The situation was urgent, sure.
But escaping wasn’t something they could accomplish by yelling a few times.
They still had to put one foot in front of the other and run.
And the four members of the Cthulhu family were no pushovers.
In the stories, anyone who saw them or heard their voices inevitably went insane.
But this was Rick.
After subjecting the phenomenon to a full course of scientific analysis, he had definitively classified Cthulhu’s nonphysical attacks as mental attacks.
More importantly, those attacks had an upper limit.
Otherwise, how the hell had Cthulhu managed to have a son and daughter?
Obviously, both parents’ bodies could fully withstand each other’s mental attacks, which made those attacks practically useless against one another.
So Rick’s solution to the noise was actually pretty simple.
A Universal Language Translator that covered the entire range of hearing, combined with a jamming function, took care of the voices.
If the sound carried a weak energy component, he could add the Multi-Frequency Signal Jammer he used to evade the Galactic Federation, preventing it from locking onto a target.
And if it still managed to lock on, the Energy Dissolver would deal with the energy.
Physical attacks, though…
Those were the reason Rick and Morty were running.
Going from three hundred meters tall to eight thousand meters was an N-fold increase in size.
In a sense, their combat power had also skyrocketed by a factor of N.
Fortunately, Cthulhu’s absurd arrival had triggered an apocalypse on a civilized planet.
As the Galactic Steward, the Galactic Federation obviously couldn’t stay out of it.
The Gromflomites might have looked pretty pathetic in the show, but their opponent had been Rick!
Even the Citadel had been built partly to hide from the Galactic Federation and Rick’s other enemies.
The Gromflomites were actually terrifyingly powerful.
The production team just hadn’t had the budget to show it.
That was why the Galactic Federation looked like nothing more than a bunch of Gromflomites backed by a pathetic fleet of a few dozen ships.
But when this emergency broke out, they casually deployed…
Five hundred warships, each ten thousand kilometers long.
And another two hundred warships, each one hundred thousand kilometers long.
Energy turrets covered the ships so densely that the sight alone could trigger trypophobia.
They poured endless blasts into the four Cthulhu beings as though ammunition cost nothing.
The entire planet began trembling beneath the impossibly rapid bombardment!
Cthulhu’s gibberish and horrifying appearance were practically useless against the Gromflomites.
Their technology had already advanced to the point of manipulating consciousness.
There was no way they would have neglected defenses against mental attacks.
That left the Cthulhu family with only one option.
A physical fight.
“Alright, they’re here.
Let’s keep looking for the Mega Fruits!”
Rick had finally found a communication device on one of the corpses.
He glanced up at the warships filling the sky, then took off in another direction.
Morty had already dealt with the Galactic Federation several times.
He stared at the massive black-and-red warships with naked envy.
They might not have been as powerful as Rick’s little rust bucket.
But in the interstellar age, who didn’t worship at the church of more guns?
Morty tore his gaze away and followed Rick.
The two of them killed their way through the planet’s creatures and inhabitants until they finally reached a valley.
The Mega Trees grew so densely that they formed an entire forest.
Morty and Rick both stared, their eyes nearly popping out of their heads.
The Mega Trees had only played a major supporting role in the Season 1 pilot, with just a few brief appearances afterward.
But they were actually cultivated on a massive scale throughout the Citadel.
There was only one reason for that.
Even for Ricks, whose intelligence was already absurdly high, these things could push it another huge step forward.
They were among the rarest items ever shown in the entire Rick and Morty universe, but they absolutely deserved to be called legendary.
Rick had no desire to visit the Citadel, so naturally, the only way to obtain Mega Fruits was to gather them in the wild.
Or rather, off-planet.
Morty rushed forward.
Faced with a trunk nearly two meters tall, he grabbed on with both hands and scrambled up.
“Climbing?
What are you, a caveman?”
Rick watched Morty clamber up the tree and sneered in disgust.
Then he pulled a pair of shoes from somewhere.
He activated their adhesion function and simply walked up the trunk as though it were flat ground.
But the moment he saw Morty bite straight into the flesh of a Mega Fruit, his face twisted in horror.
Rick had realized long ago that Morty desperately wanted to become stronger.
That was why he had been deliberately training him.
But this stuff?
Even Rick wouldn’t dare eat it unprocessed!
Morty was practically begging to die!
By then, however, Morty had already entered an extraordinary state.
He had never experienced anything like it in his life.
It was as though a single-core CPU had suddenly been upgraded to thirty thousand cores.
In that instant, his mind and consciousness became godlike.
Everything he saw was stripped down from its most superficial appearance.
His thoughts plunged deeper and deeper, producing complete, systematic, and critical analyses.
With nothing more than a grain of sand, the wind blowing past him, the condition of the soil, the periodic table, and countless other factors, Morty could reconstruct how it had looked ten years ago, a hundred years ago, even a thousand years ago.
The Galactic Federation warships in the sky were dismantled by his terrifying processing power.
Their unified structures broke apart in his mind, each functional section becoming an individual component.
Even without ever seeing the interior, Morty used pure logic to reconstruct an entire warship one hundred thousand kilometers long.
From its gun turrets to a crew member’s cup of coffee, even the internal water recycling system, every last detail was calculated inside his mind.
Nuclear fusion.
The Meeseeks Box.
Technology capable of unlocking animal intelligence.
One invention after another unfolded from its most basic principles.
After a single second, Morty understood how to create nuclear fusion.
By the second second, enhancing animal intelligence had become easy.
[So this is what it feels like to be Rick…]
[Nothing can stop me!]
Then Morty realized the portal gun was what he should really be thinking about.
And his mind came to a dead stop.
Even Rick had paid an enormous price to develop that technology.
Morty felt like a scientist standing before the problem of nuclear fusion, tearing his hair out with no idea where to begin.
Because in a way, the portal gun was a complete glitch in reality.
How much energy would it take, and how unusual and stable would that energy need to be, to create a portal that wouldn’t kill its user?
How could anyone locate the coordinates of another universe?
If universes had coordinates, did that mean distant universes were actually located side by side?
And if universes were packed neatly together like cigarettes in a pack, what lay beyond the multiverse?
The deeper Morty thought, the paler his face became.
He was finally beginning to understand why Rick had become a nihilist…
Just then, a tremendous force slammed into Morty’s stomach.
“Ah!”