“Why did you run with a group of deadweights?”
“Someone who grew up in the Earth Federation like you shouldn’t have…
shouldn’t have any compassion left…”
“You yourself were barely surviving.”
“As far as I know, you personally killed over a hundred Earth Federation elite citizens.
Those precious, high-grade Earth Federation citizens.”
“For a group already stamped with quarantine stamps.”
“They’ve already lost their human rights in the Earth Alliance.”
“Was it worth it?”
…..
Antor and Annie were curled up on the soft air mattresses in the engineering section’s rest room, clutching their blankets tight.
If this is a dream, please don’t let me wake up.
Tears of contentment slid from the corners of their eyes, and they held onto the feeling with everything they had.
A thunderous boom shook the air.
A wave of strange, indescribable energy rolled across the entire camp.
Both siblings jolted upright.
“What’s happening?”
Fear was written across their faces.
Something deep inside told them that fate wasn’t finished with them yet.
The ground beneath the player camp began to fracture and shudder.
The jagged rocks of the surrounding mountains crumbled and fell in the tremors.
Red arcs streaked across the dim sky.
There was no telling where the light originated.
The naked eye couldn’t trace it back to any source.
“Holy crap?” Bruceus stumbled without warning and cracked his head against the heart-shaped rock another player had chiseled out earlier.
Drool couldn’t help himself.
“Bruceus, very on-brand.
You spend every stream spamming that emote and now you’re literally face-planting into one.
hahaha…”
The explosions didn’t stop at one.
The earth kept roaring.
“An earthquake?”
It felt like something underground was howling.
The violent shaking made the players feel like they were about to leave the ground entirely.
“Is this a trampoline?”
“Did the game bug out?”
The players were thrown back and forth, the world spinning around them.
“Look up, what is that?”
A cry of surprise made everyone look up at the sky.
The horizon had been swallowed by darkness.
At the same time, countless bursts of firelight and red radiance blazed across the sky.
A blinding red light flared across the surface of the earth.
Like something had torn the ground apart.
The players stood there with their mouths open.
BOOM!
The earth sank.
Miners from Pit Three came pouring out of the tunnels in blind panic.
Terror was spreading like a flood.
Rock walls collapsed and fell, and the miners ran like something had broken loose inside them.
The Federation had made it clear that outsiders were not permitted inside the camp.
But the fear of death overrode everything, and their feet carried them instinctively toward the safest place they could think of.
The will to live made them trust the Federation.
Made them trust the man who shone like something beyond human.
The player camp.
“What in the hell is that thing!”
Darkness that blotted out the sun covered most of the sky.
BOOM!
Another massive explosion.
“Septimus, charge the secondary cannon!” This story is hosted at g.com.
Aldric closed his eyes and reached outward with his senses.
“Psychic energy?
That is a deeply polluted psychic signature…” As a Stellaris commander, he knew psychic energy as well as he knew anything.
Psychic weapon exchanges had been a routine feature of interstellar warfare for as long as he could remember.
That nauseating sensation was not something he had ever forgotten.
“This dirty?
Was that a psychic weapon detonation?”
“A dirty bomb?”
This qualified as a dirty bomb by any psychic warfare standard.
Someone capable of using psychic weapons shouldn’t be producing something this crude.
It felt like someone had taken a living organism saturated with negative psychic energy and simply detonated it.
“Or some other variant of psychic energy?”
Psychic energy came in many forms, broadly classified as warp energy.
If this had been a physical strike, the impact needed to produce this effect would have been at least orbital bombardment level.
But orbital bombardment didn’t leave anyone alive afterward, let alone with the ground still shaking beneath their feet.
A physical attack of sufficient force would shatter a continent like tofu.
Ordinary people would be reduced to dust, not thrown around on top of ground that was vibrating like a sieve.
Only a psychic reaction could produce a disaster this strange.
“System, recall all players.”
“Septimus, activate the energy shield!”
The earth split open.
A vast chasm tore across the ground.
The camp was sliding.
The tectonic plate beneath the camp was sliding.
“What’s going on?” Bruceus struggled to pull himself off the rock.
“What the hell is happening?”
“Am I seeing things, or is there a cathedral flying through the sky?”
Faintly visible in the distance, something enormous and cathedral-like was breaking apart and exploding in midair.
“No way, the cathedral is flying.
Wait, a cathedral?”
“That’s not right.
It’s not that the cathedral is flying, it’s that…”
“The ground is standing up.”
The dark sky finally revealed what it actually was.
It was the earth itself.
Drool stood nearby, jaw hanging open, genuine fear in his eyes.
Even for a player, this was something to be afraid of.
Bruceus was still a little dazed from the knock to his head.
He shook it and asked, “What do you mean the ground is standing up?
Does the ground have legs now?”
Drool was literally drooling.
He stood there with his mouth open, pointing into the sky in the distance.
Following the direction of his drooling gaze,
“Holy crap, the earth really is standing up!”
Yes, the earth was standing up!
“Oh my god.”
A tectonic plate spanning thousands of meters heaved and bucked in their field of vision, wrenched clean off the crust beneath it.
As though some giant had reached down, grabbed the earth by its edge, and hauled it upright into the air.
“The scale of this is insane.”
Viewers watching through the streamers’ immersive perspectives had gone completely silent.
“Can anyone survive this?”
“This might be a bit over the top.”
“What do you mean the ground stood up?”
“Even Hollywood disaster movies don’t have scenes this big.”
“Did a meteor hit the planet?”
“I’m actually terrified right now.”
The near-real visual experience combined with a catastrophe of this scale sent dopamine flooding through players and viewers alike.
“Just this one scene has a bigger budget than a full feature film.”
Aldric could see the streamers’ broadcast interfaces.
He had real-time access to all player status feeds.
The reach of the streams was useful to him.
Influence, and occasionally a genuinely sharp idea from the comments.
Honestly, aside from screening beta applicants, Aldric had never paid much attention to the comment sections before.
But reading this one, even he couldn’t hold it together.
The “Stellaris dev team” didn’t know either!
This was a real “natural disaster.”
There was no time left to think.
He issued the order immediately.
“Septimus, fire the secondary cannon!
System, take control!”
A crimson aurora flickered across the hull of the ship.
“Only a handful of Star Wars game modules available?”
Only the secondary cannon and the shield were responding.
Only a portion of the game modules could be loaded.
“Orbital calculation, psionic targeting view…”
“That’s enough.”
Federation AI had formidable processing power, but it was still limited by hardware.
Without sufficient sensor arrays, without data feedback, even Federation AI couldn’t account for everything.
AI alone couldn’t make the right call in extreme situations about what to sacrifice and what to protect.
But AI paired with the system mod could easily predict the trajectory of falling debris and execute exactly what Aldric needed next.
The best of Federation technology and the system working together.
The game mod system could interface with any framework.
A streak of red blazed across the sky.
BOOM!!
Pierced by the red light, the tectonic plate spanning thousands of meters shattered.
Shattered, not erased.
The debris would still fall on them.
But that was fine.
The Federation’s advanced shields would handle it.
“What are the odds?” Aldric couldn’t help feeling surprised by the turn of events.
The secondary cannon had been the only weapon system intact on the ecological command ship.
He had expected it to be a trump card against enemies.
He hadn’t expected it to save his own life first.
In truth, the survival odds had only improved by a narrow margin.
But that narrow margin was all it took.
An intact tectonic plate coming down would have left no survivors at all.
A continental plate thousands of meters across, dropped directly onto the camp, would have flattened everyone there except Aldric himself into nothing.
“The Federation actually pulled it off!”
For the first time, the players had witnessed a fleet weapon fire at close range.
The first time they had seen a ship cannon fired horizontally across land and felt the full weight of what it meant.
The first time any of them had directly experienced what an energy weapon of that magnitude actually looked like.
The shattered plate came down and cratered the ground.
The entire subsurface of the camp compressed like a sponge.
The sound of tunnels collapsing was everywhere.
The underground had been hollowed out.
This was a mine pit, after all.
RUMBLE!
Aldric braced with one hand and kept his eyes fixed on the ion shield.
If it started to fail, he would not hesitate.
There was no room to hesitate now.
The ship’s shield flickered under the strain, its light stuttering with the weight of what it was holding back.
Antor watched the disaster unfolding in the sky, his face draining of color, his focus beginning to slip.
The extreme swings of the day had left his raw and desperate for something solid to hold onto.
Without knowing why, Antor began to pray.
The image that rose in his mind was Aldric’s face, that perfect, impossible face.
“God-Emperor above…” Thaniel_a_goodchild much appreciated