Inside Wormhole Tunnel #42—a busy inter-galactic stretch connecting the Milky Way trade hub to the newly joined merchant galaxies—the midnight traffic had just quieted down for the nightly thirty-minute road sweeping window.
Out of a hairline crack in the shadow behind Mile-Marker #42, fifty figures wearing pitch-black Eighth-Dimensional Chameleon Cloaks crept silently onto the shoulder of the Unbreakable Inter-Galactic Wormhole Expressway.
At their head crept Shadow-Lord Wu Ying, a Rank 9 Mid master of the notorious Dimensional Assassin Guild.
Three days ago, several jealous aristocratic warlords in the distant 300-Galaxy Central Cluster had panicked when they saw twenty merchant galaxies defect to Pei Xuan over a bucket of fried scorpion nuggets. Fearing that their own tax-paying subjects would run away to Dry-Well Cluster next, they had pooled together five hundred billion Spirit Stones to hire Shadow-Lord Wu Ying and his forty-nine elite dimensional assassins.
Their mission was simple and vicious: plant fifty Rank 9 Space-Shredding Mines right down the center line of Tunnel #42, blow a three-million-light-year hole in Pei Xuan’s highway, and scare every merchant fleet in the cluster away from using Dry-Well’s public transit!
“Move fast and keep your cloaks tight,” Shadow-Lord Wu Ying whispered through a secret soul-link as his men tiptoed across the black-hole brick pavement—crossing right over a solid double-yellow line without looking both ways. “Each of these fifty Space-Shredding Mines is forged from compressed dimensional blades and unstable star-gunpowder. Once we arm them all at 12:15 AM, the explosion will tear this wormhole into…
