(t/n: Psionic Bio-Battery, Emperor style)
While Drool was still processing everything, grief and anger and shock all tangled together, a rumbling tremor rolled up from deep underground.
Rumble!
Everyone could hear it.
Something moving through the rock beneath their feet.
And underneath that, a lighter sound, sharp and crisp, like dominoes toppling one after another.
“Something’s wrong.”
Everyone present looked up at the dome in unison.
The high-energy shield dome, erected by the Human Alliance Technology creation, was now showing cracks.
The cracks rapidly expanded, covering the entire dome.
Then came the sound of rock grinding and splitting, a tooth-grinding sound of stone giving way.
The dome was already on the verge of collapse.
All the survivors in the shelter were terrified.
“Damn it, is it going to collapse now?”
The players all had the same thought: Had the plot changed again?
“The completion rate isn’t even…” Vrekk frowned.
He remembered it sitting at thirty percent.
This shouldn’t be happening.
But if the dome came down, they were all dead.
Tens of millions of tonnes above them.
Even a fraction of that would flatten everything beneath it.
Hiding in the tunnels gave them a thin chance, but without power, the life support systems wouldn’t last.
Federation armor came with its own built-in breathing system and could filter toxic gases and generate trace amounts of oxygen, but all of that ran on energy.
And beyond that, how were they supposed to log out?
If they went offline and died, what then?
Stay in indefinitely?
Starve in the real world?
“Wait.
Hold on.”
“Look at the completion rate!”
One player had already pulled up the game interface.
The thirty percent completion rate that had been sitting there was gone.
Wiped to zero.
What happened?
Why did the completion rate drop?
Was there a cutoff point?
Did hitting thirty percent trigger something?
Red emergency lighting flooded the shelter.
Alarms screamed.
“We’re going to die!”
The sound of the alarms hit everyone hard.
Several miners whose sanity had already been worn thin snapped entirely, running in blind panic without direction.
The players’ minds went blank.
“Could it be related to the stasis pod?”
“That timing can’t be a coincidence.”
They had just rescued people, and the shelter collapsed?
They had all seen the system warning.
“Is this the end for us?”
“Silence!”
Aldric’s voice cut through the entire camp.
A gentle wave of psionic energy swept through the shelter.
The miners who had lost themselves to panic found their thoughts going still.
Every miner turned toward the command ship’s hatch.
That man.
That impossibly perfect man.
The Modeling Optimization module worked at full effect.
Overwhelming personal presence, confidence, resolve, morale, and sanity all flowing outward from a single figure.
The headless miners were calmed down. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Then, under the disbelieving eyes of everyone present, a blazing golden light rose from Aldric’s body.
“Septimus, prepare to activate the psionic shield!”
Gold light pulsed at the center of the camp.
That warm light made all the miners feel as if they were enveloped in the sun.
The sun!
The collapsing dome slowed.
It stopped.
It hung in place as though time itself had paused around it.
Aldric looked up at the dome and raised one hand, palm open, pushing upward.
With that single small motion, the fractured dome was pushed back.
The tremors of the earth subsided, and the shelter returned to stability.
Only a faint layer of golden psionic energy remained, and Aldric stood at its center.
“Holy crap, is this for real?”
“The Commander isn’t even pretending anymore!”
While the players were still reacting, the completion rate changed.
“Completion rate: 50%”
“It went up?
The meter reversed?”
The image of sudden collapse followed by something like time running backward was almost too much to take in.
The players had been there to witness it firsthand, and even they were struggling to process what they had just seen.
The miners went from fear to disbelief.
And then…
Fervor.
Every player, and everyone watching the streams back on Earth, was stunned by a scene that felt too real to be part of a game.
But then Aldric stumbled.
The same thought surfaced in every mind at once.
Whatever he had just done, He had paid a heavy price.
“In the God-Emperor’s name!
Long live the Federation!”
The miners erupted.
The sound they made was almost incomprehensible.
Hats flew into the air.
Then every miner went to their knees, facing Aldric’s direction.
The God-Emperor again.
But compared to a faith he had no connection to, this at least carried something better with it.
These miners no longer held only the old name in their hearts.
Now there was the Federation alongside it.
He trusted that the Federation’s truth would wear the old faith down over time.
“Commander, I…” Drool was at a loss.
Aldric raised a hand.
“This has nothing to do with you.”
“The energy the treatment pod consumed wasn’t significant enough to cause this.”
“This is geological.
We cleared the rock-borers in the surrounding area, but there are still large numbers of them below us, and they are compromising the structure.”
Pushing outward to explore had always served two purposes.
Mining resources for the shelter was one.
Clearing rock-borers to stop them from destabilizing the ground beneath them was the other.
“The camp has been on the edge for a long time.”
“The camp is constantly being crushed by at least tens of millions of tons of tectonic plates above it.”
“Sustaining the high-energy shield on rock-borer bio-energy alone to this point is already well past any reasonable limit.”
“It has nothing to do with you.”
This was indeed completely unrelated.
“You did well, my Captains.”
“All of you did well, my Captains.”
“I know you pooled everything you had and gave it to Captain Drool so he could bring his miner back.”
“I am glad to see the inheritors of the Federation standing before me.”
“You have understood a part of what the Federation stands for.”
“Humanity is the most noble species in the universe.”
“Our greatest quality is unity.”
Aldric turned to face the miners.
“To all Federation citizens here.
Those so-called gods cannot save you.”
“The oppressive force of ten million tons is something even gods would fear.”
“But when humanity stands together, we accomplish what no god can.”
“I believe in you.”
He had used psionic energy openly, and what he had wanted to show them was this.
Humanity overcomes.
But did the miners really think so?
Antor took hold of Aldric’s arm to steady him.
“The dome still requires the psionic shield to hold it.
The shield generator needs my psionic energy to run.
From here on I will rarely be able to leave the ship.”
The chat on every streaming platform detonated.
“Is the Commander under some kind of restriction now?”
“The shield needs the Commander’s power, holy crap, isn’t that a bio-battery?
Has the Commander become a battery?”
Drool’s fist tightened and he shouted across the camp.
“Commander!
We can definitely build the shelter!”
Aldric stopped walking.
“I believe in you.”
Each step after that came harder than the last.
When he finally made it back inside the warship, the last thing that followed him in was four words.
“Long live the Federation!”
Even with the ecological command ship’s psionic shield generator to counteract the pressure of over ten million tons, it was still an unimaginable burden.
“Antor, help me to the chair.”
Antor looked at Aldric with something that was equal parts reverence and anguish.
His lower lip pressed tight between his teeth.
“I will likely be unable to leave the command ship for the foreseeable future.
Communication with the Captains will probably need to go through you from now on.”
“For you, I would give everything I have, Commander.” Antor’s voice carried a faint tremor.
Aldric walked with great difficulty.
Until he reached the command chair.
He dropped into it, the full weight of his body settling into the seat.
The command chair housed a piece of Federation high technology built into its frame.
A psionic extraction device.
A psionic converter.
One of the few psionic instruments still intact and functioning.
It had a particular capability.
It drew psionic energy from a psyker and fed it directly into the ship’s systems.
And Aldric had become its power source.
The device drew from him continuously, supplying energy to the ecological ship.
If he cut the psionic supply, the entire dome would come down.
When it did, tens of millions of tonnes would fall, and everyone in the shelter would die.
He could not freely leave this chair any longer.
Not until the shelter was built to the point where it could bear the weight of the dome on its own.
It didn’t need to be finished.
It only needed to be structurally sufficient.
He looked out at the camp beyond the viewport.
It’s in your hands now, players.
Show me what you’re capable of.