50: The range of truth

The torrential rain poured down.

It beat frantically against the pitch-black hull of the black iron ghost, creating a continuous, muffled roar.

But inside the bridge,

the soundproofing system filtered all the clamor into a distant background noise.

Only the faint hum of the climate control system flowed through the air.

This extreme tranquility formed a stark contrast with the violent natural environment outside.

Jiang Ran leaned back in the commander's seat.

His pitch-black eyes reflected the jumping fire control data on the holographic screen.

The red locking frame was like the crosshairs of the Grim Reaper, firmly locked onto the distant "Tower of Babel" that loomed in the curtain of rain.

There was no need for a passionate declaration of war, nor for any redundant emotional venting.

At this distance, at this energy level, destruction required only a tiny movement.

Jiang Ran's finger had been resting on the red physical button with the anti-accidental touch cover.

The sensation from his fingertip was the cold, hard texture of engineering plastic.

But he knew that once he pressed it down,

the released energy would be enough to make the entire river channel boil.

“It’s over.”

He whispered to himself, his voice as calm as if he were announcing the start of dinner.

Then, without any hesitation, his index finger pressed it firmly to the bottom.

*Click.*

The insignificant sound of mechanical contacts closing instantly triggered a chain reaction.

“Screeeech—!!!”

In that instant, the world changed color.

There was no deafening explosion like traditional gunpowder weapons, nor was there pungent smoke filling the sky.

Instead, there was a sharp howl, as if high-voltage electricity were tearing through the firmament.

The sound wasn't deep, but it carried a high-frequency vibration that instantly pierced the rain and the rock walls.

It drilled directly into the depths of everyone's bone marrow, making their teeth ache and chatter.

The massive hull of the black iron ghost suddenly sank into the water.

The terrifying recoil, enough to overturn ordinary ships, was forcibly suppressed by the Level 4 hydraulic stabilization system.

The water surface around the ship seemed to be struck by an invisible giant hammer.

A ring of turbulent white shockwaves instantly exploded, shattering all the rain within dozens of meters into mist.

Between the long rails of the Twin Electromagnetic Railgun, long-accumulated electrical energy was released in an instant.

The brightness of the ghostly blue electric light reached its peak at this moment, lighting up the pitch-black rainy night like a pale noon.

Hundreds of millions of electrons surged frantically within the magnetic rails.

The resulting Lorentz force, like the hand of God, pushed that fist-sized solid tungsten alloy projectile.

In an acceleration path of less than two meters, it completed the qualitative change from static to extreme speed.

Mach 7.

The moment the projectile burst out of the muzzle, the shockwave instantly shattered the air in front of it.

It was no longer a shell.

It was a steel nail of the Reaper endowed with absolute kinetic energy, carrying the will to destroy everything as it roared out of the barrel!

The limit of human dynamic vision is about 0.1 seconds.

And in the face of Mach 7 speed,

the fragile human retina didn't even have the qualification to capture an afterimage.

In that instant, even sound was left far behind.

The people in the canyon, who were in a state of extreme terror, didn't see the flight path of any "shell" at all.

They only saw a bizarre scene that defied common sense and was enough to be etched into the depths of their nightmares—

In this raging, continuous curtain of torrential rain, a straight "vacuum channel" suddenly appeared out of thin air.

It was an absolute straight line connecting heaven and earth.

The intense friction between the tungsten alloy projectile and the air generated temperatures of thousands of degrees.

In a thousandth of a second, all the rain and mist along the path were instantly evaporated.

The originally chaotic and disordered rain curtain was like being violently pierced by an invisible, red-hot iron poker.

Water vapor instantly exploded, turning into rings of visible white shockwaves that spread frantically along that straight ballistic path.

The air was torn, and space was pierced.

That channel was like a crimson scar.

It forcibly cut through the pitch-black, heavy night sky, ignoring the barriers of space and distance.

With an irreversible causality, it nailed itself firmly into the foundation of that high tower.

When the delayed, eardrum-shattering roar of the sonic boom finally reached people's ears, destruction had actually already arrived.

There was no warning, nor any possibility of evasion.

At this distance, the Reaper did not swing his scythe.

He simply drew a line at the speed of light.

A line of truth called "Range."

“BOOM—!!!”

This loud noise was not accompanied by soaring flames like a conventional explosive detonation.

Instead, it was more like a ten-million-ton invisible giant hammer smashing violently into the earth.

It was a physical impact sound so dull that it seemed to make the entire Earth's crust jump.

The tungsten alloy projectile, accelerated to the extreme by electromagnetism, was like a red-hot table knife cutting into butter.

Without encountering any substantial resistance, it instantly pierced through the load-bearing foundation at the bottom of the Tower of Babel, which was several meters thick.

That steel fortress, composed of countless scrapped cars compressed by hydraulic presses and then mixed with a large amount of steel-reinforced concrete,

didn't even have a chance to deform under the impact of millions of joules of terrifying kinetic energy.

It simply "disappeared."

At the moment of contact, the massive impact force shattered the hard concrete and metal structures into the finest dust.

Dust filled the sky, mixed with metal particles that were instantly pulverized.

Like a sudden burst of gray mist, it sprayed violently toward the rear of the dam.

The originally solid tower foundation, under this strike, had a transparent hole with a diameter of over five meters appear out of thin air.

Through this huge hole, one could even clearly see the churning muddy waves behind the dam.

That kind of visual impact was far more terrifying and intuitive than any fiery explosion.

It was as if an invisible giant hand from a higher dimension had forcibly "gouged out" a piece of the heart from the physical world.

This was the dominance of pure kinetic energy weapons.

No fancy combustion, no long chemical reactions.

Only the simplest, most brutal—annihilation of matter.

“Crack... Snap!”

It was the wail of metal fatigue reaching its limit, as sharp as a bone breaking.

Having lost a third of its load-bearing structure at the bottom, the laws of physics took over mercilessly.

The "Tower of Babel," over thirty meters high and once regarded as a spiritual totem by the people of Dragon King Stockade,

finally let out one last shrill groan.

Like a giant whose spine had been suddenly removed, it tilted slowly toward the water with an irreversible and terrifying momentum.

Countless welding points snapped under the massive torque, bursting into a series of dazzling sparks that looked like tragic fireworks in the rainy night.

Atop the tower, the madman who had just been clamoring to smash everything with stones was now like a panicked ant.

The "Dragon King" gripped the severely deformed railing tightly, the iron plate beneath his feet tilting at a fatal angle.

The gale swept away his thinning hair.

But in his cloudy old eyes, there was no fear of death.

Instead, there was a heart-wrenching despair from the collapse of his faith.

“The stress point... my stress point is gone!”

“What happened to that hole?! That was concrete! How could it scatter like dust?!”

“It doesn't follow mechanics! This doesn't follow mechanics!!!”

In this moment, the engineering knowledge he was so proud of,

his so-called structural aesthetics, were as fragile as a piece of soaked straw paper in the face of absolute kinetic energy.

He could only watch helplessly as his great "Tower to Heaven" was disintegrating.

He watched as the pitch-black, muddy river surface rushed toward him like the mouth of a giant beast.

“My tower—!!!”

A shrill scream had just left his mouth before it was instantly drowned out by the massive sound of the collapse.

“Rumble—!!!”

Following that was a continuous, earth-shattering roar.

Tons of scrapped cars, cement-filled containers, and broken steel beams,

like a rain of meteorites filling the sky,

carried the crazy old man and smashed violently into the rushing flood below.

Massive kinetic energy was instantly converted into violent potential energy.

A ten-meter-high muddy wave exploded out of thin air, like a gray wall of water, instantly swallowing all the floating platforms and small boats around the dam.

The high tower that symbolized the "Dragon King's" absolute power and arrogance,

just like that, turned into a pile of meaningless underwater scrap metal in a matter of seconds.

There were no miracles, only pulverization,

and the turbulent waves on the river surface that could not be calmed for a long time.