To maintain the absolute "banger" pacing and showcase the squad's new Tier-10 toys, the best route is Route A: The Void-Steel Armada (The Fleet Battle of Aethelgard).
If Kane duels the Gardener alone, the squad becomes background characters again. By engaging in a Fleet Battle, we see the true power of Unit-Alpha, Sully's neural-nexus, and the terrifying efficiency of Void-Steel. It transforms the story from a "Solo Cultivation" tale into a Galactic War Epic.
Chapter 60: The Gardener's Scythe
The sky of Lot-12C didn't just darken; it erased.
As the Revenant ascended through the metallic shells of the machine-world, the stars above were snuffed out by a fleet of white-and-gold monoliths. These weren't ships; they were Geometric Sanctions—perfect cubes of Tier-10 logic, each three miles wide, vibrating with a frequency that forced the laws of physics to realign.
In the center of the formation hovered The Gardener.
He was a being of pure, solidified light, standing a thousand feet tall on the hull of the lead monolith. He didn't carry a staff like the Reaper. He carried a Seed-Bag made of captured pulsars, and in his right hand, a sickle of "Anti-Time" that hummed with the death of a trillion unlived seconds.
[SUB-SECTOR-LOG: 12C] [STATUS: BLIGHTED BY THE 14TH ITERATION] [ACTION: PRUNE. BURN. REPLANT.]
The Gardener didn't give a speech. He simply reached into his bag and threw a handful of "Solar-Seeds" into the vacuum.
Each seed ignited instantly, turning into a localized supernova. A hundred miniature suns bloomed in the space between the fleets, the heat enough to turn a standard titanium hull into gas in a millisecond.
"Shields!" Kane roared from the bridge of the Revenant.
"I've got it, Sarge!" Sully yelled. Her hair was standing on end, sparking with the silver data of the Neural-Nexus. "Unit-Alpha, sync the Void-Steel resonators! Give me a Timeline-Shunt!"
The Revenant and its escort of fifty ghost-drones didn't raise a physical shield. Instead, they flickered. To the Gardener's sensors, the fleet was no longer "There." They had shifted their existence five seconds into the past, letting the supernova blasts pass through the space they used to occupy.
"My turn," Kane hissed, his Void-Steel Crown glowing with a predatory violet light. "Vance! Open the silos!"