Military Alliance

"You're saying that you've already completed the theory for an antimatter engine?"

Uzumi drew a deep breath and asked in disbelief.

Though he was not a technical expert, he understood perfectly well the revolutionary breakthrough an antimatter engine represented.

Every revolution in energy meant the complete collapse of the old order.

Just as steam engines had replaced horse-drawn carriages, and internal combustion engines had replaced steam engines—

Large-scale nuclear fusion reactors had already turned warships into tireless steel behemoths, even allowing vessels with shapes that defied aerodynamics to soar freely through the atmosphere.

Even so, for a warship to break free of a planet's gravity and pierce through the atmosphere into space, it still had to sacrifice weaponry and MS mounting capacity to reduce its weight.

Yet based on the dimensions and armament configuration displayed for the Minerva on the screen, fusion engines alone would not be enough for a single ship to break through the atmosphere.

Only an antimatter engine could make it possible—

But the problem was that this theory was like Icarus's wings: beautiful, yet lethal.

The cost of producing antimatter was astronomical. How to store it stably, how to precisely control the energy released by annihilation reactions—every single issue was a challenge that could consume the lifetimes of the greatest scientists of an entire century.

"In fact, the prototype has already operated successfully for 3,600 hours in a secret PLANT shipyard."

Durandal's answer was casual. He offered no evidence, but his tone—one simply stating a fact—was itself the strongest proof.

A chorus of sharp intakes of breath rose in the conference room. The man with the handlebar mustache, who had been slapping the table and shouting moments ago, now looked like a fish out of water, his mouth hanging open without a sound emerging.

Uzumi's hand