissing of the waste-lead neutralizer remained.

Elias looked at this demigod, who was covered in wounds yet still brimming with overwhelming battle intent, and slowly extended his callused right hand.

"An alliance across species." Elias said plainly. "We help you get your revenge, and you help us live on."

Orion stared at that mortal's right hand, seeing the calluses and scars on it. He suddenly burst into loud laughter, the laughter tugging at his wounds and making him bare his teeth, but he still extended that steel hand covered in golden divine blood, clasping it heavily with Elias's.

"Deal, god-slaying boy." Orion grinned.

And in the darkest corner of the protective shed, the secret follower Vespera (Umbra), who had been standing quietly like an inanimate object all along, was calmly watching all this with her beautiful violet eyes.

The moment Orion shook hands with Elias, his body suddenly stiffened inexplicably. His keen, high-dimensional divine intuition was frantically blaring alarms at him at this moment, as if in that corner, under the dim light, lurked some taboo far beyond his realm of understanding. It was an indescribable, yet instinctively trembling oppressive feeling on his divine core—cold, dead-silent, boundless.

He subconsciously turned his head to look at Vespera, his pupils abruptly shrinking to the size of pinpricks.

However, Vespera only met his gaze coldly. There were no ripples in her profound violet eyes, but they carried an unquestionable warning of death, like an invisible, icy hand dead-pressing all the probing ripples deep within his divine core.

A layer of cold sweat seeped out on Orion's forehead, and he felt a chill shoot up his spine. He calmly withdrew his gaze, dead-pressing this astonishingly horrifying discovery into the deepest part of his divine core, not daring to utter even half an extra word. He was arrogant, but definitely not stupid. That mortal woman without a single trace of divine power fluctuation was absolutely the most untouchable taboo existence in the entire universe.

The secrets and perils hidden inside this seemingly dilapidated mortal camp, teetering in the radiation storms, were ten thousand times more terrifying than what he had previously imagined in the heavenly realm.

Elias withdrew his right hand, looking at the somewhat absent-minded, sweating Orion. Thinking he was just physically weak due to his severe injuries, Elias turned his head to Lyra and said: "Lyra, I'll leave this to you. Do your best to stabilize the state of his divine core. Caleb, let's go. Inform Barnaby of the Heavy Equipment Department to immediately begin smelting the spoils of war and prepare to cast prototype warheads specifically targeting the Aries escort shield ships. Time is running short; the vanguard army's net has been cast, and we must sharpen our knives faster before they haul it in."

Veteran Caleb gave a solemn response, a resolute red glint flashing in his mechanical eye. The two of them lifted the door curtain shoulder-to-shoulder, braving the biting cold wasteland wind and sand outside the camp, and strode towards the lower casting cabin. In the dark corner behind them, Vespera (Umbra) also followed them out silently, leaving only the demigod Orion, wrapped in a lead blanket, staring somewhat distractedly at the ceiling in the dim, cold shed.