Getting a Technology System in Modern Day - Chapter 1017

Capítulo 1017: How to Kill a Whale

The reaction from the Conclave, or what remained of it, was what many expected.

“I would rather die than live with the shame of being forced to surrender to some mongrel,” the Valthorin ruler said. As someone in a position that literally stood as an acknowledgment of their pride being the highest, even reading that letter felt like losing his pride with each word. By reading it, those words appeared in his mind, and his pride couldn’t handle having them stain it. Had it not been for the situation he was in requiring calm, he would have gone and tried to come up with ways to humiliate Emperor Aron to regain even a thimble of his tainted pride. But he had to set it aside for now, though he still had the hope of doing it in the future once things settled.

“So, you think that they are not bluffing and are planning to end it once and for all, and they have only sent this letter because they are now fully ready and prepared?” the leader of the Zelvora spoke calmly through his mental network. As the most reasonable civilization of the top ten, his reaction was more analytical than angry, like many of the others, but even he didn’t look pleased at being made to read that letter. It was very obvious from the way the letter was written that the empire was confident it would win this fight, no matter what their united forces did. The way it was written hinted that the empire was taunting them not to accept it if they couldn’t handle the consequences. Despite it being very obvious, many leaders would knowingly fall into it, since the other side of them accepting the offer was nothing pleasant at all.

“They are just bluffing. To keep their promise, they would need a way to arrive at our star systems, but since we are constantly scrambling the coordinates, finding them in a year is impossible, and more so in five hours, since even we don’t know the coordinates as they are random,” the Trinarian leader said. Despite that, the printed letter was currently being scrunched into a ball from the anger he felt from the obvious disregard and taunting, something he had never experienced in his life, having enjoyed being at the top of the food chain for his entire life. It was a new and unpleasant experience for him, one that he knew he needed to cleanse himself from fully.

The remaining leaders reacted in similar but slightly different manners, but anger was a constant among all of them except one, who could be heard heartily laughing in his luxurious room once he was done reading the letter sent to him.

Unlike what the other nine received, what he received was a completely different letter. It was a letter from Emperor Aron Michael using his right to challenge him for his position—a right he, the Grand Xor’Vak, had given to him after he deliberately made Seraphina surrender, confident that the Emperor was never going to use it.

But here he was, receiving the challenge letter, which gave him the option to choose who he, the Grand Xor’Vak, would like to face for the ownership, control, and loyalty of the Xor’Vak civilization: the Emperor or Seraphina. The Emperor had given him the decision to choose his opponent, and in return, he took the right to choose the date, which he had set as a week after the remaining nine civilizations fell. In return, the empire would not attack Xor’Vak territories, although the Xor’Vak forces sent to other civilizations’ star systems were considered a fair game by the Emperor.

“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” the Grand Xor’Vak continued laughing heartily for a long time, but as time passed, the heartiness in the laughter vanished as it got more and more sinister with each passing minute. Not long after, the laughter turned into a suffocating and suppressed rage that would have suffocated anyone inside the room had there been one.

“Fine, I accept your challenge. My challenger will be…” The Grand Xor’Vak wrote his response and sent it back to the empire through the same channel the challenge was sent.

Time, uncaring of all that was happening in what would be a speck of dust on the scale of the cosmos, continued moving, and it wasn’t long before it was only a few hours before the week the empire had given the remaining civilizations to surrender was up. At the moment, a massive screen could be seen in every part of the VR with a timer set to complete at the exact time the week-long period would have passed.

When only fifteen minutes remained, the timer moved aside as images now started being transmitted as if from a movie, as angles changed every few seconds to a few minutes. All the footage looked like it was being shot at eye-level, showing the daily lives of the Yrall Coalition’s citizens, making it clear to anyone watching that they were the first, randomly chosen target, just as the Emperor had promised.

The world for those under the control of the empire stopped for a moment as nearly all of those eligible to watch found themselves sitting, ready to see what would unfold as the excitement, fear, worry, and pressure continued to accumulate the lower the timer got. It wasn’t long: 09, 08, 07, 06, 05, 04, 03, 02, 01, 00.

The moment the timer hit zero, it was as if the cameras sending footage had malfunctioned, as the ones that were moving stopped in unison. The screen widened to accommodate nearly a hundred different POVs, and in unison, all of those POVs started moving to a switch or the control panel of an important piece of infrastructure before crashingly starting to destroy them.

Anyone who tried to stop them was dealt with uncaringly, as the robots, who were now visible thanks to the camera shifting from a POV to a third-person point of view, were in every part of the star system: sewers, security, electric, food, delivery, and many more. This had resulted in the robots being in nearly all important areas, which translated to the damage being dealt, causing hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths indirectly as a result of their actions’ cascading effect.

Everyone watching found themselves with their mouths open and their bodies full of goosebumps in disbelief at what they were witnessing. It was not something they were expecting the empire to pull, as they had all speculated that the empire would try to overwhelm a star system by sending all of its forces there. But it didn’t send even a single ship as it started dismantling it from the inside, and by the look of it, five hours was way too long, since everything was nearing its conclusion in a matter of half an hour.