Entering the Kuiper Belt was extremely dangerous. Most celestial bodies here moved rapidly along the Solar System's ecliptic plane; even a fist-sized rock could easily punch through the Sky Battleship's heavy armor plating. For that reason, the Sky Battleship had to activate Ion Shields based on Wakandan technology, imitated and improved by the City of Immortals, causing all micrometeoroids headed toward it to glance off the shield's surface. Although the craft slowed after passing through the portal, those standing beside the bridge's observation window could still see the searing glow produced as rocks and ice scraped against the shield through the thick armored glass. If sound could travel through a vacuum, the noise of those impacts might have felt like a barrage of bullets rushing straight at them. This was almost the only light to be found in the Kuiper Belt.
Using the differences in Kuiper Belt planetary observation data from before and after the war, the accompanying astronomers guided the Sky Battleship here. The anomalous asteroid where the flash had occurred lay tens of thousands of kilometers away. It was absent from the star charts, while radar data showed that the black asteroid still retained a tremendous amount of abnormal heat, making it conspicuous among the Kuiper Belt's countless asteroids. Yet the radar still failed to locate the Emperor, because the residual radiation noise here was utter chaos. Asteroids that should have remained on the ecliptic plane had all departed from their original orbits, and repeated chain collisions sent vast numbers of micrometeoroids hurtling at extreme speeds, abruptly increasing the pressure on the Sky Battleship's shields.
Suddenly, everyone on the bridge felt the surroundings turn as bright as day, as though a star had risen not far from the ship's bow. Blazing metal, radiating brilliance, swept past less than