Just as the Votann were gripped by panic, the entire vast Silver Fleet suddenly vanished from realspace.
Only after repeatedly confirming that it had not appeared anywhere within the leagues did they turn to check on the Ancestor Cores.
Yet the Ancestor Cores remained unchanged, as though nothing had happened at all.
The representatives of the five great leagues gathered aboard the great Votann ship once more, asking about the state of one another's Ancestor Cores as soon as they met.
The answers, however, left them baffled.
Exactly the same thing had happened aboard every merchant ship.
The silver streams had turned into mist, then fled in apparent fright after touching the Ancestor Cores.
This made them wonder.
Could the Ancestor Cores be the true means of countering these mechanical entities?
Unable to understand what had happened, the Votann could only attribute it to their ancestors' protection.
At the same time, however, they suddenly realized that if they had not moved the Ancestor Cores in the first place, perhaps those ten Star Systems would not have been lost, and the hundreds of billions who had died afterward might still be alive.
The Greater Theria League, which had first proposed relocating the Ancestor Cores, immediately came under scrutiny from the others and was ordered to cover every league's losses.
A fresh round of verbal warfare broke out almost immediately in the ship's conference room.
While everyone waved their leagues' loss reports and shouted, only Rugit, the representative of the Urani-Surtr Regulates, kept his head lowered with a slightly different expression on his face. Then he became the first to leave.
Uthar thought Rugit was staying out of the argument as a gesture of thanks for his earlier promise to help fight the Orks.
Little did he know that Rugit's expression finally