The Martial Unity

“Look, Madam President! They’re not just able to shoot and bind spaceships from a terrestrial stance, but they can also use it to reel the spaceships into their planet!” Arastia could scarcely believe her eyes as she spotted several spaceships falling from orbital revolution and into the gravity well of the planet, pulling deeper and deeper into the planet despite the tremendous resistance they faced from the spaceships.

“Where… where are they getting all of that leverage from?” Arastia asked with a stunned tone of voice as she spotted the spaceships falling into the planet at high speed. The spaceships began incinerating as the friction from the atmosphere, which the strange humanoid spider-like aliens seemed entirely unbothered by, began heating them up, causing the hulls to glow red as they began falling faster and faster.

“We do not know yet, Your Excellency. But somehow they are able to generate enough leverage to literally drag massive spaceships from outer space to crash into the planet,” the analyst remarked with an amazed expression. “For an alien species to possess such tremendous biological power, this strongly suggests that Planet Amadeus likely possesses the resources that we seek from it.”

There were a handful of ways that individual lifeforms could come to possess tremendous destructive power. One of them was through esoteric matter. Lifeforms that had integrated esoteric matter into their phyisology could obtain truly extraordinary power that was on par with pathwalkers that could achieve that level of power without needing such priceless resources.

And the other was through extremely advanced technology, usually also very energy-demanding. However, such technology was only in the hands of quasi-Type-Three civilizations like that of the laminar integuments. Based on their observations of the strange humanoid spider-like creatures, they didn’t appear to be of such a high technological prowess.

That meant that the former was overwhelmingly likely.

Which meant—

“This is an infected world!” Arastia’s eyes lit up. “Spectrographic analyses of the web fluid suggests the presence of electromagnetic leptonic condensate, known for its exceptionally electromagnetic molecular pairing leading to extreme tensile strength and electromagnetic adhesion,” an analyst confirmed with an excited tone. “We can confirm the presence of esoteric matter on this planet, and thus its identity as an infected planet.”

A wave of cheers and applause swept across the crew as they bid each other congratulations with tones of relief. The atmosphere was jubilant and energetic. Missions like the one that they had planned were capital-intensive and resource-hungry. And since they occurred beyond the frontier of human civilization and outside of human territory altogether, they couldn’t easily gather information on it. They had conducted raids on other suspected infected worlds and had often ended up in disappointment.

“Alright, settle down.” She turned towards the infected world with a defiant expression. “Since we now know for a fact that this is an infected world, we must gather proof.”

Her blood-red eyes sharpened. “We must gather a deep sample in order to invoke Protocol Omega.”

Those words immediately cooled down the atmosphere as everybody grew silent.

Protocol Delta. It was the protocol that enabled any human entity that received a drop of the Tide of Samsara to essentially submit the information that they had gathered to the conscious and intelligent poison that they had been endowed with. However, the information that they needed to submit needed to be incontrovertible and prove beyond all doubt that the world being targeted was indeed infected by the virus.

This required more than just footage. It required a sample of the crust and the mantle of the infected world, where the virus was known to be present. “What is the estimated difficulty of the sample-gathering operation?” Arastia remarked with a serious expression.

“Based on our preliminary estimates, a simple rover dispatch will not be able to survive the onslaught of the native alien lifeforms,” an analyst remarked, bringing up the image of the planet. “The surface of the planet appears to be covered by the alien species. Any rover dispatch will simply be intercepted by their long-range web fluid attacks and be destroyed. The average power of these creatures, tentatively dubbed ‘homoarachnoids,’ appears to be on par with a Martial Squire, and they appear to be excellent at leveraging their collective might to destroy even heavy cruiser warships. If we are not careful, we will face destruction ourselves.”

“And?” Arastia turned towards her with a serious expression. “With the current military might that we have gathered, including myself, will we be able to gather a sample of the virus while protecting from the horde of homoarachnoid?”

The analyst’s expression grew even more serious. “It will be difficult, but it should be possible, Madam President. The biggest issue won’t be the homoarachnoids themselves but rather…”

“I know,” she muttered with a irritated expression, turning her attention towards the other human fleets in the vicinity. “Humans. They are the greatest risk here.”

They were outside human civilization in the unconquered wilds of the cosmos. There were no rules and there was nothing holding anybody back from attacking the pathwalkers of the Blood Arc the moment they arrived by the conquest. “That is why we have allies,” Arastia spoke with composed confidence. “How much more time until the Kandrians, the elves, the moridians, and the therianthropes arrive?”

“All of them should be arriving within three hours, Your Excellency.”

“Good, have the pathwalkers aboard our ship be ready,” Arastia spoke with a serious tone. “We will need them to be at their peak for when we execute this operation. Until then, maintain distance from Planet Amadeus III and gather intelligence on the local alien lifeforms. We need to ensure that we are as prepared as possible with our Hellbringer Models as soon as possible.”

The Hellbringer models were essentially models of adaptive evolution that had been created and proliferated by the Water Sect in the Era of Expansion to all pathwalkers. Since the revolutionary technology of mass-produced high-quality neural inlays, each and every single pathwalker was capable of processing information the way that the Dawnbringer had been able to when he was a Martial Master, allowing for many of the systems of thought that he had used and proliferated to become standard-issue for all pathwalkers in the stars.