The main control room had been blown apart.
Fortunately, the main server wasn't located in the control room.
Now, the entire warship was drifting in a state of commandlessness.
This was the perfect window to strike.
Yet one nagging doubt remained—was Damoro truly a spy?
After all, he had just eliminated a band of infiltrators not long ago.
At this very moment, Damoro, secluded in his own quarters, logged into the virtual hall to clear his name.
"I've been in my room the whole time. The server logs can verify it. I couldn't have killed the Captain!"
Everyone stared in confusion.
But soon, someone who knew the inside story spoke up:
"Damoro wasn't the one who went into the control room. Remember the first incident? A spy took Damoro's form to attack the pier. We captured it, but just before this event, it managed to escape."
The revelation that there were two Damoros quickly dispelled suspicion from him.
With that cleared, the spy group no longer had any reason to hesitate.
Damoro predicted they would move within three days.
But he had underestimated their speed.
The moment his name was cleared, the spy group went into motion.
In truth, not all doubts were gone; some still wondered if the entire affair was a staged play.
Yet, even if it was a play, for the rank-and-file soldiers aboard, it was indistinguishable from reality. The ship was in turmoil, and that chaos was the perfect moment to act.
Damoro's maneuver—appearing like a conspiracy—was in fact an open strategy.
First, bait the spies into revealing themselves. Then eliminate some of them, making the rest believe their cover had been compromised.
Next, strike at the warship's senior officers, forcing the spies' hand. If they didn't seize this chance now, they might never find a better one—and missing it could doom their mission entirely.
Faced with uncertainty, they chose the certainty of action.
...
Less than ten minutes after Damoro's message went out—
The warship's eastern main corridor detonated.
The corridor was essentially the ship's arterial conduit.
Pipelines ran in every direction throughout the vessel, sometimes clogging, sometimes leaking.
So—how was such a critical collapse handled?
The main corridor contained eight bidirectional pipelines, like an eight-lane superhighway, designed to carry the largest flow of traffic. Stretching from the far left of the warship all the way to the far right, it was the vessel's true central thoroughfare.
Its destruction instantly severed rapid transit between the eastern and western sectors of the ship.
Their objective was all too clear.
[Continuous detonations reported in the Warship East Bridge. 2,973 individuals have gone dark. All soldiers, be advised: the enemy has initiated a full assault! Weapon systems are now fully deployed!]
The server's alert came almost instantly.
Barely two minutes had passed since the corridor was blown apart, yet nearly three thousand crew members were already dead. The scale of the spy group's massacre was undeniable.
The deployment of weapon systems meant one thing: the server had authorized open combat within the warship.
This was the signal—calculation complete. The situation could no longer be contained. Control was lost.
At that moment, Damoro received his personal combat suit.
Unlike the standard issue distributed to others, his had been transferred directly from Hyperdimensional Space.
Inside Hyperdimensional Space, Damoro owned countless artifacts capable of erasing the Milky Way itself. But those remained virtual. The system imposed strict limits on what could be carried over. In reality, only gear that physically existed could pass through.
Even so, as a Divine being, his equipment was absolute top-tier—valued at tens of billions of Energy Credits, far beyond anything most soldiers could even dream of. To Damoro's knowledge, such equipment was rarely seen at all, likely custom-forged.
In fact, Ayla had established an entire R&D chain within Hyperdimensional Space for this purpose.
This chain operated in a single star system, fully automated, running on the apex technology of human civilization.
Why research and not direct production?
Because Mortality Selection participants were spread across the breadth of human civilization. Manufacturing and delivering physical gear could take centuries. Instead, once R&D completed, the blueprints were transmitted via tachyonic communication to a nearby Boundary God or server, which would then employ local industry to fabricate the equipment. What would've taken centuries was reduced to a matter of months.
Damoro's personal loadout was simple, but lethal.
First—his Strong Force Armor.
Armor at the particle scale, shielding every constituent particle of his being from damage.
With it, Damoro could walk through the heart of a star—surviving millions to tens of millions of degrees Celsius—and endure pressures of millions of atmospheres without flinching.
It was no ordinary matter plating, but constructed from Degenerate Matter, also known as Simplified State Armor.
This defensive armor was his most precious piece—harder to acquire than any galaxy-shattering device in the virtual realm. He had skirted death countless times to obtain it.
Beyond the Strong Force Armor, Damoro wielded:
Infomatter Weaponry
Negative Energy Compression Arms
Supersymmetric Monomer Protocol Gear
Each represented the apex of human science, condensed and miniaturized into soldier-class weapons.
They floated in orbit around Damoro like ominous black Rubik's Cubes.
At their center—housed within his body—a high-energy core pulsed, supplying power. From the outside, one could see arcs of raw current leaping from the core, stitching the cubes together in dazzling, terrifying flashes.
Damoro muttered under his breath, crimson eyes narrowing:
"The shadows weren't handled well... but now, this is truly my home field."
"The hunt begins!"
Damoro was no careful schemer, no long-winded advisor.
He was a warrior.
The "plan" he had used earlier was nothing more than a disposable tactic to him.
In Hyperdimensional Space, strategy gods could manipulate the battlefield like a chessboard. That was a different discipline altogether.
But in direct combat? Damoro was born for it. His mechanized, vaporized body granted him near-limitless possibilities.
To allow soldiers to maneuver inside the warship, the internal pipelines weren't fixed. The entire vessel was modular, designed so the conduits could expand and contract—ranging from 10 cm to as wide as 50 cm.
Damoro shot through the pipelines, heading straight for the East Bridge.
When he arrived, he spotted a spy detonating in a suicide strike.
These infiltrators were, to put it bluntly, living bombs.
Perhaps they had some technique for recalling their consciousness afterward. Damoro didn't know—and didn't care.
He raised a finger.
The quantum field ahead of him began to oscillate, rippling with countless micro-fluctuations. Matter spontaneously flickered into existence, persisting for a fraction of a fraction of a second before collapsing back into equilibrium.
At an imperceptible scale, those fluctuations unleashed energy strings that pierced the spy's body, rewriting its internal symmetry.
Everything in the universe carries supersymmetry. Yet under natural conditions, that symmetry always collapses into imbalance. The Supersymmetric Monomer Protocol Gear forcibly restored the target's symmetry—then locked it into a single unidirectional state.
It was like taking a twisted, irregular strand of noodles, reshaping it into a perfectly uniform one—then folding it in half until the halves overlapped.
Except this folding occurred in the super-microscopic domain.
In essence, the weapon stripped matter of balance, converting particles into pure bosons or pure fermions. The result: catastrophic self-annihilation.
At this level of civilization, the deadliest aspect of individual weaponry wasn't raw firepower, but its strange, unresolvable mechanics.
The Supersymmetric Monomer Protocol Gear was almost impossible to defend against—and that was the source of its terror.
The spy hit by Damoro dissolved instantly into bosons; most of its mass became photons. In a blinding instant, it flared like a grenade of pure light—then vanished without a trace.
Damoro moved on without hesitation.
Ahead, another spy rampaged through a squad of soldiers, weapon in hand.
Damoro noted with a chill that the soldiers' high-energy beams weren't killing it.
That was abnormal.
The infiltrators' bodies were vaporized machinery. At such energy levels, even a pencil-thin particle beam would produce scattered electron radiation strong enough to rupture the body's other components, killing them outright.
Yet now, the spies endured the hits unharmed.
They weren't clad in advanced armor.
No—the countermeasure had to be deeper, microscopic. Their bodies had been engineered to neutralize the destructive effect of electron radiation.
They carried a special form of protection.
Damoro's eyes narrowed.
"Use the Collapse Charge!"
A soldier shouted.
The Collapse Charge was a grenade—or sometimes a physical shell.
Upon impact, it generated a powerful gravitational singularity at its core, dragging all surrounding matter into collapse.
Human civilization had long developed weapons of this nature, but the Collapse Charge was refined, portable, and small—only slightly larger than a bead.
Its flaw was obvious: it was slow.
At the soldiers' cry, the spy immediately pressed its entire body against the floor. The deck vibrated violently, releasing a deafening resonance.
Several soldiers, still too close to the surface when the sound hit, collapsed instantly, their bodies folding in on themselves.
"This doesn't match the intel I had…"
Damoro had collected fragments of information on these spies.
According to the reports, this civilization used sound as a weapon: those who heard it collapsed within seconds. The attack suffered from accuracy issues and margin-of-error drift.
That was the intel.
But what he had just witnessed was entirely different.
Perhaps this was an altogether separate attack.
"Micro-unit activation."
A segment of Damoro's body morphed into a miniature electron microscope, probing the microscopic world.
In high-level combat, the microscopic battlefield was just as real as the macroscopic one. Both sides wielded weapons there. Without means to see into that scale, you were fighting blind—waiting to die.
Through the scope, Damoro observed: fermions in the vibrating deck were arranged in a precise lattice, transmitting energy at a particular oscillation frequency.
But the energy was weak—far too weak to collapse a human body.
So, it wasn't the vibration itself.
The attack had to originate deeper, at the microscopic level.
Yet—how?
This was a high-speed warship. How could the enemy possibly stage a quantum-level attack field in such an environment?
Could the quantum field itself be mobile? Did it follow macroscopic physical laws?
Damoro could manipulate quantum fields with his weapons, yes. But observing one was another matter.
He didn't understand it.
And if he didn't understand it, he wouldn't waste time trying.
All that mattered was evasion. As long as he avoided the sound's targeting pattern, the attack was irrelevant.
Damoro shifted his thoughts. Instantly, the cube-shaped modules orbiting him snapped into position, fanning out across his line of sight.
Within thirty meters, all matter was converted into information—including the spy.
The enemy could counter conventional energy attacks. They were prepared for those.
But against this? Against information conversion? There was no time to devise a defense.
Here, Damoro was untouchable.
Just then, several spies burst from a nearby pipeline, weapons raised.
At point-blank range, barely meters away, they unleashed their beams before Damoro could even reposition his modules.
The blasts slammed into him. His body didn't so much as flinch.
"If this were the mothership's weaponry, I'd be dead in an instant."
"But you're stuck with soldier-class arms."
The output of personal weapons was too low—their energy density insufficient to pierce his armor.
Damoro didn't bother deploying his gear. Instead, part of his body split off, reshaping into a massive human hand.
It closed around the spies.
Blinding light ignited within the hand.
When his fist opened again, there was nothing left—no trace of them at all.
It seemed the infiltrators had received updated orders.
More spies emerged from the pipelines.
But this time, they didn't attack Damoro directly.
Instead, they dove into the warship's hull itself, fusing with the vessel's structure.
The warship was modular, riddled with countless structural gaps.
Their bodies had already been vaporized, making infiltration effortless.
Damoro drifted forward a few meters, keeping as much distance as possible between himself and the surrounding walls and floor.
Now a being of vaporized machinery, he had no blind spots—his vision was total.
His body carried a suite of advanced sensors; he had no need for external systems to pinpoint his enemies' positions.
The spies didn't know this. Even so, they chose the safest approach—
attacking Damoro from every direction at once, in hopes of denying him the chance to respond instantly.
Their tactics had shifted. In the microscopic world, Damoro saw countless particles swarming toward him.
And the spies themselves closed in as well.
In an instant he understood: these visible attackers were nothing but decoys, meant to draw his focus.
The true strike came from the particles.
He could not allow them to touch him.
But at the very moment he thought this, the particles abruptly vanished—and with them, portions of the dust left behind by the earlier explosion.
Damoro narrowed his gaze. Suspicion gnawed at him. Even so, he swatted aside the spies who had ventured too close, dispatching them with ease.
When the last of them fell, he prepared to withdraw.
But as he shifted, a sudden pressure ripped through his form—his strong force armor had been breached.
An unknown attack had struck.
"This isn't an attack—it's consumption."
Damoro's habit, forged by tens of millennia of war, was constant microscopic observation.
What he saw confirmed his fear: once the strong force armor fractured, it wasn't simply broken—it was being dissolved, consumed piece by piece.
And on the macroscopic level, the effect was brutal—whole portions of his body winked out of existence.
The consumption triggered a cascading reaction, slowed only by the armor's resistance.
Logic dictated retreat. Yet Damoro held his ground.
He had to know what was devouring him.
His arsenal functioned primarily at the microscopic scale. He dialed his weapons to the lowest output, releasing a faint stream of probe particles.
Through them, he observed the same eerie effect: disappearance.
Not destroyed. Not countered. Simply… gone.
He had seen such things before—within Hyperdimensional Space.
That realm contained countless cosmic-scale battlefields. Imperfect simulations, yes, but never false—always grounded in extensions of existing physics.
It was within those wars that Damoro himself had been tempered into a physicist-warrior.
At his level, anyone below two-star or three-star physicist tier couldn't even survive in battle, much less contend.
He recognized the phenomenon instantly.
Coiled higher-dimensional space.
Though at first glance it might resemble quantum entanglement, entanglement was bound by range. Only consumption woven into the fabric of space itself could erase particles one by one.
"What those spies hurled at me… was space itself."
But was it particles creating space, or particles opening space?
The difference was fundamental.
If they were creating space, then the unknown civilization had no weakness of attack range—Damoro, and the entire warship, were already doomed.
But opening space... that carried multiple possible interpretations.
For example, space might already exist in a folded state, disconnected from the macroscopic world—and the particles were the key to bridging it.
Or perhaps space wasn't truly here at all. The particles could be creating miniature black holes and wormholes, linking this place to distant regions of space and pulling their influence across the divide.
It was also possible that the particles themselves acted as portals, conduits to a singular "true space" hidden elsewhere—perhaps embedded in the warship, or carried secretly by one of the spies. The particles would then act as anchors, tethering their locations directly to that space.
Damoro couldn't determine which explanation was correct.
The spaces were too small. Any weapon he unleashed might not even register against them.
"This is getting a bit complicated."
Particles swirled thickly all around him.
If he tried to brute-force his way out, those particles would inevitably consume large portions of his body's matter, stripping away armor and even damaging his weaponry.
"I must unravel these space seeds."
He sighed inwardly. "If only I had Ladalu world technology… these coiled microscopic worlds could be wiped out with a gesture."
The Ladalu world was a virtual construct embedded within Hyperdimensional Space.
Within it, the Ladalu Civilization had expanded across more than 200 galaxies, mastering control over eleven dimensions throughout that vast domain.
From the one-dimensional String World up to the eleven-dimensional Origin World.
In the Ladalu world, one-dimensional strings composed the fabric of matter, but only at the eleven-dimensional tier did reality reach completion. All spaces beneath were mere projections—each dimensional layer subtracting from the whole, down and down until it collapsed into zero.
Damoro had been a warrior there as well.
He had fought through those wars, spending millennia upon millennia battling upward—from the one-dimensional plane all the way to the eleven-dimensional peak—and then back down again.
Though fictional in parts, the framework of that world was underpinned by a theoretical completeness and a raw realism.
And Damoro could now call upon that understanding of dimensional mechanics to analyze the tiny spaces surrounding him.
Coiled microscopic worlds were not, at their core, breakthroughs of advanced theoretical physics. They arose from the simple fact that macroscopic physical laws collapse at the microscopic scale, and inter-dimensional repulsion ceases to function.
One could picture the universe as an impossibly precise machine. But even the finest machine collects dust. These coiled spaces were that dust—imperfections that the machine of the cosmos could neither perceive nor clean.
They exerted no influence on the grand totality of the universe. And if the universe itself could not interact with them… how could he?
From what Damoro knew, most coiled spaces were unfathomably small, observable only beneath the Planck scale.
"They look like pearls strung on a thread." That was how such spaces were often described.
Ordinarily, their minuteness rendered them irrelevant to the macroscopic world.
But these coiled spaces—these seeds—were different. They could touch him.
Damoro reasoned that they weren't as infinitesimal as Calabi–Yau manifolds, but still dozens or hundreds of times smaller than elementary particles.
Most detectors today relied on incomplete particles, or at best ultra-short quantum waves. Their maximum resolution reached no finer than one fourteenth of a quark. Anything beneath that threshold was unobservable, undetectable.
And yet this microscopic coiled space, operating just below that scale, was enough to disrupt the macroscopic.
"If it's large enough to affect particles," Damoro thought, "then particles can, in turn, affect it."
Interacting forces.
Damoro considered whether gravity itself could be used to shift these alien spaces.
He generated a powerful gravitational source.
But the effort failed.
He had overlooked a key truth: these spaces were artificial.
Artificial constructs carried safeguards. They weren't so easily swayed.
Most likely, they were anchored tightly within the quantum field. Gravity could still act on them, yes—but not with the magnitude he was producing.
If he could form even a micro–black hole, then dismantling these spaces would be trivial.
Before a black hole, all things are equal.
Rock or star. Life or time. Even space itself.
A black hole devours all.
But Damoro could not risk it.
He was far too close to the particles.
A lone black hole demanded vast energy and time to generate. A large-scale array of them would be faster, but then he himself would be within their kill radius.
Instead, he fired streams of particles into the void, striking the coiled spaces again and again, analyzing every shift.
The changes were imperceptible. At least, beyond the reach of his sensors.
"Anything that exists must consume energy," he thought. "Can I form a vacuum barrier—starve these spaces into collapse?"
A flicker of triumph crossed his mind. He truly was a genius.
He acted immediately.
Encasing twenty of the coiled spaces in a containment field, he watched closely.
Not to escape. He knew this wouldn't free him. After all, the spaces were everywhere, surrounding him on every side. If he could encapsulate them all, he wouldn't need to escape—he'd simply squeeze himself through the gaps. So why attempt this?
Because he needed data. He needed to know whether these coiled spaces were tethered to the outside.
If they were, isolating them might rupture their link.
But nothing happened.
No response at all.
"That rules out portals."
"Then... wormholes?"
But wormholes required isolated space. And isolating space wasn't like boxing off an object. A box might appear to divide inside from outside, but in the mathematics of space, both were still continuous. A simple boundary could not block a wormhole.
"I still need to create black holes... even if only for testing."
The thought made him recoil. One black hole would burn through too much of his reserves. His weapons drew on that energy, and any loss now could hand the advantage to incoming spies.
Damoro hesitated. Reluctance warred with necessity.
In the end, necessity won.
He forged six micro black holes.
They lasted only 0.007 seconds—but they drained 17% of his personal energy.
The six singularities wrapped themselves around a central coiled space, warping the lattice of surrounding matter.
Damoro scrutinized the result.
The coiled space remained unchanged. Its state, its geometry—untouched.
The worst-case scenario confirmed. These spaces were fully self-contained. The particles hurled against him were indeed space seeds, birthing new domains outright.
Now the puzzle grew darker: how could such a threat be neutralized?
As Damoro wrestled with the question, something unexpected tore through his mind—
[Congratulations on completing the sub-mission (Understanding the Unknown Civilization's Attack Methods). You have received a C-rank evaluation. Would you like to claim your reward now, or continue exploring?]
He hadn't expected the mission to complete at this moment.
"The information actually got through!"
The instant the prompt appeared, Damoro realized he'd fallen into a trap of his own thinking.
The surrounding coiled spaces were numerous, yes—but not impenetrably dense. As long as enough information packets were sent, some would always slip through.
And if that was true…
Then he could draw power directly from the outside.
"Server, transmit energy to me!"
The server's response was cold and inflexible: [Soldier Damoro, you lack the proper authorization. Please submit an application to your superior officer.]
Damoro ground his teeth in frustration.
Fortunately, he still had another body.
That body was already racing toward this location. He ordered it to release one of the figures who looked like a high-ranking officer.
These individuals hadn't truly been killed by him earlier—merely compressed and sealed.
His clone threw the officer into the pipeline next to Damoro, and a moment later the man emerged, restored and free.
He spotted Damoro at once.
"You…" His eyes were full of suspicion.
"Commander, help me! I'm trapped!" Damoro said shamelessly, putting on a plea for rescue.
The man froze in disbelief.
"You, a spy, are begging me to save you?"
"I'm not a spy," Damoro denied flatly. "The one posing as me is the spy."
"If you doubt me, just ask the server. If I were a spy, would I really trap myself inside here?"
The officer hesitated, half-convinced but still cautious.
He sent a covert inquiry to the server. The reply confirmed Damoro's identity as a registered soldier, but his doubts weren't fully eased.
"I just killed several spies," Damoro pressed. "Check the surveillance logs yourself. Time is short."
"What? More spies?"
The officer, who had been imprisoned by Damoro until now, had no grasp of the current situation.
He quickly reviewed the server's latest reports—and his expression hardened. The warship was in far greater chaos than he had imagined.
Scrolling through the recordings, he saw Damoro dispatching multiple spies with his own hands. Only then did he finally believe.
"What do you need from me?" he asked.
"Simple," Damoro replied. "Order the server to inject energy into me. Then leave this area immediately."
The other officer didn't bother asking for details. He simply used his authority and ordered the server to inject energy.
In an instant, Damoro felt raw energy pouring in from outside, flooding into the core energy device inside his body.
He immediately coiled himself into a compact sphere. Around him, terrifying energy gathered, flaring brighter and brighter until it gleamed like a newborn star.
The commander sensed the danger at once. Following Damoro's warning, he retreated through the pipeline and left the zone.
A single second later—
The external energy detonated with Damoro at its center.
It was catastrophic. He had drawn in over a thousand times more energy than his body could endure, compressing it to the very edge of collapse before triggering ignition—forcing it into the state of a black hole.
Even with his immense defenses, Damoro still lost a portion of his body. The singularity itself lasted only a brief instant before it burst outward in a horrific explosion.
The blast tore him apart, shredding even his reinforced armor. Along with his body, space itself fractured and blew open.
The black hole's implosion unleashed spatial tremors and distortions. Though a miniature singularity couldn't create massive gravitational waves, it could still ripple the fabric of space across dozens of meters.
Exactly what Damoro had intended.
The shock displaced the surrounding coiled dimensions, forcing them aside.
It wasn't about gravity this time—would they be able to withstand the push of shifting space itself?
When Damoro's body reassembled, he was left weak and drained. The corridor that had once been a narrow passage was now reshaped into a circular void more than twenty meters across. Its edges were scorched smooth by the blast.
Had the warship been built of ordinary steel, that same explosion would have carved out a cavity ten times larger.
"I didn't expect such a small trick to be this dangerous," he muttered. "This unknown civilization can't be underestimated."
Even as he thought this, another of his clones stirred.
That officer, seeing Damoro apparently unharmed, demanded, "What just happened? What caused that uproar?"
The clone didn't reply. Instead, it surged forward, swelling and contracting in one fluid motion until it once again compressed into a small sphere.
The officer fell silent.
"It's not time for you to come out yet," Damoro's clone murmured.
The clone located Damoro's main body, collided with it, and fused seamlessly. The missing portions of Damoro's body reformed—restored and even more abundant than before.
Revitalized, Damoro pressed onward.
His hunt had been briefly interrupted, but it was far from over.
More importantly, the clash had taught him how to counter the enemy's tricks.
The root cause was speed. He simply wasn't fast enough.
If he struck swiftly enough, the enemy wouldn't even have time to retaliate.
He slipped through another pipeline into a different void—this one not a natural space, but a hollow created by an earlier blast.
Each of these rupture-chambers was far larger than the one he had just forged.
Now, Damoro entered a space nearly 400 meters wide, where a ferocious battle was already raging.
Dozens of spies were clashing against a smaller force of barely ten soldiers.
For a moment, Damoro couldn't even tell who was who.
More spies than loyal troops? That was unexpected.
"Run!!" the soldiers shouted when they spotted Damoro.
It wasn't true concern for him. Their call was calculated—a distraction to draw some spies toward him, easing the pressure on themselves.
Clever move.
Several spies indeed broke off and closed in on Damoro.
But Damoro, wiser now, gave them no time. He unleashed his weapon immediately.
From the microscopic domain, his particle-level strike tore through them with no defense possible, disintegrating the spies outright.
Without pausing, he swung his attack toward the remaining twenty-plus enemies.
"Die—all of you!!"