The Martial Unity

Countless parties had commenced their machinations the very moment they got even a whiff of the Emperor’s plan to unshackle human civilization. While his Void Order Regime was truly a breath of fresh air to ordinary people who were no longer as concerned about Martial violence and the instability that Martial Art created, the more powerful forces couldn’t see the Void Order as anything other than oppression.

Every single party of Panamic and even Gaian Civilization understood a single truth. The conquest of stars was their only ticket to escape the looming shadow of the Emperor of Water.

The Sage-level powerhouses, which had grown much more plentiful in the past six years thanks to the explosion of Martial Sages, as well as other organizations and power blocs, all began preparing for what was going to undoubtedly be a vicious race.

“Good.”

In the depths of outer space, the voice of the Martial Transcendent radiated through the very fabric of reality, overcoming the flow of causality, resonating through past, present, and future. His royal attire floated weightlessly, as did his hair. His ethereal eyes bore deep into Gaia, penetrating every inch of her surface and her depths.

“Panamic and Gaian Civilization need to grow up.”

That was why he didn’t stifle their ambition, even if their ambition sought to overthrow him. That was why he ultimately decided to allow Gaian Civilization to freely spread across the stars. Not just because of the economics of growth and the logistics of conquering ten thousand stars in ten years. But also because he realized just how dependent they were growing on him. He needed them to grow stronger and independent, even if that meant that they would grow out of his control, even if that meant that they would harbor the ambition to overthrow him, as certain parties had.

“That risk is smaller, and those outcomes are more acceptable than the destruction of Gaian Civilization by greater alien forces.”

It was only a matter of time before they ran into them. Some quasi-Type-Three Civilization, or perhaps even higher, with a military power beyond their wildest comprehension. The virus’s SOS broadcast.

Then there were his own shenanigans in Gaia. He had flooded an entire solar system with literal water. That wasn’t something that could be done without drawing tremendous attention. The radiation, the spectrography, the gravitation, the hydro-lensing, all of these things would immediately allow even Type-One Civilizations to detect that somehow an entire solar system in the middle of nowhere had been flooded with literal H2O.

More advanced civilizations would understand exactly what had happened and would hunt them alive to seek that power. “Thankfully, light is slow.”

It was slow relative to the scale of the galaxy.

It would take four-point-two years to reach the nearest star system. As long as their conquest across the Local Bubble was faster than light, then they would be fine.

“Once the Gaian Alliance captures Garg and reverse engineers his reproduction method, the expansion will commence.”

That was all he was waiting for. He didn’t have to wait too long.

The Gaian Alliance rapidly gathered intelligence on Garg. They began undertaking more bold and risky operations against the gargantian to test its reactions, its retaliation, and its defensive measures. It began building a very powerful profile of everything that the conscious planet was capable of.

And also fleshed out a strategy capable of taking down the gargantian, relying on the unique capabilities of each civilization and major state. The preparations for the plan would have taken years to achieve, for it required a lot of improvisation and modification of existing technologies and paradigms. The Kandrian Manifold fixed that shortcoming entirely, of course. Over the next few months, dwarves, elves, scientists, and researchers from the Esocline Federation and even the Kandrian Empire’s own research teams entered the manifold to engineer solutions to various hurdles that they had been entrusted to overcome.

The production and building process of those solutions also only took months side by side, as various civilizations and states got together to commit all their manufacturing capacity to building the engineered solutions.

The two biggest problems that they couldn’t solve, of course, were transporting all of their engineered solutions, and also all the warships and pathwalkers they would need to capture and incapacitate the gargantian in battle. They also couldn’t solve the energy supply problem, since they had no method of accessing energy generated in Gaia and the Sun.

Thankfully for them, Rui accepted handling both those problems with his Transcendent power.

He would open the Intestellar Gate to Sirius for as long as the operation was active. This would allow them to transport whatever they needed and access energy through the wormhole.

Just like that, three months passed in the blink of an eye. It was a shockingly small amount of time, considering the operation, but it was a reflection of what a Type-Two civilization made up of trillions of people and a manifold with a fourteen-to-one flow of time was capable of.

They were tremendously powerful when united.

RUMBLE

In outer space, a truly enormous number of warships gathered about the Interstellar Gate. An incredibly diverse, but homogeneous space army composed of the best that every civilization in Gaia had to offer. Massive fleet carriers carrying many titanic weapons, filled with smaller spacecrafts, MECHAs, mechs, pathwalkers, and other combat units. Giant floral superweapons, refined and upgraded after the Laminar Battle, were armed with every weapon that the elves had developed specifically for Garg. Massive space whales manipulated by therianthrope crews swam closer in warpods, equipped with special technologies designed for the battle.

The war front stretched for thousands of kilometers in every direction and dimension, visible even when one beheld Gaia as a whole.

It was a mighty army, one that brought a smile upon Rui’s face as he floated on the other side of the Intestellar Gate, waiting for the command for his role.

“Alright, check check, is this on?… is everybody ready?” An informal, male voice buzzed in the earpiece of every participating member.

It reeked of lazy confidence.

“Just get to it, Rasmarck,” Rui huffed.

In the central command headquarters of the Unified Gaian Forces of the Gaian Alliance stood a young man at its very center with an excited smile. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

Despite his youth, he was the Supreme General of the unified military forces of the Gaian Alliance.

An immortal sage who specialized in military strategy and command.

“And Operation Gargle commences… now,” his tone grew low and intense as the smile on his face widened.

Yet, despite commencing the operation, almost nothing happened.

A single hatch on the Pioneer VIII omni-ship opened up, letting out a strangely-shaped spherical spacecraft towards Garg.

WHOOSH

It slowly moved towards the gargantian.