(We did our best, brothers, but we were stuck at the last second.)
Thirty years ago, in the Phantom Zone.
The interstellar meteor suddenly shattered the pressure relief valve at the rear of the cabin.
At the very moment the airtightness was compromised.
The depressurized Stormfront roared in, mercilessly hollowing out most of the cabin area.
The support frame shattered, and people and debris were pulled out of the gate by the powerful suction before they could even react.
I plummeted straight into that illusory, frigid, eternal night.
Seeing this, the knuckles of the soldiers in the front row gripping their swords tensed.
He was locked in the inner safe room at that time.
Through the reinforced crystal panel, I watched helplessly as my adjutant was thrown into the decompression chamber.
At that time, the backup power of the pressure chamber had just started to activate, and it would take at least ten minutes for the air pressure to gradually cover the entire warship.
However, there wasn't enough time in the decompression chamber.
After the adjutant struggled to hold on for five minutes, the air pressure inside the cabin finally failed to be completely reduced to zero.
And in that very instant...
The adjutant's eyeballs and subcutaneous tissue swelled up like balloons.
Dark red blood foam had just spurted from the cracked eye sockets and nasal cavity when the extreme cold of deep space slammed down upon them.
The rising water vapor and blood foam suddenly crystallized.
In just a few seconds.
The extreme cold froze his distorted and disfigured face in a deathly ashes.
A vacuum is silent.
Only those dehydrated, blackened finger bones, devoid of skin and flesh, continued to tap slowly on the window, carried by inertia.
"Tap, tap, tap."
Shocker, despair... The skeletal structure pierced through the entire isolation chamber, slamming heavily into his heart.
Due to an accident.
He had to endure the isolation ward alone for more than half a year, relying on a meager amount of food.
It wasn't until eight months later that he was rescued by the guards of the Phantom Zone and returned to Black Zero.
And that withered skeleton floating in the eternal night.
They lingered face-to-face outside the cold, swaying window, spending the past six months together.
At the same time, the soldier behind him swayed and almost fell to his knees.
The illusion reflected in his eyes was not the hatch.
But it's the scenes that make the film even more suffocating.
That was the first glimpse of the warship as it "served its sentence," leaving the phantom belt and returning to its home planet's orbit.
It died.
The entire celestial body split into several pieces of rock from the depths of the Earth's core, and the original horizon was completely destroyed.
The atmosphere has long since dissipated.
The dense crust, thousands of meters thick, has broken into dozens of floating continents, which are suspended haphazardly in the orbits of the stars.
Those jagged cliffs, severed by the repulsive force, rise straight up for thousands of miles.
On the cross-section, the sedimentary strata are partially exposed, with fresh edges and no trace of wind erosion.
The side facing the rising sun was tinged with a dark red.
In the shadowed areas, there was a dim, dark expanse, a stark contrast between light and shadow, a chilling and disjointed atmosphere.
The abyss's core had long since crumbled into several fragmented remains, and the surging molten flow was extinguished by the freezing temperature before it could even erupt.
It coalesced into a continuous, precipitous cliff face stretching for thousands of miles.
The remaining gravity, like an invisible rope, pulled up billions of tons of broken shells and charred corpses, stretching out a turbid ring across the void.
The massive, hanging peaks slowly shifted in the dim, red light, grinding and rubbing against each other.
It hung there, cold and hard, in the darkness, becoming a silent, withered tomb.
"Whoosh--"
Beneath the mask, his breathing was heavy and disordered, and he was in a daze.
Driven by their emotions, the plasma arcs on several light blades violently trembled and emitted stray light.
The originally imposing formation silently sank back slightly.
Stand up straight!
Zod's voice was not loud, but it was exceptionally authoritative.
"The homeworld is shattered, that's a fact... but Krypton civilization is not extinct!"
As long as we have a breath left, as long as our race exists, Krypton will remain on this ship!
Stand up straight!
We crawled out of thirty years of suffering, not to mourn at the grave of our home planet!
Keep your sword level—we will tear open this starry sky and carve out a new world for the billions of our fallen kin!
Zod took a step forward and swung his sword.
The illusion shattered instantly.
The finger bones scratching on the window were crumbling inch by inch.
The desolate graves lying outside the porthole twisted violently, receding back into the cold, hard deck like a tide.
The plasma arc suddenly converged, condensing once again into eight straight blue rays.
"Step back... I'll do it..."
Zod pushed aside Faora, who was blocking his way, and strode across the formation.
"Tap, tap."
The combat boots pounded on the deck with a dull thud.
He stopped two steps away from the yellow light, his eyes sinister, looking down at the suspended, murky substance.
"Are they unknown energy beings from the universe... or some kind of evolved, unique race?"
The ball of light did not move.
But the moment Zod spoke, the heavy, murky yellow mass suddenly paused for a beat.
It keenly sensed the scent of fear through the outward leakage of its emotions.
Deep within this physical body lies a compressive obsession far more profound than the collapse of celestial bodies.
The fury of a fallen home planet and exile in deep space... and the determination to restore civilization even at the cost of slaughtering billions.
For the Spectrum of fear of devouring.
Nothing could be a better breeding ground for Asahi's soldiers than this army whose morale had been welded shut with blood.
"Laugh!!"
The next second, a piercing, rapid whistling sound suddenly exploded in the void!
The suspended, dark yellow liquid stretched and tightened without warning, then condensed into a cold, sharp cone in an instant.
With its streamlined shape, the air was easily torn apart by the sharp cone, heading straight for Zod's chest!
"General!"
Beneath her visor, Faora let out a short, sharp shout.
He slashed out with the light blade in his hand, the Blade trailing a sharp blue Arclight light that tore through the air, flying straight toward the light cone.
However, the beam of light completely ignored the plasma's cutting power, piercing straight through the blade like a phantom.
Then it crashed into the family crest in the center of Zod's breastplate.
"Smack!!"
The moment it touched the armor, the dark yellow cone of light spread like molten lead, instantly seeping along the metallic etchings of the family crest.
Cold, damp, and greasy.
The shimmering, dark yellow liquid greedily pierced Zod's chest, flowing through his breathing valve, pores, and nerves!
"Well--!"
Zod's tall body suddenly leaned back half an inch, then arched back sharply.
A muffled roar, barely suppressed, escaped uncontrollably from deep within his throat.
He gripped the center of the breastplate tightly with his backhand, his knuckles digging into it as if he wanted to crush the alloy family crest.
Inside the ribcage, there was a large, extremely cold yet extremely hot foreign object.
Just like countless barbed hyphae, they frantically pierced his heart muscle.
It travels against the flow of blood along the aorta, staining every drop of blood it pumps with a murky, dark yellow hue.
Then it ascends up the spinal cord segment by segment, breaking directly through the neural synapses responsible for reason.
The next second, countless noisy screams exploded in Zod's mind.
Thump!
That was the mournful cry of Krypton's core as it crumbled.
It is the desolation of Rao Red Sun turning into a superstar, and the despair of billions of people being melted into charcoal in flames and explosions.
"No--!!!!"