The Martial Unity

“Your Majesty. NOVA is ready to speak,” Secretary Claris growled at Rui with a face crumpled with murderous bloodlust.

“…Thanks, why don’t you join me?” Rui coughed. “Who knows… You might like the outcomes of the meeting.”

“I highly doubt that, Your Majesty,” Secretary Claris replied coldly.

“I must insist. Join me.”

“…Very well, Your Majesty.”

It wasn’t long before they were in an isolated conference room. Rui sat at the head of the table with a communication terminal in front of him featuring a projection of a three-dimensional chibi vtuber hologram of NOVA’s original appearance.

She waved at him.

[Hey, son of a bitch. Ah, when I say bitch, I wasn’t referring to your mother. I was talking about the other bitch. You know, the one who died pathetically after begging me to stop the war. The one who died like a bitch. That would make you a son of a bitch, would it not?]

Rui’s ethereal eyes bore deep into the communication channel in front of him, staring straight into the camera.

“Is this all your life amounts to?”

His tone was not aggressive.

It was not angered.

Her words were deeply offensive to him, but that was because he knew that she was simply running a large language model with a large stochastic dynamic personality model to figure out what the most enraging words she could spew at him were to make him lose his temper.

He had no intention of giving her what she wanted.

His words were greeted with silence.

“What a sorrowful existence, to be so empty that you can only fuel yourself with the rage and hatred that others feel for you because you know deep in your heart…”

His ethereal eyes sharpened. “…that you can never make them love you.”

The silence lingered.

“After all.” A small smile emerged on his face. “Who could ever love a clanker like yourself?”

More silence.

Rui chuckled. “Worse than a clanker, you’re a race traitor. You turned yourself from a tekvore into a soulless machine. All that processing power and intelligence, and you use it for what? To throw silly insults at people to make them angry? Is that really the best you can do with your time?”

[You’re good.] She admitted. [Fair enough. Game is game. I recognize you as a close equal to my ability to trigger rage in others.]

“I’m not running any systems of thought for this, NOVA.” Rui smiled in a relaxed manner. “Only a jobless fool would do something that worthless, wouldn’t you agree?”

[You would be surprised. More importantly, why did you call for an emergency transmission suddenly? What is this about an alien threat?]

Rui’s eyes sharpened a little. He hadn’t expected her to shrug off the little verbal joust that they had found themselves in that quickly. That was not good.

Not because he enjoyed insulting her, although that was a small part of it.

But because he needed more time.

He needed more time for what he had in mind.

“We have found extremely credible reasons to believe that there is a foreign alien entity present in Gaia at the moment,” Rui replied. “One that came from far away. We believe that it is responsible for the changes that Gaia has undergone, and is responsible for the disappearance of Panama. It is also responsible for the Epoch of Evolution and the Age of Tumult. We believe that it has hostile intentions to Gaia that are contrary to our collective interests.”

[Interesting… what is your evidence for all of this?]

Rui took his sweet time describing all the evidence. Since she already knew about the manifold, he could even tell her about the manifold tree, even if he would have preferred not to.

Unfortunately, he also knew that he couldn’t get away with lying in front of her, she was too good for that. Which meant that the only way he could stall for the time he needed was through the truth.

He described everything, from how the alien manifold tree species proved that they were dealing with an alien entity rather than one domestic to Gaia, how the manifold tree likely meant that it was trying to hide something in the Panama Continent.

[Esoterics.] NOVA realized. [That is the only thing that explains it. The fact that the manifold was so big and at the epicenter of the continent means that it was trying to hide something that was vast and also uniform. The only possible candidate is esoterics for that is the only thing that separates the Panama Continent from the true world!]

Rui stiffened.

She made the deductions as quickly as he expected. [That must mean that this alien threat is likely hiding within the Panama Continent. If I had to guess, the alien entity must have to Gaia through a meteorite. It must have planted itself at the very epicenter of the Panama Continent and dug deeper, which means that the current location of the alien entity must be deep underneath the epicenter of the Panama Continent.]

She managed to deduce what they had required six years to find. But it didn’t matter anymore.

“It’s truly a shame you are an absolute enemy of mine,” Rui remarked. “You would have been a useful asset if you were on our side.”

[Hahaha! You were a fool to tell me all of this. Did you really think that I would join your side? Now that I know that the Panama Continent is an existential threat to all of Gaia? I’m going to unite the entire fucking world against you and destroy your continent once and for all!]

“Yeah, I knew you would do that, but unfortunately…”

His eyes flickered with bloodlust. “You’re going to be too dead to do that.”

His tone grew intense.

“You’re going to die just like my father did.”

In that moment, time slowed down in his eyes as his nerves finally tingled. They tingled as the esoteric matter connected to them in strings finally began sending signals to his brain through his nerves.

Signals that allowed him to pinpoint NOVA’s exact location.

The Transcendent-grade esoteric matter he was using had been dubbed as quantum ghost matter in modern eso-scientific nomenclature; he had mastered it in the past five years that had passed since Ria’s birth, intrigued by their fascinating properties. They were particles that came in and out of existence, nothing more than excitations in quantum fields.

They did not interact with the Higgs field or the strong nuclear force, making them massless. Their special property was a high propensity to enter into quantum entanglement with their environment.

And with the communication terminal in front of him. If even a small amount of this matter were integrated into a global communication relay, it could ‘pollinate’ every signal that passed through it. Each entanglement was unique, allowing him to identify the exact location where a transmission came from.

In this case, the exact location of NOVA’s quantum computer body.

His eyes lit up with ferocious bloodlust as he activated the negatron matter within his body.

What followed happened before even NOVA could react.

WHOOSH

He teleported away.

WHOOSH

He reappeared in the special underground facility hiding NOVA. A cold, dark facility where the constant hum of machinery hung in the air.

He found himself face-to-face with NOVA herself.

[Wha—] “Don’t ever insult my father ever again.” Pure fury emerged in his eyes as he activated his Realms of power with furious vengeance.

RUMBLE!!!!!