Thus the Eroian queen, clad in armor, wreathed in blood mist, and with a halo of light spread behind her, fell to the ground in a clean, decisive motion. Her head struck the floor even more naturally, as if she were offering a New Year's greeting.
The damage wasn't much, but the humiliation was severe...
No, it was definitely more than just humiliating.
Before Queen Tomitaili Khan's head could hit the ground, her battle-honed spiritual intuition had already warned her of a powerful sense of danger. Beneath the transparent floor, which seemed to be made of crystal, flowed the energy source of this ancient warship. It should have been sacred and immense. But to the Eroian queen's senses, it seemed to conceal a vortex that was about to devour her entire soul and life.
The instant before the queen's forehead touched the ground, she braced all her strength against the floor. Her body sprang upright again like it had a set of springs, in a way that defied physics.
This is a trap! Tomitaili told herself in a low voice.
She isn't humiliating me. She's winning in the most decisive way possible.
What exactly is she trying to do?
The blood-red light behind Queen Tomitaili kept spreading, but the woman's figure seemed to have vanished again. At that moment, her breathing, the blades of light she had extended, and her mental-control field all entered a state of synchronized resonance.
She saw the purple night sky aboard the Ancestral Shenzhou, twenty years ago. It wasn't a real night sky, but the world around the galactic core, seen beneath the dome of the clan ark.
Back then, Tomitaili wasn't the great ruler who had led the raiders on a two-million-light-year expedition, nor was she the defeated woman who had lost everything. She