Zhen Yue Battleship, Core Control Room.
Captain Gu Yizhou, Lieutenant Commander, stood before the control console.
His gaze was sharp, fixed intently on the death corridor cleared by allied forces outside the observation window ahead, and the surging Imperial Fleet at the corridor's end.
In his ears came the confirmation from the Tiankui Star Fleet that the corridor was clear.
Without hesitation, without any stirring rhetoric.
He took a deep breath, mustering all his strength, and issued a resolute, low roar over the ship-wide broadcast and the weapons control station.
"Titan's Grip—fire!"
As his words fell, his finger pressed down heavily on the final launch button on the control console—protected by a transparent cover and glowing crimson!
Hum!!
An unprecedented, terrifying hum, so deep it seemed to originate from the very pulse of the cosmos itself.
Instantly swept through the entire Zhen Yue!
This sound did not travel through the air but acted directly on the hull structure, on the bones and internal organs of every person aboard!
Immediately after, everyone felt that irresistible, violent reverse thrust!
The entire leviathan, thousands of meters long and weighing billions of tons, the Zhen Yue.
Was as if struck by an invisible cosmic hammer from directly ahead, violently jolting backward!
The ship's keel emitted a teeth-grating groan; all unsecured objects shot forward, and the vast majority of the crew were thrown violently against the control console or bulkheads by this sudden, immense force.
Thankfully, safety harnesses and magnetic boots held them firmly in place!
The tremendous inertia forced the warship to translate backward through the void by over ten thousand meters!
Leaving behind a brief zone of energy vacuum and chaotic ion wake in its original position.
And at the very moment this earth-shattering reverse impact occurred.
Within the opened launch channel at the bow, that graviton beam condensed to its extreme, its color as deep as a cosmic scar, had already vanished.
The instant Titan's Grip was projected, it did not trigger a conventional explosion.
But rather a violent, brief, and extreme distortion of a fundamental property of space—gravity—within a localized region.
The first to detect the anomaly were the most precise gravitational wave detectors on all Imperial vessels.
As they detected the signal of an anomalous gravitational source appearing out of nowhere, its intensity spiking vertically.
Their internal precision components smoked from overload, screens shattered, and entire modules instantly burned out.
Immediately after, destruction descended in an incomprehensible form.
The numerous Imperial Escort Ships and Light Destroyers within the core region of the gravitational distortion bore the brunt.
They didn't even have time to react before their hulls were as if seized by an invisible, higher-dimensional hand!
Hundreds-of-meters-long hulls emitted a teeth-grating groan of metal being compressed to its extreme.
Within less than a second, they collapsed inward with insane force!
Armor plates, internal structures, pipelines, equipment, personnel...
All matter was forcibly squeezed and kneaded together by irresistible gravity.
Like a child brutally crumpling a tin foil toy.
One warship after another was compressed into irregularly-edged, dense metal spheres, only tens of meters in diameter, their surfaces shimmering with the cold light of molten metal!
These metal spheres were subjected to unimaginable internal pressure, continuing to shrink relentlessly.
Material structures disintegrated and transformed under extreme gravitational forces.
Finally, under the horrified gazes of countless Imperial officers and crew, those metal spheres flickered a few times.
Then, like pencil marks erased by a rubber, they vanished completely into the void.
Not an explosion, not vaporization.
But rather, they were utterly compressed by extreme gravity into a microscopic, unobservable scale.
Perhaps they briefly became black hole precursors before instantly evaporating, leaving behind only faint, unsettled space ripples in their wake.
Farther away, larger medium-sized starships such as cruisers and electronic warfare ships faced a different nightmare.
The gravitational fields in the space they occupied were twisted into a noodle-making machine.
Their hulls were subjected to terrifying gravitational pulls of opposing directions and varying magnitudes at both ends.
These warships were like strands of metal noodles seized at both ends by invisible, colossal hands.
Their midsections were violently compressed and flattened.
Heavy armor and internal structures were crushed into uneven metal sheets less than a meter thick.
Meanwhile, their bows and sterns were stretched, thinned, and elongated under opposing gravitational forces, twisted into bizarre and tragic strips.
Many pieces of equipment were torn directly from the hulls and hurled into deep space.
Many warships silently fractured and disintegrated under the combined effects of extreme stretching and compression.
Transforming into twisted metal debris, unrecognizable from their original forms.
Even the sturdiest T5-class battleships in the Blood Locust Fleet could not escape this gravitational weapon beyond comprehension.
They were not destroyed outright but subjected to the most bizarre gravitational tidal differentials.
Different parts of the same warship experienced gravitational forces differing by thousands of times in an instant.
The most typical scene was this:
The bow section of a T5 battleship seemed suddenly plunged onto the surface of a neutron star, crushed by unimaginable force.
Heavy multi-layered composite armor shattered and compacted as easily as brittle crackers.
The entire forward hull was brutally compressed into a shattered metal pancake, less than one-tenth of its original thickness.
All internal turrets and compartments vanished.
Yet the stern of the same warship, including its engines, seemed only lightly affected, remaining almost intact.
A single colossal vessel presented an absurd and terrifying spectacle: its front half a flattened metal sheet, its rear half a perfectly preserved hull.
Then, having lost all power and balance, it began tumbling uncontrollably.
And this was not all.
The area directly struck by Titan's Grip experienced violent gravitational disturbances, like a massive rock thrown into a calm lake.
This generated a visible annular shockwave, mingling high-energy particles and spatial oscillations, expanding outward at sub-light speed!
Even Imperial starships located outside the core destruction zone, fortunate enough to avoid being directly crushed or stretched, could not escape.
This invisible death wave slammed mercilessly into them!
Thud! Thud! Thud!
Dull impacts reverberated through their hulls.
Under this onslaught of pure kinetic energy and spatial oscillations, their heavy warship armor...
...cracked like glass struck by a sledgehammer, surfaces instantly exploding into dense, web-like fractures!
Many external sensors, turrets, and antennae were directly shattered and torn away.
More critically, the immense force carried by the shockwave instantly sent these colossal objects spiraling out of control.
Like leaves in a gale, they were pushed away from their original positions, colliding at extremely high relative speeds with nearby friendly ships that were either out of control or attempting to evade!
Boom!!
The piercing sounds of tearing metal and explosions merged into a chaotic roar.
A cruiser, flung aside by the shockwave, slammed hard into the midsection of a battleship.
The cruiser's bow was completely deformed and shattered upon impact.
Meanwhile, the battleship's thick broadside armor was dented into a massive depression, with its internal structure severely damaged and flames erupting from the breach.