A main-sequence G-class star does not enjoy being shaken.
Inside Felix Vance's dantian, the miracle of modern astrophysics was maintaining hydrostatic equilibrium at fifteen million Kelvin. Hydrogen nuclei fused into helium ions under the crushing inward pressure of one full Earth Mass, perfectly counterbalanced by outward radiation pressure.
It was an engine of pure, unadulterated cosmic perfection.
Then Felix Vance, blinded by gamer rage at forty rusty nails, violently snapped his wrists downward like an angry teenager resetting an old television set.
For one ten-millionth of a second, the AetherDeck's background gravitational dampers experienced an input interrupt.
The slate was too busy processing Felix’s angry taps on the frozen screen. Its CPU cycles dropped by a fraction of a percent.
And in that microscopic window of reduced containment...
The star burped.
It barely qualified as a full flare. In solar astronomical terms, it was a Class-A micro-prominence, representing approximately 0.0001% of the star’s total thermal output.
Inside Felix’s chest, it felt like nothing more than a faint, spicy bubble of mild heartburn, as if he had eaten his morning scallion flatbread without chewing properly.
Felix patted his solar plexus with his left hand, letting out a small, muffled breath.
"Ugh," Felix murmured. "Gotta stop drinking cold well water on an empty stomach."
He looked back down at the screen.
He didn't notice the sky cracking open.
From the center of Felix’s chest, a golden filament of pure, relativistic plasma erupted into the mortal plane.
It was no thicker than a single strand of hair when it left his cotton tunic.
Yet as it breached the atmosphere, it expanded into a blinding golden scythe of pure coronal fire. It moved at ninety-eight percent the speed of light, ripping through the ambient air with a sound that bypassed human ears entirely.
It did not boom. It did not roar.
It produced a sound like the tearing of five hundred miles of silk:
*SHZZZZZZT!*
The sky above Solitude Spire ceased to be blue.
For two hundredths of a second, the entire horizon turned blinding, retina-scalding white. The clouds for thirty miles around were instantly vaporized into dry mist, exposing the raw, cobalt-blue dome of the stratosphere.
The golden plasma arc sliced upward at a sixty-degree angle.
It reached twenty miles into the upper atmosphere, carving a glowing, ionized scar across the heavens that hissed with ambient electromagnetic static.
And right in the direct path of that twenty-mile golden arc sat the imperial flagship barge, the *Sun-Vessel Aurelia*.
Specifically, its two-hundred-foot-tall adamantine mainmast.
The mainmast was the pride of the Sol-Aethel imperial shipyard. It was forged from seven-fold tempered star-iron, plated in enchanted gold, and carved from the heartwood of a thousand-year ironwood dragon-pine.
At the very peak of the mast flew the Imperial Sun-Dragon Standard, an embroidered silk pennant woven with golden thread that symbolized the eternal sovereignty of Emperor Aurelius the Third.
The plasma arc crossed the mast at eighteen thousand miles per hour.
There was no explosion.
There was no splintering of wood.
There was no clashing of metal.
At a temperature exceeding twelve million degrees, the concept of structural integrity simply dissolved into theoretical physics.
In zero-point-zero-two seconds, the middle thirty feet of the ironwood mast didn't catch fire. It didn't burn to charcoal.
The molecular structure of the wood, the adamantine plating, and the golden runes were superheated past their boiling points, then flash-cooled by the atmospheric vacuum behind the beam.
The mast vitrified.
【Target: Vitrified Adamantine Flagship Mainmast】 【Condition: Vitrified Ruby Glass (Structural Integrity: 0.00%)】 【Thermal Exposure: 12,000,000 Kelvin (Micro-prominence burp)】 【Inspector Note: Flagpole converted into hollow art installation. Zero structural load capacity remaining. Highly aesthetic decorative failure.】
It transformed into translucent, bubbling, ruby-red glass.
The six-foot-thick enchanted metal mast was instantly converted into a hollow tube of glowing, liquid-slick crystal.
And the Imperial Sun-Dragon Standard?
It didn't leave behind ash. The energetic photons stripped the electrons clean off the silk molecules, converting the sacred imperial banner into a cloud of glowing, ionized gas that drifted toward the stars like golden dust.
Then the atmospheric shockwave caught up.
*KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!*
The concussive thunderclap hit Solitude Spire with the force of an erupting volcano.
A wall of compressed air slammed across the clearing seventy paces from the cottage.
The seventy-two suppression banners planted in the turf snapped like dry toothpicks, their golden silk tearing to shreds and tumbling wildly into the mountain gorge.
Eighty elite gold-armored censors were lifted clean off their feet.
"BY THE GODS!"
"MY ARMOR! MY EYES!"
"THE HEAVENS ARE COLLAPSING!"
Eighty heavily armored imperial warriors flew backward through the rotor wash like bowling pins struck by an iron cannonball.
They crashed into each other in a chaotic tangle of clattering greaves, dented breastplates, and flying halberds, rolling across the flattened clover until they piled up against the flagship's hull.
Grand Inquisitor Drake stood his ground, but only by driving his Sun-Piercing Lance six inches into the living bedrock.
The thermal backdraft hit his face like the open door of a celestial blast furnace.
His feathered imperial helmet was ripped from his skull, tumbling into the abyss. His white ermine cape caught fire, smoldering into blackened cinders before he could even extinguish it.
His eyes, wide with sheer, unadulterated madness, looked upward.
Above the flagship’s gilded deck, the top seventy feet of the mainmast—now a twelve-ton pillar of solid, smoking ruby glass—tilted sideways with agonizing slowness.
*CRACK-SHATTER!*
The glass mast sheared off its glowing stump.
It plunged over the port railing, hurtling five thousand feet down into the abyssal clouds below Solitude Spire, leaving a trail of glowing red sparks in the morning air.
On the deck beneath the severed mast, the stump remained.
A six-foot-wide circle of smooth, molten red crystal, dripping glowing beads of liquefied glass onto the scorched deckboards like thick strawberry jam.
Drake’s right hand began to tremble.
He looked down at his Sun-Piercing Lance, the weapon that had slain rogue dragons and broken ancestral gates.
The star-iron tip of the lance was gone.
The eighth-tier imperial steel had caught a stray micro-filament of the plasma arc’s outer corona.
The three-foot spearhead had melted into a droopy, bulbous ball of slag that looked like a half-eaten golden lollipop, sizzling softly as it dripped onto his gilded gauntlet.
Drake’s breath caught in his throat.
His knees turned to water.
He couldn't speak. He couldn't scream. His Tier 6 core was frozen solid in absolute terror, vibrating with the horrifying certainty that if that golden beam had been angled two inches lower, the entire flagship, the eighty censors, and his own mortal soul would have been converted into free-floating subatomic particles.
Beside the cabbage patch, the Thunder Gryphon didn't even stand up.
The golden beast merely cracked open one amber eyelid, glanced at the flying glass mast, let out a bored, grumbling sigh, and tucked its beak deeper under its wing to block the sunlight.
By the fence, the former Ghost King remained on his knees.
He had ducked his head beneath his straw sun hat during the shockwave, protecting his wooden bucket of dandelions from the flying dirt.
He peeked out from under the frayed brim, looked at the weeping, soot-covered Grand Inquisitor, and quietly shook his skeletal skull.
On the porch, Lyra Ashford was leaning heavily against the railing, her rapier clattering onto the floorboards.
Her mouth was hanging wide open.
Her vision swam with afterimages of golden coronal fire.
She had felt the sheer, crushing reality of that beam as it passed ten feet above her head. No mere sword ray could match that fury. No mortal spell could touch that heat.
It was the living breath of the Great Sun itself, summoned by a master who didn't even bother to stand from his chair.
*Senior Brother...* Lyra thought, her tears falling freely onto the porch planks. *He warned them. He gave them three full minutes to leave. When they dared draw a weapon in his presence, he severed the symbol of the mortal empire with less effort than flicking a fly!*
She looked toward the reclining chair, her soul prostrated in absolute, religious awe.
*Look at him,* she whispered in her heart. *He does not celebrate. He does not gloat. To Senior Brother, destroying the pride of an empire is nothing more than taking a breath!*
In the Zero-Gravity Recliner, Felix Vance stared down at his AetherDeck.
The screen had finally changed.
The spinning loading wheel was gone. The forty rusty nails, the thirty-six yards of twine, and the moldy turnip had finally been cleared from the display and deposited into his inventory storage tray.
The home menu returned with a cheerful, high-pitched chime:
Felix let out a long, heavy breath of pure exhaustion.
He rubbed his thumb across the cold obsidian glass, his eyebrows furrowing into a deep, irritated grimace.
"Finally unfroze," Felix grumbled aloud, his voice flat and profoundly annoyed. "Took three full minutes just to process ten pieces of low-tier trash."
He tapped the screen three times, testing the responsiveness of the inventory icons.
The menu opened with a slight, half-second delay.
Felix shook his head in absolute disgust.
"Four hundred and twenty milliseconds of ping," Felix muttered to himself, leaning back into his padded headrest. "And the touchscreen latency is completely unplayable. Who coded this garbage UI? You tap a button, and the input buffer takes three business days to register."
He let his hands rest on his lap, looking up at the sky with a weary, long-suffering sigh.
"If the devs can't optimize the framerate, they shouldn't push the patch," Felix said to the empty air. "Seriously. Worst update since launch."
Above him, the twenty-mile golden plasma scar in the stratosphere slowly began to fade into a shimmering veil of emerald aurora borealis.
And on the grass fifty paces away, eighty imperial warriors remained frozen in the dirt, weeping at the terrifying voice of the god who commanded the stars.