Three inches of azure light slid from the scabbard.
A sound like ice fracturing across a frozen sea echoed through the vacuum of space. The pure sword-intent caused the stellar dust around the Sovereign Aurora to freeze into crystalline snowflakes that tumbled softly through the void.
High above, atop the central rampart of Wall Number One, Supreme Wall-Commander Mo-Li watched the azure glow with bulging purple eyes.
“Fools!” Mo-Li’s panicked scream echoed through the emergency megaphones, vibrating with hysterical terror. “You think a single sword can pierce ten million years of imperial engineering?! Activate the Nine-Layer Greed-Iron Aegis! Lock all thirty-six defense arrays! Divert the energy of twenty dying stars into the forward shields!”
CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!
Along the six-million-mile Command Citadel, nine massive planetary shields slammed down in concentric rings.
Each layer was forged from solid black greed-iron, thousands of miles thick, reinforced with the blood-runes of twenty dead star-empires. Black lightning crackled between the layers, forming a defensive dome that boasted total immunity to all conventional attacks.
“Even if a true Rank 10 Sovereign descended,” Mo-Li howled from his throne room, his fists pounding the iron armrests, “they could not scratch this citadel in ten thousand years! The Greed Dao Will itself forged these battlements! We are eternal!”
