Ten miles outside Dry-Well Station #15, the two hundred bronze warships of the Star-Beast Tamer Sect looked like two hundred tiny walnut shells floating in front of a six-hundred-mile-wide wall of neon-orange cosmic leviathans.
BEEP... BEEP... BEEP...
Every time the sixty-two Rotating Yellow Warning Beacons on the Void Whales’ heads flashed in synchronization, the twenty thousand Beast-Tamer disciples on the bronze decks flinched as if struck by lightning.
On the bow of the lead flagship, Elder Wan Shou felt cold sweat soaking through the back of his dragon-skin cloak. His sixty-two hundred-mile former prisoners—now proudly wearing bright orange “DRY-WELL VILLAGE SANITATION DEPT.” safety vests—were licking the leftover pork-bone gravy off their lips and staring at his bronze warships with sixty-two pairs of glowing, vengeful eyes.
“Turn the fleet around! Full reverse thrusters! Open the emergency escape wormhole to System #18!” Elder Wan Shou screamed, abandoning his cracked bone altar and sprinting back toward the captain’s wheelhouse.
Inside the wheelhouse, the chief navigator was frantically slamming his palms against the spatial compass array, his face white with terror.
“We can’t open an escape wormhole, Elder Wan!” the navigator sobbed, pointing at the dead runes on the console. “A single Rank 8 Void Whale can lock down fifty miles of space when it gets serious! Right now, all sixty-two Void Whales are linking their spatial aura together in a union formation! Space within a thousand miles of Station #15 is frozen harder than solid Star-Iron! Even our normal sub-light engines are getting…
