Chapter 131: The Victory of the Pretender

A group of Viridians hauled their massive bodies toward the astronomical observatory. They urgently needed to determine the exact threat level of this unknown alien civilization.

On a dreadnought measuring 150 kilometers in diameter, space was never an issue. The Viridians’ primary astronomical observation deck boasted a telescope lens over a kilometer wide! Under normal conditions, a telescope of this magnitude could observe the surface of a neighboring planet with crystal clarity.

However, because the ship was currently encased in a Warp Bubble, incoming light was severely distorted. To the naked eye, the outside universe was nothing but a smear of ambiguous, glowing blobs. The ship’s supercomputers had to process this chaotic data to reconstruct a true image.

“Quickly, route the feed through the central mainframe. Clean up the image as much as possible!” Commander Fario ordered solemnly.

The Viridians’ vocal organs had evolved from specialized foliage, producing speech through the rapid friction and vibration of these leaves. The resulting sound resembled the rustling of wind through a dense forest canopy.

Despite his earlier boasting about crushing lesser civilizations, faint puffs of white vapor escaped Fario’s foliage, betraying a deep, underlying anxiety.

Exterminating a primitive, planetary species was child’s play, but… what if this unknown faction was a genuine Interstellar Empire? (The galactic classification system will be detailed later.)

In their ship’s current crippled state, they stood no chance against even the weakest interstellar power!

Fario’s tension was contagious, quickly spreading throughout the observatory. Soon, every Viridian present began emitting white mist, turning the room into a damp, humid greenhouse. Because of their unique biology, Viridians struggled to hide their emotions. This inability to conceal feelings had led to a society built on straightforwardness and a strict code of etiquette.

The core rule: always maintain inner peace. Emitting stress vapor in public was considered highly inappropriate.

To mask the collective embarrassment, Fario subtly ordered the climate control system to raise the room’s temperature. A hotter environment naturally evaporated the vapor faster, making the mist less visible. As more high-ranking officials crowded into the observatory, they were met with stifling heat and humidity, making everyone distinctly uncomfortable.

But now was not the time for complaints. After agonizing minutes of processing, the mainframe finally rendered a clear image on the main screen:

Orbiting a red planet in the distance was a spherical space fortress. It wasn’t overly massive perhaps fifteen kilometers in diameter but its hull bristled with a vast array of deployed weapon batteries!

An eerie blue light glowed deep within the cannon muzzles, radiating a lethal threat. Worse yet, there was a massive, glowing sphere, roughly a hundred meters wide, attached to the structure. It pulsed with unimaginably high thermal energy.

Was it a planet-cracking superweapon? Or something even worse?

Were they about to… open fire?

“By the roots of Gaia!” Mal shrieked, his legs buckling beneath him. A thick cloud of white vapor exploded from his leaves as he nearly collapsed in terror.

The other Viridian officers cried out in alarm, their faces tight with fear. Even heavily damaged, their dreadnought was a technological marvel that could easily steamroll a primitive world.

But this… this was undeniably the war machine of an Interstellar Empire!

Like a sinking aircraft carrier, they could still blast a fleet of wooden canoes out of the water, but they were sitting ducks against a modern destroyer.

“Raise the temperature… increase it by another five degrees!” Commander Fario shouted frantically. He stared at the screen, exhausted by the sheer terror of what he was seeing, desperately hoping it was a sensor glitch.

After a few minutes, the temperature rose further, and the thick white fog began to clear. The room was now sweltering, making the plant-based aliens miserable, but they had no choice but to endure it.

“Wait… they haven’t fired! If they had, we would have been hit by now!” Fario hypothesized, his green face somehow looking a shade paler.

Before he could finish his thought, a sensor technician screamed, “Report! Massive energy surge detected! Incoming ion bolts! They’re flying right past us! Miss distance is approximately 800 kilometers! Projectile velocity… near light-speed!”

“They’re firing at us! We’re under attack!” Mal wailed, utterly overwhelmed by the psychological weight of the spherical fortress. That station was explicitly designed for total war! No primitive civilization could forge a fifteen-kilometer steel moon, let alone fire plasma weaponry at relativistic speeds.

While ion cannons weren’t the absolute pinnacle of advanced weaponry, their projectile speed was undeniably terrifying. Because the shots had technically missed, the Viridians had no way to gauge their actual destructive yield.

Fario squinted at the data, searching for weaknesses, but found none. The sheer distance made it impossible to scan the enemy vessel’s internal structure.

Swept up in the rising panic, Fario closed his eyes in despair. Was this where their journey ended? He refused to accept it. If the brightest minds and the last hope of their civilization died under his command, he would be a sinner for all eternity.

A miss distance of a mere 800 kilometers was practically a grazing shot in the vastness of space. Firing a weapon that traveled at light-speed across an interplanetary distance, and managing to predict a moving target’s trajectory within an 800-kilometer window… it required a level of targeting precision that the Viridian Empire simply didn’t possess!

To their minds, if the enemy’s artillery could effortlessly box them into an 800-kilometer kill zone, they possessed the absolute capability to obliterate them at will!

The entire Viridian high command was paralyzed with dread. The thought of fighting back evaporated entirely. They unanimously agreed that this human civilization was at least their technological equal, if not vastly superior.

Death is the inevitable end of all life, but it is also a universal terror. Survival is the absolute prime directive; everything else comes second. The Viridians did not fear death conceptually,they believed their essence would return to Mother Gaia. But no one wants to die prematurely and pointlessly.

Despair hung heavy in the room, accompanied by fresh, thick clouds of white vapor. In their crippled state, they were no match for a legitimate Interstellar Empire.

“Wait, hold on! We only detected a single volley of ion fire!”

Suddenly, a desperate spark of hope cut through Mal’s panic. As one of the chosen inheritors of their legacy, his mind was exceptionally sharp, and it began to race as his survival instincts kicked in.

“If their goal was our total destruction… they would have saturated the area. They wouldn’t have bothered sending us an audio transmission beforehand!”

“He’s right, we haven’t been targeted again…”

“It’s a warning shot! They are deliberately missing us to send a message! Just a warning!”

The bridge crew immediately replayed Jason’s intercepted broadcast. Though the alien syntax was incomprehensible and the vocal tones completely foreign, true emotion transcends language barriers. They felt the underlying anger and the stern, line-in-the-sand nature of the message.

Was it really just a warning?

The more they thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. The enemy hadn’t followed up with a lethal strike.

Realizing they had just brushed past the jaws of death, Mal and Fario embraced in a joyful, misty hug, shaking so vigorously that loose leaves fluttered to the deck.

It was a miraculous reprieve!

Gradually, the panic subsided. The high-ranking officers gathered around the central holo-table to formulate a strategy.

Fario took the floor first. “Mal is correct. That was an intimidation tactic. Praise Gaia, they are a rational species, not the mindless Annihilators.”

“We triggered their defensive perimeter because of our trajectory,” another officer noted. “Honestly, if an unidentified dreadnought warped into our home system, we would have done the exact same thing.”

“Which means they don’t actively want a war!” Fario concluded. “However… if we maintain our current course, we will cross their red line, and we will be attacked. What are our options?”

The warning had been delivered, but the Viridians desperately needed to reach the inner system. If they kept moving forward, retaliation was guaranteed. The officers debated anxiously. Their empire was young and completely lacked experience in interstellar diplomacy. They hadn’t even fought a civil war in recorded history.

“…But we have to reach that star!” Commander Fario stressed, his voice rattling. “We need to recharge our solar reserves and mine raw materials for repairs. This vessel will tear itself apart before we reach the next neighboring star system!”

The officers paused, their ensuing debate revealing thought processes remarkably similar to humanity’s.

“Perhaps this is merely a frontier outpost and not their homeworld?” one officer suggested. “Maybe we can negotiate with them to share the system’s resources?”

“We need to hold our ground here. We must present a position of strength,” a Viridian with speckled leaves argued fiercely. “Our pacifism is exactly what got our fleet massacred in the first place!”

An elder Viridian with a long, drooping face immediately shot back. “Illydo, if your posturing provokes them into a shooting war, will you take responsibility for our extinction? We may not be cowards, but we cannot afford to pick a fight over a unremarkable star!”

The debate raged on, voices rustling louder and louder, but no consensus could be reached. Yet, one undeniable fact remained: they had to open a diplomatic channel immediately.

“Enough!” Commander Fario snapped, silencing the room just as the arguments threatened to boil over. “We are out of time. I will personally draft a broadcast response!”

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