Ran's encounter with the Ghost Ship was merely a prelude. As if that had marked the beginning, ghost ships began appearing frequently near the Macro World Network. Several extreme cases in recent days even indicated that they were directly disrupting our civilian routes, gradually threatening the stability of the Macro World.
Although this threat was currently quite minor, and those "void floatstones" could be ignored simply by raising the alert level and defensive strength of the teleportation systems a little, it had undoubtedly already drawn the Empire Army's highest vigilance.
Today was the fifth day since the first Ghost Ship capable of counterattacking had been encountered. Over the past five days, we had received roughly three reports a day of "foreign objects entering the Teleportation Channel." Some of the objects discovered in those reports were enormous starships, while others were astonishing habitable structures. The reason they were called by such an odd term was that those colossal things were not starships. They had engines and jump systems, but their structures were utterly unlike any known type of starship. They lacked heavy shields and armor, but possessed layer upon layer of protective structures, filled like sponges with compartments large and small. Powerful residual life signatures could be detected within those irregularly shaped objects, indicating that vast numbers of residents had once lived inside them—but now they were utterly silent. Most of these structures were damaged, and all that remained in their compartments was dust from thoroughly decomposed organic matter. If not for the solidification fields around them still functioning at considerable strength, these enormous objects would likely have long since shattered in the void.
Because of the increasingly frequent Ghost Ship incidents, the Macro World Network had recently raised its Alert Level. All civilian teleportation applications were being processed centrally, while