Turn back the clock.
After returning to Warhammer, Kain jumped toward the next star system on his original route.
This place had the same kind of perpetual energy device as the ship, but that was not what he had come to retrieve for now.
His objective was an Imperial armory left behind in this star system. He was here to replenish his supplies.
That armory had been revealed to him by Archmagos Belisarius Cawl. It was hidden inside one of the system's gas giants, a planet similar to Jupiter.
Ordinary ships would have difficulty entering it, because the planet's surface was wracked by abnormal lightning storms that would tear them apart.
His ship, however, could infiltrate it in ghost mode.
He glanced at the star chart. The current state of this system differed somewhat from what the chart showed. In simple terms, it was like looking at a map of mountains and rivers after the entire landscape had shifted. It was no longer the same as it had been in the past.
The star chart came from the Great Crusade era. After more than ten thousand years, this star system had changed almost beyond recognition.
This had once been a garden world, a natural, unpolluted, almost primitive resort-like world without factory blight. But because of a war, it had become a ruined system, a dead system.
The planet that should once have been beautiful had been turned into a glass sphere by an Exterminatus order. Several horrifying cracks now scarred its surface.
It looked as though the slightest touch would split that glass-sphere planet into several pieces.
As for the other planets, they were not much better. Some looked as though the Moon had been bitten by a heavenly dog, with an enormous chunk missing. Others had split cleanly in half.
The worst of them had become asteroid belts made of countless fragments. Some of those fragments had been captured by the gas giant he was headed for, forming a planetary ring.
He looked toward the slightly dim sun. It was dark red, like a setting sun, giving the impression that its life was already nearing its end.
Even now, fragments of celestial bodies were being pulled toward that sun every moment, falling into that unstable black hole-like maw.
When a relatively large chunk of matter smashed into it, the star's brightness seemed to flicker faintly, like a faulty lightbulb.
According to the ship's data, this star could undergo a helium flash at any moment and swell into a red giant all at once.
In addition to celestial fragments, the system was filled with enormous amounts of trash-like debris. Some of it was wreckage from the war, while some seemed to be garbage that had drifted in from other star systems over the years.
Perhaps this star system really had been treated as a dump.
Garbage from other star systems had been thrown here.
And among that garbage, there were probably more than a few dangers hidden.
Some debris had passed through the Warp. Such things obviously would not have been deliberately protected by a Gellar field to keep daemons away.
That meant that when these objects returned to realspace, daemons might be hiding inside them.
When he arrived near the gas giant and prepared to enter the seemingly endless lightning storm, the ship suddenly sounded an alarm.
A large number of objects were entering this star system at faster-than-light speed.
Faster-than-light? A large number of objects?
In the next instant, space not far from the gas giant seemed to ripple like a mirage. In a region of space where there had been nothing a moment ago, a vast fleet of warships appeared.
They were science-fiction warships that conformed very closely to Kain's aesthetics.
And in this world, almost any warship that matched his aesthetics would not belong to the Imperium.
These ships had not performed a spatial jump. They had appeared after ending their faster-than-light flight. To the naked eye, it looked almost as if they had materialized from nowhere.
No matter how he looked at it, a fleet suddenly arriving in a dump-like star system was not normal.
...
Sleek science-fiction warships, their curves fitting human aesthetics, rapidly filled the entire area of space.
The carrier-like vessels released even more futuristic starfighters.
A dense mass spread out everywhere, all of them seemingly of the same model.
The scale of this space fleet was on a completely different level from what Asuna had seen before.
The previous Ork fleet was still something whose number of ships could be counted.
This fleet, however, probably contained thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of warships.
Once the smaller craft such as starfighters were added, their numbers became impossible to count.
The sight was truly magnificent.
"Huh? They're not a human fleet?"
Mr. Kain explained it briefly. They were an alien fleet belonging to a species called the T'au.
He also showed them what the T'au looked like. They were quite different from humans, but they were still humanoid, not some octopus-like alien life-form.
Fallen Angel Kuroneko: When you compare the Imperium's warships with the T'au Empire's warships, anyone who didn't know better would probably think the T'au Empire was the human fleet, and the Imperium was the alien fleet.
Tendo Civil Security Company: Agreed. I've wanted to complain about that too.
Asuna agreed with both of them.
However, Mr. Kain's ship also had a very futuristic appearance, which meant that humanity's fleets in the past should also have been the sort of science-fiction vessels Asuna imagined.
Especially in that previous confrontation with the Orks' Attack Moon. A planet had been transformed into something like that. The science-fiction shock of it still lingered in her mind.
At present, the livestream soon stopped showing the massive T'au fleet, because Mr. Kain had already headed toward the Jupiter-like planet.
After breaking through the strange lightning-storm environment, he finally saw something.
"A cathedral?"
Asuna could not help murmuring the word, because the enormous object that appeared before them really did look like a religious building.
Only after getting closer could she roughly determine its size. It was probably about as large as a soccer field.
When the ship passed through its exterior like a ghost and entered the interior, the scenery inside created another illusion. It looked like a giant cathedral-shaped hanging clock, an enormous timepiece, because the huge gear assemblies inside were very similar to the structure of a watch.
After they went deeper, they saw what should be weapons.
Some of them were things they had seen before: combat aircraft and ground tanks used during the previous war against the bugs.
Clearly, this was an armory. However, it looked as though there was not much left.
The ship finally stopped in front of three humanoid machines. These were mechs, then. They looked to be around thirteen to fifteen meters tall.
As for their design, from a distance, they looked like medieval knights in full metal armor.
In the end, Mr. Kain really did call them Imperial Knights.
Although these things did look somewhat futuristic, compared to the Gundams on Miss Lacus's side, they felt backward. They really gave the impression that a Gundam could easily beat them down.
However, Asuna already knew that weapons from Mr. Kain's world could not be judged by appearance alone, so of course she would not underestimate them.
She checked her own energy coins and began wondering whether she could find a time when Mr. Kain was free, then invite him over to help on her side.
(End of Chapter)
[Get +30 Extra Chapters On — P@tr3on "Zaelum"]
[Every 300 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter Drop]
[Thanks for Reading!]