204: Nightmare of the Dimensions

The Star Map of the Orion Arm is undergoing a violent redrawing.

If the task force that destroyed the Gate of Hell thirty-five years ago was just a slap from the God of Death, then what has now descended upon the territory of the Iofer Federation is a full-force swing of the Reaper's scythe.

The Faleim Third Interstellar Expeditionary Fleet and the Seventeenth Interstellar Expeditionary Fleet—two super-fleets that had conquered countless star seas in the old universe, crushed dimensional demons, and even clashed head-on with Awakened Empires—finally bared their hideous fangs at the overlords of this starry sky after centuries of silence.

On the Iofer Federation's proud "Iron Bastion" defense line, the veteran One-Eyed General Kalug, stationed in the 49th Sector, was experiencing the most incomprehensible day of his long military career.

"What is that on the sensor screens?" Kalug growled, staring intently at the massive patches of static. "Interference? Or a malfunction?"

"No... General, those are... those are non-allied ship signals!" The radar officer's voice trembled like a leaf in the wind. "Not one, not ten... but tens of thousands! They appeared directly inside our defensive zone!"

Just as his voice fell, the starry sky outside the viewport changed.

The originally deep, dark background was instantly filled with a silver-white glow. Space shattered like a mirror, and countless elegantly shaped, sleekly lined Faleim warships emerged from thin air.

They completely ignored all the early-warning buoys and space minefields the Iof People had deployed at the edge of the system.

"Fire! All gun positions, fire at will!"

Kalug issued the order to fire, but it felt more like a desperate release.

Thousands of gravity wave oscillation cannons and blaster beams tore through the void, weaving a dense web of fire in space.

However, this firepower—sufficient to turn any conventional civilization's fleet to ash—was like a gentle breeze before the Faleim fleet.

The surfaces of the silver-white warships rippled with faint, ghostly blue waves; those were the Dark Matter Deflector Shields in operation.

The gravity wave attacks the Iof People were so proud of were forcibly neutralized by some higher-level power the moment they touched the shields, while the blaster beams were swallowed whole like light entering a black hole, failing to produce even a single spark.

"Unable to penetrate! The enemy's shield readings haven't budged!"

"Enemy attack! High-energy reaction!"

The Faleim counterattack arrived, and it was devastating.

The Sciences End-class battleships at the front of the formation activated the crystal-clear Focused Arc Emitters on their bows.

Zzzzt—

Countless ghostly blue electrical arcs crossed hundreds of millions of kilometers, ignoring the heavy armor and shields of the iofer warships. In that instant, Kalug saw the frigates and cruisers around him go dark like lightbulbs with their power cut.

"Is this the gap between us?" Kalug looked at the darkened screens on his command seat. Before he could even draw his sidearm to commit suicide, an even thicker beam of light pierced through his flagship.

It was the main cannon of the Titan flagship, the Exterminatus—the Hell Ray.

An orange-red pillar of light, like God's paintbrush, made a gentle stroke across space.

Kalug's flagship, a ten-kilometer-long super-dreadnought, along with the three heavy cruisers nearby, were erased directly at the atomic level by that single stroke, turning into the most basic particulate dust of the universe... Similar scenes were playing out simultaneously across thousands of light-years of Iofer Federation territory.

The Faleim tactics were simple, brutal, and efficient to the extreme.

They did not adopt a traditional linear strategy of "advance-occupy-advance." Instead, utilizing the mobility of their Jump Drives, they split their massive fleet into hundreds of sub-fleets, penetrating every iofer system like mercury spilling across the floor.

For the Iof People, it was as if they were still using spears and shields to form ranks, while the enemy was flying stealth fighters to drop bombs directly onto their central command tent.

There was no strategic depth to speak of; every inch of space was the front line, and every second was doomsday.

The "invincible" main fleet Barlena had assembled in the core sector didn't even have time to deploy its formation before it encountered a head-on assault from two Faleim Juggernaut combat platforms.

The Galaxy Weaver and the End of All Things.

The moment these two mobile interstellar fortresses, each over two thousand kilometers long, appeared, their massive mass directly triggered tidal anomalies in the system.

They didn't even need to fire their cannons.

Simply releasing millions of fully automated drone swarms created a metal storm that blotted out the stars.

Equipped with miniature Phase Disintegration Beams, these drones swarmed the iofer warships like locusts, shredding their proud armor into fragments.

"This is the Third Fleet! We're surrounded! Enemies everywhere! I can't see the end of them!"

"Fifth Fleet requesting support! Our shields are failing! Engine output is dropping! The enemy is using some kind of interference field!"

"My God! What is that? That ship... it's eating our frigates!"

The communication channels were filled with the desperate screams of iofer commanders.

They saw a massive Faleim warship open its ventral armor plates and directly suck in several iofer frigates attempting a suicide charge. Minutes later, the ship's rear vented a cloud of exhaust, and on its production lines, several brand-new drone warships had already been "printed."

In a sense, this was sustaining war through war.

This was the Faleim art of war.

Faced with an absolute technological generational gap, the Iof People's numerical advantage became a joke. The more warships they had, the more resources the Faleim recycled, and the more drones and automated warships they produced.

Just three days.

In just three days.

The main fleet of the Iofer Federation, which had once made the entire Orion Arm tremble and had fought the Angel Empire for thousands of years, completely vanished from this starry sky.

Nothing remained but countless cold wrecks floating in orbit, telling the tale of an old hegemon's fall... The Eye of the Abyss system, the new capital of the Iofer Federation.

This fortress system, armed to the teeth, had now fallen into a deathly silence.

The outer warp relays had been shut down, all defense platforms were activated, and tens of billions of space mines filled the shipping lanes.

But in the eyes of the Federation speaker Barlena, these defensive measures were as laughable as using paper walls to stop a tsunami.

She stood in the center of the command hall. The holographic screens around her no longer showed any friendly signals; there were only overwhelming silver dots representing the enemy, converging on the capital system from all directions.

"Madam speaker..."

The last remaining Red Demon Clan general knelt on the floor, his voice trembling. "The border defenses have completely collapsed. All main fleets... confirmed destroyed. The enemy's vanguard has entered the edge of the system's gravity well."

Barlena's charming face was devoid of color, but her purple eyes burned with a chilling madness.

"We lost. We lost completely."

She walked slowly to the command console, looking at the two massive silver dots on the Star Map that were drawing closer—those were the Faleim super-warships that looked like flagships.

"They didn't even give us a chance to negotiate, nor did they give us the option to surrender."

"They are here to sweep away trash."

Barlena began to laugh, her laughter sharp and piercing.

"But even trash has its dignity!"

"They think they can swallow us so easily? They want to turn us into pets like the Angel people? In their dreams!"

She turned abruptly toward the closed black door at the end of the hall. Behind that door lay not a vault or a shelter, but a restricted zone containing the Federation's highest secret.

"Open it," Barlena ordered.

"speaker?" The general looked up in horror. "You mean... that thing? But the Research Department said it's uncontrollable! Once awakened, the entire system, even the surrounding dozens of light-years, will..."

"Will be destroyed, I know."

Barlena interrupted him, her eyes flashing with resolute light.

"We're going to die anyway, so why not drag these high-and-mighty 'gods' to hell with us?"

"If the Iofer Federation is destined to perish, then I will make this starry sky our burial ground! I will make these ruins their eternal nightmare!"

"Execute the order!"

Under the general's trembling operation, the black door slowly opened.

Inside was a massive console. In the center was a single red button, locked behind layers of complex runic chains and energy force fields.

This button was connected to a secret containment facility near a small black hole named Kathexiloc at the edge of the Eye of the Abyss system.

In the deepest part of that facility slept a terrifying entity from another dimension, discovered by chance during the iofer expansion.

The Iof People didn't know what it was, but it had a name in the Faleim People's old universe database that struck fear into hearts—

The Planar Nightmare.

It was a high-dimensional creature that fed on dimensions themselves, capable of tearing the boundary between reality and illusion.

It did not kill for survival; its very existence was a destruction of the universe itself.

The Iof People found it while it was already in a dormant state; they had been trying to research and utilize its power, but never succeeded.

And now, it had become Barlena's final trump card.

"Come then, let's see if your technology is tougher, or if this nightmare from another dimension is more terrifying."

Barlena reached out a pale hand and pressed the red button heavily... On the edge of the Eye of the Abyss system, outside the event horizon of the Kathexiloc black hole.

A massive containment station disguised as an asteroid suddenly erupted with violent energy fluctuations.

The containment station was blown to fragments under the massive energy impact.

Immediately following, an indescribably terrifying shriek exploded directly in the depths of the souls of all sentient beings.

It was not a sound wave; it was the wail of space being torn apart.

The accretion disk around the black hole suddenly stopped rotating, as if even light had frozen in fear of something more terrible.

In those endless dark depths, a ghastly white rift appeared out of nowhere. It didn't look like a hole; it looked more like a wound—a wound torn open on the smooth skin of this universe, oozing pus and blood.

A... or rather, a massive tentacle composed of countless distorted geometric shapes, broken lights and shadows, and constantly screaming faces, slowly reached out from that rift.

Its length exceeded thousands of kilometers, and every sweep left behind lingering black void cracks in space.

Then came a second, a third... a suffocatingly massive, unspeakable thing was squeezing into this reality bit by bit from that non-existent dimension.

Its true body was not in this dimension; what was revealed in this universe was merely a shadow it projected into three-dimensional space. Yet, the gravitational waves and psionic radiation emitted by this shadow alone were enough to send large patches of nearby asteroids instantly off course.

It opened an eye.

It was not a biological eye, but a miniature quasar that was constantly collapsing and expanding.

It sensed the approaching silver-white fleet.

"Hungry..."

A simple wave of thought, containing endless greed and malice, swept across the entire system.

At this moment, whether Iof People or Faleim People, all felt a shudder from the depths of their genes.

This was the gaze of a hunter upon its prey.

"Ultra-high energy dimensional reaction detected!"

"Warning! Reality stability has dropped to the critical point!"

"Target Identification: Leviathan-class lifeform—Planar Nightmare!"

On the bridge of the Galaxy Weaver, Talon looked at the terrifying monster tearing through the black hole's gravity well. Though his expression was solemn, he did not panic.

As a commander who had defeated such monsters before, he knew exactly what this fellow was worth.

"I knew these lunatics must have been hiding something."

Talon sneered.

"All ships, halt advance. Maintain formation."

"Juggernaut combat platforms, deploy Siege Mode."

"Since they've opened the cage, we'll help this universe clean up some pests while we're at it."

"Notify all ships: prepare to hunt a mythical creature."