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

Chapter 268 Eris (3k)

half year later.

April 14, Crisis Era 203

The largest-scale battle between the Solar System Fleet and the Devouring Fleet broke out in the Kuiper Belt.

Humanity has lost count of how many times it has clashed with the Devouring Fleet. As the Devouring Fleet on the periphery of the Kuiper Belt once again advanced in a wedge formation, the Kuiper Belt defense fleet sounded the invasion alarm once more. On the pan-Kuiper Belt defense system, countless hydrogen bombs serving as interstellar beacons were ignited, and the oil film material that is widely present in the Kuiper Belt continued to flicker after these hydrogen bomb explosions.

Plumes of interstellar smoke burned against the dark background.

Oil film material was first discovered in the rings of Neptune. Its core characteristic is that it rapidly vaporizes at high temperatures and diffuses into nanoscale dust, and the resulting dust cloud is difficult to disperse by the solar wind. This property makes it an ideal "space canvas"—a small amount of material can cover a vast space and can exist stably for a long time.

Thanks to the properties of the oil film material that can refract light waves and cannot be easily dispersed, the Solar System Fleet developed it into an interstellar beacon, used to mark the area invaded by the Devouring Fleet and directly guide the fleet to carry out fire coverage on the "beacon" area.

The two sides first clashed at 9:24 AM Solar Standard Time.

Orange nuclear fusion glow suddenly appeared on the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt in the direction of Pluto. The energy glow quickly intertwined into a large area. Soon, about three thousand Tyrant-class warships tore through interstellar dust at 0.01 times the speed of light and cut diagonally into the flank of the Kuiper Belt defense zone.

The thousand planetary warships on the inner side of the Kuiper Belt, which were in cruise mode, simultaneously entered [Advance 3] and accelerated their cruise at 0.01 times the speed of light. These thousand golden stars overwhelmed the three thousand orange halos of the Devouring Fleet. As the golden stars lit up, the brilliance of the interstellar nuclear mines also began to explode one after another in the direction of the vanguard of the Devouring Fleet. The shining nuclear explosion spheres swallowed some of the orange, but were quickly filled with more orange.

Approximately 15 electromagnetic railgun shells were released from the planetary-class warship fleet. Limited by power and the length of the electromagnetic acceleration rails, the initial velocity of the electromagnetic railguns on planetary-class warships was only 1% of the speed of light. While less powerful than the electromagnetic cannons of stellar-class warships, the increased speed of the warships themselves allowed them to fire from different angles at varying speeds of 1% to 2% of the speed of light, creating a vast, staggered strike zone to intercept and devour the vanguard of the fleet.

The vanguard of the Devouring Fleet continued its advance into the Kuiper Belt under a dense barrage of electromagnetic cannon fire. The Tyrant-class warships swept their gamma-ray cannons across a wide area towards the human fleet. The planetary warships also retaliated with gamma-ray cannons. The two sides engaged in a large-scale laser bombardment across a distance of 200 million kilometers. Both sides suffered damage, but the human planetary warships, with the advantage of nanomaterial protection and the mobility of their defensive maneuvers, won this round of interstellar trench warfare with far fewer casualties than the vanguard of the Devouring Fleet.

The interstellar nuclear torpedoes aboard the large Kuiper Belt meteorites began to activate one after another. A large number of interstellar nuclear torpedoes propelled by chemical propellants drew tens of thousands of interwoven silver-white trails in the dark depths of space. These were the cosmic dust from the burning. The propulsion of these interstellar nuclear torpedoes was driven by space detonation engines. Their speed could also reach close to 3% of the speed of light through a four-stage acceleration system. They also had a certain ability to change course. Each one had the power of an intercontinental ballistic missile that mankind had in the early 21st century.

However, suddenly, a dense array of gray-black iron triangular cones emerged from the night sky... This was the Great Triangular Barrier Fleet, which the Devouring Empire had ordered to glide at 1% of the speed of light, and then shut down its engines to evade optical reconnaissance in space for a silent surprise attack.

The suddenly emerging triangular barriers formed a dense shield wall in the space array, protecting the Tyrant-class battle group as it continued to advance. Tens of thousands of interstellar nuclear torpedoes bombarded these triangular blocks, each 10 kilometers on each side and comparable in size to a small city. The ordinary hydrogen bombs mounted on them failed to cause any fundamental damage to these triangular barriers.

Ultimately, the explosion of twenty stellar hydrogen bombs tore a huge hole in this iron wall of space, and a fierce barrage of electromagnetic cannon shells immediately penetrated the Devouring Fleet's formation through these defensive gaps, smashing out bursts of fire.

Humanity won a narrow victory at the start of this surprise attack.

This small victory, however, did not allow the frontline fleet to relax. The alarms at the Solar System Fleet command center shattered the tranquility of the Pluto outpost. On the space model, the red ring representing the Devouring Ring was slowly creeping along the ecliptic plane, and meteorites in the Kuiper Belt were clearly being disturbed by the ring's gravitational field…

The big ring is coming.

The three commanders of the Solar System Fleet are currently on Pluto, including the commander of the Asian Fleet.

In reality, the commander of the Asian Fleet had already secretly completed a review of the number of space forces under the ideological imperative within the Asian Fleet, and the data reported back by his review department was shocking. This glimpse into the bigger picture suggests that the situation in the European and American fleets is likely even worse than that of the Asian Fleet.

However, he did not have time to make personnel adjustments within the fleet, nor could he notify the two friendly fleets, especially since the soldiers at the front were fighting bravely. At this time, recalling the Asian fleet to the front was definitely not a wise choice.

Most importantly, apart from the line of pencil writing that appeared to be escapist, which was discovered by two junior space force officers in the review department—Second Lieutenant Zhang Ting and Second Lieutenant Li Jing—during the review of the Wanhu star-class warship, he had no 'evidence' to directly accuse the soldiers fighting bravely on the front lines of being potential escapists.

It is important to know that many so-called 'escapists' have already sacrificed their lives on the front lines in the fight against the Devouring Fleet. They are heroes of humanity and heroes in the eyes of the Asian Fleet Commander. It is absolutely unacceptable to label heroes as escapists.

The commander of the Asia Fleet is a political veteran; he knows what to do.

He needed to keep all his thoughts to himself for the time being and focus on commanding the fleet against the enemy.

Through gravitational field detection, the Earth-like gravity of the Kuiper Belt's satellite constellation was beginning to disturb it. Simultaneously, across the vast Kuiper Belt battlefield, spanning 120 astronomical units, nine fleets, each numbering tens of thousands, formed an arc-shaped attack formation, launching a full-scale assault on the Kuiper Belt defense zone. The size of the vanguard fleet had suddenly increased ninefold. By this point, the number of large warships deployed by the Devouring Fleet to the Kuiper Belt defense zone had reached 36000. Within this arc-shaped defensive line, 986 stellar-class warships and 19100 planetary-class warships were scattered throughout the Kuiper Belt, confronting, counterattacking, and annihilating the dispersed attacks of the Devouring Fleet on this battlefield littered with meteorites.

The Solar System Fleet desperately wanted to replicate the expeditionary fleet's great victory, but the Devouring Fleet, now completely dispersed, would not give humanity that opportunity again. Moreover, during the year that the Devouring Empire had been battling the Solar System Fleet, the Devouring Empire's fleet command capabilities had also been rapidly improving. Its space tactics and strategies were no less advanced than humanity's, and its use of the fleet was no less sophisticated.

After all, they all came from the same womb.

The Devouring Fleet has made up for its inferiority in quality with its sheer numbers and has maintained an offensive against the Solar System Fleet.

This ancient empire, which has existed for 6000 million years, has shed all its arrogance and devoted all its energy to dealing with this powerful insect civilization.

The Devouring Fleet can conceal itself in the darkness of space by temporarily shutting down its nuclear fusion engines, but the Great Ring cannot; its direction remains entirely under the control of the human fleet. Moreover, in addition to optical observation, humanity has also released a large number of electromagnetic probes.

However, space radars deployed in the Kuiper Belt also have many shortcomings. The Kuiper Belt has an extremely large spatial scale, so much so that the radar system deployed by humans in the Kuiper Belt consists of at least thousands of radars. However, the electromagnetic radar signals of these radars will attenuate with the square of the distance. When detecting at long distances, the echo signals are extremely weak, the real-time performance is poor, and it is difficult to respond quickly to dynamic targets.

With current human technology, we can only accurately locate devouring fleets within the Kuiper Belt; it is difficult to fully control devouring fleets outside the Kuiper Belt.

These disadvantages make space radar more suitable for medium- and short-range detection. For ultra-long-range detection at the solar system level, the solar system fleet prefers to use optical and radio telescopes.

But at this moment, the Solar System Fleet already knew the Devouring Fleet's subsequent offensive strategy, and knew that the Devouring Fleet's gear attack was not a large-scale feint, but a genuine main force advance.

As for the source of the intelligence, it is naturally the Wallfacers who are stationed in the solar system.

Although this Wallfacer's divine sense could only extend to the orbit of Pluto, which is about 53 astronomical units away from Earth, he had learned to condense his divine sense into threads to scan back and forth across 200 astronomical units, like a real solar system radar, reporting the enemy fleet's movements to the solar system fleet every half hour.

Therefore, the massive raid by the Devouring Fleet was met with targeted and tenacious resistance from humanity from the very beginning.

The direction of the approaching ring has been relayed to all parts of the frontline fleet. Currently, the only weapons capable of effectively damaging the ring, besides the stellar-type hydrogen bombs carried by the star-class warships, are the ultra-high-power gamma lasers carried by the four dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt: Pluto, Eris, Makemake, and Haumea.

The super-powerful laser gamma-ray cannons mounted on these four dwarf planets are no less powerful than the 350 gamma-ray main cannons that devoured the giant rings, and are directly powered by high-power controlled nuclear fusion facilities.

However, these four dwarf planets are all inner planets of the Kuiper Belt, and due to orbital issues, most of them are unable to directly participate in this operation.

After all, humans have no way to manufacture planetary engines for these dwarf planets in a short period of time to control their flight paths. Although the current scale of human industry is very strong, this strength diminishes more and more as we move further away from Earth. Jupiter's orbit is the largest space industrial center outside of the Earth-Moon system.

But there is one exception: Eris.

Eris is the farthest dwarf planet from Earth, and its orbit is extremely eccentric. Its aphelion is about 97.56 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, which is about 146 billion kilometers. At this moment, Eris happens to be at its aphelion, which is precisely the main direction of attack from the rings. This means that Eris, which is nearly 100 AU from the Sun, can directly participate in the attack on the rings.

Dwarf planets, as the name suggests, are small due to their size. The dwarf planet Eris is extremely small, with a volume approximately 0.5% of Earth's, and even compared to the Moon, it's only about 2% of its size. In fact, among the four major dwarf planets, Eris is relatively large, second only to Pluto's 0.6% of Earth's volume. In comparison, Makemake has only 0.3% of Earth's volume, and Haumea is even smaller at 0.17%. The smallest of these, Eris, cannot even maintain a spherical shape, being only an oblate spheroid.

Although small, Eris has a diameter of 2000 kilometers. While this size is not large enough to support a massive electromagnetic railgun strike matrix, Eris is already equipped with a super-powerful gamma laser cannon.

This is the most powerful gamma laser beam cannon ever made by mankind, powerful enough to cause effective damage to the giant ring itself.

Three minutes after the outbreak of war.

The Solar System Fleet has authorized Eris to officially participate in the Kuiper Belt defense campaign.

(End of this chapter)