For the first time, that many red alarms started blaring at once.
But those warnings were not reporting an actual malfunction anywhere in the ship. They were threshold warnings, alerts that the craft was nearing critical failure.
The cause of it was the super-gravity cannon fired by that Attack Moon. It had come close to warping and shattering realspace itself, enough to make him drop out from the other dimension.
According to the warning readouts, the ship would not be able to withstand another shot. If it got hit again, it would truly be dragged back into realspace.
And at that point, it would probably be blown apart for real.
In truth, it was not that the ship's own systems were overloaded or physically unable to endure it. The main issue was the energy supply.
Although its power came from that so-called infinite energy cube, the cube's output still had an upper threshold.
It was like a faucet. By adjusting the valve, you could control how much water flowed out.
But no matter how you adjusted it, the maximum was still only fully open. There was no way it could instantly dump out all the water stored inside a water tower in one burst.
That was the threshold, the limit. And it could not match the threshold of the drain outlet in the pool beneath the faucet.
After being struck by the gravity cannon's effects, it was as if the pool's drain had been opened all the way. In an instant, more than half the water in the pool was emptied out, while the faucet's water - its energy - could not refill that missing half quickly enough. The remaining water in the pool, the remaining energy, simply could not support the Quantum Ghost state strongly enough to endure a second super-gravity cannon shot from the Ork Attack Moon.
Fortunately, that kind of superweapon mounted on the small-planet-turned-Attack Moon clearly could not be fired again immediately.
As long as he escaped its attack range before it could fire a second shot, or managed to recharge his Quantum Ghost state to a sufficient level first, he would be fine.
Unfortunately, recovery was slow. Countless large and small craft were still chasing right behind him, pouring out a dense storm of firepower.
Thankfully, because his ship was so difficult to observe, most of their shots were little more than blind firing. But there were simply too many attacks. A great number of them still pierced his phantom-like state, and although it was like lightly touching the surface of still water and producing only faint ripples, it still caused interference.
He looked toward another system: the quantum jump function.
This jump function did not appear to depend much on energy supply. Energy was mainly used only to trigger the initial ignition effect.
The actual preparation time for the jump depended mostly on the mass and volume being carried during the jump.
If the carried mass stayed the same, then no matter how far the distance was, the time required would remain the same.
Right now, he still needed thirty seconds.
Huh?
He saw a new change on the Ork face that had appeared on the Attack Moon. The area representing its eyes looked like it was about to fire something, and that made his eyelid twitch.
And when he looked back at the Orks swarming after him, only to see them suddenly scatter in all directions like startled birds and beasts, he knew something bad was coming.
Without the slightest hesitation, he immediately canceled the Ghost state.
That meant his ship was now directly exposed in realspace. Incoming attacks would no longer pass through it like empty air. They would hit the vessel's physical body head-on.
At the same time, he activated one of the ship's functions, one that could also be used offensively.
In that instant, his blood stopped flowing. His heart stopped beating. His cells froze in place. His thoughts ceased as well, ceased rather than ended.
Everything inside the ship froze in that same instant. The data on the displays, all of it, became completely still.
It was like pressing pause in a video game. Everything had been stopped.
And then, in the very next instant, almost like the blink of an eye, Kain saw the scenery outside the ship abruptly switch to somewhere else.
It looked as though he had activated some kind of space jump again.
But in reality, that was not what had happened.
He immediately took control of the ship and turned it, because it was about to plunge straight into a star that looked as though it were on the verge of becoming a red supergiant.
And there were no longer any Ork pursuers around him, only empty star-filled space.
Re-entering Quantum Ghost state, he then used his own livestream on the Hyperdimensional Channel to review what had just happened.
After adjusting the progress bar, he saw the Attack Moon's eyes suddenly fire something like a needle made of light toward him.
That had actually been a Gravitic Whip lashing out at him.
It caught up with the ship in an instant and sent it flying, like a baseball smashed by a bat.
Everything in its path had been effortlessly pierced through. Even the Ork warship that had suddenly jumped in front of him, with its brute-force shield deployed, had provided less protection than a sheet of paper. The ship was simply torn apart and punched clean through.
In the end, it had even shot straight into an asteroid belt, piercing through every celestial body in the way without the slightest obstruction.
And the Orks' pursuit had been blocked by the dense asteroid belt, which finally let him shake them off.
It was as though, in that moment, the ship itself had become something that could not be affected by any kind of resistance, something that would bore through all matter.
That was the ship's other function.
It stopped its own time, and when time was stopped, that meant nothing could happen and nothing could change.
So under those conditions, almost any attack against an object whose time had been stopped was effectively useless.
And once it was sent flying by inertia, there would be no resistance at all, because even the barrier of time itself had stopped.
No matter how tough or durable the object it struck might be, it would still be severed and punched through.
That was the ship's one true offensive capability.
And because time itself had stopped, there was no way to alter its course mid-flight through internal control or steering. After all, time inside the ship had also stopped.
The inertial force it had at the moment he activated the stop - the speed and direction of the ship's acceleration at that instant - would remain fixed, and it would continue piercing forward along that exact vector.
You could say this ability was very similar in nature to that of the Sin Archbishop of Greed from Re:Zero, Regulus Corneas, and the properties of his body.
The reason Regulus could casually toss out sand and destroy everything so easily was precisely because the sand's time had been stopped. It would pierce and tear through anything with ease.
If even the air he touched could have its time stopped, then even the breath he exhaled could destroy any defense.
And by stopping the time of his own flesh, he gained a body like an indestructible vajra, one that no attack could leave even the slightest scratch on.
It seemed he could only leave this star system for now, then come back to look for the lost warship the Emperor had mentioned after the Orks' Attack Moon had moved on.
So, should he go look for the infinite energy source now?
After giving it some thought, Kain decided to first observe the Orks' movements.
He needed to determine the route of that Attack Moon and whether it overlapped with the coordinates of the lost warship he was searching for.
(End of Chapter)
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