Chapter 400: Duel with the Guardian Battleship

The Guardian Commander stared at the battlefield ahead, his tone tinged with a hard-to-detect ancientness, "For hundreds of millions of years, countless civilizations, like blind moths in the night sky, have flung themselves at this line of death, yet ultimately they are but a fleeting, inconsequential glimmer in the vast universe."

"Now they have indeed become quite admirable. The sheer scale of their formation is indeed breathtaking, having reached a level of 1.9. This is certainly the 'strongest' opponent we've encountered in tens of millions of years."

"There is a high probability that they are a Silicon-based Civilization, possessing a strong central obedience; only they could launch an offensive of such massive scale."

"However, their flaws are also obvious; their strategic decision-making capability is severely lacking, which is undoubtedly their most fatal weakness."

"Their encounter with us will be the final glorious chapter in the history of their civilization."

"Order the execution of the second combat scheme!"

The Guardian Commander turned his head to look down at the Staff Office and continued, "After the battle, be sure to notify the Mother Civilization to intensify the purge of lower-level civilizations."

"In silence, such a 'powerful' threat has taken root within the borders of our civilization; this cannot be taken lightly."

Chief of Staff Office, "The greatest respect we can show them is to annihilate them!

"Actually, even if they were able to by chance cross our nearly one light-year defense line, their fate would not change!

"They would still need to travel hundreds of light-years to reach the defensive line of the Lord Civilization on the other end of the Orion Arm, and on this long journey, they will receive no resupply of resources.

"Even more crucially, when they finally arrive there after an arduous journey, what awaits them is another defense line that stretches for several light-years. How can their remaining fleet possibly break through that line again?"

*

As the three tremendous fleets of humanity, together with the Dinosaurs (hereinafter referred to simply as Humanity), like lightning in a tempest, furiously tilted their firepower capable of tearing the starry sky, they finally forced the mysterious and unpredictable Guardian Civilization warship to reveal itself from the deep and elusive folds of space.

The appearance of this warship completely overturned all of humanity's understanding and imagination of universal warships.

Human Warships, even when invisible to radar waves and visible light, would inadvertently reveal a splendid luminescence when caressed by Interstellar Dust or when bombarded by artillery fire.

However, the Guardian Civilization's warship, which only caused minor ripples under gravity wave detection, remained undetectable by any of humanity's methods, like a silent ghost of the night, quiet and stealthy.

Under gravity wave detection, it was not large, ellipsoid in shape, less than 30 meters long, but its mass was a staggering fifty million tons.

At this moment, it was withstanding an hysterical attack launched by millions of Human Warships, like an enraged swarm of bees.

Yet, even this continuous barrage of firepower that could tear apart the stars seemed unable to leave a trace on the surface of the vessel. All attacks appeared suspended in the space around it, as if time had been paused, and the once-powerful assault had lost its force before this spectacle, challenging the limits of humanity's understanding of physical laws.

In this space mercilessly scorched by warfare, even the Guardian Civilization could not engage in faster-than-light travel, but had to rely on conventional propulsion to navigate through the battlefield.

Yet, the vessel's maneuvering capabilities were enough to astonish humanity; it was as if it had become a ghost within a probability cloud, popping up in various corners of the battlefield, making it nearly impossible to track or lock on, becoming a bizarre sight in the midst of combat.

The two sides were separated by tens of Astronomical Units, and even at the speed of light, it would take several hours to traverse this vast distance. However, the current level of civilizational technology has made such distances no longer an obstacle.

For both sides were employing wide-area spatial fragmentation weapons that could tear space and overturn dimensions, with an effective range so wide that it covered several Astronomical Units, rendering the vast distances trivial before their might.

In this breathtaking showdown, control over real-time battlefield information became the key factor determining victory or defeat. To this end, they had released countless faster-than-light communication probes earlier, shuttling between the fires of war and the stars, relaying vital intelligence.

However, Sophon, once considered the ultimate surveillance artifact on the battlefield, appeared so fragile in this unprecedentedly large-scale war that its role was very limited.

At this moment, the Guardian's warship, like a lone hero, resolutely faced the metallic tide of millions of warships from the human-dinosaur alliance.

With the appearance of this warship, the millions of vessels in the Human Fleet immediately had a target for their attack, employing a coordinated array-style offensive.

The Human Fleet Command set strategic objectives and then, through smart algorithms, calculated the target zones for each warship to attack, allowing all the assaults to form a vast net that covered every possible area where a Guardian Battleship might appear, and blocking their escape routes.

At this moment, the Human Warships also deployed their most advanced attack modes in a desperate, all-out gamble, in the hope that these attacks could affect the Guardian Battleship.

Despite the initial indiscriminate barrage of human assaults, which seemed as futile as a child throwing stones at an elephant, humanity firmly believed that there were only incorrect methods of attack, not truly invulnerable targets.

The Guardian Battleships, of course, were not to be outdone; they too continuously launched a mass of unknown cloud-like objects that sped towards the Human Warships at the speed of light.

This cloud-like mass seemed to be encapsulated by some force field, hence humanity referred to it as the "Sealing Cloud."

*

Two hours later, the relentless, tide-like "attacks" of both sides finally bridged the interstellar gulf and fiercely collided with each other's positions.

In that instant, Human Civilization had to deeply acknowledge the breathtaking technological prowess of the Guardians, a force that transcended the limits of human comprehension.

Space within a radius of ten astronomical units was instantly shattered under the force of a Guardian "Sealing Cloud" attack, as if the universe itself had been torn open by an invisible colossal blade. The wound surged with the forces of chaos and destruction, sending shivers down the spine.

Upon reaching its designated area, the "Sealing Cloud" detonated like a cosmic-level bomb, violently "exploding" and sending shockwaves at the speed of light in all directions, shattering the space within ten astronomical units.

All matter within that space, whether warships or dust, was instantaneously wiped from existence, while all energy converged into an unprecedented spatial tempest.

Even more terrifying, at the moment of the "Sealing Cloud" explosion, the Human Warships' abilities to jump at the speed of light were sealed, locking them firmly in this perilous battlefield.

The maximum conventional speed of a Human Warship could reach 34% of the speed of light, yet even at such velocities, it would require at least fifty minutes of acceleration to reach it.

The explosion of the "Sealing Cloud," however, spread at the speed of light, meaning that if human warships couldn't accelerate to the speed of light and flee within an extremely brief period, they would inevitably turn to dust under such an onslaught.

However, fortunately, the Human Fleet was not without its advantages.

First, during the ten thousand years of technologically-assisted evolution, humans had undergone a myriad-fold enhancement. Their bodies were filled with countless nanorobots, providing nanofilament scaffolds to support all organs and cells, allowing humans to withstand pressures of up to three thousand Gs in the Deep-Sea Acceleration Fluid.

Otherwise, even within the Deep-Sea Acceleration Fluid, the body would be crushed due to the density difference among organs.

Second, the Dinosaurs, serving as decision-makers on the warships, possessed keen intuition and a preternatural ability to sense danger. Just like this attack, if it weren't for the Dinosaurs' foreboding that prompted a majority of the warships to evacuate in advance, then when the "Sealing Cloud" blew open, the Human Warships would lose their last chance of escape.

But even so, a single "Sealing Cloud" had caused the Human Fleet to lose nearly a thousand vessels, marking another bloody encounter between Human Civilization and the Guardian Civilization.

The Human Fleet Command realized that this initial attack from the Guardian Battleship was just the beginning, as hundreds of "Sealing Clouds" were on their way. Like a school of bloodthirsty sharks, they were ready to tear the Human Fleet into pieces.

Furthermore, while dodging the attacks of the Human Warships, the Guardian Battleship also kept launching "Sealing Clouds," as if to drown the entire Human Fleet in flames of destruction.

According to the Human Fleet Command's prediction, even with a prepared Human Fleet, the vast size of the fleet and the need to organize a joint array attack on the Guardian Battleship meant that every "Sealing Cloud" could potentially destroy dozens or hundreds of Human Warships.

PS: The Guardian's "Sealing Cloud" that sealed off faster-than-light travel clearly involved superluminal effects. This book explains superluminal effects as being achievable in the microscopic higher dimensions, such as Sophon's entangled resonance.

Currently, human faster-than-light travel relies on two principles: curvature and space expansion propulsion. Curvature maneuvers are difficult to perform in such a battlefield, relying on space expansion instead. Space expansion utilizes dark energy from the microscopic higher dimensions, which also allows the "Sealing Cloud's" ability to seal, hence the superluminal effects.