Sword of Dawnbreaker

Chapter 1034: Chapter 1033: Bathed in Starlight

The spacetime that had been in stasis for one million eight hundred and seventy thousand years was gradually disintegrating.

The wheel of history began to turn once more, everything that had once been frozen broke free of its shackles, the sea that had been locked in ice surged again, ever fiercer winds poured into the vortex from every direction, and the "spherical shell" covering this space shattered in utter silence—falling together with the torrential rain came a low, distant roar from far-off Talronde, as if it contained endless madness and chaos.

The sky seemed to topple and collapse, the colossal cloud walls and cyclones that composed the Eternal Storm, and the countless tons of seawater swept up in those cyclones, all turned into a terrifying oceanic tempest. Lightning raged, thunder crashed, rain came down in sheets, Dragon Roars undulated deep within the clouds. Everything was like the coming of doomsday, and amid this apocalyptic scene, the vast ancient starship faced the howling wind and continued its slow ascent.

This was a Zenith Fleet vessel into which a portion of Voyager technology had been woven, a miraculous creation for which the mighty, peerless dragon civilization of more than a million years ago had poured in the strength of their entire race. This miracle had been delayed for many years, but today, at last, it had set out.

"The storm is causing heavy interference, the attitude-correction engines are auto-adjusting the ship’s pitch," Balogar sat at the chief Mechanic’s console, speaking quickly while monitoring the data on the panel before him. "But their effect is limited, the Talronde Ship is already beginning to deviate from the planned trajectory."

"As long as we can reach the sky, that is enough. Keep accelerating, keep climbing... pay no mind to destination or precise route, and do not concern yourselves with return. To rise from the ground is to succeed..." Heragor murmured from the captain’s chair. "Can we do it?"

"Of course that’s no problem," Balogar thought for a second, then nodded with confidence. "But the shaking from here on out will stay very strong. I’m afraid I can’t eliminate all the vibrations and drift..."

Navigator Andar laughed. "This bit of shaking is nothing—we’ve already done the impossible by getting this behemoth into the air at all. After all, this thing wasn’t designed to be run by just three people."

The aged dragon spoke as he turned his head, letting his gaze sweep across the empty control hall behind him—within this vast space were arrayed more than a dozen vacant seats, and on the projection screens before each seat flickered a name that had long since vanished into history. Those comrades who should have embarked with this ship... had fallen forever, before departure.

Heragor noticed Andar’s line of sight. Following the other’s gaze, he swept his eyes over the control hall; a moment later, he broke the silence: "We’ll go up there in their stead, and see it for them."

"Of course we will," Balogar said in a low voice. "But... achieving that may not be so easy."

Almost the instant Balogar’s words fell, a violent jolt suddenly tore through the entire ship, laced with countless chaotic, indistinct booms that were like both screams and thunder. An indescribable mental pressure crossed the vast gulf of space, pierced layer after layer of barrier and alloy, and surged into the control hall like a storm-tossed sea.

In the hall, Heragor, Andar, and Balogar instantly felt that terrifying force that seemed to act directly upon the soul. Their senses were flooded by innumerable murmurs; knowledge from the gods hammered at the defenses of their minds. In their tottering vision, they saw illusions: the ship lunging straight toward a hellish abyss ablaze with roaring flames, countless shadowed rifts spreading across the sky, and myriad colossal entities enough to drive a mortal insane frantically stretching out their long limbs, trying to drag down and destroy this vessel that sought to leave the planet...

The gods had caught up.

Yet in the next second, those horrific things abruptly vanished. The three of Heragor’s crew returned once more to the cold but safe real world. They panted harshly, until Andar was the first to break the silence: "Omega is buying us time."

"And this will be the last time," Heragor said, his face ashen. "I can feel it... the gods have already left Talronde, and They are drawing near to us. Next time, what we face will be Their true form."

Balogar glanced down at the instrument readings, speaking in a rapid rush: "We’re still not high enough, we haven’t broken free yet—hold on, I’m going to解除所有引擎的限制了."

A moment later, a continuous tremor ran through the hall, and an even more unbearable sense of acceleration and vertigo surged up. The massive ancient starship had already crossed the boundary of the Eternal Storm’s former cloud wall; it rose into the blue sky and began slowly adjusting its angle, entering the subsequent trajectory at a slant. Almost at the same moment, in the depths of Heragor’s mind there came the faint, distant sound of frenzied, chaotic roaring.

Andar, standing to the side, had clearly heard the same "voice" as well. He shook his head with a bitter smile. "Looks like we’ve pissed Him off quite a bit..."

"Of course," Heragor struggled with the pressure bearing down on the very level of his soul—although the bridge between mortals and gods had been severed and the power of the Goddess of the Night had been weakened by Omega to below the critical point, this mental might from the gods still made him feel as if he could fall into collapse and madness at any moment. He clenched his teeth; although he could not see his own face, he was certain that his expression must be twisted with ferocity at this very moment. "After all... what we’re doing is the ultimate ’defiance’..."

Forcing himself to endure, Andar lifted his gaze and looked at the distant blue sky displayed on the projection curtain. Amid the tide-like flood of spiritual pollution, a faint smile gradually emerged on his face—

The ultimate "defiance", huh...

It was not the violation of doctrine, nor the denial of faith, nor even the slaying of gods—for gods that were born from mortal thought-currents and operated according to rules, these acts of rebellion were in truth far from the ultimate "defiance".

The ultimate defiance would only occur when mortals overcame their most primal shackles and taboos, broke free from their first cradle and swaddling, and took the step that marked their true "coming of age".

The ultimate "defiance" was to step into the starry sea.

This signified an earth-shattering transformation in the Mortal Races’ understanding of the entire world, signified that a child growing in the cradle had at last taken real action to leave that cradle. It bore an incomparable symbolic meaning and deserved the cheering of the whole world—yet it lay beyond what any of the gods could endure.

Because no matter which god it was, all the "information" on which their birth and existence were founded was constructed upon this planet—and this point had taken Andar many, many years to fully grasp.

Heragor felt his thoughts gradually settling down; the brain that had seemed on the verge of boiling slowly cooled. He exhaled lightly and placed his hand above a panel at the front left of his seat.

Andar lifted his eyes and looked out at the external sky rendered upon the projection curtain—the sky was tilted, its edge drawing a wide-angled arc. He saw sunlight slanting in from the rear side of the curtain’s frame, plating every cloud with a faint layer of gold, and at the border of that golden glow he could already see the curved, bulging expanse of land and the faint starlight glimmering at the end of the firmament.

The vibration of the ship lessened somewhat; the image on the projection curtain grew darker, and the grand, resplendent starry vault slowly emerged from the background of the sky, bit by bit. The whole world seemed to fall into silence, with only the low, droning hum of various instruments and devices running echoing from all around.

All this lasted only a few brief seconds before an unprecedented jolt surged through the entire vessel, and together with it came a deafening boom from some distant compartment.

In an instant, the lights in the entire control hall dimmed, and immediately afterward every alarm system burst into a shrill, piercing wail. Emergency orange tubes flickered at the entrances of every passage, and the shipboard systems frantically broadcast damage reports from each section. Heragor felt his whole body tilting, the scene on the curtain before his eyes starting to roll over. The next second, he heard Balogar shout, "Engine Two has separated from the hull! Antenna bay destroyed! Life-support cargo bay destroyed! Reactor One destroyed... He’s caught up with us!!"

Andar clung desperately to his chair, struggling to keep his balance amid the rolling. He looked toward the projection curtain to his front side; the curtain showed the situation outside the ship—a sight of unspeakable terror:

He saw a long rift torn open in the sky outside the ship, its interior filled with frenzied, icy eyes. A ferocious, twisted dragon-shaped mass, pieced and stitched together from countless chaotic limbs, was clinging to the outer hull at the stern, destroying the masterpiece that the Dragonkin had poured their hearts and souls into—

Part of the ship’s engines had been completely annihilated, shattered and twisted steel spinning as it fell into the dense atmosphere below. Several enormous breaches had been torn open along the side of the hull; the heavy barrier and the tough alloy shell were ripped apart as if made of paper. Massive quantities of equipment and gases, liquids like ruptured viscera, spewed from those breaches, mingling with scorching smoke as they jetted into space. And even after wreaking such colossal destruction, that Dragon of Chaos showed no sign of stopping. He continued to tear at the ship’s structure, constantly climbing along the hull, crawling toward the direction of the core section!

"Hold our attitude—we still have three engines!" Heragor shouted loudly, dragging Balogar’s attention back to the situation at hand. "Keep pulling up, we’re about to make it!"

"He’ll tear the entire ship apart before that!" Balogar yelled as he fought with all his strength to control the systems. "Don’t we have any weapons we can use to strike back?!"

"Reaching for the stars is the greatest counterattack—" Heragor stood up, gripping the back of his seat so hard that his fingers sank deep into the alloy plating. "Look—He is already so weak!"

Andar stared wide‑eyed at the scene unfolding outside the ship. After forcing himself past the initial panic and chaos, he suddenly realized something—the Dragon of Chaos clinging to the hull of the Talronde Ship, its posture grotesque and terrifying, was actually almost the same size as the ship itself!

Not long ago, He had still been as vast as a city, floating over Talronde and blotting out the sky, yet now... He had suffered another massive weakening!

Balogar noticed it as well. He began trying to restore the ship’s attitude, straining with all his might to rebalance the remaining engines—the Automatic Systems had been completely destroyed, and he could only fight the damage and shaking caused by the Dragon of Chaos through manual control. His efforts finally bore fruit: though the ship was on the verge of collapse and every system was shrieking alarms, it still continued, bit by bit, to climb toward the starry sky!

Starlight began to fall upon the ship’s outer hull. The pull from the ground was fading. Heragor felt his body growing lighter, and on the projection curtain before his eyes, the Dragon of Chaos clinging to the ship’s hull had grown smaller again. He was now almost only one third the size of the entire vessel.

Heragor was not surprised by any of this:

Though there were only three dragons aboard this ship, so long as the three of them stood upon this deck, so long as they were striding toward the stars, this "coming‑of‑age" ritual was underway.

For gods born within "symbolic meaning," symbolic processes affected them with the same absoluteness as the truth of the universe.

Therefore, the final step of defied had to be completed by the Mortal Races themselves—Omega could not take their place, people of another race could not take their place, no one could take their place.

Another explosion came from the ship’s tail. The piercing alarms grew ever sharper, ever more grating. Amid the ceaseless jolts and shudders, Heragor gave the order without a moment’s hesitation: "Jettison all return structures and escape pods, divert all energy to the main engine—I only need it to hold for three more minutes."

"With me here! It can hold for thirty!" Balogar shouted, carrying out Heragor’s command without hesitation. "Keep your eyes wide open—we’ve waited one point one million years for this moment!"

A powerful thrust surged again through the ship. The Talronde Ship, already showing signs of exhaustion, suddenly flared with its final trace of vitality. It began to climb, and climb again—its bright exhaust trail stretched out behind it, the heavy, pristine white atmosphere receding into a distant backdrop. Scattering debris, dragging flames and thick smoke, like a falling dancer plunging into the stars, it ascended. The twisted "Goddess of the Night" still clung to its hull, madly gnawing at the shielding of the core module. His body shrank a little, then a little more... until He was flung into the boundless void.

The mortal left their cradle; the gods were left at the last border of the planetary edge.

Heragor felt his body float free as the last thread of restraint from the earth quietly dissolved. Distant starlight was now shining upon the hull of the Talronde Ship; that light passed through the monitors into the control hall, magnificently beyond compare.

And against the deep backdrop of the starry sky, some massive structures once hidden by ancient technologies were shedding their disguises step by step as the Talronde Ship drew near, revealing their true forms.

He looked at Balogar. "Mechanic, open the dome and filters. We switch to visual observation."

"Aye, Captain."

On the tattered outer shell of the core module, a protective panel quietly unlocked, and the light‑shielding curtain slowly slid open. Heragor controlled the flow of Magic Power, letting himself drift gently to the window of high‑strength polymer, gazing out into the vastness of space.

In that boundless void, ancient satellite systems ran in silence, and space stations abandoned long ago still floated quietly along their orbits.

It was as though they had been here waiting for countless years, waiting for the Dragonkin once left behind on the planet to finally arrive.

"We’ve caught up..." Heragor could not help but murmur softly.

"We’ve only caught up for now," came Andar’s low voice from behind him. "Our kin who remain on the planetary surface... cannot build a second Talronde Ship."

"But someday they will... even if they must begin from zero."

Heragor spoke in a low voice, then drew his gaze back from those Abandoned Satellites and space stations in the distance. But before he returned to his seat, a sudden stir rose in his heart.

Instinctively, he lifted his head, looking toward the other side of the arched polymer dome. The next instant, he saw what was drifting out there in space, and his breath and heartbeat stopped at once.

It was a mass of hideous, twisted wreckage—the Dragon of Chaos, now shrunken many times over. The many traits of the Goddess of the Night that had once composed Him still lingered upon that chaotic, formless body, yet now, at this moment, they seemed so... small.

There was still a lingering radiance wandering through that cluster of debris. As a God, He had not yet completely "died," but now He only floated there in silence, utterly motionless.

Heragor’s taut expression slowly relaxed. He watched in silence as that cluster of wreckage drifted in the universe, watched as the light deep within it gradually went out.

A vague voice—one he could not tell was real or imagined—suddenly sounded in the depths of his consciousness: "From this day forth... you must walk on your own."

"Yes, my Lord."

"The world beyond is dangerous. Guard yourselves well."

"Yes, my Lord."

"Do not forget to glance back, every now and then..."

"Yes, my Lord."

"..."

"Yes, my Lord."