Falling silently through space was a thrilling experience. You could not hear a thing, nor was there any rushing wind in your face to make you realize you were hurtling toward something at high speed. Yet you could watch a stretch of land rapidly swell before your eyes, changing from an arc into a gentle curved surface, then quickly into a two-dimensional plane right in front of you, before revealing its three-dimensional details in even less time. It was as if mountains were rising up and pressing straight toward you. The absence of bodily sensation mixed with the full force of the visual impact, creating a strange illusion: your body told you that you were safe, while your eyes told you that you were about to land face-first...
I watched the Alloy Land rushing toward me. From high above, I could barely make out that it was an incomparably vast Metal Ring Belt, but at this distance, it looked little different from an ordinary planetary surface. The dark alloy armor was covered in broad, deep fissures like valleys. Deep-red light surged upward from those cracks in waves, like magma churning beneath the ground. That was the mutated psionic energy supplying power to the Gospel system. This colossal alloy ring, thousands of kilometers in radius, contained tremendous power. It provided the outer "broadcast" for the Gospel and Apocalypse Systems, while also serving as the terminal guidance component of the Genesis System. I had originally intended to bypass this sturdy obstacle and strike directly at the Sovereign's core, but I suddenly changed my mind: perhaps destroying its outer ring would cause enough of an energy runaway to incapacitate the Sovereign. My thinking was simple: if possible, I wanted to preserve the cores of these super battleships, because they would be extremely useful