Chapter 158: Nuclear Attack

Time flew by; three months passed in the blink of an eye.

The looming threat of death was immense. It could break a person, but it could also unite them with extraordinary strength, especially when a glimmer of hope remained.

The people worked day and night in a frenzied construction boom. Towering blast walls completely enclosed the residential and industrial sectors, leaving only a few non-essential outer structures exposed.

To be precise, they built seventeen distinct layers!

Due to the Noah’s internal honeycomb structure, the layout of these walls was highly complex, effectively sealing off the core from all angles. From now on, humanity would live behind these massive barricades.

Between each wall lay a buffer zone ranging from one to ten kilometers wide, packed with dampening materials like slag, sand, and industrial waste. Everyone understood the sheer destructive power of a supernova; even with Mars and the Noah’s outer hull absorbing the brunt of the impact, the residual radiation was enough to cause catastrophic damage.

Humanity had maximized its defenses. Theoretically, the Noah’s purple metallic hull could withstand a certain dosage of gamma rays, and the seventeen layers of heavy shielding would block the rest. But whether it was enough to survive was anyone’s guess.

However, bracing for the supernova was the worst-case scenario, offering the slimmest chance of survival. They still had one other option: nuking the Viridian spacecraft!

Inside the command center, Jason was finalizing the tactical plans with Austin, Professor Hao Yu, and the rest of the council. Living under the constant, crushing pressure of survival seemed to have numbed them to the fear of death; their anxious excitement almost bordered on euphoria.

They possessed exactly one ultra-high-yield tetrahydrogen nuclear warhead, developed at a staggering cost. However, they had a vast stockpile of standard nuclear and conventional missiles of varying sizes.

“…I’m just not certain the tetrahydrogen warhead will detonate successfully,” Professor Hao Yu said hesitantly.

He was usually an easygoing man who rarely second-guessed himself, but this time, the stakes were too high. They had conducted several ignition tests using massive laser arrays, but the success rate hovered around a mere 70%. And an ultra-high-yield tetrahydrogen bomb of this magnitude had never actually been field-tested.

A trillion-ton yield warhead was a thousand times more powerful than their previous trump card, the helium-3 bomb. The jump in scale was so massive that he couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be unforeseen misfires.

But time waited for no one. In just a few days, their prime attack window would open. The crew felt a volatile mix of nerve-wracking tension and pure adrenaline.

It was utter madness that they were in a position to launch an uninhibited first strike against an advanced interstellar civilization. An opportunity like this would never come again.

From the launch silos surrounding the Noah, thousands of heavy-lift rockets launched in rapid succession. They carried a mixed payload of nuclear warheads, conventional missiles, reconnaissance probes, and thousands of bulky, low-mass decoy blocks.

Utilizing a multiple-reentry deployment system, the rockets would reach their designated coordinates and release their individual payloads. A total of 6,400 nuclear warheads and over 20,000 conventional missiles were deployed—representing the absolute limit of humanity’s industrial output.

Federation was throwing everything it had into maximizing the success rate of this single operation.

Regardless, this was humanity’s first true military engagement with an interstellar power, and no one knew how it would play out.

“Our primary obstacle is the target’s automated point-defense grid,” a tactician stated.

“Space is mostly empty, but micrometeoroids and asteroids are still a hazard. While we don’t fully understand their warp technology, it’s highly unlikely the Viridians would let random space debris strike their hull.”

“Therefore, the ship’s automated defenses are likely active at all times. Whether they use energy shields, point-defense lasers, or railguns, they’ll be designed to pulverize incoming threats.”

“As a result, our warheads will almost certainly be flagged as incoming debris and intercepted. A nuclear bomb in the vacuum of space is just a localized flash; if it doesn’t detonate directly against the hull, its destructive output drops drastically.”

“To counter this, we have to rely on saturation tactics, a massive missile swarm!”

The saturation strategy relied on sheer, overwhelming volume. A massive influx of projectiles could overload the enemy’s targeting computers, allowing the critical payloads to slip through and strike the hull.

Listening to the briefing, Jason ran a hand through his hair, a tight knot of tension forming in his chest. It was a brute-force approach, and there was no guarantee it would work.

“The target vessel is simply too massive, 150 kilometers in diameter. Low-yield nukes won’t do much more than scratch the paint, will they?” a council member asked.

Austin nodded. “True. While the destructive force of the smaller warheads is limited, they generate intense, high-temperature radiation zones upon detonation. The blinding thermal flashes and massive electromagnetic pulses should temporarily blind their sensor arrays. That creates the opening for the heavy hitters.”

If the Viridian ship was a heavily armored aircraft carrier, the conventional missiles were just throwing rocks to draw fire. The standard nukes were small arms fire, and the gigaton-yield helium-3 bombs were heavy artillery.

Humanity’s true trump card was the single trillion-ton-yield tetrahydrogen bomb!

If that warhead was intercepted or failed to detonate, they would have no choice but to sit back and wait for the supernova.

The greatest minds of their generation had analyzed countless attack vectors, ultimately settling on this all-or-nothing saturation strike.

*Come on!* Jason prayed silently.

As the hours ticked by, the optical sensors relayed increasingly clear images of the Viridian vessel. Just as projected, it was a leviathan, 150 kilometers across, bristling with unknown arrays and structures.

Its hull seemed to be enveloped in a mysterious, shimmering field. Light passing through this invisible membrane was aggressively refracted. Even at this relatively close range, their telescopes couldn’t render a crisp image of its internal architecture.

Due to the severe optical distortion, sections of the ship appeared bizarrely elongated, while others looked compressed.

It was the visual signature of spatial curvature!

As the attack commenced, the embedded probes would transmit invaluable real-time data on the physics of spatial distortion.

“It’s breathtakingly massive.”

“Yeah. Even distorted, you can practically feel the sheer power radiating off it.”

The command center buzzed with low, tense chatter. The atmosphere was a mix of awe and grim determination. They would soon find out if their desperate gamble would pay off.

Staring intently at the feed, Professor Hao Yu fell dead silent. His expression darkened with every passing second.

“Professor Hao Yu, what is it?” Jason asked, noticing his grim demeanor.

“I have a very bad feeling about this,” Hao Yu muttered, tapping his stylus against the monitor, his brow furrowed deeply.

“Why? Is there a flaw in the firing sequence?”

“The curvature bubble’s diameter is far larger than our models predicted,” Hao Yu explained, rubbing his graying temples. “Our tactical simulations failed to account for the physical interactions of localized spatial distortion. We simply don’t know how conventional matter behaves when it hits a warped spatial membrane.”

“A spatial fold of that magnitude could manifest as extreme gravitational shear, or it could physically tear matter apart at the molecular level… or something else entirely. We have no idea if our missiles will even be able to penetrate that field…”

Hao Yu sighed heavily. “And even if we had anticipated this, without hard data, we wouldn’t have known how to engineer a countermeasure.”

“Wait—!” Jason started, eyes widening in alarm.

It was too late.

The vanguard probe breached the outer edge of the Viridian curvature membrane. In that exact millisecond, a blinding, white-hot beam of localized energy annihilated the probe.

The battle had begun!

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