The Martial Unity

The war had raged on for more than a month, a little under two months. The most immediate effects of the war had already rippled across human civilization. The catastrophic crash of stock markets, the spiking of interest rates and of insurance premiums sent massive tsunamis that disrupted every single edge of human civilization. Even the furthest edge of humanity on the other side of Arima III wasn’t unaffected by such a change.

The immediate financial catastrophe destroyed many firms and enterprises. Astro-economics had always been brutal compared to its planetary equivalent. Transporting goods and services by crossing light-years between stars was much more complicated and intensive than traveling by land or by sea between nations on a planet.

This made firms fundamentally more fragile in the Era of Expansion compared to firms during the Age of Unfolding. The financial catastrophe alone caused a large chunk of less well-off firms to collapse immediately. Just the cost of insuring spacefare had risen by nearly one thousand percent, making most firms immediately unprofitable for the most basic interstellar logistics and operations. A record high of nearly seventy thousand firms applied for bankruptcy in just a month and a half into the war.

The wave of bankruptcies was followed by waves of mass lay-offs. Not all of these individuals were able to be absorbed into the war with war contracts the way that the destroyed virus-hunting industry diaspora were. Most of them were simply civilians with specializations that weren’t directly relevant to the war.

The financial crisis only added to the sense of doom that the war had caused in the hearts of people. It was one thing to fear the destruction of human civilization; it was another thing to fear it when everybody was getting laid off.

The only source of hope amid the dread that had spread across human civilization was the fact that the arakai hadn’t escaped Arima III and spread to other star systems. Morale would be even lower if everybody saw that star system after star system was being conquered. People would have assumed that it was only a matter of time before they would be killed.

However, the resilience of human military might was on full display. Most Martial Artists and pathwalkers had gotten involved in the war in some fashion or another, most of whom were in reserve. Although Central Human Command would have loved to send all of them, pathwalkers were only useful when they were close to the enemy ships. For this, they needed ships, which proved to be the biggest bottleneck in the throughput of their battle capacity.

The dwarves had been working like madmen, pumping out ship after ship as fast as they humanly could, but even with the manifold, it was simply not enough. Shipbuilding was an extremely time-consuming process, especially for the dwarves who were very particular about the process. The fact they relied very little on automation, if at all, made it even slower.

It took a year to build even a single sub-capital, on average. It took several more years to build bigger ships. Central Human Command had chosen to settle for light cruisers that had the highest mobility outside of frigates. By reducing the length of the ships to just two hundred and fifty meters, they managed to receive the first wave of dwarven ships that were built exclusively for the war.

The biggest source of relief, however, was the surge in the supply of esoteric matter. A total of nine new infected worlds had been delivered to human civilization on a silver platter by one unknown, mysterious company. But Central Human Command could only bow to this mysterious benefactor and accept this gift humbly. The surplus of Transcendent-grade esoterics created a buffer that allowed them to make do even when a stable flow of dwarven ships had yet to come.

At the same time, the humans had also begun developing mini long-range high-precision worm bridges.

These were worm bridges that were meant to directly teleport pathwalkers to the enemy war fleets, bypassing the need for ships to deploy them in the first place.

The only problem was that the interdiction force of the Web of War made that extremely difficult. The Greater Worm Bridge in Gaia Prime was about a hundred kilometers in diameter and had the penetrative power to overwhelm even arakai interdiction measures. It had been crafted by dwarves and contained a literal sea of negatron matter.

Other ongoing projects involved developing weapons systems that could actually harm the arakai war fleets. It was humiliating for a civilization to have all of its weapons so profoundly negated by more advanced solutions.

In this regard, a breakthrough had been made.

[Here, these are the principles for superluminal light. These should be enough to bypass the arakai singularity lattice.]

Central Human Command had been dumbfounded when the nominal leader of the tekvores suddenly gave them a technological principle to create weapons that could defeat the arakai. They hadn’t known that he had just broken through to the Transcendent, so they could only assume that the tekvore had been selfishly hiding this technology from CHC all this time.

Another breakthrough came from the hyperdimensional departments that had received massive funding to analyze and reverse engineer prothanite. An experimental research team isolated in the manifold managed to crack the underlying principle of tapping into hyperdimensional technology.

”Quantum wormholes! In order to bypass the Calabi-Yau manifolds. We must create quantum wormholes that leverage the principles of quantum tunneling to enter the higher dimensions!”

This was the non-Transcendent path to higher dimensions. Not everybody could open up the higher dimensions by washing away quantum vacuum flux with metaphysical Water or alter the laws of reality to a more convenient state.

Although saying it was different from achieving it, it was a start.

These developments and breakthroughs only added to arakai anxiety.

CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK!

”These. Humans. Are. Growing. Too. Quickly!” A glint of dread emerged in the six eyes of Divine Mother —o-o—o.

She now finally understood how humans were able to expand ten thousandfold in just thirteen years. They were monsters of growth. The entire civilization was primed for rapid and astronomical rise. It was the same kind of growth that somebody who had prodigious talent in a field first came into contact with that field.

In the case of human civilization, that field was the entire universe. It was the stars. The moment they entered the stars. Their innate potential and talents, in combination with a carefully calibrated civilization promoting growth, bloomed like a firework.

At this rate, the humans, the Divine Mother rightfully feared, would not only resist, but actively destroy the Web of War.

Something needed to be done.

And, indeed, something was on the verge of being done.

Far away in arakai civilization, six Divine Mothers arrived at the Gate of Conquest.

Their bodies were covered with a dense, woven web armor that took time to weave and time to remove.

The kind of armor that they only wore when it was truly warranted.

At their very forefront was Divine Mother oooo——, the leader of the War Faction. Her demeanor was considerably more martial than it normally was.

There was a lot of risk with this operation.

But there was even more to be gained.

”It’s time.”