Chapter 311

Chapter 312: Noble Sacrifice

A deafening boom shook the entire hall, and the Hermitage Members who were pinned by the walls, floor, and control consoles watched in terror as part of the Control Hall ceiling broke loose and crashed down right on the Sage’s head.

The trapped cultists thrashed hard, trying to break free from the steel holding them down, but the pressure only grew heavier. From every wall, every pipe, and every cable came a rising fury, a rage poured out by the now living ship itself.

Then the fallen pipe slowly rose.

The white robed Sage stood up, and with every small move, his body grew taller and stronger. When he first crawled out from under the pipe, he was a tall, thin old man. By the time he straightened, he was a warrior over two meters high, powerful and perfect like a heroic statue.

The wrinkles of age smoothed away, his hollow cheeks filled and glowed, and his once too-large white robe became a fitted short robe. He lifted his head toward the iron face on the wall. Bright blue sparks leapt through his hair and beard. His expression was stern and fearless, carrying the presence of a god among humans.

He stepped forward as Thunder cracked underfoot: “The greatness and necessity of the holy path are beyond your understanding!”

One Hermitage Member, caged in steel, suddenly grew excited. Even while bound head to toe, he shouted: “The Sage has finished the final metamorphosis! We are saved!”

Others, seeing the Sage’s new form, grew hopeful too, as if a savior had descended before their eyes. They had no idea how the Sage would fight a living ship that had turned against them, but they still cheered, feeling hope blaze again.

Yu Sheng did not answer. He ripped two slabs of steel from the hall’s wall and hurled them like cannon shells at the towering man in white, while softening the floor around him, scrambling the hall’s gravity, and turning everything he could control into attacks and snares. He unleashed his strike in a crashing wave.

Thunder burst across the hall. Steel fell like rain. The huge white robed elder rose in the tangled gravity field and drove Thunder head on into the raging metal. A stony sheen spread over what looked like a mortal body, and he took the impact of the falling iron with brute force before firing a powerful blast of Thunder at the iron face on the opposite wall.

But to Yu Sheng, it meant nothing.

His body was now the whole ship, and the face in the hall was just an interface for talking.

The Power of Thunder exploded on the wall. Electric light sprayed and hot molten streaks ran across the metal surface. Yu Sheng’s face warped and melted away in the blast, then vanished. A heartbeat later, the ceiling of the hall opened two eyes and stared down at the floating Sage.

“You don’t seem to care much about your ‘comrades’ either,” Yu Sheng said in an unhurried voice.

Several Hermitage Members pinned to the wall had been hit by the aftershock of that Power of Thunder. They were now lumps of charcoal, still smoking inside their metal cages.

The cheers inside the hall faded.

Wrapped in Thunder, the towering elder only turned, fearless as he faced the face on the ceiling, now even larger: “This too is a noble sacrifice.”

In the next second, his already giant body swelled again, lit by an even fiercer Thunder. The bulk pushed past “strong” into monstrous. Muscles surged into gruesome slabs of flesh. Limbs stretched and warped. Skin split inch by inch. Blinding arcs burned away meat under the skin until it ran like liquid and dripped down. The robe that showed his honor turned to ash. In only a few breaths, the Sage became a mass of glowing electricity, an Aberrant Behemoth with no human shape. Thick bolts blasted from his limbs and, with just a sweep across the floor, the aftershock turned more than a dozen Hermitage Members into charcoal.

“This is all a noble sacrifice!”

The ship’s ventilation fans sucked a lungful of Reactor fumes as Yu Sheng yelped: “Wow, you kill your own people even harder than I do?!”

Even as he blurted it out, he was already moving. A chain of thunderous bangs rolled through the hall. The ship’s structure linked to this compartment shifted fast. Metal was drawn, moved, and reshaped. Two huge hands grew from the side walls and clapped toward the floating Aberrant Behemoth.

[End him fast. He keeps growing, and he’s not sane. If I let this drag on, he’ll slaughter all his cultists himself.]

The metal palms slammed together.

Only a heartbeat later, blinding electric light burst from between the palms. In shock, Yu Sheng watched the two hands getting pried apart from the center. White hot matter dripped from the air like blood, and the Thunder wrapped Aberrant Behemoth showed itself again. The Behemoth had lost all original shape, flattened by the clap, then crudely rebuilt itself.

Bloated, crawling flesh pushed up seven or eight arms and forced the giant palms wide.

A harsh voice roared from the lightning: “They were unstable products after many failed iterations. They had not ascended to become pure and faithful. Rather than let them spill secrets to the enemy and lose honor, I will send them ahead while their souls are still clean, so they can stand with the Forebears!”

Yu Sheng said: “…?!”

What shocked him even more was that the surviving Hermitage Members did not rage or waver when they heard this near death sentence. They began to shout instead:

“Step onto the holy path!”

“Martyrdom! Martyrdom! Martyrdom!”

“Salute to you, let the perfect way bear witness!”

A frenzy filled the hall, wild and ecstatic. Yu Sheng had never seen anything this mad. They were wrecking everything with clear joy in their eyes, calling it faith. Then, in the next second, he noticed the lightning around the Aberrant Behemoth flare even brighter.

Its body swelled fast. Something inside was about to burst out.

“This is also a noble sacrifice!”

Yu Sheng blurted: “What the heck?!”

He did not know how much strange tech the Holy Revere Hermitage had, or how a living person could turn into this in minutes. But he knew one thing for sure: if that Sage exploded here, not one cultist in the hall would survive, and the ship’s central structure might get blown to pieces.

He was not confident he could fix that level of damage. Reconnecting a few pipes and wires was one thing. This would be another.

So he picked the backup of his backup plan.

At the Control Hall’s End Web, the heavy Composite Porthole gave a sharp shudder, then blew open a gaping hole.

Sirens screamed. Gale force winds tore through the hall as the ship’s air met the vacuum of space. A huge suction yanked at everything near the breach. At the same time, a giant pipe fell from the ceiling, and halfway down, it swung like a club and smashed into the rapidly swelling Aberrant Behemoth.

“Off you go!”

The Sage bellowed in the storm, but the sudden pressure drop twisted his voice into something awful. Between broken gravity, the massive hit, and the pull of vacuum, the monster could not steady itself. Like a cannon shell, it shot out of the Pillar of Order.

The cracked window sealed itself the next instant. Before the surviving Hermitage Members died from vacuum and cold, Yu Sheng patched the hole in time.

His eyes turned to the stars outside.

Thrown into open space, the Aberrant Behemoth kept flying away from the Pillar of Order at high speed. Blinding electric light surged and shrank like a pounding heart. Yu Sheng watched it race farther and farther. He braced for a blast. Even without air for a shockwave, that much energy blowing up close by would still be bad.

He tensed.

The Sage’s Aberrant Behemoth throbbed a few times, then kept going, farther and farther, and still farther.

It really did just keep going.

It sped up. In the end it turned into a streak of light flashing across the stars.

Yu Sheng said: “…?”

…

“Noble sacrifice, noble sacrifice… bearing blame is a sacrifice too.”

Far out in space, the Aberrant Behemoth thought in rage. The radiation and cold hurt terribly, but he knew he had escaped that terrifying Ghost.

From the lump of flesh, a thin limb formed and clutched a charm. Two rings overlapped, and a ruby shone in the center. He poured his will into the beacon.

“This is Babole-3, requesting to spend one use of Blessed Shelter, any coordinate is fine. I am dying… I carry vital intel!”

A flash cut through Deep Space, and the Sage, Babole-3, vanished into the dark.