The Martial Unity

Rui stared at the Divine Mother with a reserved expression. He didn’t trust her, but their interests temporarily aligned. She surely knew that if her civilization was too weakened, they would not be able to achieve the goal that she wanted of them. At some point, he predicted their interests would diverge. And unfortunately, it gave her a prime opening to set up a trap for him.

Once she had inflicted enough damage to her rivals using his ambushes, she could, for example, inform his sisters of the next target and allow them to set up a trap where they could capture him. This would allow her to get her hands on his negation of the consequences of Transcendence.

He would just have to trust his judgment, his analysis, and his instincts in evaluating the information she gave him.

Thankfully, he had an intel advantage.

Divine Mother ooo—o- didn’t know that her sister o-o-o-o was still alive, if frozen in time on the verge of death with her mind for him to scour. She didn’t know that he had access to a plethora of profoundly top-secret intelligence and a good grasp of the arakai as a whole. That meant that if she tried to scam him with information meant to lead him into a trap, then he would likely find out because she wouldn’t take the necessary precautions to hide the trap.

That gave him the confidence to continue his shaky partnership with the Divine Mother.

She heaved a sigh. ”Since you are this impatient for this information, I will not hold back. But since you are not entirely familiar with our civilization, I will have to give you that background.”

She waved her hand, causing a three-dimensional hologram featuring a stellar map to emerge before them. It featured the Orion star strand, marking the territories of human civilization and the arakai civilization, as well as the territories of the dessandrites and the aquadites.

Rui feigned intrigue, as if he had never seen the map before. He had managed to acquire this information and more from o-o-o-o’s mind.

”The distance between human civilization and the arakai civilization,” she drew a line with her finger. ”…is four hundred and eighty-six light-years. Humanity falls within this bubble, which we call the o-o—oo-o— Bubble. Or, in Gaian language, the Barren Bubble.”

Rui huffed, but didn’t interrupt. He already knew that the name wasn’t ill-suited. She continued as if nothing happened.

”Arakai civilization, on the other hand, stretches across dozens or hundreds of millions of stars, depending on where you think it begins and ends, and is filled with not just stellar bubbles, but also stellar rivers and stellar plains.”

Bubbles were simply clusters of stars of a certain density or trait. While stellar rivers were stars that were moving in the same direction at the same speed, in contrast with the stars in their interstellar banks. Stellar plains were a uniform distribution of stars that only ended at voids or other forms of stellar categorizations.

Rui knew from the memories of o-o-o-o that this was how advanced civilizations distinguished groups of stars within the Orion Star Strand and sub-categorized the giant stellar arm. The Orion Star Strand comprised billions of stars, after all. It was too large to be useful to civilizations living inside the star strand looking for ways to delineate interstellar geography.

”Arakai civilization is broken down into nexuses, or cells as we call them,” she continued, zooming into the map of the arakai territory, which further broke down into sub-zones. Like provinces within a country. ”We have around three hundred cells, but also a hundred and twenty of those cells are led by a Divine Mother. Each cell contains hundreds of thousands of stars.”

Rui’s eyebrows furrowed. ”So a Divine Mother could be in any one of the hundreds of thousands of stars of a given cell?”

She nodded. ”That is correct. That is why finding them is very difficult. And that is why they are very good at hiding. We have an extensive and highly well-developed and secretive wormhole web. They can travel across their cells in instants thanks to that. Finding them, even for an information broker like me, is very difficult.”

Rui frowned. ”How long will it take you to get a lock on the location of a Divine Mother of the War Faction?”

She smiled.

”I have already located one, for the time being.”

Without waiting for a response, she waved her hand, causing the projection to feature a profile of what looked like a middle-aged Divine Mother. She wasn’t as young as —o-o—o who led the War of Web, but she wasn’t as old as the faction leaders either. She had a fierce expression, nonetheless.

”This is Divine Mother o—ooooo,” ooo—o- explained. ”She’s a low-level Divine Mother who is tentatively part of the War Faction and is in favor of destroying your civilization. She administers the o-o——o Cell, or the Fallen Rain Cell. And currently, she is preparing for the next generation of eggs in the Colton System of the Pleiades River.”

She brought up the image of a star system that was so densely engineered that it made even the Solar System of human civilization look like a pauper. Countless rings and layers of structures surrounded their stars, stretching light-minutes in their radius.

A web-like energy structure flowed throughout the star system, composed of hyperdimensional channels that allowed vehicles to move at superluminal speeds without needing negatron warp drives or even additional energy.

It was a level of astronomical engineering that exceeded anything human civilization was capable of at the moment, even with the dwarves.

”She is currently on this planet, Planet oo-ooo—o-o, or Planet Nest VII, in human terminology,” she zoomed into a planet with a crust that resembled a three-dimensional web structure, meant to create an underground web environment suited for the arakai to easily move about. ”She is undergoing a mass fertilization event, so she will not be moving for the next week or so.”

”…Mass fertilization event?”

Divine Mother ooo—o- nodded plainly. ”She is mating with large numbers of male arakai. She will need their seeds to give birth to the next generation of arakai in her cell. She will be particularly vulnerable during this time, so it is the ideal moment to strike.”

”…”