Chapter 45 — Wavering Before the Dead End

Wasteland Camp of the Blind Spot, dusk.

The sky took on a suffocating dark lead color, the aftershocks of high-dimensional gravitational waves stirring up faint polarized halos in the air. At the edge of the horizon, in that once-empty dead corner of deep space, the engine exhaust ports of twenty-seven heavy battlecruisers were glowing with cold, scarlet light. Although tens of thousands of physical units away, that icy killing intent from the Divine Court's regular army had already locked onto the sky above the wasteland, inch by inch, like a heavy iron net.

Inside the makeshift assembly hall converted from the main control cabin, the air was terrifyingly stifling.

Around the rough magma-rock table crowded the cadres of various ranks of the Vanguard and representatives of the miners. On the dim holographic projection, the three jump channels dead-locked by those scarlet nodes monitored by Lyra were flashing with glaring light. Every pulse felt like a noose tightening around everyone's necks.

"We have absolutely no chance of winning!"

A despairing low roar broke the silence. The speaker was Jonas, a platoon leader of the First Assault Company. This man, who had struggled his way out from a dead mining planet in the Sixth Star Zone, was deathly pale at this moment. His callused hands were gripping the edge of the stone table dead tight, black machine oil still lodged under his fingernails. "That is the regular army! It's the Aries Lord's direct flagship 'Golden Ram Imperator' and twenty-seven heavy battlecruisers! What do we have? A few dismantled electromagnetic rifles, a few thousand rounds of scrap iron that can't even pierce the skin of a divine core, and that fallen demigod who can't even walk steadily! What are we supposed to use to fight the divine soldier legion? This isn't resistance; this is mass suicide!"

As his voice fell, a suppressed chorus of agreement immediately sounded in the assembly hall.

"Yeah, Jonas is right. We followed the Supreme Commander to rebel against the divine envoy back then to survive, not to clash head-on with an entire divine soldier fleet!"

"If we just hand over that bleeding demigod Orion right now, and push the responsibility of beheading Gar onto him... maybe the Divine Court will be lenient? Aren't they at odds with the Aries Lord? We can pledge loyalty to the Lord of the 6th House. Going back to digging ore is better than being evaporated by a law cannon!"

Terror spread through the crowd, rapidly corroding the originally coarse and resolute battle intent like a plague. When facing incomprehensible, absolute mighty power, the first thought that arises in a human mind is never resistance, but self-rationalizing submission. They would rather return to those dark mine shafts and continue being karma batteries than be burned into nothingness by high-dimensional energy on this desolate wasteland.

Veteran Caleb stood on one side of the stone table, his expression terrifyingly gloomy. His mechanical eye flickered violently with a piercing red glow, the sour sound of the internal gears grinding exceptionally clear in the silent cabin. He did not speak out to reprimand these wavering subordinates, because he himself knew clearly that every single word Jonas said was an irrefutable physical fact. The chasm of power between mortals and gods was not something that could be filled by mere hot blood.

And in the deepest shadows, Vespera (Umbra), wearing her dark grey trench coat, leaned quietly against the tin wall. Her eyes hidden beneath the hood gleamed with a cold violet light in the dimness, like a cold-blooded bystander, silently calculating the countdown to the self-collapse of these low-dimensional ants facing a dead end.

In her divine logic, this scene was truly far too common. When facing the absolute law suppression of the astrolabe, all low-dimensional lifeforms would display this ugly instinct—wavering, infighting, begging for forgiveness, and even betraying their own kind. This was exactly the foundation for her insistence on "silencing and termination." These forcibly patched-up lives never grew true backbones to begin with; their survival was nothing but a chronic death window-dressed as peace.

She looked at Elias.

This blond boy was sitting quietly on a wooden crate at this moment. He wasn't sharpening his knife, just lowering his head, looking at the extremely thin wisp of dark matter embers passed into him by Vespera in the medical cabin on his fingertip. That black ember had completely melted beneath his skin, faintly rippling with a cold and hidden fluctuation as he breathed.

"Are you done talking?"

Elias slowly raised his head. His voice wasn't loud, but that calm and steady tone instantly suppressed all the noise and clamor in the assembly hall.

He stood up, walked to the holographic projection, and pointed his index finger at those three scarlet nodes representing death.

"Jonas, and all of you who want to surrender to the Divine Court Inner Cabinet. I only want to ask you one thing." Elias's lake-green eyes calmly swept over every terrified mortal face. "Do you think the Aries Lord's twenty-seven battlecruisers sealed this blind spot tight as an iron cage just to catch a fleeing demigod, or to punish a mortal who killed Gar?"

The crowd looked at each other, no one able to answer.

"Wrong." Elias tapped lightly on the holographic screen, enlarging the gravity amplitude guidance map of those three scarlet nodes. "Look at the frequencies of these gravity scans. They are weaving a high-intensity 'law purification field' on the periphery of the blind spot. A purification field means that no matter if what's inside is human, god, or scrap iron, the moment the purification ring is activated, all physical structures will instantly be dissociated into high-micro-particle vapor."

"The black box of accounts regarding the Aries Lord's embezzlement of the star-marrow divine ore is right here in this blind spot. To him, once this black box leaks, he will face joint impeachment and stripping of his rank by the Divine Court Inner Cabinet. Do you think a warlord Lord who values his divine core as his life would spare our lives to act as witnesses for the Lord of the 6th House just to save a few rounds of law cannon fire?"

Elias's voice abruptly lowered, revealing an icy coldness like a sharp blade scraping across ice: "The Divine Court's Star-network system does not recognize the word 'surrender'. In their astrolabe algorithms, we people do not even count as registered lives. We are merely a 'Null Error'—an invalid overflow in the system, data impurities that must be erased immediately. Even if you kneel on the deck of the Golden Ram Imperator and smash your heads open on the steel plates, the main cannons of Aries will still scatter your ashes into the void all the same."

The assembly hall instantly fell into a deathly silence.

Jonas's throat bobbed, his chapped lips trembling slightly: "Then... then can we only wait for death? Surrendering is death, fighting is death... Those are twenty-seven heavy battlecruisers! Supreme Commander, why do you think we can escape from the muzzles of the divine soldiers with these few modified guns? This completely defies basic mechanical logic!"

"Because this is not suicide, but a precise breakout with a winning probability of over seventy percent."

Elias took a step and walked in front of the holographic projection. He raised his head, and in those lake-green eyes, there was no empty fanaticism, only clear rationality as cold as ice, which conversely gave the terrified waverers a rare sense of security.

"Look at the screen, everyone." Elias extended his finger, tracing out an extending green trajectory on the holographic map. "First, the Aries Lord is deploying his private army, not the joint fleet of the Divine Court Inner Cabinet. In order to conceal his black accounts of embezzling the divine ore, he absolutely dares not report this purge to the Central Astrolabe. This means he does not have the star-track enhancement of the heavenly Chief Gods, nor does he have the direct dimensional-reduction strikes of the law edicts. What we are facing is just a conventional fleet navigating in physical space."

"Second, we don't need to clash head-on with these twenty-seven battlecruisers; that would indeed be throwing our lives away. Our true targets are only the three 'Aries-class Escort Shield Ships' at the very edge of the blockade net. These three shield ships are the physical netting anchor points supporting the entire high-dimensional gravity lock. Orion has already confirmed to me that these three shield ships, at the instant their orbits intersect and their polarized beam deflection angles overlap, will generate a microsecond-level frequency collision dead corner. The prototype shells in our hands are the specially made lead blocks to smash this resonance core."

He took a step forward, his gaze blazing like a torch, staring dead at Jonas and those wavering warriors: "As long as we pierce through those three shield ships, the entire blockade cage will physically leak a massive gap. At that time, we can take our supplies and everyone and break out of the blind spot, heading for the black market star sector of Taurus! That is the grey area where the Divine Court's law control is the weakest, and it is also the only passage where we can survive!"

He looked around, a wild and resolute sneer appearing on his handsome face, his voice like wildfire instantly spreading through dry grass:

"When I escaped from the destroyed Tartarus, I was left with only half a pendant and my life. I never expected to live to this day. And you, too, barely managed to take root in this radiated wasteland amidst the oppression and purges of the Divine Court's various mining planets. Every single one of us has the iron-nature washed by strong radiation in our bones."

"The Divine Court doesn't treat us as lives; we are just 'Null Error' code loopholes in their star-track algorithms. Have you ever seen a programmer negotiate with a loophole in the system, or make way for it? They will only press the delete key. To survive, the only way is to become a hard iron nail that jams the gears of their Star-network dead!"

"Either obediently wait for death here, waiting for their purification field to evaporate us into undignified smoke; or pick up your crowbars and electromagnetic guns, follow me to smash those three shield ships, and go to the Taurus black market to live on."

Elias abruptly drew the broken knife, chopping it heavily on the edge of the magma-rock table in front of him, sending stone chips flying. A wild, extremely cold color ignited in his lake-green eyes as he roared in a low voice:

"The path is right here. Whether to walk it or not, choose for yourselves!"

This low roar was like a heavy hammer falling on an anvil.

Those originally numb and terrified mortal warriors, looking at the clear and explicit survival probability line on the holographic screen, and then looking at the deep mark chopped by Elias's blade, instantly felt the long-suppressed humiliation and anger in their chests erupt like a volcano. Jonas gritted his teeth until they bled, slamming his fist heavily on his breastplate, emitting a deafening muffled sound of metal:

"Fuck surrendering! I won't be smoke! Supreme Commander, I'm doing this with you! Pierce through Aries's bullshit blockade line!"

"Pierce through the blockade line! Live on!"

Dozens of mortal platoon leaders struck their chests simultaneously, the clashing sound of metal iron armor converging into a violent, muffled thunder that exploded within the main control cabin. The morale of the rebel army, which had been on the verge of turning cold and scattering, was completely and dead-tightly welded together at this moment by this calm, rational, yet wild obsession with survival.

And in the deepest shadows, Vespera (Umbra) silently watched all this.

She looked at that boy who was somewhat dazzling in the firelight, looking at that thin body that seemed capable of bearing the karmic weight of tens of thousands. She discovered for the first time that those violet eyes of hers, which could see through all trajectories of life, were actually unable to clearly see the true limits of this mortal soul.

The causality within his body was frantically self-burning and aggregating in the blind spot in a way that the astrolabe completely could not quantify.

Pierce through the heavens, hm...

The corners of her mouth beneath the hood gently lifted into an extremely hidden smile carrying a hint of madness and amusement.

Then I will watch from the dark, mortal. See if this insignificant iron knife of yours can really cut a bleeding wound into that hypocritical golden starry sky.