"The Purification Center of the 'Purification Protocol' designated by the NGC 206 Star Cluster has been destroyed..."
"Eliminating the remaining 'Purification Protocol' corrupted units... Thump thump thump!!!"
"Warning! Warning! Warning!"
"Unknown information-index source detected covering the area. Battlefield data lost... Issuing emergency faster-than-light escape orders..."
"Approximately 34,599,000 orders failed to transmit. Only 6,588 orders were successfully transmitted..."
From a macro-strategic perspective,
the Star System where Cyberlex and the Purification Protocol had committed fleets numbering in the millions to a brutal war was merely an unremarkable system within the NGC 206 Star Cluster of the Andromeda Nebula.
Besides the million-strong fleets in the Star System containing the Purification Center, tens of thousands of other Star Systems in nearby regions had also been included in the battlefield.
In each Star System, fleets from both sides, ranging from hundreds or thousands to as many as a hundred thousand ships, were locked in savage combat.
The occasional cross-system strike weapon that instantly annihilated a system, pulverizing every enemy and allied ship within it, was simply a common sight across this vast battlefield.
With the fall of the Purification Center, the forces belonging to the Purification Protocol throughout the region were affected to varying degrees.
Driven by the escalating brutality of the war, these effects were magnified without limit. Before long, the Purification Protocol forces in the region were on the verge of collapse.
But clearly, as the instigator of this war of extermination, the Purification Protocol would not give up so easily.
"Contact with 'CX-106399 Purification Center' lost--"
"Related backup protocol authorized. Transmitting extermination order. Activating the 'Higgs Field Reconstruction Matrix'..."
Boom!
An unremarkable explosion erupted on a mechanical planet in a Star System somewhere within the battlefield.
Only a few hundred Cyberlex warships were fighting the Purification Protocol vessels stationed in that Star System.
The Cyberlex ships' detection systems did not notice the mechanical planet's sudden, spontaneous detonation.
Or rather, they no longer had time to notice.
A vast vacuum bubble rapidly formed, centered on the mechanical planet and spreading across the entire Star System.
Everything it touched—stars, planets, warships, and even matter on the microscopic scale, down to atoms, protons, and neutrons—underwent irreversible collapse.
The collapse formed in an instant, spread outward in an instant, and took effect in an instant.
All matter in the entire Star System collapsed without exception.
The enemy and allied forces that had been fighting vanished in an instant, reduced to their most fundamental particles.
Everything seemed to fall silent.
But it was far from over.
The vacuum bubble continued to expand, engulfing one Star System after another. One battlefield after another was caught in its reach and plunged into eternal silence.
It all happened in a mere instant.
The vacuum bubble expanded faster than light, faster than the expansion of the universe, and faster than any faster-than-light technology known to Cyberlex.
At last, after engulfing a region nearly a thousand light-years across, the enormous vacuum bubble disintegrated on its own under the counteraction of some technology.
The once-mighty interstellar battlefield was forcibly brought to an end.
Within a thousand light-years, nothing remained but emptiness and a mass of pure matter—matter at the particle level.
Not even the singularity of a black hole, the usual result of a star's destruction, had formed...
Under gravity, some of the matter was slowly gathering, while other parts were being drawn toward nearby celestial bodies.
If left to run its natural course, in hundreds of thousands or perhaps hundreds of millions of years, stars and other celestial bodies might form in this region again.
But for now, it was merely basic matter, so pure that it had almost no practical value.
This battlefield had ended, but the fighting between the Purification Protocol and Cyberlex in the Andromeda Nebula had not!
Countless other battlefields still raged in other regions of the Andromeda Galaxy.
For both sides, the end of this battlefield amounted to no more than the loss of two tiny pieces on a game board.
M32 Satellite Galaxy.
This satellite galaxy drifted beyond the Andromeda Nebula, yet lay very close to the Andromeda Galaxy.
It was only about 8,000 light-years in diameter and contained nearly four million stars.
At its center lay a supermassive black hole, roughly three million times the mass of the Sun, somewhat smaller than the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
The black hole had likely once been the core of a nebula or galaxy. Its outer regions may have been stripped away through interactions with the Andromeda Galaxy, leaving only the central region close to the black hole.
As a result, the stars in the M32 Galaxy were extraordinarily densely packed.
This galaxy had long since been designated a battlefield by Cyberlex and the Purification Protocol.
However, Cyberlex had clearly seized control of the galaxy first and held the home-field advantage here.
In a region of the M32 Galaxy,
several Gray Gu Storm fleets led by Gray Wind's will arrived in the galaxy through the Human Federation's Heavenly Navigation Tower, located in the Milky Way.
These fleets had come to help Cyberlex fight. They planned to join forces and drive the Purification Protocol's forces out of the galaxy entirely.
Both sides intended to turn the M32 Galaxy into a joint forward base for the Human Federation and Cyberlex.
But before that, the Gray Gu Storm fleets needed to expand a little.
The Gray Gu Storm fleets were powerful, but their numbers were somewhat lacking compared with the forces battling across the Andromeda Galaxy.
Gray Wind's nanite swarms could expand without limit. Given sufficient resources, she could even wield the strategic power to take on an entire nation alone.
However, the resources produced by the Forge Worlds the Human Federation had established in this universe, as well as by celestial factories such as Matter Depressors and Matter Reconstructors,
were needed to produce all kinds of warships and construct megastructures. There was hardly any left over to divert to Gray Wind.
This was not because the Federation did not value Gray Wind's contribution.
There were other reasons.
Generally speaking, when Gray Wind's Gray Gu Storm fleets came into play, the Federation's strategic options were already close to exhausted.
At present, the Federation's main focus was on expanding across the Milky Way, with the aim of building up its strength as quickly as possible.
After all, the Federation had too little of a foundation in this universe and could not yet afford to wage a war of attrition on a large scale.
The Gray Gu Storm fleets sent to the Andromeda Nebula were, to put it nicely, there to help Cyberlex fight the Purification Protocol.
To put it less nicely, Gray Wind was just making an appearance and lending a hand here and there.
She would also keep an eye on the fighting between the two sides and see if she could reap any benefits.
Allies were allies, and war was war.
How she helped her ally fight this war depended on Gray Wind.
If they wanted Gray Wind to bring her strength to bear, Cyberlex would have to provide her with some resources.
Beneath the radiance of a star,
inside the enormous Ring World system base,
Gray Wind's sub-individual avatar expanded her nanite swarm using the high-strength alloys, living metal, nanomachines, and other resources sent over by Cyberlex, while also sharing access to their intelligence network.
She had obtained the latest battle reports from the NGC 206 Star Cluster. This was not the first time she had received a similar report from Cyberlex.
The Purification Protocol possessed a superweapon capable of indiscriminate strikes across a range of up to a thousand light-years at a time.
A weapon capable of launching a Vacuum Decay attack!
Cyberlex had now more or less determined how the weapon worked and what it did, and was researching ways to counter it.
"The 'Higgs Field Reconstruction Matrix'..." Gray Wind's sub-individual avatar joined the research with interest and relayed the real-time data to United Star.
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