Inside his pitch-black stealth shuttle hiding behind the moon of System #71, Supreme Elder Jin Bao did not realize that the fifth star had already been capped half a second before his camera screen flickered.
Because of the two-light-year signal delay on his normal crystal monitor, Jin Bao only saw the blinding white flash from Old Mother Ember #5 as its core reached maximum compression.
“Hahaha! Look at that flash!” Jin Bao threw his head back and laughed with tears of cruel joy in his eyes, slamming his hand onto the global broadcast button. “My live feed is now playing on every public sky-screen from System #60 to System #90! Watch closely, you ungrateful mortals! Three... two... one... BOOM!”
Jin Bao leaned forward, pressing his nose right up against the crystal window of his cockpit, waiting for the eighty-million-mile Red Giant Star in front of him to blow apart and vaporize Planet #71-A into glowing cinders.
Down on the eighty planets across Systems 71 to 80, two hundred billion settlers squeezed their eyes shut and held their breath as the countdown hit zero.
One second ticked by.
Instead of a deafening, planet-shattering roar of doom, a crisp, mechanical CLICK echoed through the magnetic field of all ten solar systems.
