The Benatar completed its final jump, emerged from the shimmering spacetime corridor, and hovered at the edge of a chilling star region.
Ahead lay the ultimate destination indicated by both Krieg's remembered star chart and the intelligence gathered from various sources-the Thunderstorm Ruins.
The sight before them was far more breathtaking than any written description or fragmentary star chart, and far more... dangerous.
This was no ordinary stretch of space. There were no glittering galaxies, no tranquil darkness. In their place stretched an endless, eternally boiling and churning ocean of pure lightning and destruction!
Countless purple-black bolts as thick as mountain ranges writhed, lashed, and exploded through the void like living creatures! They did not vanish in an instant. Instead, some terrifying force seemed to have imprisoned, accumulated, and compressed them within this region, creating an almost tangible forest of lightning that constantly destroyed and regenerated itself! The deafening thunder was not sound, but a terrifying vibration that struck directly at the soul. Even the ship's soundproof barriers could not fully block it!
Space itself had become extremely unstable here, riddled with visible black fissures that constantly opened, closed, and vanished, spewing chaotic dimensional energy and deadly void radiation! Enormous fragments of shattered celestial bodies, made of unknown metals and stone, were swept up, tossed, and smashed together like toys by the towering waves of lightning, unleashing endless sparks of destruction!
Farther away, they could faintly make out even larger, terrifying remains resembling the fossilized skeletons of ancient beasts. They drifted through the lightning sea, radiating a suffocating pressure.
The energy conditions here were brutally hostile. The moment the ship's sensors entered the outer region, countless red warning symbols flooded the screens!
"Warning! Ultra-high-intensity electromagnetic storm! Gravitational field anomaly! Extremely unstable spatial structure! Forced activation of the jump engine carries