Those who face the wall, but are in the Nascent Soul stage.

Chapter 253 Devouring the Great Ring (6k Remastered)

Human star-class warships are not large in size, even smaller than Brachiosaurus-class motherships and Triangular Bulwark ships, and their numbers are far fewer than those of the Devourer fleet.

But at this moment, the oppressive feeling brought by the few warships that were inferior in both number and size far exceeded the sense of security that tens of thousands of swallowing warships could bring.

Especially when the latter becomes immobile.

The dinosaurs finally figured out why the expeditionary fleet had evaded the Devouring Empire's optical observation: these fleets were covered with mysterious yellow talismans. As the yellow talismans burned to ashes in the vacuum, the photon shielding array covering the expeditionary fleet failed.

The fusion engine shone brightly once more, and including the Paradox Engine ship, a total of 488 radiant silver stars rushed toward the Devouring Fleet at 12% the speed of light.

The human warships began to unleash their full firepower.

Under the precise guidance of the quantum computer, millions of electromagnetic railgun shells bombarded the completely still consuming fleet like undulating mountains. Nearly five hundred gamma laser beams and six convergent beams also intertwined and shone in this small space.

The flames from the space explosion caused by the elite human cavalry spread rapidly, like ink dripping into clean water, covering the small yet vast cosmic battlefield.

Golden Wind, Blue Space, Revelation, Destiny, Ultimate Law, Enterprise, Deep Space, Free Will, Bronze Age, Irrational Number, Siberia, Pangu, Cronus, Luo Qing...

These 488 star-type warships ushered in their most glorious moment since their birth. The electromagnetic railguns firing thousands of rounds per second and the constantly recharged gamma-ray laser main guns below the bow carried the will of the solar system fleet, constantly gestating, converging, flowing, and condensing into pure matter momentum and energy impacts, frantically slaughtering and devouring the fleet during this 90-second time freeze period.

The rate of loss of the consuming fleet is in the thousands per second.

Ultimately, these 488 steel mountains completely pierced through the Devourer fleet in deep space. Behind them were at least 5 fireballs of wreckage of varying sizes. The expeditionary fleet had no intention of hunting down the remaining Devourer fleet remnants in the corners and outskirts. Instead, it formed a lightsaber, with the Paradox Engine as its tip, and swooped down toward the Great Ring at 10% the speed of light.

Moreover, the warship was constantly accelerating.

Within a mere 1 million kilometers, the expeditionary fleet reached a top speed of 0.13c!

[Forward four, full power propulsion!]
Fifteen thousand four hundred and seventy-two star-shaped hydrogen bombs began to be launched in rapid succession!
Devour the Empire and receive the final nuclear strike from the expeditionary fleet!

At the same time, the 90-second regional molecular stagnation spell finally ended. In order to imprison the particle vibrations in such a large space, Luo Qing exhausted all his mana reserves and collapsed helplessly on the deck inside the Paradox Engine.

Even Somoko noticed his weakness. Somoko didn't have time to review the exquisite space war she had just witnessed. Instead, after many years, she seized this opportunity to boldly approach the Wallfacer and carefully observe his condition.

The Wallfacer was no longer able to destroy the sophon. With the help of a large number of medics, he barely managed to get up, closed his eyes, and sat cross-legged on the ground to begin meditating and recovering.

After the 90-second time freeze ended.

The surviving Devouring Fleet regained its mobility. The surviving dinosaur pilots stared blankly at the devastating battlefield ruins. They soon discovered a sad fact: the fleet wreckage on the battlefield consisted entirely of their own warships.

There wasn't even a single human warship wrecked.

And they have no idea what just happened.

In what seemed like only a moment, the Devouring Fleet guarding the front of the Great Ring was torn apart by the human fleet, creating a passage, and seventy to eighty percent of the Devouring Fleet's frontal force was annihilated.

The surviving Devourer warships, facing the human fleet that was moving away at a speed of 0.13c, didn't even know whether to continue the pursuit. But how could they possibly catch up? The surviving Dinosaur pilots could only watch helplessly as the human fleet broke through the Devourer fleet's defenses and rushed towards the Great Ring.

The commander of the Devouring Fleet also realized a problem during this battle.

Humanity's solar system fleet has achieved complete generational superiority over the Devouring Fleet. Under this generational superiority, the Devouring Fleet no longer has any objective conditions that would allow it to win against the solar system fleet.

The suppressive power of advanced warships over outdated warships is terrifying.

Even after the commander of the Devouring Fleet abandoned the pursuit, the resistance of the Great Ring continued.

"Stop them! Stop them! Stop them!"

After the Devouring Fleet was completely routed, the Great Ring Commander roared.

The 350 gamma laser beam cannons began fine-tuning their aim. At this moment, the expeditionary fleet had already broken through the 2 million kilometer combat line and arrived at a distance of only 3000 million kilometers from the Great Ring.

At this distance, a strike at the speed of light would only take 100 seconds!
The turrets of 350 giant gamma laser beam cannons began to emit intense and powerful light and heat. Just by maintaining the state of being ready to be activated, the temperature in the vicinity had already instantly risen to tens of millions of degrees.

But the human fleet's gamma-ray counterattack came even faster! In particular, the six Converging Prism Cannons mounted on the Paradox Engine had already bombarded the edge of the Giant Ring Gear. Six long beams of light bloomed on the base of one of the giant gamma laser turrets, followed by a continuous barrage of human gamma laser beams. The gamma laser beams ionized the air, forming more than 600 pale blue beams that strung together against the backdrop of the thin atmosphere to form a vast, scorching ocean of light.

boom!
A gamma-ray laser cannon base that was extremely important to the giant ring was destroyed.

Meanwhile, the stellar hydrogen bombs that humanity continues to unleash are also hurtling toward the Big Circle at a speed of 0.13c.

Among them, 5000 star-shaped hydrogen bombs have been released, rushing towards the gamma laser ray turrets on the ring's wing and the giant ring's equatorial engine on the equator.

The human fleet had long since recalibrated its targets to these more important military objectives. After completing the first phase of nuclear bombing, the expeditionary fleet rapidly descended, heading towards the center of the giant ring.

With the full-power acceleration of the forward-moving fourth stage, the speed of the expeditionary fleet has approached 14% of the speed of light. At this moment, all the innate martial artists of the expeditionary fleet are enduring the acceleration of hundreds of grams. Not one of them has entered the deep sea state, and they are all sticking to their posts.

The weapons operators have begun deploying the second wave of nuclear bombing.

Another 5000 stellar hydrogen bombs, traveling at 14% the speed of light, were launched directly at a tricky angle towards the inner ring area!

The Devouring Empire faced a dilemma: the human fleet's sub-light-speed attack was far too fast, leaving the Great Ring with very little time to react. If the Great Ring adjusted all its attack targets to these stellar-class warships, it could indeed destroy half or even all of them. However, the 5000 stellar-type hydrogen bombs that were aimed at the Great Ring's equator would also severely damage the thousands of Great Ring equator engines in that direction, which would significantly impair the Great Ring's maneuverability.

The Devouring Empire believes that humanity still has more than 4000 such star-class warships, and exchanging engine damage for human warships would obviously be a huge loss.

In this asymmetric space war, the Devouring Empire finally realized that there are disadvantages to being large. Against an enemy of equal size, the Great Ring was a sitting duck.

In addition to the stellar-type hydrogen bombs that were aimed at the equator of the giant ring, another 5000 stellar-type hydrogen bombs were being launched towards the dinosaur habitat in the inner ring, which also required a large amount of intercepting firepower to intercept them.

These nearly 1 star-shaped hydrogen bombs have already filled the maximum interception limit of the large ring's laser defense.

As for the 488 human warships flying towards the ring, it appears that their trajectories are heading towards the central airspace of the giant ring, rather than crashing into a specific structure within the ring.

The commander of the Great Ring was thus relieved. If the real purpose of the human fleet was to ram the Great Ring with warships at 14% of the speed of light, then the commander of the Great Ring would destroy all of these warships, even if it meant taking all the damage from the stellar nuclear bombs.

Fortunately, this is not the case. Although humans are warlike and their tactical commands are bold and crazy, they still retain a sliver of rationality.

The Great Ring Commander made what it believed to be the most correct decision.

[Full-power interception of the stellar-type hydrogen bomb; secondary gamma-ray lasers prepare to intercept the inner-ring hydrogen bomb, allowing the inner-ring's redundant missile defense systems to intercept human warships!]
Gamma laser beams lashed and swirled across the sky once more, each burst of gamma laser beams capable of causing the sympathetic detonation of dozens of star-shaped hydrogen bombs in outer space.

The improved gamma laser beam interception efficiency is very high. Most of the 5000 stellar hydrogen bombs that rushed towards the equatorial direction to attack the giant ring engine were hit by the laser. The nuclear bombs were forced to detonate under high temperature and heat. Only less than 100 successfully hit the giant ring engine.

Of the 100 stellar-type hydrogen bombs that hit the large ring engine, half of them were burned and detonated in mid-air because they cut into the plasma exhaust plume that stretched tens of thousands of kilometers from the large ring engine. The actual number of hydrogen bombs that avoided the plasma exhaust plume and hit the mountain-sized engine itself was less than 50.

However, the destructive effect of these 40-plus large ring engines was also astonishing.

When a stellar hydrogen bomb struck the engine armor, which was 40 kilometers in diameter and 10 kilometers in height, at 13% of the speed of light, it instantly formed a blazing fireball with a diameter of over 20 kilometers. The fireball expanded at near the speed of light, and its temperature, comparable to that of the core of the sun, instantly melted a large area of ​​the large ring engine.

The thick composite armor on the surface of the large ring engine, the huge support structure, maintenance platform, pipelines, exposed robotic arms... everything was evaporated the moment of contact. The originally balanced heavy nuclear fusion state was also destabilized and exploded due to the intervention of external forces. The plasma beam, which was tens of thousands of kilometers long, lost its foundation and quickly shrank.

The extremely destructive shockwave created a wall of destruction that advanced outwards at tens of kilometers per second. Wherever the shockwave passed, the secondary structures of the giant ring engine were twisted, torn apart, and thrown away. As the entire giant ring engine collapsed, the fireball created by the stellar hydrogen bomb continued to rise and eventually cooled, forming the iconic mushroom cloud. Due to the thin air near the equator of the giant ring, the mushroom cloud expanded to tens of thousands of square kilometers.

There was no chance of a miracle; the struck large ring engine had no chance of surviving.

The core heavy nuclear fusion reactor inside the large ring engine will experience a secondary detonation, which will completely destroy this epic behemoth that the dinosaur empire has built over a hundred years, from the inside out.

The massive ring engine, after the nuclear explosion of the stellar hydrogen bomb, was reduced to nothing more than the electronically degenerate skeleton of its core and some steel debris in the rear section, lying there silently like a steel corpse of Mount Fuji magnified dozens of times.

Such scenes of destruction occurred more than 40 times.

The Devouring Empire had never suffered such a loss.

However, for the technologically advanced Devouring Empire, the loss of these 40-plus large ring engines was still within its acceptable range.

After all, the dragon is still there, and the engine can be rebuilt.

Aside from the 5000 star-shaped hydrogen bombs that were fired at the equator, the situation was different for the other 5,000 star-shaped hydrogen bombs that were fired at the inner ring.

Because the angle at which the stellar hydrogen bombs bombarded the inner ring was more tricky, the gamma laser beam interception zone on the outer ring was actually smaller, and the gamma laser beam ultimately only successfully intercepted less than 3000 stellar hydrogen bombs.

As the remaining 2000 stellar hydrogen bombs crashed into the inner ring of the Great Ring, the secondary gamma laser turrets began to operate. These smaller gamma laser beams, which were produced in large numbers by the Devouring Empire in recent years using the Great Ring's powerful industrial production capacity, attacked in a dense barrage.

Although its power is insufficient to penetrate human warships, it can easily penetrate the outer armor of these stellar hydrogen bombs.

The remaining stellar hydrogen bombs were intercepted by a large number of secondary gamma laser turrets, and about 1900 stellar hydrogen bombs were successfully intercepted and destroyed just before they hit the inner ring area.

The commander of the Great Ring breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing this.

These secondary gamma laser beam turrets are distributed across the 11 zones of the large ring. However, since the area near Zone 6 is not dinosaur territory, there are not enough secondary gamma laser beam interception turrets. Therefore, the interception effect of Zones 5 and 7 in assisting Zone 6 is relatively limited.

Ultimately, hundreds of stellar hydrogen bombs still fell into Sector 6, causing extensive damage to the surface of Sector 6. Even thousands of white dwarf fish that were unable to dodge were killed in the nuclear bombardment.

The enraged Light Speaker civilization absorbed and gave birth to hundreds of thousands of Nuclear Mushrooms, but since the Puji couldn't find the enemy, they could only vent their anger on the dinosaur garrisons in Sector 5 and Sector 7.

The recently quelled internal strife within the Giant Ring has once again descended into civil war.

While the Great Ring was busy intercepting the hydrogen bomb, humanity's stellar-class warships followed closely behind, passing through the central airspace of the Great Ring one by one, completing the epic feat of the human fleet traversing the void region of the Great Ring.

During this time, the expeditionary fleet was intercepted by a number of secondary gamma laser turrets in the inner ring area. These secondary turrets were numerous but individually weak. Although the human fleet suffered some damage, the toughness of the nanomaterial armor withstood the bombardment of these secondary rays. In addition, the dinosaurs' firepower was dispersed, and no warships were destroyed.

As they passed through the interior of the large ring, the human fleet launched a laser counterattack of the same scale towards the secondary turrets.

In particular, the six prism cannons, led by the Paradox Engine, bombarded multiple counterattack nodes in the inner ring with beams.

While weakening the inner ring's counterattack capabilities, the fleet also encountered tens of thousands of oncoming 'inter-ring' interceptor missiles.

Compared to the extremely high speed of warships, these interceptor missiles are as slow as snails. They were simply launched in advance into the central void area, forming a dense missile barrier, waiting for the human fleet to actively "crash" into it.

But the dinosaurs were destined to be disappointed, as the missile barrier was prematurely destroyed by the active defense system of the starship—a small, non-gamma-ray high-energy laser emitter.

Amidst this barrage of missile explosions, the human fleet successfully pierced through the giant ring.

As for the subsequent pursuit of the 'Inter-Ring' interceptor missiles, they were simply unable to catch up with the human warship fleet, which was already approaching 15% of the speed of light.

It took the human warships only one second to traverse the approximately 10,000-kilometer-wide void of the giant ring, leaving the giant ring with only a brief window of opportunity to strike.

For a large-scale defense system based on electronic computers, it is almost impossible to launch a full-scale counterattack within this one second.

Luo Qing, who had been squinting, closed his eyes again with relief after confirming that none of the human warships had been destroyed.

Due to the presence of thin air within the ring, the expeditionary warship fleet exhibited significant ionizing shock waves as it traversed the ring. Simultaneously, the resonating thin air created a low-pitched cosmic hum, which traveled along the inner ring's atmosphere towards the inner ring's surface. 488 bright stars emitted a human-like roar in the ears of countless dinosaurs.

All the dragons that raised their heads saw the massive human fleet that traversed the ring, seemingly asserting sovereignty over the solar system.

What the commander of the ring did not expect was that humanity was not willing to leave the ring so easily. Just before the shuttle operation was about to be completed, 488 star-class warships simultaneously completed their final attitude calibration.

The massive ship turned in unison in deep space, and by the time the commander of the Great Ring realized the enemy's purpose, it was too late.

The expeditionary fleet launched the last 5000 light orbs at 15% of the speed of light, these last 5000 stellar hydrogen bombs were thrown toward the inner edge of the dark side of the giant ring.

(Note: The giant ring has a front side and a dark side. The direction in which the exhaust flame of the giant ring engine extends is the dark side.)
However, due to their excessive speed, these stellar hydrogen bombs exploded almost grazing the edge of the dark side of the giant ring, and thousands of them even missed their targets! They flew directly past the inner edge of the dark side of the giant ring and plummeted infinitely into deep space.

The roar of the hydrogen bomb engines caused these hydrogen bombs to deflect at a very small angle. Combined with the fleet's own directional adjustments, these hydrogen bombs, which were flying at an angle, all fell towards the inner edge of the dark side of the "donut".

The Devouring Empire was also almost unable to effectively intercept these thousands of stellar hydrogen bombs. For humanity, striking from this angle was extremely difficult, and for the Commander of the Great Ring, it was unimaginable.

The dark side of the ring is far more important than the front. The ring's propulsion system consists of 6000 equatorial ring engines at the equator and 24000 conventional ring engines at the rear. The equatorial ring engines are used for steering, while the rear ring engines are the primary source of power for the ring.

More than 3,000 star-shaped hydrogen bombs, which had not yet missed their target, continued to fly towards the dark side from the edge of the inner ring. Without precise guidance, they all indiscriminately bombarded the convex part of the large ring, ultimately causing varying degrees of damage to more than 300 engines on the dark side of the large ring, resulting in a decrease of about 1% in the total propulsion power of the large ring.

The initial strategic objective of the expeditionary fleet was to reduce the total propulsion power of the large ring by 1%.

The fleet did consider launching an attack from the back of the ring by making a giant slew from outer space, but the ring was not stupid either. It could also "flip over" using the equatorial engine. This mechanical giant ring seemed to have a life of its own, and could complete all of this autonomously without the dinosaurs having to operate it. It had a flexibility far beyond human imagination.

The fact that the Great Ring could "resist" the Empire's braking order and continue flying towards the solar system to "hunt for food" regardless of the consequences suggests that the Great Ring is not controlled by an independent AI computer, but is driven by the source of its hunting power.

Moreover, the engines at the tail of these rings are also part of the 'force' of the large ring. The plasma jets emitted by these 30000 large ring engines are like 30,000 long blades, weaving and waving on the back of the large ring, making it impossible for ordinary stellar hydrogen bombs to get close to the large ring engines.

A proliferative nuclear bombing attack from within the ring exceeds the ring's ability to intercept it using its engines, ultimately succeeding in one fell swoop!
In addition to the damage to 300 giant ring engines, the remaining stellar hydrogen bombs also caused some damage to the dark side of the giant ring.

The expeditionary fleet has only one core objective: to find a way to bring the Great Ring to a halt!
Ideally, it should be brought to a complete stop before entering the solar system! Given the inability to completely destroy the large ring, bringing it to a stop outside the solar system is the optimal solution.

After the final strike, the expeditionary fleet had no more regrets. With its back to the Devouring Ring, it continued to accelerate and eventually escaped the 20 billion-kilometer radius of the ring at a constant speed of 15 percent of light.

During this time, the engines on the inner dark side attempted to adjust their direction and attack the human fleet with plasma jets tens of thousands of kilometers long. However, before these plasma jets could complete their "encirclement" and blockade, the human fleet had already escaped the encirclement from the engines.

The Great Ring seemed "unwilling to give up," overloading approximately 3000 Great Ring engines into a "focused firing" state, causing the pale blue plasma jet, which stretched for tens of thousands of kilometers, to instantly expand into a blood-red plasma jet stretching for 10 kilometers to bombard the departing human fleet.

But this still didn't catch up with the human fleet.

Even so, the human fleet still reserved 5% of the speed of light as redundancy and did not expose itself.

A week later, the expeditionary fleet will make a turn with a radius of 20 astronomical units at a speed of 0.15c, and eventually turn the fleet back to Jupiter.

The total number of hydrogen bombs released was nearly 2, the total number of electromagnetic railgun shells fired was about 300 million, and the entire fleet had less than 20% of its fuel reserves left after returning to port.

That's all the expeditionary fleet could do.

(End of this chapter)