Mao Ying raised his hand, a dazzling silver manifesting in his palm; six meters long, it became a lightning javelin, crackling with electricity as if capable of reducing all things to ash.

Yang Ying aimed the javelin at the central pillar of energy and hurled it forth.

Strike!

With a tremendous boom, the transparent outer wall of the energy pillar shattered, triggering a violent explosion that unleashed endless arcs of electric light. These lights spread out like colossal electric serpents spanning kilometers, transforming the entire cylindrical space into an electrical domain.

The current struck the spatial membrane, inciting further detonations, and the core area began to crumble.

“Let’s go, Yang Ying,” he told Ya Fei. “We split up and destroy the other targets.”

“Understood.” Ya Fei nodded, her form flickering, leaving a trail of musical notes as she vanished.

Yang Ying exchanged a glance with Dao Feng, and both transformed into streaks of lightning, departing the core zone.

Meanwhile, in the fortress command center, a Kustar staff officer reported to the Fortress Commander: “Sir, the core zone has exploded, and the fortress is losing power!”

“The defenses arranged by God Karagounis were broken so quickly?!” the Fortress Commander clenched his fists and roared, “Are the enemy forces still outside the attack range?”

“Not yet, they are holding position outside the maximum firing range of the ‘God’s Wrath’ fortress cannon.” God’s Wrath was the name of the Level Eleven fortress cannon; however, to the Kustar people, “God” referred to Karagounis, leading many Kustar to call the cannon the Wrath of Karagounis. Under normal circumstances, one shot from this cannon could annihilate tens of thousands of enemy warships, granting the fortress garrison immense tactical superiority.

“Those cowards!” a staff officer cursed. “Only hiding behind a woman’s skirts—cowards who don't dare challenge us openly!”

“Employing the most suitable tactics on the battlefield is entirely normal. Our weakness lies in lacking a Level Four entity to match the opposition.” The Fortress Commander seemed to deflate, collapsing into his command chair. “Deploy the Fortress Defense Fleet. Kill as many of the enemy as you can.”

“Yes, sir.”

Upon the Fortress Commander’s order, dozens of exits, each the size of a city, opened on the fortress’s aft section. The half-million-strong Fortress Defense Fleet surged out like fish schools in the ocean. After traversing thousands of kilometers, they executed a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, heading toward the Singer United Fleet.

At this moment, inside the fortress, Ya Fei arrived at a vast space, thousands of times larger than the core zone housing the energy pillar. This area possessed a simulated blue sky with clouds above, and earth with hills and vegetation below. “The distance from one edge of this landmass to the other is nearly a hundred kilometers.”

At the center of the space, neat yet distinct architectural clusters formed a prosperous city capable of housing a million inhabitants.

Clearly, this was a residential sector.

The Amundel Fortress boasted a diameter exceeding three thousand kilometers, and numerous large residential spaces like this existed within. In reality, the fortress was home to at least ten billion people, primarily composed of fortress guards, their families, and immigrants obligated to the fortress’s defense. While many were Kustar, the majority were the native inhabitants of the Dida Starfield, aliens who became vassals of the Kustar Empire after its conquest.

“Attention all citizens! Attention all citizens!” An emergency broadcast echoed throughout the city. “The Fortress Command has issued the highest-level coordinated combat order, requiring all citizens obligated to fortress defense to report immediately to the nearest staging post to participate in defense operations. Repeat: Report immediately…”

Ya Fei could sense the rising panic and fear permeating the city. Nearly every Kustar citizen cursed the arrival of the Singer United Fleet, and the other aliens offered no praise either. Having lived under Kustar rule for so long, they were accustomed to obedience and defaulted to the Kustar perspective.

“Civilians?” Ya Fei mused inwardly. “Citizens with defense obligations—they shouldn't count as civilians, but…”

She ultimately decided against attacking the city, vanishing from the space as she conceived a different approach.

The most crucial parts of the Amundel Fortress housed its core infrastructure: the power center, the computer core, and so on. The middle layers contained various factories and raw material warehouses. Only the outermost layers were residential zones.

Yang Ying arrived at a massive arms factory. This space was choked with heavy industrial machinery. Everywhere, colossal blast furnaces hundreds of meters high poured out waterfalls of molten iron, and kilometer-long conveyor belts were laden with fighters, armored vehicles, robots, and other weaponry.

Without complex calculation, it was evident that such a factory could churn out hundreds of thousands of armored weapons daily, and similar factory spaces existed in abundance throughout the fortress.

Judging by the distribution of facilities within the fortress, unless a Level Four entity infiltrated the core directly, occupying the fortress would necessitate a gradual advance, starting from the outer layers. Each occupied residential sector served as vital strategic depth, exacting a bloody price for every gain. The fortress garrison could leverage its superior production logistics to wage urban warfare, attrition battles, and prolonged conflicts against any attacker.

However, for a Level Four entity, such defensive layering held little meaning. Yang Ying could simply open a wormhole directly into the fortress core, bypassing the need to capture the outer layers sequentially.

Yang Ying scanned the armaments factory, his gaze penetrating the outer plating of the production equipment until it located the energy conduits, following those circuits to the control nexus of the production line.

He raised his hand, and a lightning javelin materialized. Yang Ying hurled the javelin toward the control nexus.

Fzzzt! Boom!

The entire production line ground to a halt.

Without a second glance at the halted assembly line, Yang Ying tracked the raw material intake ports, proceeding to the storage depot.

To sustain the factory’s output, the Amundel Fortress maintained colossal reserves in its raw material warehouses—each holding hundreds of millions of tons of various materials, predominantly high-grade metallic ores, even pure metal ingots.

Yang Ying had already accounted for these resources before entering the fortress. Naturally, his target wasn't common ores like copper or iron, which could be mined in trillions of tons from any random star system. His focus was on the rare and difficult-to-source strategic ores with the lowest stockpiles.

“Citizens, whether you are soldiers or civilians, you must know that the Kustar Empire faces a moment of life or death.” The Fortress Commander addressed the entire fortress with impassioned resolve. “Our great Guardian God has fallen, but we must summon greater courage to resist the wicked Singer invaders and those opportunistic, despicable Earthlings. Remember, every counterattack we launch may be small in the grand scheme of the war, but countless counterattacks amassed together can accumulate to results that make the enemy tremble. All Kustar, united, can win this war of defense! Go forth, bring fear to the enemy, and achieve your glory!”

“Even now, there is no thought of surrender. Is this steadfast will to fight, or mere foolishness?” Dao Feng materialized silently within the command center. “This command center is protected by concealment runes; it took me some time to locate it. However, the concealment runes drawn by Karagounis are far inferior to those of Emperor Salian.”

No one replied to Dao Feng. Their consciousnesses dissolved the moment his voice appeared, and their bodies began to cool rapidly, like statues of wax.

Zzzt. Dao Feng summoned a lightning sword and approached the control console, raising it as if to strike down.

“Lord Dao Feng!”

Ya Fei happened to enter the command center and called out immediately upon seeing Dao Feng’s movement.

Ya Fei had been searching for this command center since her arrival, but her perception had been blocked by the concealment runes. Only after Dao Feng breached them could she enter.

“What is it?” Dao Feng lowered the lightning sword.

“Are these devices still useful?” Ya Fei walked two steps toward the equipment, yet made no physical contact. The devices immediately began to operate autonomously: indicator lights flashed on and off, holographic screens flickered into existence and vanished, all at blinding speed, as if the entire system were having a seizure. Ya Fei executed tens of thousands of operations per second, quickly gaining total control of the system.

“Done.” Ya Fei smiled after completing her preparations. “Next, all we need is music.”

She picked up a microphone and began to sing.

“So that’s it, singing a lullaby? A brilliant method indeed.” Dao Feng understood Ya Fei’s objective instantly.

As a Level Four entity and the founder of Song Art, Ya Fei’s singing surpassed that of Jia Youna or any other Singer alien. It was an indescribable sensation; the music seemed imbued with the most fundamental beauty, existing outside the known world. Even Dao Feng found himself immersed.

Those who heard it through the broadcast system should feel privileged to witness such exquisite Song Art.

Across the fortress’s living sectors, every Kustar or alien who could hear the broadcast grew drowsy, then collapsed, unconscious. Only the Level Three experts, possessing some resistance to the lullaby, could manage only a final, dying struggle.

The Song Art even permeated the communication systems, affecting the deployed Fortress Defense Fleet, robbing them of combat effectiveness before they even engaged the Singer United Fleet. Soon after, they were captured.

As the Singer United Fleet occupied the fortress, the greatest obstacle in the Poda Starfield, the Amundel Fortress, officially fell.