The dome of the Giant Rock Hollow (GRH) let out its final groan before the collapse. It wasn't the sound of rock breaking, but of space itself wailing under the overload of physical oppression. At the breach of the Eden Fortress, a bloody stalemate had stained the black stones a slick, deep crimson. Sean’s cyborg units were paving a road with their own self-detonated limbs, while Arnada’s Far East mercenaries advanced over the warm scrap metal toward the town's core.

  But in this instant, all sound vanished. A heavy shadow, vast enough to stop a heart, slowly eclipsed the last residual glows of the ghost lichen on the ceiling.

  It was PDN’s ultimate totem of violence, the hammer Alexander used to reshape the Earth: the "Bahamut" Super-Dreadnought.

  It dove slowly from above the Hyper-Gate, its 2,500-meter pitch-black hull looking like a dragon swimming out from the depths of hell. Its presence made the vast expanse of the Hollow feel suddenly cramped and suffocating. Huge spoiler wings, shaped like angel feathers, extended from its sides—not for flight, but to stabilize the massive anti-gravity field. Each "feather" housed hundreds of micro-sensors, making millisecond corrections based on the core’s gravitational fluctuations.

  At the ship’s rear, high-temperature thermonuclear exhaust warped the air into distorted waves. But its most devastating feature was the pair of 500-meter-long obsidian "Gungnir" horns extending from the bridge. Crafted from deep-earth obsidian, these "Anti-Gravity Convergence Horns" pulsed with blood-red electrical arcs, violently pulling in every free electron in the vicinity. This wasn't a ship; it was a floating tribunal of absolute order.

  On the bridge, Adimas stood before the holographic window. Her blonde hair looked as vivid as fresh blood under the red emergency lights. In her view, the resisting miners and the piles of cyborg wreckage were merely "inefficient" red negative values on a screen.

  "Captain, we have arrived above the defensive line," the comms officer reported, his voice trembling as he saw the near-holy cruelty in Adimas’s eyes.

  Adimas’s private communicator chirped. Alexander’s reflection appeared—he was in his snow-white office, swirling a glass of red wine. "Adimas. My target is just ahead. You know I dislike waiting. The time you’ve wasted on that town has exceeded my tolerance. Do not be slow... or I shall not be merciful."

  "Understood," Adimas replied shortly. She offered no excuses. To her, a woman who had sacrificed herself to Alexander’s will, explanation was a weakness. She turned to the weapons officer, her gaze cold as ice.

  "Anti-Gravity Phase Cannon. Target lock: Eden Settlement center coordinates."

  "Captain?!" The officer’s fingers froze. "But... Arnada’s legions and Sean’s Leviathans... they are still engaged in close-quarters combat there. If we fire, the phase energy will atomize every biological entity within a kilometer. Our own casualties will exceed fifty percent!!"

  Adimas did not speak. She slowly drew her gold-etched pistol.

  BANG.

  The shot echoed in the silent bridge. The questioning officer fell limp over his console, a bloom of crimson on his forehead. Adimas turned the muzzle toward the weapons officer, her voice a flat, ripple-less pond.

  "How many lives can you bear on your hands? Tell me. For every word of nonsense you speak, I will kill one person in this cabin. Until you press that button."

  The weapons officer broke. Watching his twitching colleague, he let out a scream of pure, desperate terror and slammed the red firing key.

  THUD————!!!

  The entire Hollow was filled with a high-frequency vibration beyond the limit of human hearing. The obsidian horns of the Bahamut compressed ton upon ton of negative particles into a crimson singularity at their tips.

  Then—SHOOOM!!

  A beam of scarlet light, fifty meters in diameter and carrying a horrific heat, descended from the heavens. This was the Anti-Gravity Phase Cannon. It did not burn or explode; it worked by twisting the spatial phase of the target area, causing a total "discordance" at the molecular level. Under that red light, solids became gas, and life became dust.

  At the breach of Eden, Sean raised a massive mechanical claw to tear through Lilith’s final gate. When the red light hit, his cybernetic eye received a signal: [WARNING: PHASE OVERLOAD DETECTED. TARGET AREA DESIGNATED AS ANNIHILATION ZONE.]

  Sean froze. He looked up at the beam of "God’s Blood" falling from the sky. He thought of his wife in the Lower Sector, and his daughter in the expensive medical vat. He had sold eighty percent of his flesh for this iron shell just so they could live.

  "So... we were just consumables after all..." Sean gave a final, static-choked laugh.

  The microsecond the red light touched him, his proud Leviathan armor—designed to withstand heavy artillery—melted like ice in the sun. His chassis, his bionic heart, and his remaining flesh disintegrated into meaningless atomic dust in less than a second. Sean died at the hand of the "God" he served.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Arnada was sharper. Three seconds before impact, his gene-enhanced "Battle Senses" screamed of his death. Without notifying his men, he triggered the emergency anti-gravity ejector in his uniform.

  BOOM!!! He was hurled hundreds of meters like a burning shell. When he crashed behind a rock pile, he turned to see the center of Eden had simply... vanished. In its place was a hundred-meter-wide crater, smooth as a mirror. Thousands of his elite mercenaries and Sean's cyborgs had evaporated before they could even scream.

  "Hah... hah..." Arnada gasped, looking at his shredded uniform. Then, he felt a horrific coldness at his waist. His Anti-Gravity Disruptor—the symbol of his honor—had suffered a lethal chain reaction due to the energy resonance of the Phase Cannon.

  "No—"

  BOOM. A dull explosion. It wasn't large, but the localized gravity collapse tore a jagged hole through Arnada’s abdomen. His proud "pure human" body was as fragile as wet paper. He fell, his vision narrowing. He pulled a blood-soaked photo from his pocket—a little girl holding his hand, smiling.

  "Daddy... isn't coming home... today..." Arnada’s eyes went vacant. In the smell of oil and smoke, the elegant executioner became cold carrion.

  The interior of Eden was now a living purgatory. Though the reinforced layers held back the direct strike, the shockwaves reduced the last paradise to rubble. Lilith was thrown against a railing, her ribs snapping. She crawled up and looked at the monitors. The town was eighty percent destroyed. The ghost lichen was dying in masses, plunging the Hollow into an ominous grey.

  "Tax! TAX!!" Lilith found the young miner pinned under a beam.

  "An angel... Auntie Lilith... I saw an angel," Tax whispered, hallucinating from pain and oxygen deprivation. "Such a red light... is it taking us home?"

  "Shut up!! Wake up!!" Lilith dragged him out. Around them, hundreds of surviving workers crawled from the debris. John stared at his scrapped excavator, his arm broken. Coco knelt in the dust, clutching a broken doll.

  "This is the sorrow of the under-class," Lilith said with desolation. "We dug for decades to build a home, thinking if we were obedient, we’d be allowed to live. It turns out our lives aren't worth a single shot of fuel to them."

  The Bahamut descended further, its horns flickering with a faint red light like a hungry beast eating the remaining air. "Give up, Tax," Lilith sat down, handing him a bottle of lichen wine she'd salvaged. "We are scraps. How can scraps win against a God? Let's have one last drink."

  They sat together—the workers, the survivors—and put down their tools. They stopped resisting because resistance had lost its meaning. They waited for the next red light to turn them into dust among the planet's bones.

  On the bridge of the Bahamut, the air was polar. Adimas holstered her gold pistol. "Captain... defensive line is 85% destroyed," the weapons officer reported. "CEO Alexander asks... shall we conduct a second phase scan?"

  "No," Adimas said. "Waste of energy. Send the 'Monster Drivers' for manual cleanup. Ensure every backup and server Dissard left here becomes atoms." She looked at the miners below. "How pathetic. Like termites in a floorboard. This is your fate."

  "ROAAAARRRRRRR————!!!"

  It wasn't a roar. It was a nuclear explosion in the Earth's heart. The Bahamut shook violently. "Gravity field shifting!!" the pilot shrieked. "Observer!! Report!!"

  "I can't!! The system is full of corrupted code!!" the observer screamed. "An undefinable energy response is surging from the forbidden zone... beneath us!!"

  Adimas gripped the railing, her indifference finally shattering. From the pitch-black abyss behind the ruins of Eden, a shadow rose so large it made the Hollow look small. Dark purple carapace, pulsing blue Aether veins. In that moment, even the Bahamut's horns vibrated in terror.

  Lilith snapped her eyes open. In the dust, she saw a colossus with yellow-lit eyes staring down the steel false god. "The truth of the depths..."

  Reality in the GRH "liquefied." It wasn't matter melting, but a higher-dimensional brush erasing the hellscape. The smoke and stench were purified by a cold blue shimmer.

  "Auntie Lilith... look..."

  Space was warping in a ring above the ruins. A thousand meters up, the center of the dark ceiling turned into a transparent sea. Then, the first light burst forth. It wasn't the cold, sharp light of PDN, but a "fluid" radiance of deep and pale blues weaving together like silk ribbons.

  Sizzle! CRACK! Static electricity popped frantically around the ring. Every spark was a pure white-purple, sounding like pearls falling on marble.

  "An Angel’s Halo..." Lilith whispered. It was the Quantum Gate—the final lifeline Stan Jackson had hidden from Dissard, mastered through ancient alien power.

  Inside the Bahamut, logic failed. "Warning!! Anti-gravity sensors offline!!" "Captain!! That ring... physics are being rewritten inside it!!"

  Adimas looked out the window. Under the blue glow of the "Angel Ring," the Bahamut looked dull and lifeless. The obsidian horns wailed under the static interference; the phase cannon lines short-circuited. "A passage to another dimension?" Adimas stepped back. The metal of the ship was shivering in the presence of a "Superior Existence."

  In the deepest shadows, the man in the black hoodie with the mechanical head looked up. "Finally." His red eyes flickered—a confirmation signal to Stan, miles away across a causal tunnel. "Stan, the rest is up to you." He vanished into the rock, his mission complete.

  Lilith and Tax were bathed in the blue light. The heat of the phase fire was gone. The smell of blood was gone. "Is that the gate to heaven?" Tax asked, his tears glowing purple.

  Lilith gripped his collar and turned his head. "That's not heaven, you fool. That is... our future... launching the total offensive against Alexander!!!"

  BOOM—CRACKLE!!!

  A massive bolt of blue lightning struck from the ring, piercing a secondary turret on the Bahamut. The Hollow became bright as day. In the center of the ring, the first engine lights began to flicker in the blue abyss. The roar of thirty thousand warriors and the hydraulic hiss of mechas had reached the threshold.

  The False God trembled. The Will of the Planet watched. The door was open.