Chapter 55 — Bracing for Impact

At the instant the silver flagship's gravity secondary cannon groups unleashed their full power, the entire Grand Canyon seemed to plunge into a bottomless physical abyss.

It was not a simple light beam, but a golden flood formed by layer upon layer of physical gravitational waves, as heavy and solid as a ten-thousand-fathom high mountain. The golden purification divine light brazenly and domineeringly slammed into the insulating barrier at the outermost edge of the Grand Canyon pass. The shockwaves from the energy explosion transformed into rings of visible golden airwaves, violently sweeping across the wilderness for miles around. The highly compressed air generated a series of sharp, deafening sonic booms that sounded like tearing fabric, even pressing countless web-like deep fissures into the steep cliffs on both sides of the Grand Canyon.

The temperature within the trench defensive line began to soar drastically, permeated with a pungent smell of ionizing ozone and scorched machine oil.

"Urgh, ah——!"

The screams were completely drowned out in an instant by the deafening roar of gravity.

Under a gravitational overload up to ten times normal, the mortal soldiers felt as if their chests were being crushed by a thousand-pound boulder. Every breath was accompanied by a severe, agonizing pain as if their ribs were about to snap. The gravity even physically stratified the accumulated water and mud at the bottom of the trenches. The soldiers' bodies were heavily nailed into the warm muddy water, making even lifting a finger extremely difficult. Their eyeballs became covered in terrifying scarlet blood vessels under the immense physical pressure.

"Zzzt... bang!"

At position number two on the right flank of the defensive line, a grounding net box modified from the steel frame of an abandoned heavy truck finally could no longer withstand the frantically surging electric charge and suffered a violent physical explosion amidst blinding blue electrical arcs. The copper cables instantly melted into golden-yellow metallic juice. Having lost its diversion channel, the higher-dimensional anti-polarization net above the right flank trench ruptured in an instant. The oppressive might of the gravitational laws slapped down ruthlessly like an invisible giant hand of steel directly toward the several mortal soldiers hiding behind the lead-plate shields.

The volcanic rock ground there instantly cracked and caved in under the intense light. The mortals' steel combat armor emitted an ear-piercing creak of overwhelming strain under the heavy pressure of the law, seemingly about to be physically crushed into a puddle of meat paste in the blink of an eye.

"Save them——!"

The veteran Caleb's furious roar rang out amidst the sky full of dust, but his own body was also pressed dead against the cover by gravity. His mechanical prosthetic eye flashed its warning frantically due to electromagnetic interference.

In this split-second of life and death, a figure wearing a khaki canvas trench coat forcibly braved the splattering lava and flying rocks filling the sky, sprinting wildly through the muddy trench.

It was Elias.

As an 'Anomaly', Elias simply did not possess a causality wavelength or coordinates in the higher-dimensional astrolabe's calculation models. Within the algorithms of the silver battleship's fire control system, he was merely an electromagnetic black hole of nothingness. Therefore, the lock-on of the gravitational laws released by the higher-dimensional main cannon could not physically track and refract onto him. All he had to endure was merely the purest aftermath of physical heavy pressure.

Elias gritted his teeth, letting the violent, strong gravitational winds tear his trench coat to shreds. His knees and palms were scraped bloody on the rough basalt, but as if unable to feel the pain, his eyes stared fixedly at that array position about to collapse. The scene of the night Tartarus fell kept flashing in his mind—the image of his sister Aira turning into stardust within these same cold laws.

That hatred, suppressed deep within his soul, a volcano yet to cool, completely erupted in this instant, transforming into an endless strength to resist physical divinity.

"Ah——!"

The boy let out a furious roar like a trapped beast, the veins on his arms bulging. He forcefully dragged a bundle of heavy copper braided cables weighing a hundred pounds through the gravitational mire, lunging his entire body over the boiling hot red mud, and violently smashed the heavy cable clasp onto the railway grounding terminal.

"Boom!"

The violent higher-dimensional divine energy instantly traveled along the thick copper cables, guided into the depths of the heavy metal ore veins below the canyon through a purely physical pathway. A blinding blue lightning bolt stretching several meters long erupted in the air, and the collapsed gravitational well above the right flank trench was finally pulled flat and stabilized once again. Several soldiers, their faces covered in blood, lay in the trench, panting heavily, looking at Elias with eyes full of the ecstasy of a narrow escape and an almost crazed reverence.

Meanwhile, inside the sturdy bunker deep in the defensive line, Orion's massive, mountain-like body firmly blocked Lyra and Nova's star-map console.

The fierce gravity of the "Saturn-Pluto opposition" generated violent physical resonance with the battleship's fire control in the sky. Orion's divine core was cracking inch by inch under the illumination of the divine light, and golden-red divine blood continuously overflowed from the corner of his mouth, staining his lapels in a mottled pattern. However, amidst the torrential rain of golden law light, Orion's body was faintly enveloped by an extremely thin, yet soft and resilient milky-white halo.

This wisp of a halo generated an extremely faint physical polarization within the gravitational tide, acting like a mirror reflecting light.

"Thud! Thud!"

Two gravity purification shells capable of physically annihilating a demigod, in the instant they were about to smash into Orion's back, bizarrely deviated from their causality trajectory. They grazed his shoulders and slammed heavily into the volcanic rock wall behind him, instantly vaporizing the hard rock into a sky full of grey dry powder, yet miraculously failing to harm a single hair on him.

Orion raised his head with great effort, looking at that layer of milky-white dim light flickering faintly on his body. Within that faint halo, he felt the warmth of his confidante, who was alone before the star-weaving loom in the Sanctum, enduring the agony of a shattering divine core to mend the star-tracks for him.

"Astra... how could you be so foolish..." Orion's voice was hoarse, a tragic smile mixing pain and resolution emerging at the corner of his mouth. "Since you risked your life to keep me alive, then right here in the mud of this wasteland, I'll use these bones of mine to shoot down these Aries hounds for you!"

"Elias! The data is out!" Lyra wiped the warm mud from her face, pointing at the violently shaking CRT screen and shouting. "When their main cannon was locking onto Orion, the system algorithm was slowed down by fractions of a millisecond by some unknown causality interference! This has caused their main cannon's impact points to constantly suffer micrometer-level deviations! Their absolute fire control... has a gap! As long as we can seize this gap, our shells can hit them!"

"Excellent!" Elias dragged his heavy steps back into the cover. He plunged the cutting knife heavily into a rock fissure, his lake-green eyes burning with bone-chilling murderous intent. "Nova, are our electromagnetic rails ready?!"

"Capacitor pump charge at ninety-nine percent... one hundred!" Nova's scream exploded instantly, accompanied by a violent trembling sound coming from the base of the guide rail. On that catapult rail crudely welded together from thick I-beams, the warheads of the three Orbit-breaking Meteor Shells were emitting a strange, deep-blue insulating light arc. Due to the passage of intense electrical current, the insulating coating on the surface of the rail began to physically carbonize, billowing white smoke, and the air was filled with the pungent smell of melting synthetic resin.

Veteran Caleb pressed down hard on the lever of the physical cooling water pump. His mechanical prosthetic eye emitted an extremely ear-piercing sound of metallic friction due to the ultra-high-load magnetic field feedback, and even the machine oil in the joints of his mechanical right arm began to boil and smoke. "My bones are about to get sucked onto this iron rack! Fire, Commander-in-Chief!" he laughed wildly, revealing a mouth full of white teeth stained with red sand.

"Electromagnetic lock complete! As long as they descend another thousand meters, they will completely enter the insulating impact point of our physical ballistic parabola!" Nova shouted, her face full of fanaticism.

Above the vault of heaven, inside the main command cabin of the flagship "Silver Ram's Horn".

"This is impossible! How could mortals survive under a one hundred and twenty percent power gravity sweep?! Even the signal of that dead-locked fallen god hasn't been erased! This completely defies the astrolabe's formulas!" The Aries vanguard officer in charge of fire control scanning looked ashen, his hands operating frantically on the holographic screen, but the feedback data remained a cluster of red dots representing survival.

The arrogance on Divine Envoy Phalan's face completely shattered in this instant, replaced by extreme fury and gloom. Looking out the higher-dimensional window at the Grand Canyon pass—which, though bombed into a devastated state, still stubbornly flew the mortal battle flag and billowed black smoke—he fiercely crushed the glass mead goblet in his hand. The golden liquor, mixed with glass shards, slid down his palm, corroding a few tiny scorch marks on the white marble floor.

"These filthy mud bugs of the lower realm... Since they want to die so badly, then I will grant their wish! Pass my divine order, the flagship is to lower its altitude to one thousand five hundred meters and activate the low-altitude gravity law field! All ground divine soldier royal guard legions, prepare to descend into the blind spot in the flesh! I will use absolute physical weight to completely trample that garbage dump flat!"

The massive hull of the gigantic silver flagship began to violently compress the air. The originally dazzling golden purification divine light contracted into an extremely dangerous dark gold gravity halo. Accompanied by ear-piercing sky-tearing storms and the rumbling of the earth, this behemoth slowly pressed down toward the Grand Canyon pass like a falling silver continent.