“Quick! Raise the barrage immediately, push the shields to maximum!” Bo Fang Shan Su Gan Yue Da The moment the interceptors closed in on the Burke fleet, they delivered a profound lesson; the very first wave of attack annihilated nearly a thousand warships.

Their nimble maneuvering and ferocious firepower subjected the Burke forces to a nightmarish assault. Often, hundreds of interceptors would swarm a single battleship, reducing it to a mere sieve of smoking holes within half a minute.

Morale among the Burke forces plummeted. The corpulent, portly commander bellowed a series of frantic orders, attempting to salvage the losing battle, yet he could not overcome the objective disparity in combat strength.

While the anti-air barrage did eliminate some interceptors, the vast majority of the interceptors were large enough to punch straight through the defensive curtain and strike the warships. Furthermore, the carriers possessed integrated interceptor factories; for every one destroyed, another could be manufactured instantly, rendering their supply virtually endless. They had no need to worry about losses.

After several more aggressive pushes, the losses suffered by the Burke forces mounted catastrophically.

At this precise moment, Yang Ying ascended to the Fourth Level aboard the floating continent. Kars, sensing this shift, also broke through concurrently. He began to draw in the psychic energy from his other avatars, achieving the peak state of the Fourth Level.

The carrier’s control room erupted in a blinding radiance, suffused with a purple hue and saturated with raw energy. Kars swept his hand, causing a luminous screen to materialize before him. With another gesture, a magnificent pillar of violet light shot forth from the carrier’s bow, slamming into the heart of the Burke fleet.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Warships caught in the beam instantly melted. Their defensive shields and outer armor were penetrated as if they were tissue paper. Kars swept the light beam across the formation. A single pass obliterated roughly five hundred warships.

“This… this… the power! A Level Nine Cannon!!!” one Burke staff officer collapsed in despair. Then another followed suit.

The Burke commander swallowed hard, his eyes bulging in disbelief. He couldn't comprehend how, in this desolate, forgotten corner of space, they encountered a warship possessing the destructive power of a Level Nine Uranium Railgun. Even the Burke Hegemony, ranked ninth in the Orion Arm, had only mastered Level Eight cannons. And looking further up the hierarchy, even the Lo’ya people, ranked third, possessed only the same; only the Jallanites and the Cycro possessed the technology for Level Nine cannons.

He remained blissfully ignorant that, while the Divine Race’s technology wasn't significantly superior to the True Human Empire’s, it was certainly not far behind. Installing a Level Nine Drillshell Cannon on a specialized carrier was standard procedure for them. In fact, the Divine Mothership currently under construction was slated to carry a Level Ten Drillshell Cannon—a weapon capable of annihilating an entire planet without breaking a sweat.

The beam cannons aboard Kars’ flagship were a form of psychokinetic armament, requiring immense spiritual strength to activate. Originally, with his peak Third Level psychic power, he could barely manage to fire them, as the flagship, logically, would not house equipment that was unusable.

However, peak Third Level power could only unlock the beam cannon’s energy level to Eight. Now that he had achieved the peak of the Fourth Level, utilizing a Level Nine Drillshell Cannon was child’s play. If the beam cannon hadn’t been calibrated with a maximum output of Level Nine—exceeding which would trigger a carrier collapse—he wouldn't have needed to fire with such calculated restraint. With his current strength, he could handle even a Level Twelve Pulse Cannon.

Of course, among the various races of the Orion Arm, a Level Twelve Pulse Cannon simply did not exist. Yet, during his time studying and living within the Empire, Yang Ying had heard whispers of such weapons.

A Level Ten Hammer Cannon could wipe out all surface life on a planet. A Level Twelve Uranium Cannon, however, could shatter a planet into dust—truly astonishing destructive power.

Kars did not hesitate, unleashing the ship’s Level Nine Beam Cannon repeatedly. The purple light beams swept across the Burke fleet, tearing it to shreds. Simultaneously, tens of millions of interceptors swarmed the Burke armada, relentlessly draining their shields. Once the shields failed, their doom would be sealed.

At this point, the carrier fleet pinpointed the location of the Burke flagship through signal triangulation. Kars manifested an illusionary technique; a flickering purple flame sparked from his fingertip and vanished into the void. The next instant, an illusion of a Luminary Consul materialized inside the Burke flagship.

The Burke commander slumped in his command seat, staring in shock at the enormous, sudden purple fireball hovering before him. The ceiling and floor were scorched and burned through by the violet flames, and within the inferno, a human silhouette was visible. The faint wisp of energy emanating from the figure caused the very space around it to warp and distort.

The illusion Kars projected was not without power; it possessed a measurable fraction of Fourth Level strength. This immediately informed the corpulent commander that what stood before him was not some ordinary expert, but an entity of the Fourth Level.

"Heavens! A Fourth Level entity!" Even though the portly commander was a peak Third Level master himself, sweat beaded on his brow. He had never encountered a Fourth Level being. The Burke Hegemony had no Fourth Level members, a fact that had always been a festering sore point for all Burkes. But non-existence was non-existence; the Fourth Level was not a game of make-believe that one could simply conjure into being.

The portly commander nervously stepped down from his command dais, adopting the posture of one who wisely yields to superior force. He offered an appeasing tone: "You are a Fourth Level entity, I presume? My deepest apologies. We were unaware of this—"

(The original text had garbled characters here, which are omitted as per instruction.) "—unfortunate situation. If we have caused offense, I beg you, do not take it ill. We shall withdraw immediately."

As he spoke, he silently cursed his bad luck. If he had known such a calamity would unfold, why would they have bothered pursuing that lost exploration vessel?

Let the exploration vessel be lost, but provoking a Fourth Level entity was catastrophic. If the entity became enraged and decided to wreak havoc in a Burke metropolitan area, slaughtering indiscriminately, conventional forces would be unable to apprehend them. If they attacked the Burke political center, the situation would be even direder—the government could collapse, potentially triggering a civil war that would result in rivers of blood.

Dealing with any Fourth Level entity was an immensely difficult task; mere military might was insufficient to exert control.

Kars’ illusionary projection gestured, and a pale yellow light flashed. The Burke commander was subjected to psychic control.

Furthermore, in an instant, Kars traversed the commander’s memories, grasping the complete reality and vulnerabilities of the Burke Hegemony with perfect clarity. A peak Third Level master might have warranted passing attention before, but now, this individual was merely a fattened pig awaiting slaughter in his palm.

Ten minutes later, the battle reached its climax. The endless swarms of interceptors consumed the entirety of the Burke fleet. Their warships didn't explode one by one, but rather, in entire clusters. A few ace pilots managed to pilot their craft toward escape vectors, but they were shot down in the seemingly infinite ocean of interceptors.

Throughout this engagement, Kars maintained constant communication jamming, preventing the Burke fleet from transmitting a single message. In the end, only a few hundred elite fighter craft managed to escape using their equipped superluminal engines, finding a momentary opportunity to flee. Everyone else was left as debris scattered across the void two hundred million kilometers from Planet Aer.

However, this conflict was merely the opening skirmish between the Divine Race and the Burkes. Kars’ eyes seemed to foresee a series of protracted wars between the two factions in the coming period, wars which the Divine Race would undoubtedly win.

Kars understood that while the general trend of the future could be perceived, the future itself was not immutably set. It contained layers of profound, esoteric mysteries that defied verbal description, comprehensible only through true, lived experience.

Meanwhile, the Kusta fleet led by Longge and Sa’an arrived at the mineral planet that was their target. Coincidentally, a local defense fleet of ten thousand vessels was stationed there, all of them the new Bull-Head Class Battlecruisers. Upon detecting the approach of the Kusta-sapiens, the defense fleet scrambled immediately.

Shortly after launch, under the command of their fleet leader, all ten thousand Bull-Head Class ships simultaneously activated their Yamato Cannons. Ten thousand simultaneous blasts unleashed ten thousand streaks of crimson light into the Kusta-sapien fleet.

“All ships, maneuver evasively, now!” Longge and Sa’an sensed the incoming attack simultaneously. The location from which the enemy launched their assault was inexplicably beyond the range of their own warships' attack capabilities!

However, Sa’an had experienced this very scenario before in the Flinn Kingdom and had already issued standing orders for all personnel to remain vigilant regarding such situations.

Ten thousand orange-red light beams pierced the fleet. A massive chain of detonations erupted. Although timely evasive actions mitigated some losses, eight hundred warships were still destroyed or rendered combat-ineffective in that single volley.

The flagship carrying Longge and Sa’an was grazed, causing severe vibrations throughout the bridge. But for the two peak Third Level masters, the impact felt like nothing more than a gentle breeze. Longge remarked, "How did these Earthlings invent Hammer Cannons with such incredible range? The drill-light energy showed no dissipation; all the power was perfectly preserved. I am astonished."

Sa’an spat fiercely, "Once we eliminate them this time, we must strip their Uranium Cannons for intensive study. How can the Kusta-sapiens allow themselves to lag behind in weapons technology? If it were the Cycro, or the True Human Empire for that matter, it would be one thing. But who are these people now? Sub-humans from Earth! A race that couldn't even defeat the Ancient Legion not long ago now dares to possess such superior Hammer Cannons. This is an unforgivable transgression."

Longge offered a noncommittal reply. "Did you notice? The power of their drill-cannons isn't just Level Seven; it must be approaching the standard of Level Eight."

"What!" Sa’an hadn't noticed initially and was startled. "Is that so? The last time I encountered them in Jilin, they were using Level Seven Pulse Cannons."

"I am certain of it. Either you misjudged last time, or they deliberately concealed their true strength when they were at Flinn. The least likely scenario is that they managed to upgrade the energy level of their drill-cannons in this short span," Longge frowned. "And according to your account, they only possessed a few hundred ships last time. How do they now emerge with ten thousand?"

"I absolutely did not misjudge; what they used last time was definitely Level Seven firepower," Sa’an asserted confidently. "As for where the ten thousand ships came from, I don't know. But doesn't this perfectly validate Lord Kalagunis’s prophecy? A genuine threat has emerged in the Solar System, and we must eliminate it in its infancy before it endangers us." If you wish to know what happens next, please log on to [URL], for more chapters, to support the author, and for legitimate reading!