CLANK! GRIND! SCREEEECH!
Up in the northern sky, the ten thousand thirty-thousand-mile Golden Sickle Harvester Ships threw their divine fire-crystal engines into full emergency reverse!
Black-and-gold exhaust flames erupted from the front thruster ports of every warship as Harvester General Jin Ge pounded his fist frantically on the helm console, his singed golden beard trembling with panic.
“Faster! Burn the reserve Divine Origin Stones! Throw the torture cages overboard to lighten the ships!” Jin Ge shrieked at his navigator, not caring a single bit about his dignity as a Rank 9 Late Peak Upper-World commander anymore. “That fat general down there stopped the Star-Crushing Millstone with his forehead, and that one-armed gatekeeper sliced it into ten thousand picnic tables with one swing! This isn’t a mortal galaxy cluster—it’s a den of ancient universe-eating fiends pretending to be farmers! Back through the Heaven-Reaping Gate before they come up here to slice us into chairs too!”
“General! Three thousand of our ships got their golden sickles tangled together when the Extinction Beam bounced back!” the helmsman cried out, sweating buckets as he yanked the steering wheel. “We’re backing up as fast as we can, our stern bumpers are just fifty thousand miles from the Gate threshold!”
