The moment Otto stepped onto the thirteenth underground level of the Fire Moth base, it felt as if he had walked into an invisible quagmire.
A second ago, his face still bore the lingering, composed warmth appropriate for the celebration lights and cheering crowds.
A second later, the instant his emerald eyes reflected the central main screen, all warmth was instantly drained away.
Alert messages cascaded down his pupils like a waterfall of blood. The arc at the corner of his mouth, which had remained unchanged for ten thousand years, seemingly in control of everything, stiffened almost to the point of breaking for the first time.
"Immediately!"
His voice cut through the sharp alarm that suddenly erupted in the room. "All orbital observation units! Highest priority! Target—Near-Earth Orbit to Cislunar Space! Let me see it clearly!"
His fingers were already pressing on the virtual interface of the master control console, the stream of light indicating authority takeover flickering madly.
Under Otto's command, the quantum cluster computer began a rare full-power operation.
And beyond that, Otto himself was the fastest and most precise secondary terminal.
The torrent of data from all currently available space surveillance networks was pouring back into his now ice-cold brain along invisible lines.
...
At the same moment, the rooftop balcony of the new resettlement area in ARC City.
The night breeze was slightly cool, carrying the unique smell of building materials and hope characteristic of the relocation to a new city.
A ten-year-old girl stood on her tiptoes, carefully pressing her eye against the astronomical telescope brought from Nagazora City.
This was the last and most precious gift she had received before the Great Eruption. When relocating from Nagazora City, she asked for nothing else, only bringing this instrument that could observe the moon.
The silver tube pointed at the night sky. The first thing she looked for was the moon, which had never changed in her memory.
The lunar surface was clear, the craters silent.
Then, her gaze unconsciously slid toward the profound darkness at the edge of the moon.
...
[Target detected... Signal enhancing... Filtering solar wind interference...]
The main screen of the quantum cluster computer flickered. Images extracted through multiple algorithms were struggling to piece together bit by bit.
And when he truly saw the monster that had not yet fully revealed itself, Otto's breathing paused for an instant.
Humanity never fears the deep starry sky because it is "dead."
Apart from light from the past, the starry sky makes no reaction to humanity.
But now... hanging beside the lunar orbit was a living piece of "deep space."
A massive shadow with a hideous outline, swallowing starlight. Its volume data was coldly popping up on the sidebar of the screen.
[Preliminary estimated diameter: Approx. 3,200 km.]
[Mass estimation: Cannot be directly determined. Gravitational perturbation model deviates severely from conventional celestial bodies.]
It was like a malformed heart, beating silently at the throat of the planet.
"Planetary-class..." Otto's mind almost instantly found the matching answer for this bizarre celestial phenomenon.
It was a Planetary-class Honkai Beast.
But...
Why was there no early warning?
With such mass, at such a distance, why did all sensors scream in alarm like a collective epileptic seizure only when it was practically "in our face"?
Wait...
Gravity?
"Not concealment..." Otto whispered calmly to himself.
Only Kallen, who had followed Otto down to the thirteenth underground level, could clearly hear the tremor in Otto's voice for the first time in his life.
"It's 'weaving'... It 'wove' its own gravitational field into the background structure of the solar system."
This was a Honkai Beast capable of manipulating gravity to such a precise degree, enough to deceive the gravity of an entire star system...
...
The little girl on the rooftop blinked.
The dark silhouette in the telescope didn't disappear.
It even revealed more details in the girl's eyes due to the slight shaking of the tube.
That wasn't the smooth darkness the starry sky should have.
It was a body seemingly composed of rugged, cold rock and writhing shadows, and a part of it was quietly covering the bright edge of the moon, casting a deeply unsettling defect.
The little girl's small hands trembled slightly, slowly moving away from the eyepiece.
She turned her head, looking at her mother's busy back in the kitchen under the warm light inside the house.
An unfamiliar fear climbed up her spine from the soles of her feet. She opened her mouth, but only a voice as thin as a thread came out:
"Mom..."
"The moon... behind the moon... there's something."
Her voice was so light it was almost shredded by the night breeze.
...
On the Antarctic ice sheet, the vitrifying "Shu" and the struggling Shu looked up at the vast sky almost simultaneously!
From the sky came the roar of "mass" itself, the shriek emitted when "gravity" was wantonly bent.
Planetary-class Honkai energy began to dissipate the moment the Honkai Beast revealed its form. Like an invisible tsunami, carrying fluctuations of Gravitational Authority strong enough to crush continental shelves, it swept across the ice cap, over their vitrifying or heavily injured bodies.
The feeling was like two insignificant specks of dust suddenly thrown into the event horizon of a closing black hole.
Despair had never been so concrete, so vast, so... undeniable.
Otto stood silently in front of the main screen, looking at the shadow representing the Planetary-class Honkai Beast, and the global gravitational field readings that instantly fell into disorder, like the EKG of a dying patient.
He slowly closed his eyes, as if falling into a slumber.
Gravity Manipulation.
This meant that almost all existing long-range attack methods of the Fire Moth were child's play in front of it.
This also meant its attacks could act directly on the planet itself from any angle and at any scale.
And what it had to do...
Heh.
It just needed to hang there, silently.
Then, let people in different corners use their own eyes, their own heartbeats, their own cold shudders, to collectively weave this silent prelude to the end that shrouded the globe.
The ripples only truly began to spread now.
The instant the pressure of Planetary-class Honkai energy crushed over the ice sheet, the thin relief deep in "Shu's" pupils was instantly shattered!
Like a gasp for air surfacing at the last moment before drowning, only to be slapped down by a larger tsunami.
He understood the source of this "malice" almost instinctively.
The echo of civilization.
The "response" of the Honkai!
Those ten million lives in Nagazora City that "should not exist," that grafted massive city and its possibilities—to this world already washed full of holes by the Finality, what a blinding, what a "noisy" miracle it was!
Just as in ancient Mesopotamian mythology, the "noise" of the new gods attracted the killing intent of the primordial sea, Abzu...
And now, this malice directed against the "overstepping" of the entire civilization transformed into a "judgment" hanging beyond the firmament, capable of tearing the planet apart.
Planetary-class Honkai Beast—
[Abzu]
"No..." A hoarse voice squeezed out of Shu's throat.
That was not an enemy Kiana and the others could face!
That was a destruction no one he knew, no one he cared about could withstand!