Spreading her Anima perception showed her the truth her eyes couldn’t quite believe. It was emptiness. Yuriko shook her head, muttering to herself. The Void, as she and Damien knew it, was the padding between the layers of reality. It was thickest between the Primordial Chaos and the combined realms of Thought, Ideals, and Desires, and contained a sort of negative energy, if it could be called that, that sapped away other energies. It wasn’t quite the same as Radiant, which consumed other energies to propagate more of its own. Void rained away other energies until there was nothing left except for the remnant. 

A distinction being that there was something to grasp, something to conquer and master, as opposed to what was out here now. This wasn’t the Void Ocean by any means, more like an Ocean of Emptiness. 

A funny thing to be irked by considering that this was less dangerous than an actual ocean of Void energies. 

Yuriko sighed and just stared out at the empty darkness. She retracted her Anima perception and followed the crowd as they made their way towards the docks. Well, not directly to where the Darlington Cross was in, but to where the the tubular connector towards the Voidship’s hatches. They didn’t directly board yet; there were the last minute checks by the ship’s crew, as well as the harbour officials. 

Stormdriven and Gold Flock were subjected to a rather rigorous search via scanners. It wasn’t much of a surprise to find out that the Flock’s gear was head and shoulders above what Heron procured for them in terms of toughness and function, something that was easily revealed by how long it took the scanners to complete the check. 

None of Stormdriven had ‘Chronian Gear of any sort, and the electronic devices they had were factory stock with a minimum of augments. Clothes and other gear were checked, even the spatially expanded storage items. They weren’t that rare for Milstate, apparently, even if most of their gear is technology-based. Spatially expanded backpacks and hip satchels were made through runescript weaving and powered by ambient energy, or if there was a dearth, by the wearer’s own resources. 

The ambient energies in the docks were just as low as Dragon Fall City’s. REI-space tethers were directed to a few obvious crystals too. After the checking was done, they were directed to board. 

At the bottom of the entrance tube was a middle-aged woman with straight brown hair that fell below her shoulders. She wore a naval cap, a white jacket with insignias on it, a grey pencil skirt that fell to her knees, black tights, and dark boots. Beside her was another woman with her black hair in a pixie cut, and was attired in a similar manner, though her rank insignia was less elaborate. 

“Captain Natalie Finley, a pleasure,” Ilvarra said as she held out her hand. The middle-aged woman, Captain Finley, took it firmly but didn’t shake. 

“Miss Erdmann.” Her countenance was stern and she nodded to Gold Flock’s sponsor in response to the other woman’s greeting. Then she swept her gaze towards the mercenaries, zeroing in on Heron and Skye Kelly, who both had an extra insignia attached to their pauldrons. “Mercenaries. We will embark on a journey that will take at least two weeks before we reach Milstate’s Outpost Omega. I expect you and your crew to be on their best behaviour. The Darlington Cross is large enough to be comfortable, but fourteen days stuck inside a confined space, even one as good as the Cross can wear on anyone’s nerves.”

When Kelly only responded with a nod, the captain’s gaze turned to Heron. All of them were wearing their powered armour, but the helmets, by protocol, were set to open, or the faceplates were transparent. 

“This isn’t the first time we’ve been confined in a ship for an extended period,” Heron said. “We know how to behave.” 

“I hope so,” Captain Finley said curtly. “Please board the Darlington Cross. Our scheduled departure is at 0900.” That was only half an hour away. “First Officer, please supervise.”

“Yes, sir,” the other uniformed woman said. Captain Finley left with the two sponsors, though they didn’t enter through the connector tube. 

“This way please.” The First Officer gestured to the hatch and preceded them. “I am First Officer Amelia Jacobs, second in command of the Darlington Cross. I am in charge of the CIC, the Combat Information Center of the ship, and will be your direct commanding officer in cases of battle. Your comms should be configured to the proper channel, but just in case, the channel IzD is 4FE345.” 

The Darlington Cross’ hallways felt a little cramped, with barely enough room for a single merc in powered armour to walk through. If someone was headed the other way, they would have to squeeze past each other. The walls had arrows painted on them, but Yuriko wasn’t sure where they were supposed to lead. They were all white and some of them pointed at contrary directions. 

“The arrows all lead to important areas of the Voidship. You can only distinguish it via your visors, which we’ll update as soon as we leave our berth.” First Officer Jacobs said. Her voice came from the speakers within Yuriko’s helmet, and she could see her comms tether link to the ship’s aft. 

The tour was quick, even if the fifty mercenaries didn’t all fit in the same hallway. The interior corridors of the ship were much more spacious, allowing two people in powered armour or three people in dress uniforms to pass side by side. They were led to their quarters, which fit two to a room. Then the mess hall, then towards the bridge, though they weren’t allowed inside. The cargo hold, then the escape pods, mining drones, and carriers. The last one was for the mercs or the shipboard marines. 

The first officer didn’t explain how many were within the ship, but Yuriko used her perception to get an accurate count. There were seventy-five other people in the Cross, and about fifty of them were guards or marines. Of the twenty-five crew, Yuriko knew that five were officers of some sort, while the rest were ordinary sailors, or miners, she wasn’t sure. Perhaps both. 

Milstate’s goal in delving was clear. Find and harvest resource points. Those points could be floating rocks that needed to be mined, perhaps spheres large enough to hold a biome. The Void Ocean was similar enough to the Chaos Sea that the same kind of islands, planes in the Sea, existed within. Just that she wasn’t sure what they looked like or how they worked. 

She couldn’t sense the Radiant Sun or the Luminous Moon, and that disturbed her more than anything else, honestly. Since she could produce her own Radiant energy, she wasn’t overly bothered, but her companions were. 

Heron had a permanent frown on his face, and Gwendith kept chewing the edge of her lips. Ryoko and Saki were calm, and from their emotions, she knew that they were leaning heavily on her presence. Only Devotee had his usual casual air, but then, even in the Void, there was ambient Chaos. Oddly, it had a higher proportion here than Dragon Fall, though it was only within the ship. 

Yuriko bunked with Gwendith, while Heron was with Devotee. It was with the understanding that Heron could visit and sleep in her quarters whenever she called for him, but the room was barely large enough to stand up while in their armour. 

Everything within the Cross was cramped, except for the most important part of it, the viewing deck and park. It was where crew, mercenaries, and marines, could relax and unwind. There was a sort of ritualistic manner in which the park was introduced and came along with a plethora of rules and regulations. She could understand the need. The park was the only space to really stretch in, but it could also be used as an emergency cargo hold. 

All of the mercs were invited to the park to witness the ship being launched off the harbour, and Yuriko found herself sitting on a field of pseudo grass. She looked at the walls, which were view screens that reflected the outside. It was the first time she saw the harbour and docks. 

Millennium State Prime Base was what it was called, and it was at least a couple of leagues wide, and three longstrides thick. A chunk of greyish rock that Milstate mined into and built facilities inside. She could see turrets, shield projectors, and sensor arrays dotting the landscape, though only a little while. The lights decorating the surface faded away to allow the port to hide in the everpresent dark. 

Then, there was nothing to see. 

A week passed by in a blur. There were facilities to train their bodies, a necessity considering that shipboard gravity was only a quarter normal. The ship had accelerated to five hundred leagues an hour, and it would still take fourteen days to get to Outpost Omega. More than thirty thousand leagues to cross and more than half the distance between Dragon Fall City and Bresia. 

Where were they that such distances were possible? She only knew the ship’s speed because she asked a crewmember. There was no way for her to measure it without using any landmarks. She got so bored that she snuck her perception aura into the bridge by way of the varied air vents and channels. Those things were no wider than her fist, and only rats or other small critters would be able to pass them. To discourage that, there were metal grills that could be electrified every five paces of pipe or so, but that proved no detriment to her aura. 

Listening to shipboard operations was about the only entertainment Yuriko had, well, aside from training, meditating, and lovemaking. None of those activities ever occupied more than half of her consciousness threads. 

She found out that the ship’s sensors could only scan for threats five leagues away, giving the crew barely more than three minutes to react. It was a small window of time, especially since the officers and pilots didn’t seem more than baseline mortals. Ah, they probably had Chronian Gear attached to their minds that sped up their thoughts, and she witnessed more than one instance where they instantly reacted to a possible collision. 

While everything outside was dark, that didn’t truly mean it was empty. With no source of light to illuminate them, asteroids could come frighteningly close before they could be detected. Three minutes of reaction window time was only true if the obstacle was stationary. It if was moving towards them, then the window was that much shorter. 

Like right now. Roughly six days in their journey, Yuriko noticed the sensor array had detected two moving masses heading towards the Cross from an oblique angle. They were moving at almost the same speed, but since both of the objects and the Cross were moving towards each other, contact was less than a couple of minutes away. 

Captain Finley ordered the evasion, but the objects altered their trajectory, which could only mean one thing. They weren’t asteroids and were more than likely, Voidships. 

The alarm rang a moment later and Yuriko disentangled herself from Gwendtih’s and Heron’s limbs. She still felt a bit sticky from their dried up fluids, but a quick flex of Radiant energy cleaned her up. She did the same for her lovers and all three of them put on their armour in less than a minute. Then they rushed to the carrier pods. 

The ship shuddered as its energy field was bombarded, and shipboard gravity was lowered to practically nil to conserve energy. Hence, Yuriko felt every evasive maneuver and every shuddering hit. 

Then, Yuriko heard and perceived a large cylindrical object penetrate through the energy field as if it weren’t there. It slammed into the hull and started cutting into it. 

“Ship board marines, prepare to repel boarders!” Captain Finley’s voice was calm and even, however, Yuriko could see that her countenance was anything but that. She heard her murmur a curse, “Hallowed Echoes…” 

Yuriko hummed to herself as she expanded her perception as far as it could go. The hostile ship was less than half a longstride away from them, and they conveniently reduced the number of defenders by sending them into the Cross. Yuriko grinned, turned to her lovers and said, “What say we get our own ship?”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep