Chapter 46 — Constructing the Position

Night enveloped the blind spot, but the surroundings of the Ember Camp were brightly lit.

Dozens of modified heavy industrial welding machines sprayed out glaring ghost-blue arcs, leaving fleeting silhouettes amidst the rough mine rock walls and scrap iron mountains. The air was thick with the pungent smell of melting metal and the sour white mist of evaporating coolant. The warriors of the Mortal Vanguard were driving clunky forklifts, transporting tons of scrap steel plates and lead-skin slag to the camp's only entrance pass. This narrow grand canyon, flanked by two towering volcanic rock walls, was the final defense line blocking the Aries Vanguard's ground armored troops.

On those cliffs covered in high-dimensional radiation and electromagnetic distortion, the miners used thick cables and steel ropes to hoist the heavy defensive armor plates piece by piece. Manual hydraulic push rods operated strenuously amid harsh frictional sounds, mixed with the sour grinding of transmission chain gears, echoing in the vast valley. Everyone was plastered with sweat and red dust, but under the flickering ghost-blue arcs, not a single person stopped what they were doing.

Under a boulder bunker at the pass, a few people were gathered around a makeshift shock-proof holographic map spread on an iron box.

Orion's chest, covered with lead paste, looked somewhat grey under the welding firelight. He held a broken heavy gear transmission shaft in his hand, heavily drawing several overlapping circular magnetic field rings on the rough dirt floor: "The Aries Lord's vanguard is not those low-tier divine envoys with rusted brains. They are the sharp blade of the Aries Legion, the death squads that always lead the charge in the wars of the gods. What they are best at is a 'net-casting formation' woven by gravity rays. Their automated sentinels and assault heavy armors have extremely strong coordination. Once they lock onto your coordinates, they will apply three to five times the heavy-load gravity above your heads through the gravity anchoring of the high-altitude flagship. At that time, your internal organs will instantly be crushed by your own weight; you won't even have the strength to lift a rifle, and can only be evaporated in place by high-temperature rays."

"Gravity anchoring requires direct irradiation from the orbital channel, right?" Elias's finger lightly swiped over a projection representing the narrow, long fissure in the middle section of the grand canyon. His blond hair was covered in coarse red gravel, but those lake-green eyes remained snow-bright and calm in the faint red light.

"Exactly, high-dimensional projection requires a precise angle of incidence." Orion tapped the iron box with the transmission shaft, emitting crisp metallic clinks. "The automated fire control core of the divine soldiers is essentially a predictive algorithm based on high-dimensional causality trajectories. They don't need the naked eye to confirm obstacles; they only look at the 'causality lines of life pulsation' within your bodies. This is a logical orbit calculated by the LinBoo Star-network loom. Therefore, those air-raid shelters you piled up from dirt are as clear as beetles in a crystal box under their three-dimensional hyperspectral law scanners; they can directly lock onto your vital organs through walls."

Lyra, who was adjusting the portable astrolabe nearby, suddenly raised her head. Her messy black hair was tied behind her head with an oil-stained strip of cloth, her fingertips covered in graphite powder. "If they lock on via causality lines, then our waste lead slag and recrystallized star-marrow dust can come in handy! I just used a multi-frequency astrolabe to test the magnetic field distortion values at the canyon pass; the gravity anomaly index there is already five percentage points higher than outside. What if we pile those lead-based scrap metal garbage with high-density absorption capabilities along the cliffs on both sides of the pass to form 'interference grids'?"

She walked quickly to the holographic map, her fingertips rapidly inputting parameters on a few key magnetic nodes. A scattered, orderly green grid instantly lit up on the projection: "We can use the chaotic gravitational magnetic field of these waste slags to create twelve fake causality pulse sources. When their scanning beams sweep across the pass, the disordered magnetic field will distort this space into an unparsable 'logic dead corner'. Their fire control systems will mistake the garbage piles for active lifeforms, and treat our warriors as lifeless rocks! This is called causality camouflage, using the chaos of physics to deceive their rigid high-dimensional algorithms."

Caleb's lone eye lit up, his thick mechanical arm slapping heavily on the iron box, emitting a muffled metallic thud. "This plan is viable! My assault teams can ambush in the shadows of these logic dead corners. Although the divine soldiers' energy shields can bounce back all energy beams, their chassis and joints are still physical structures. Once they are blinded by Lyra's interference net and enter physical melee range, our heavy electromagnetic saws and polarized oscillation knives can directly tear apart their power joints! Who cares if they are divine soldiers or demigods; without the suppression of gravity waves, in the mud, two mortals can use alloy crowbars to pry out their power cores!"

Elias looked at the grid Lyra calculated, a trace of approval flashing in his eyes.

"Lyra, the interference grids' coordinates will be uniformly dispatched by you. Be sure to ensure that the emission frequency of every fake node is synchronized with the electromagnetic fluctuations of the canyon." Elias turned his head and spoke to this young astrologer who had always been silently calculating orbital cycles in the rear. "Caleb, you take the First and Second Companies and lay polarized magnetic landmines on both sides of the narrowest 'Thread of Sky' at the pass. We need to pile up all the physical traps we can use. Since the gods are accustomed to looking down at the ground with the high-dimensional field of view of the star-tracks, then we will use the physical gravity of this wasteland to drag them down from the sky and smash them to death!"

"Understood! Leave it to me, Supreme Commander!" Caleb grinned, revealing a mouthful of incomplete yellow teeth, then turned and strode into the roaring workshop to dispatch the groups of warriors carrying steel plates.

Beside the stone table, only Elias and Lyra were left.

"You've worked hard, Lyra." Elias looked at the girl's bright eyes and the black graphite powder rubbed on the tip of her nose, a rare gentleness revealing itself in his cold, stern eyes. He reached out a finger and wiped the black powder off the tip of her nose with his fingertip. "If not for these interference grids you calculated, we wouldn't even be able to set up a defense line."

Lyra's cheeks suddenly flushed red under the faint holographic fluorescence. She shrank her neck back somewhat awkwardly, clutching her data pad tightly with both hands, her heartbeat uncontrollably skipping a beat at this instant. She bit her lip, revealing a little white canine tooth, and softly snorted a "Hmph" to cover up her fluster. "This... this is nothing. I am the radar of the rebel army. Also, stop always rubbing my hair with this kind of gesture like treating a child. I'm not a child anymore..."

Vespera (Umbra), standing at the edge of the shadows, silently watched this scene. Her deep violet eyes were calm and waveless, lingering on Lyra's flushed cheeks for half a second like observing an interesting specimen, then withdrawing her gaze and submerging back into the shadows.

Moonlight spilled on the cobble beach, refracting the dim glow of cold metal.

Orion leaned against an abandoned armored steel plate, watching the mortal warriors bustling like worker ants in the ruins. His thick right hand unconsciously touched his blackened divine markings, and he said in a low voice to Elias beside him: "I have seen countless low-dimensional civilizations destroyed by purification edicts. Some of them knelt before temples praying for miracles; some piloted crude spaceships wanting to escape into the sea of stars, but ultimately all turned into dust in the Star-network. Elias, you are the first person who, when the divine army presses the border, starts calculating how to use physical garbage to pit and kill gods."

Elias was using a whetstone to sharpen the edge of the broken knife in his hand, the steel blade and the grinding stone producing a rhythmic rustling sound. He didn't look up, only cold, clear focus in his lake-green eyes: "Because neither escaping nor kneeling can prolong life. Orion, we mortals live on this wasteland. The first rule we learned is, no matter how hard a garbage pile is, as long as you use enough force to pry it, it can always break a beast's leg bone. Gods are the same. Since they have come to the ground of mortals, they must abide by the gravity rules of this physical wasteland. The mud here is very heavy; there are no ethereal strings of light that can keep them floating in the sky forever."

Orion froze for a moment, then let out a muffled, low laugh, the laughter sounding extremely heroic in the cold wind of the wilderness.

"The gravity rules of the physical wasteland... good, well said." The demigod stood up. Although his steps were a bit unsteady due to his cracked divine core, his back was extremely straight. "When this interference net is completely constructed, I will stand on the front line of the pass as your 'causality bait'. The generals of the Aries vanguard recognize my divine core fluctuation. Once they spot me, their fire control cores will have a momentary tendency to overload—that is the unique priority preemption of the Orion divine markings in the astrolabe system. That instant will be the best time for you to detonate the landmines and launch the ambush."

"You might die, Orion. The Divine Court's trackers will throw all gravity anchoring at you in the very first second." Elias stopped his grinding stone and looked up at him.

"I've been a dead man for a long time, Elias." Orion mockingly pointed at the star map glowing dim red on his chest. "If I can drag a few of those arrogant bastards of Aries down from the sky before I die, even if my divine markings rot into iron slag, it will have been worth it."

Behind the two of them, Vespera (Umbra) stood silently at the edge of the shadows.

The night wind fluttered the hem of her dark grey coat. Her bewitching violet eyes quietly gazed at the interference grid flashing with green light on the map, and the red defense line faintly visible within the grid.

In her mind, this crude physical defense line, full of mortal wisdom and coarse power, was just like a rough iron plate, wedged dead tight on the originally smooth and flawless Aries star-track. This was a construct she had never seen in millions of years—no sacred incantations, no enhancement from high-dimensional laws, only crude iron, waste lead, magnetic ore, and this group of mortals' nearly mad instinct for survival. This was a tactic the astrolabe fundamentally could not calculate.

This might actually work.

Her finger hidden in her sleeve twitched slightly. A microscopic strand of negative energy silently seeped into the magnetic field node at the very bottom of the pass, dead-locking the originally somewhat unstable fluctuation onto a perfect resonance frequency.

The mortals were unaware of this secret assistance, but they found that in the subsequent installation, all magnetic field tuning went surprisingly smoothly, and high-energy lead plates that were originally extremely difficult to weld actually fused perfectly on the first try.

Before dawn, this "God-catching Net" woven entirely from scrap iron and physical laws finally completely closed in the deepest part of the grand canyon. The morning light broke, illuminating the steel pass piled up from layers of scrap iron, lead skin, and landmines. It lay quietly dormant in the cold wind of the blind spot, waiting for the descent of the brilliance of the gods.