To Sovereign Chen Tian, having four of his capital dreadnoughts punched into expanding clouds of scrap metal by sped up iron rods was not merely a tactical defeat. It was an unforgivable cosmic holy insult.
“Form the Grand Celestial Crucible!” Chen Tian’s roar shook the cavernous bridge of The Void Devourer. His eyes burned with black, rotting fire that cast hideous shadows across the black glass inner walls. “All ninety-six dreadnoughts, link your spatial arrays! Transfer every living crewman to the command ships and slave the empty hulls to the Crucible! Mortal iron rods won’t spill Harvester blood a second time! Divert every ounce of forward thrust reserves into the Sovereign Star-Drills! We shall unleash the Nine-Fold Void Decapitation Ray! I’ll melt their insolent iron ring into bubbling liquid melted rock waste, burn up their air into bare empty pocket, and boil their oceans into dry salt flats!”
Across forty thousand miles of open void, the leftover ninety-six Harvester warships reorganized into a terrifying, crescent-shaped concave formation spanning ten thousand miles of space.
From the bows of ninety-six warships, massive black glass drain tubes extended like the poisonous fangs of monstrous cosmic serpents. Spatial runes flared along their hulls in blinding, poisonous emerald soft glow. Ancient dark-matter reactors screamed at maximum redline. It drew upon the stolen life-force of three thousand dead stars to weave a single, unified beam of spatial total ruin. A terrifying torrent of packed void energy designed to cleave world-size mantles.
