High in the stratosphere, eighty leagues above the peaceful sapphire twilight of the Azure Cloud Realm, the surviving heavy vessels of the outer-void armada realized that passive defense was suicide.
Ten huge Void Dreadnoughts, each three miles long and forged of stone-hard dwarf stars, gathered in a tight three-sided spearhead formation. Flanking them were fourteen Void Sea monsters—monstrous bio-metal entities spanning between two and five miles in length. Resembling deep-sea cuttlefish and ancient trilobites magnified to the scale of mountain ranges, their rounded black back shells pulsed with jagged veins of negative mass, trailing thousands of light-deleting tentacles that churned the thin air into swirling vortexes of gray static.
Driven by the hive mind’s desperate math for survival, the twenty-four capital units timed together their heavy spatial weapons.
From the prow of each dreadnought, and from the central maw of each mountain-sized giant beast, erupted packed lances of total zero unmaking. Twenty-four land-wide-grade beams of dark-matter disintegration came together into a single world-ending torrent, roaring upward toward the curving ceiling of Lin Xiao’s sapphire canopy.
The sheer destructive yield of the combined barrage was enough to punch through the mantle of a world-size core. The surrounding space shattered like cracked glass. That created a howling empty pocket that threatened to invert the high-sky air currents.
