Forty thousand miles past Pluto's orbit, the sun looked like a tiny, cold pinprick of white light. Out here in the black void, the Concordat Grand Void-Siege Dreadnought Line hung like an impenetrable wall across the stars.
Fifty colossal capital dreadnoughts stood locked in a rigid battle line. Each warship stretched one hundred miles long. They were forged from jagged void-iron and armored with ten-foot-thick plates of iridescent adamantine. Connecting their spires and prow siege lances was a shimmering web of golden energy: the *Seven-Star Diamond Aegis*.
The Aegis was the ultimate shield formation of the Great Empyrean Void Concordat. It linked the spiritual reactors of all fifty capital ships into a synchronized power grid. Together, they generated an unbroken, four-million-gigawatt barrier. It was built to shunt the direct blast of a supernova straight into subspace.
Aboard the command dreadnought *Wrath of the Seven Stars*, Grand Marshal Lei Zhen stood on his command terrace. His dragon-crested helmet gleamed under the shield light.
"Let the barbarian come," Lei Zhen sneered, resting a gauntleted hand on his thunder-carved halberd. "Arch-Dominus Wu Ji was a soft politician who let himself get duped by mortal tricks. But this is the Imperial Iron Line! Fifty capital warships locked in total spiritual resonance! Nothing in this universe can breach the Seven-Star Diamond Aegis!"
"Grand Marshal!" the Chief Auspex Officer called out, pointing toward the forward scrying sphere. "A lone heat source has exited the Kuiper Belt maintenance hub. It is approaching our central axis at eleven miles per second."
Lei Zhen laughed, a booming, arrogant sound that echoed through the bridge. "Did he bring a fleet of star-barges? Has he assembled a siege array?"
"No, Grand Marshal. He is... alone. Our scanners report two forward-projecting heat plumes shooting from his shoulders. Energy density is... calculating... error! The sensor crystals are overheating!"
*CRACK.*
The forward scrying sphere split with a hairline fracture. Smoke curled from the glass as it choked on the incoming numbers.
Lei Zhen’s laughter died in his throat.
Through the forward observation dome, he looked out into the black vacuum.
A single human figure coasted through the void on a straight, unhurried path. He wore heavy canvas double-knee work trousers, insulated boots, a neon orange safety vest with reflective silver piping, and a bright yellow hard hat. A massive steel harness across his back carried fourteen hundred pounds of certified lead ballast. In his right hand, he carried a five-foot titanium-tungsten pipe wrench.
Twin solid beams of blinding sapphire-white plasma shot forward over his shoulders. They emerged from two ninety-degree star-jade elbow pipes clamped down tight with stainless hose clamps.
The two beams were scarcely four inches wide. Yet they stretched forward through the void for ten miles like two laser-straight bars of captured starlight. They hummed with five point zero zettawatts of focused near-light speed fury.
A translucent system notification hovered before Austin’s welding goggles:
Austin squinted through his dark Shade-14 lenses at the forty-thousand-mile wall of fifty linked dreadnoughts.
"Look at that hedge," Austin muttered into his helmet comms, where Tie Kuang and Xuan Ming were monitoring the numbers back on Substation Kuiper-01. "Completely overgrown. Extending straight out over the property line. If you let a hedge grow across the public sidewalk like that, people can’t even push a stroller past without getting scratched by branches."
*"Boss,"* Tie Kuang’s voice rumbled over the radio. *"The energy readings from that golden barrier are off the charts. Xuan Ming says that’s the Seven-Star Diamond Aegis. It spreads all incoming impact and heat across all fifty ship hulls simultaneously."*
"Doesn't matter how well they spread the load," Austin replied calmly. He adjusted the five-foot pipe wrench on his shoulder. "If you don't prune your shrubs, they become a safety hazard. I’m just giving it a quick trim along the easement line."
Aboard the *Wrath of the Seven Stars*, Grand Marshal Lei Zhen saw the lone figure adjust his footing on empty space.
"All ships!" Lei Zhen roared into his fleet command seal. "Reinforce the Aegis! Channel all reserve spirit-coal into the barrier matrices! DO NOT ALLOW THE BARBARIAN TO BREACH THE PERIMETER!"
Across fifty hundred-mile dreadnoughts, three million void-cultivators poured their spiritual qi into the golden web. The Seven-Star Diamond Aegis flared with blinding, diamond-like brilliance. It solidified into an impenetrable wall of crystallized spatial geometry sixty miles thick.
Austin arrived at the barrier perimeter.
He didn't knock. He didn't issue an ultimatum.
He simply leaned forward by five degrees. The twin ninety-degree star-jade elbow diverters on his shoulders aligned directly with the golden energy wall.
*BZZZZZZZZZZZT.*
The twin solid beams of ultra-dense electron-positron plasma struck the barrier at near-light speed.
Five point zero zettawatts of blistering thermal energy, packed into an area smaller than a dinner plate, ignored conventional defenses. The energy density smashed straight through the laws of normal combat.
The sixty-mile-thick Seven-Star Diamond Aegis was built to withstand the fury of dying suns. Yet it didn't even slow the beams down. The golden crystalline barrier suffered instant and devastating vaporization.
It didn't shatter into shards. It simply burned out of existence along a neat, four-inch horizontal slit. A sound like a wet sheet being torn by an industrial table saw ripped through the vacuum.
*RIPPPPPPPP.*
Before Grand Marshal Lei Zhen could even process the collapse of his shield, Austin took his first step forward.
He began to walk.
Moving at a steady pace of twelve miles per second along the front of the forty-thousand-mile battle line, Austin swung his shoulders in a slow, rhythmic arc. He moved exactly like an experienced landscaper swinging a commercial gas-powered hedge trimmer along a suburban fence line.
The twin sapphire-white plasma lances swept across the prows of the Concordat warships.
*ZZZZZZZZT. ZZZZZZZZT. ZZZZZZZZT.*
The first hundred-mile dreadnought was sliced cleanly in half along its horizontal equator.
Ten-foot-thick adamantine armor plates offered no more resistance than warm butter to a red-hot wire. The beam sliced through forward torpedo bays, sheared main command spires, dissected central engine rooms, and exited the stern nozzles in less than four tenths of a second.
The two halves of the hundred-mile dreadnought smoothly drifted apart in the vacuum. Frozen air and glowing emergency sealant foam hissed into space as bulkhead doors slammed shut.
Austin didn't stop. He took another step and swung his shoulders to the right.
The second dreadnought was sliced cleanly in half.
*ZZZZZZZZT.*
Then the third.
*ZZZZZZZZT.*
Then the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh!
Aboard the flagship *Wrath of the Seven Stars*, twenty-fifth in line, Grand Marshal Lei Zhen watched the forward viewscreen in frozen terror.
Down the forty-thousand-mile line of battle, dreadnought after dreadnought fell apart like sliced loaves of bread.
There were no massive, cinematic thermonuclear explosions. Austin’s blistering plasma beams were so hot, fast, and focused that atomic bonds snapped before heat could spread to adjacent fuel tanks. It was a terrifyingly clean, mechanical, surgical cut.
Upper hulls drifted upward at three miles per hour. Lower hulls drifted downward at three miles per hour. In between lay a flat, mirror-polished cut that glowed with faint, cherry-red heat.
"He... he is weed-whacking our fleet..." Lei Zhen whimpered, his halberd clattering from his limp fingers onto the deck. "He is not even using a celestial technique... he is simply walking down the line... with two stovepipes on his back..."
*ZZZZZZZZT.*
The dreadnought immediately to the left of the flagship fell in two.
Austin arrived before the prow of the *Wrath of the Seven Stars*.
He paused in his stride, leaning his head to the side to inspect the cut he had just made on the neighboring ship. He reached up with a gloved thumb, squinted through his welding goggles, and muttered into his radio:
"Clean cut. Minimum kerf loss. Kerf width is less than four inches. There's a tiny bit of dross adhering to the lower flange on ship number twenty-four, but a pneumatic needle scaler will knock that right off during salvage."
He turned his welding goggles toward the bridge of the *Wrath of the Seven Stars*.
Through the transparent dome, Grand Marshal Lei Zhen was already on his knees, both hands raised high above his head, holding a white linen napkin he had hastily grabbed from the officer’s mess table.
Austin straightened up, swiveling the twin star-jade elbow diverters on his shoulders back toward the vertical position with a quick twist of his wrists.
*CLICK.*
The twin sapphire plasma lances shot straight upward and downward into deep space once more, venting harmlessly away from the ships.
Austin unclipped his clipboard from his tool belt, pulled out a red carbon-copy slip, and clicked his grease pencil.
He tapped the radio transmitter on his hard hat:
*"Grand Marshal Lei Zhen, or whoever is currently in charge of this floating scrap heap: congratulations on having the common sense to wave that napkin before I trimmed your bridge off. Under Municipal Code Section Eighteen-D, you are being cited for maintaining an unpermitted vegetative obstruction in a public utility corridor. Total fine: two hundred and fifty million spirit stones."*
Lei Zhen bowed his forehead against the deck so hard the adamantine cracked.
"We surrender!" Lei Zhen wept into the communications crystal. "We surrender all weapons! We surrender all fifty dreadnoughts! Just... please... do not sweep your shoulders again!"
Austin nodded, tearing the yellow slip from his pad with a crisp *ZIP*.
"Tie Kuang," Austin said into his comms.
*"Yeah, Boss?"*
"Tell Xuan Ming to get the new intake forms ready," Austin said, turning back toward Substation Kuiper-01 with heavy, rhythmic strides. "We just acquired fifty hundred-mile modular bridge sections. We can use the lower hulls as covered storage warehouses for the Neptune cable spooling yard."