1.54 Every Twinkling Star

"Garrison base!" With a single command from Wu Chen, sci-fi or not, he no longer cared!

Female warriors surged in from all directions. Two empty hunters inside the hangar also plummeted down from the breach torn by incoming debris, firing their ion cannons at full blast to attack the Nordic dragon ship. Without exception, however, they were all blocked by the lightning barrier inherent to the dragon ship.

The two empty hunters circled around, pouring out a barrage of ion-cannon shells, attempting to pierce the defense through saturated fire.

Two squads of female warriors were not to be outdone. Forming up in armored rides, they charged toward the Vikings.

The Vikings raised their shields to block, only to be effortlessly torn apart by the storm of bullets.

"Huh?" The one-sided slaughter left the artificial intelligence Aiyi in a state of bewildered doubt. Logically speaking, plot debris capable of breaching the base's protective shield should not be this weak.

While they spoke, the two squads of armored female warriors cut through the ranks like butterflies flitting among flowers, leveling everything in their path and blasting the Vikings into fragments.

There was no flying flesh and blood, no wailing ghosts and howling wolves. The crystal remains of the Viking warriors covering the ground were transforming into rolling billows of dense smoke. As the crystal remains vanished visibly to the naked eye, purplish-red smoke converged from all directions, resembling clusters of swaying ghost fires. The ghost fires quickly transformed into phantoms, and the phantoms solidified into lifelike armored female warriors. There were precisely twenty of them, no more, no less. Their postures and appearances were indistinguishable from real ones; their weapons and armor were identical in every detail.

"This is their true level." The AI quickly annotated the numerical values of the phantom female warriors on the viewport.

The Viking dragon ship also rose into the air amidst the surging mist. Its sails shifted into tailfins, and rotary laser cannons on both sides of the hull opened fire in a dense barrage, exchanging long-range fire with the two empty hunters.

"It's actually a spaceship!" AI Aiyi was speechless. "Truly... sci-fi indeed."

Lines of Gauss machine gun fire crisscrossed, and both sides scored hits. The female warriors' armor cracked and they tumbled to the ground. The Nordic female warriors, however, were blasted into tiny bits along with their mounts, scattering across the ground as glittering debris before atomizing once more.

Wu Chen had already summoned repair drones to patch up the female warriors' armor on this side. Fortunately, only the armor was damaged, and aside from minor concussions, the female warriors were unhurt. By the time the repair drones finished fixing the deformed armor, the Nordic female warriors on the opposite side had once again completed solidification.

The major battle was on the verge of breaking out. Wu Chen slammed his foot down on the accelerator, and the AE86 drifted laterally across the front lines, blocking the enemy's preemptive volley for the female warriors. The vehicle-mounted weapons swept across everything, shattering the Nordic female warriors once more.

"Master, unless we deal with the mastermind inside the dragon ship, they will keep regenerating," Aiyi calculated. "And they will grow stronger each time."

"What on earth are these purplish-red crystals?" Wu Chen felt a sense of familiarity, yet could not pinpoint their origin.

"A very peculiar energy fluctuation, seemingly quite similar to Master's Omega brainwaves," the AI discovered. "Yet it's not mental solidification. To be precise, it's an extremely rare substance, seemingly capable of shaping forms at will. Oh no! Master, the purplish-red crystals are transforming into you!"

Visible through the viewport of the AE86, right behind the continuously battered and shattering Nordic female warriors, another AE86 was rapidly condensing within the billowing mist.

"Hmph!" Wu Chen swung the steering wheel, executing a 360-degree drift with the AE86. The vehicle-mounted machine guns swept in a complete circle with no blind spots, shattering the pursuers closing in from front, back, left, and right. The moment the car's nose was aligned, he slammed his foot back down on the eased accelerator. The AE86 accelerated in a straight line, colliding head-on with the newly formed replica.

With a deafening roar, the replica split apart and exploded into fragments.

The AE86 did not lose speed as it tore through the enemy formation, leaving a trail of tracer fire that eliminated every enemy soldier along the path. The super-alloy body of the AE86 held an obvious advantage. The technological dominance brought by shifting gears twice was concentrated and magnified by the AI. This Nordic dragon ship, originating from gods-know-what plot debris, had chosen the wrong opponent from the very beginning.

Yet the purplish-red crystals smashed by the AE86 resorted to their old tricks, atomizing to reunite and solidifying to reorganize. Clearly, they did not intend to concede defeat easily.

"Master, look at the dragon ship!" The AI projected the aerial combat scene onto the viewport.

Fighting two against one, the Nordic dragon ship maneuvered against the two empty hunters. Practical combat had already proven that Gauss kinetic weapons were far more devastating to the purplish-red crystals than plasma energy weapons. Unfortunately, both front and rear cannons of the two empty hunters were plasma-based, limiting their lethality against the Nordic spaceship.

Worse still, as the cannons exchanged fire, mist filled the air. The two empty hunters swooped back and forth, inevitably becoming contaminated. Like congealing frost, the noses and wingtips of the craft were gradually covered by crystals, which spread outward in an expanding spiderweb pattern.

"Plot intrusion?" Wu Chen furrowed his brow slightly.

"Yes, the mastermind inside the Nordic dragon spaceship seems to still be... alive," the AI encountered a logical paradox. "Yet the special structure of the purplish-red crystals should fundamentally be a zone forbidden to life."

"Have the empty hunters detected the situation inside the spaceship?" Wu Chen wanted to get to the bottom of it.

"Enshrouded by a vortex, detection is impossible." The AI had tried numerous times without success.

"Let's go up and take a look." Wu Chen switched to flight mode with a single keystroke. Just before colliding with the replica, the AE86 instantly soared into the air, heading straight for the Nordic dragon spaceship.

Sensing the crisis as well, thick clouds rolled in, enshrouding the AE86. The hood of the car rapidly crystallized, while all vehicle-mounted weapons of the AE86 fired at maximum output. The furiously shooting streams of fire converged into a pair of headlights, guiding Wu Chen as he charged straight toward the dragon spaceship.

The closer they got, the greater the resistance. The dense clouds were filled with granular crystals, resembling ice crystals studding the cloud layers. The AE86, along with the spacetime it occupied, could be seen visibly accelerating its solidification.

"Attack with all your might." Wu Chen pressed the accelerator down to a steady maximum.

The vehicle-mounted machine guns spat fire to clear a path, and the AE86 smashed through layers of crystals. Regrettably, just as it was a single step away from the dragon ship, spacetime and the AE86 froze together into a massive purplish-red crystal, immediately invaded by an invisible external force. Within the steadily thickening crystal body, tiny spiderweb cracks rapidly spread. The intangible intrusion originating from the consciousness of the dragon ship's master was infiltrating the body of the AE86 from all directions.

"Interesting." Wu Chen's Omega curtain was instantly triggered. The intuition-forged experience of a lord-tier grand player kept him calm in the face of sudden changes.

The AE86's exclusive sanctuary attribute kept everything inside the vehicle as it was. Ordinarily, until Wu Chen's "0326 exclusive branch plotline" was concluded, the AE86—as part of his exclusive sanctuary—would not be easily destroyed, much like that red telephone box that had stood unyielding through all resistance.

"Master, be careful." The AI constructed a mental intrusion countdown in the shortest possible time.

An intangible pressure transcending spacetime rolled toward every pore of Wu Chen's body.

Wu Chen held his breath and slowly closed his eyes.

At the edge of his microcosm, the nodes of the 33 newly connected female warriors from the City of Ruins lit up one after another. The dim microcosm was instantly imbued with light.

Encouraged by this, the Omega brainwave curtain amplified and projected outward, counter-intruding into the countless tiny ice cracks within the crystal freezing the AE86.

Two strands of consciousness met within the fissures, engaging in a brief mutual probing before fusing together seamlessly, clinging to one another like glue.

After all, Wu Chen had only recently arrived following his shattering, and his microcosm had not yet fully awakened. His mental strength fell far short of the dragon ship's master. Once their minds connected, Wu Chen met with almost no resistance before being counter-attacked by the dragon ship's master. A surging torrent of mental force poured ferociously into Wu Chen's dim microcosm, shattering one fragile node after another.

The moment Wu Chen suffered mental intrusion, every single female warrior in the base locked in fierce combat with the enemy lost control. Their consciousness became chaotic, and they lost their sense of self. They were likewise seized upon by the omnipresent purplish-red mist and, through their mental links, poured endlessly into Wu Chen's microcosm, converging into a terrifying mental (heretical) vortex.

As previously known, every twinkling star in the microcosm represented the solidified mental core of a female companion. Once the brightest stars were constellations, followed by galaxies, along with beautiful meteorite rings and meteor showers—those were coagulated masses of mental force and served as crucial raw materials for forming a new star.

To everyone's utter astonishment, the intrusion of the external heretical mentality actually triggered the meteorite rings floating at the edge of Wu Chen's microcosm!

Those coagulated clusters of mental force drifted toward the heretical vortex one after another, as if drawn by gravity!