Damoro once again forged a new body for himself.
Following the given directives, he made his way to the armory.
It was an isolated storage unit.
The interior measured roughly 360 cubic meters—compact, yet more than sufficient to house an arsenal for individual soldiers.
The walls and floor were lined with weapons of every imaginable type, many of which he had never even heard of before.
[Quantum Void Gear], [Micro Black Hole Cannon], [Instant Degeneration Bomb], [Pseudo-Dimensional Interlace Shard]…
So many.
Every last one was a short-range, individual-soldier, restricted-class weapon.
These had undoubtedly been stockpiled long in advance. The higher command had clearly anticipated he could accomplish Sub-Mission 1.
"There are three missions. But the main mission and Sub-Mission 2 aren't the real ones. The critical objective has always been Sub-Mission 1."
"And now, the extension of Sub-Mission 1 matters even more."
"If I perform well, I might finally win the favor of the higher-ups. With that comes a Federation Pass—special privileges, a foothold that could let me climb toward the true upper echelons."
Damoro's pulse quickened with excitement.
Yes, in Hyperdimensional Space he already wielded enormous influence, even holding the lofty title of "Divine."
But everyone knew the truth: they were only cultivated pawns. None of them had ever laid eyes upon the so-called "master."
Would this mission finally grant him the chance to see that elusive figure?
Many harbored deep resentment toward the "master." Damoro did not. He remembered clearly—he had once been dead, a broken soul that had abandoned life itself. Hyperdimensional Space had gifted him a second existence.
It had given him sanctuary.
And yet, now he was weary of it. He yearned for another kind of life.
This mission was that chance. A blessing, not a curse.
And more than that—he understood resenting the "master" was pointless. The disparity was too vast. This wasn't about struggling against a single being, but against the Federation as a whole.
Shaking off further thoughts, Damoro reached for the weapons.
Each instantly reshaped into the familiar cubic form that allowed him to control them with ease.
What he chose were, by design, fairly standard—but lethal nonetheless.
With the knowledge of another world's existence, and that world now trapped with no escape, the spies aboard the warship had lost their value. His task was simple now: eliminate them.
There were still more than five days remaining. No rush.
Exiting the armory, Damoro immediately stumbled upon spies already in the midst of a massacre.
They weren't like the posturing villains of Hyperdimensional Space, wasting time with endless speeches. These simply killed without hesitation.
The moment they saw him, their weapons swung in his direction.
Damoro glanced at a strange new device hovering at his side.
"This thing… seems to have another function."
Pressing his body against it, he activated the mechanism.
In an instant, it expelled a torrent of disruptive particles. The reaction hurled him sideways with brutal speed, slamming him into the wall—but also carrying him clear of the enemy's opening barrage.
"It seems I still need more practice controlling it."
Just as everyone assumed Damoro had made a fool of himself, the torrent of particles he had unleashed spread outward, enveloping the enemy soldiers.
Every molecule of their bodies became bound to a particle.
And those particles began to collapse inward, dragging the matter of their flesh along with them.
Before Damoro's eyes, the spies were compressed into a sphere—
A technique not unlike his own.
Only far more terrifying.
The sphere then shrank past the threshold of visibility, vanishing to the naked eye—followed instantly by a violent gravitational surge.
It had collapsed into a black hole.
The soldiers never had time to scream. The immense pull devoured them whole, dragging them into the singularity. In less than a millisecond, their existence was erased.
Damoro paused, stunned. Then, with a helpless shrug, he muttered, "My fault for not warning you. My mistake."
"Rest."
And he returned to the hunt.
Time bled forward.
The main server kept tallying the dead.
Over one hundred thousand soldiers aboard the warship were gone. Collapse was absolute.
At this point, the main server tried designating successors—each was assassinated almost immediately, dying within a minute of appointment.
The warship was doomed. Even its own crew knew it. The spies knew it even more.
Their numbers swelled as they joined the slaughter.
By the fifth day alone, the death toll had climbed past forty thousand.
Even Damoro hadn't expected the escalation to be so brutal.
He had planned to watch quietly for seven days, then cleanse the infestation on the eighth.
Now, he had no choice but to begin early—on the sixth.
He stalked the warship like a lone predator.
"Main server, where are the largest concentration of spies?"
No longer bothering with pretense, he asked directly.
The main server, of course, could track them—it simply had no weapons of its own to respond with.
[b11-2 sector]
Damoro moved at once.
The so-called "sector" was barely a sector anymore; it had been torn open and hollowed out.
The warship's left side bore a scar two kilometers wide and four hundred meters deep. Through the ruptured hull, raw starlight spilled in from the void.
The area was wreckage.
Hundreds of spies prowled within the ruins, swarming like carrion birds.
They had severed this zone, cutting off soldiers from moving through, and turned it into a killing ground.
"Hey," Damoro's voice rolled across the fractured decks, carried on the currents of information, "have you killed enough yet?"
Every spy in range froze. Heads turned.
Then—almost as one—they fixed on him.
Damoro's body flared to life as every weapon and device he carried activated at once.
In a single instant, his speed broke past all restraint—
Forty thousand kilometers per second.
Damoro's greatest strength was not attack, nor defense—
It was speed.
To move at extreme velocity within confined, compressed space was nearly impossible. But Damoro could do it.
40,000 kilometers per second.
The space around him stretched only two kilometers in length. At such speed, he had to react within a ten-thousandth of a second—again and again, without pause.
This was Damoro's domain.
The gift of being machine.
In a single second, he traversed the entire chamber 72,931 times.
When that second ended, he was already standing before a pipe opening.
The spies, only just registering his presence, tried to respond—
Only to realize their bodies were gone, reduced to ash and nothingness.
Damoro slipped into the pipe, carrying his slaughter onward into the next sector.
Every "Divine" born from Hyperdimensional Space's Mortality Selection carried a unique, overwhelming attribute—a mark of godlike strength.
Damoro's attribute was simple.
Combat itself.
"What do we do? They can't be killed—our weapons don't even touch them!"
Inside the warship, what remained of the soldiers had withdrawn into hidden corners.
They clustered together for warmth, trembling, powerless. They could not summon weapons from thin air.
In truth, individual soldiers aboard a warship were already redundant units.
Their only purpose was to handle minor interstellar tasks, problems a battleship could not resolve directly.
And so they were never equipped with high-powered personal weapons. Against enemies like this, they had no chance. Only death awaited.
"The enemy's too strong. We're finished this time."
"Prepare… to send final messages to the main server…"
Their voices sagged with despair.
No hope remained.
"Abandon ship. Let's abandon ship." One voice dared to say.
The silence that followed was heavy.
Then another voice answered, flat and bitter: "Abandon ship? And go where?"
"At the warship's velocity, anyone who leaves will still be flung through space at over 200,000 kilometers per second. Sure, our bodies can withstand much—but colliding with even a pebble of a celestial body at that speed will crush us instantly."
The speed was too great. Once ejected, they would have no way to properly steer or stabilize.
Perhaps they could drift in a vast arc and circle back, rejoining the warship's course.
But then what?
Star City 5 was a nest of chaos. By the time they returned, it might already have fallen to the same spies now devouring the warship.
And even if it hadn't, the main server would have no time to build deceleration systems for them. They would either slam into Star City 5 like meteors—or overshoot entirely, cast adrift into endless deep space, to wander forever.
"This is still better than dying here, now," someone muttered. "At least… there's a chance."
There were always a few who clung to hope.
They slipped through narrow crevices, crawling into the void.
But the moment they emerged, they stumbled into a hunting party of spies already sweeping the sector.
The spies turned at once—like wolves catching the scent of blood.
In an instant, they lunged.
The fleeing soldiers bolted outward, desperate to reach open space, to abandon the warship entirely.
But the spies would never allow it. No matter how fast the soldiers ran, they could not outpace weapon-fire.
The attacks came like lightning.
Shots tore through flesh.
The wounds burned as though their bodies were paper set alight—every particle of their being turning red, dissolving, collapsing.
When the last scream died, the spies shifted their gaze.
Toward the place the escapees had just emerged from.
They had already killed countless.
But the numbers didn't add up. Too many survivors remained unaccounted for.
This exit meant something.
They pressed forward, deeper.
They could smell fresh life.
Their pace quickened.
Soon, they reached a sealed compartment. At its center lay a rectangular box—perfectly intact, seamless.
It was a shelter designed by the main server itself, constructed to conceal the soldiers within. No cracks, no openings—except when someone left.
Inside, the trapped soldiers received the message:
[Warning: Spies have located this refuge. Evacuate immediately.]
Evacuate.
Not resist.
There was no resistance worth attempting. The enemy's weapons made defense meaningless. A single sheet of alloy was nothing. Even a multi-layered vacuum shield would only delay the inevitable.
Panic overtook them.
The soldiers rushed for the exit.
Some were unlucky—stumbling straight into waiting spies.
And when they saw those black, abyssal weapons aimed at their hearts, there was no time to turn, no time to run.
They could only charge forward blindly, eyes shut, hurling themselves into the jaws of death.
But everyone knew—
It was futile.
The core problem was simple: the enemy knew them, while they remained blind.
The spies had spent ample time studying their prey, devising precise strategies tailored against them.
The soldiers, by contrast, knew nothing. They were unprepared for the enemy's arrival.
Many among them couldn't understand.
If the higher command had known from the start that the warship would face disaster, why hadn't they taken precautions?
Only a small number grasped the truth: they themselves were the experiment.
Precautions?
Equipping every soldier with advanced weapons?
Who could guarantee those weapons would even work against such an enemy?
It was simpler to let the first wave die—then analyze the results and develop targeted countermeasures.
"Bastards!"
That was all the soldiers could scream.
Thousands scattered in chaos, fleeing like headless flies.
But the spies had already begun converging, tightening the noose from the outside.
Whenever the fastest escapees clashed with spies, they were driven back, herded toward the center once more.
Damoro watched the pattern unfold.
"Still no different."
"Exactly like before—these soldiers can't maintain composure in the face of danger."
"Though… I suppose the fault isn't entirely theirs. The disparity is simply too vast."
The Eternal Cycle Star Nation drew no line between "new era people" and "pre-era people."
Everyone alive now was a survivor of the past age.
Damoro included.
He had lived through the Gas Victory Era.
And to his eyes, today's soldiers looked no different from those of that time—
Just a flock of sheep.
He found himself wondering: had the era truly advanced at all?
"Maybe my expectations are too high. I expect everyone to be like me—"
"Or like those forged within Hyperdimensional Space."
The reality was that most of these people had never lived through situations like this. Even a lifespan of ten thousand years meant nothing. If someone had spent all those millennia as an ordinary worker, their mind would still be ordinary.
Ask them a complex mathematical problem, and they would stumble. A child who had studied math for only half a year might solve it more easily.
Longevity was not directly proportional to ability.
In the Eternal Cycle Star Nation, most people had no need to join real battles. And when they did, it was usually within virtual arenas.
But simulated combat was not the same as reality.
Virtual battles could sharpen reflexes and refine technique, but they could never temper mentality.
And mentality was the essence of war.
The high death rate aboard the warship was not solely due to the spies' speed; it was also because the soldiers themselves were weak.
Damoro watched as the soldiers clustered together like sheep, while the wolves—the spies—tightened their encirclement.
At that moment, he too began to move.
The sheep gathering meant the wolves would gather as well.
And only then could the tiger strike, wiping them all out in one sweep.
"Spies are everywhere—we need a direction to break through!"
"Break through? Don't kid yourself! What do you think this is, a battlefield of low-level civilizations? Their weapons may not have wide coverage, but the firing rate is insane! We're already dead men; no point struggling."
"Damn it, I'll take those bastards down with me!"
The sheep effect itself was born of fear.
Some lives in the Eternal Cycle Star Nation did not fear death, but they were few. For most beings, fear of death was natural—and the longer one lived, the deeper that fear sank.
Their present cowardice embodied this truth perfectly.
Were there truly no soldiers here who feared neither life nor death?
Of course there were.
But such individuals would not have hidden among the crowd. They were most likely already dead.
The spies pressed closer, weapons charged and ready.
A sigh rippled through the air.
Then came the whirlwind of slaughter.
This was not the battlefield of a primitive civilization; this was the clash of higher orders.
Here, disparity in weaponry alone could dictate absolute victory, regardless of numbers.
Damoro's immense speed tore through the converging spies, his particle threads brushing across their bodies and erasing them in an instant.
This was not the first massacre he had carried out, nor would it be the last.
He did not linger. He moved on to the next sector, another round of slaughter awaiting.
By the end of a single day, a third of the spies aboard the warship had fallen to him.
But the enemy had grown cautious. They had noticed him.
[Soldier Damoro, enemies are converging on your position. Their numbers exceed 1,700, and they may be employing new tactics.]
The main server continuously fed Damoro information, sparing him the need to gather intel himself.
"Perfect timing."
"I was just wondering how to bring them all together."
He glanced at the map.
The spies weren't approaching from one side but from all directions. Soon he would be encircled, trapped in the center.
Damoro picked a point for a breakthrough.
He lunged forward, tearing through a cluster of spies. Breaking the circle, he reshaped their formation into a fan. This fixed their attack angle, limiting their maneuvering.
"Their attacks are crude—primitive. Almost no strategy at all."
"Just like most human armies."
Damoro had marched across the battlefields of the Federation and the Twenty-Eight Star Nations Alliance.
He had lived through countless wars.
Yet all of them were the same—raw, brutal, simple.
To call it war was generous. To put it bluntly, it was nothing more than a race in weapon superiority.
My weapons are stronger, so I win.
Yours are weaker, so you die.
That was all.
War, stripped of depth and strategy. A flaw born of excessive technological reliance.
True, overwhelming superiority on the battlefield often erased the need for other methods.
But Damoro could never accept warfare devoid of strategy.
Strategy could lessen the cost of victory, soften the toll of defeat, and—on rare occasions—even tilt the tide of battle.
Damoro would never allow himself to be caught at a disadvantage.
He always seized the position most favorable to himself.
Elsewhere aboard the warship.
A cluster of soldiers was monitoring the spies' movements through the main server.
When they saw masses of spies converging toward a single point, reactions varied—some felt fortunate, others mournful, and still others fell into despair.
"I wonder who got exposed this time."
"With infiltration on that scale, it has to be more than a handful."
"Hopefully they can hold out a little longer—draw more of the spies—so the rest of us might still have a chance to escape this ship."
It was the old principle: sacrifice others to preserve yourself.
Human nature laid bare.
"There are too many of them—over ten thousand spies."
"Once those people are wiped out, the pressure on us will only intensify."
"Forget this ship, just abandon it! The enemy's too powerful—Eternal Cycle Star Nation is finished!"
More and more soldiers toyed with the thought of fleeing, abandoning the warship altogether.
In their hearts, they no longer saw even a sliver of hope for victory.
Then—suddenly.
They watched as several of the converging spies fell dead.
A spark of hope flickered.
"Could it be that someone over there has figured out a way to kill the spies?"
But a voice quickly doused the fragile flame.
"Just futile struggling. They barely scratched a few. By now, hundreds of our own must already have died."
The tension grew thicker, the air heavy with dread.
Someone finally turned to the main server:
"Main server, how many of our people have fallen over there?"
The answer came back.
[0 people]
"???"
"The main server isn't joking, is it? How could no one be dead?"
"They must've been erased. Isn't that always the case in Star City? Once you die, you're wiped clean from the main server's records."
Everyone found this a reasonable explanation.
Those who had grown excited quickly sank back into despair.
"Main server, how many are still alive over there?"
Since the dead were erased without a trace, they could only ask about the living to infer the casualties.
The main server replied:
[1 person!]
"Only one left… the spies are overwhelming."
A wave of disappointment spread through the crowd. Their plan—to divert attention to that sector so they might escape—seemed ruined.
"Wait—look! The spies are still moving in that direction."
On the main server's map, the enemy had not dispersed. In fact, even more spies were being deployed to that same point.
"The enemy's intel must be outdated. They're still chasing just one person."
"Maybe… maybe there's still hope."
They noticed a dozen spies in their own sector also shifting course, rushing toward that location.
And then—more red markers vanished from the map. Several spies had died, precisely in the same direction.
"Wasn't there only one person left there? Why are more spies dying? Is the main server malfunctioning?"
Confusion spread like wildfire.
[The main server is not malfunctioning. There is indeed only one person there.]
[Due to severe damage to the warship's sensors, direct footage cannot be shared. However, the main server can generate a simulation.]
The simulated feed was virtually indistinguishable from a live recording.
The soldiers immediately requested the projection.
Within seconds, the main server reconstructed the scene.
They saw him—one lone figure, drifting in the vast wreckage of the warship. Dozens of metallic cubes orbited his body like satellites.
He had sealed off all retreat routes, leaving only the front corridor open.
It was not the posture of a man fleeing. He was waiting. He intended to face the enemy head-on.
And shockingly, many of the incoming spies—so close they were separated only by a thin pipe—had halted. They lingered, cautious, as if unwilling to advance. They were waiting for reinforcements.
The soldiers could hardly believe it.
The spies… were actually afraid?
Just then, the lone man's voice came through, calm but cutting.
"Do you think hiding behind a wall will keep you safe from me?"
"Don't forget where you are."
"This is my home turf."
"Main server, dismantle the wall."
At his command, the hundreds-of-meters-thick bulkhead exploded apart.
In the same instant, several cubes swarmed in front of him, disassembling and reforming into a single massive weapon.
A violent surge of energy ignited from its barrel, unleashing a storm that swallowed every spy in sight.
Death.
This time, it was the spies who were annihilated.
Hundreds of them disintegrated into raw particles, erased without a trace.
"This…"
All the soldiers watching the simulated feed were left speechless.
When had such a powerful figure ever existed aboard their warship?
Who was he?
The warship was Damoro's home ground; with the main server at his command, he could accomplish things no ordinary soldier could.
In truth, everyone on the warship depended on it. Without the server's constant support, they wouldn't survive more than a week—two or three days at most before being hunted down.
But that wasn't Damoro's real edge.
What he truly preferred was the boundless void itself—open space, stripped of all obstacles—where he could kill without restraint.
Boom!!!
A colossal fragment of the warship crashed down behind him.
From the wreckage, a spy emerged—its body twisting like a living cyclone. Shards of armor and plating were drawn into its vortex, fusing into its frame until it stood hundreds of meters tall.
The storm condensed, its whirling mass forming a massive, mist-clad fist that came crashing down toward Damoro.
He responded with a lance of particles, a stream of light that sliced through the haze like a molecular blade.
The stream expanded, every molecule detonating in rapid succession—bursts of white brilliance flaring like fireworks.
But these "fireworks" carried the force of millions of tons of TNT.
The cleaved mist collapsed, yet Damoro remained perfectly centered in the cut.
The next instant, the fog surged back from every direction, like a vast beast kicking up a storm of dust to engulf him whole.
"Fall."
Damoro uttered a single word, calm, dismissive.
Gravity obeyed. All the dust slammed downward, pinned to the wreckage below.
A cube weapon shot skyward, fragmenting into twenty-seven smaller modules. Each linked to the energy of his core cubes, firing beams of searing light in all directions.
The ground became a lattice of annihilation. Temperatures soared into the hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius—enough to vaporize even the warship's reinforced alloys.
But then—
Countless subatomic particles slipped through the web of lasers, streaking toward Damoro.
He watched as they struck the wreckage, each impact erupting into a chain reaction, flash-vaporizing entire sections.
In an instant, his entire body fragmented—dispersing into a cloud of ultra-dense particles that rushed forward to meet the assault head-on.
Every molecule of his being clashed with an incoming particle. Each vibration released a surge of energy, annihilating the enemy matter on contact.
Moments later, the cloud converged, and Damoro stood whole once again.
He flicked a gesture. Several cubes streaked forward, locking together into an energy field. Instead of clinging to him, it detached and surged outward, projected directly into enemy territory.
There, several spies revealed themselves, their bodies unraveling into particle streams.
The earlier attack—it had been them.
The energy field bore down on them. In response, their scattered forms fused into a massive ring-shaped construct.
The ring pulsed, generating a monstrous force field that tangled with Damoro's attack, tearing it apart molecule by molecule.
The next heartbeat, the ring flared.
It unleashed a blinding beam of light.
The blinding beam struck Damoro head-on.
The photons riding the light converted instantly into electrons as they collided with his body, tearing through him like a swarm of razors. They scoured his atomic lattice, hammering at his molecular bonds in an attempt to tear his very atoms apart.
But Damoro's particle armor held firm. Every assaulting electron was blocked.
Another cube in front of him flared to life. It drew in the electrons, swallowing them whole. The device collapsed under the strain, and in its place, a micro black hole bloomed—a gravitational well so intense it bent space within a fraction of a breath.
The cube itself reconfigured, transforming into a shield that materialized before Damoro. It radiated torrents of negative energy, counterbalancing the pull, anchoring him in place against annihilation.
Even so, the black hole's influence rippled outward. Though only atomic in scale, its gravity dragged on the warship itself, bleeding off hundreds of kilometers per second of its speed.
Debris, fragments of metal, even living bodies were ripped away, devoured by the sudden singularity.
In less than 0.01 seconds, it winked out, leaving a hollow stillness.
But the reprieve was fleeting.
A jagged bolt of lightning split the void.
Even as the black hole vanished, Damoro's surroundings were already awash with a haze of particles.
He narrowed his gaze, tuning himself to the micro-world.
There—he saw it. Within the vacuum, particles were spontaneously combining into the simplest of hydrogen atoms. The atoms vibrated in unison, resonating with his very body.
The next moment, his form surged outward, expanding in an instant. His body's diameter swelled to over a kilometer within a single second.
Then came the strike.
The assault from the micro-world landed—not as a weapon of precision, but as an all-encompassing devastation. Damoro's body collapsed without warning, one-third of him atomized in a single blow.
At that exact moment, hundreds of spies materialized from every direction.
"It's over!"
The soldiers watching the simulation cried out together.
They had thought the spies' immunity to conventional weaponry was already insurmountable—but this… this was something far beyond. The spies hadn't even been fighting at full strength before.
Even Damoro's eyes widened.
He had already accounted for their strength, had already overestimated their capabilities—or so he thought. Yet he had still miscalculated.
They hadn't simply prepared counters to individual weapons. Their operation wasn't standard at all. It was something else—something far more deliberate, far more dangerous.
"Could it be… they've been aware of me all along?"
His thoughts flicked back to the figure who had warned him at the start. For a time, he had wondered if that person had been a spy as well.
In Hyperdimensional Space, true NPCs didn't exist—everyone bore their own identity. If that rule held here in the real world, then his inability to distinguish soldiers from spies suggested the spies had already marked him.
At the beginning, perhaps they hadn't considered him worth their attention.
But over time, they must have recognized the truth—that he was not an opponent to be handled lightly.
And in these past few days… perhaps they had already completed some kind of "upgrade."
Damoro let out a cold breath.
"They really do know how to stir up chaos…"
"But it doesn't matter. As long as you keep deploying small fry like this—no large-scale strikes—your chance of victory will remain exactly zero."
Against any ordinary vessel, Damoro could have stood still and awaited his end.
But the enemy wasn't fielding warships.
They only had individual soldier tactics.
And in that arena, Damoro reigned supreme.
This was the confidence of the king of single combat.
Hundreds of spies unleashed gravitational fields at once, trying to bind his particles, to keep his body from recombining.
In that instant, Damoro's consciousness fractured—splintering across every atom of his form.
Consciousness Fragmentation.
It was his unique ability.
He could divide his awareness into not infinite, but hundreds of thousands of fragments. More than enough.
Each shard of thought commanded a handful of particles—sometimes a dozen, sometimes fewer.
Those particles activated their own electric fields, linking together into larger base units.
Then, they charged.
Each unit hurtled toward the spies and detonated on contact.
The chain of explosions disrupted the enemy's assault. Damoro seized the opening, summoning two distant cube devices into play.
They closed from the left and right, enclosing the battlefield between them.
These were not ordinary cubes. They were anti-super weapons.
The twin devices shifted position, one above, one below. A lattice of lasers stretched between them, sweeping across the entire field.
Every particle caught within underwent a phase shift.
Energy levels dropped to their lowest states.
A single particle sinking to low energy meant nothing—but here, all particles were forced into suppression.
Motion slowed. Space itself felt heavy, frozen.
Even the battlefield's matter slipped into superconductivity.
Damoro flooded the superconductive field with raw energy.
And then, in the very next instant, the phase shift collapsed.
The superconductors returned to their normal states, releasing every joule stored within as thermal shock.
The result was instantaneous.
Hundreds of spies liquefied, their forms melting into nothingness.
Damoro's body suffered as well, vast portions dissolving under the same stress. But he simply reassembled himself, piece by piece.
Now, he was only half the size he had been before. The energy core in his central cube was visibly depleted, its reserves cut deep.
Yet in the eyes of every soldier aboard the warship—
At this moment, Damoro was magnificent.
"He actually fought back," someone whispered, stunned.
"And killed them."
"What kind of battle instinct is this?!"
"Damn it, it's making my blood boil!"
"Who the hell is he? Could it be that our Star Nation has been secretly cultivating a force of super-soldiers?"
For soldiers who had lived countless years, this was the first time they had praised someone so highly.
And precisely because of their long lives, they understood just how impossible such combat truly was—this wasn't something just anyone could accomplish.
Even in the virtual world, achieving a battle like this would make one a legend.
"Calm down. He's only taken out a few hundred spies."
"There's still half left. Even if he wipes out the other half, more are still crawling all over the warship."
"Look at his body—it's shrunk drastically. That means his computational power has been cut down as well. The main server can compensate for the energy deficit, but it can't replace raw processing power."
Each basic unit of their bodies was a hyper-integrated computational module. Losing a portion of one's body meant losing a portion of one's brain.
Slower. Duller. Not nearly as sharp.
"Then I'll give him mine!" one soldier suddenly declared.
"I'll head to the battlefield and sacrifice part of myself to make up for his loss."
His voice was unshakably firm.
Better to become part of a stronger being than watch him suffer endless mental torment.
"Oh? Such resolve… but are you even capable of that?"
The question crushed him instantly.
He couldn't even stand against the spies on his own—let alone offer himself as support. He couldn't even die properly.
He really was useless.
Others nearby shared the same thought, but once they realized it would only mean certain death, silence followed.
It was the classic inner war: if you hesitate at the very first step of resolve, you will, almost certainly, give up.
"More spies, incoming!" someone shouted.
On the tactical map, fresh clusters of enemies were converging.
Across other sections of the warship, pockets of slaughter still raged.
They could not see their own allies, because the main server refused to risk exposing who was genuine and who was an infiltrator.
If it highlighted allies on the map, wouldn't that just be painting targets for the spies?
"Over 2000 now! Some of the spies among us have pulled away to join as well!"
"Good! Keep dragging more toward him. If we can concentrate them there, we might just have a window to escape!"
At that moment, a handful of soldiers grew restless with excitement.
They were ready to cut and run, gambling on Damoro's strength to draw the fire.
Damoro himself was oblivious to their thoughts.
He was staring at the map, watching more and more spies converge. But his reaction wasn't fear. It wasn't retreat. It was—
"Too few."
"In this situation, and you still send so few against me? Do you really take me so lightly?!"
"Main server, expand this space. Now."
Instantly, the battlefield around him widened, reshaping into a massive bowl-shaped pit nearly 1000 meters across. Its rim split open straight into outer space. Anyone slipping free here would be ejected into the void.
"Perfect."
Now the arena was vast, open. Damoro floated at its heart.
The bowl wasn't aligned with the warship; it was tilted. Its mouth pointed toward the warship's prow, not directly upward.
That meant Damoro still only had to face enemies in a fan-shaped spread before him. For the spies, flanking around would mean circling past the massive hull—an added difficulty.
This was the battlefield Damoro wanted.
The spies did not leave him waiting.
This time they were smarter. A hundred at once, emerging all around, spreading wide.
They locked into a circular formation, ringed tight with their focus on Damoro.
The moment the circle sealed, Damoro felt it—
A shift.
Indescribable. Subtle yet overwhelming. Something pressed down on him, a distortion he couldn't pinpoint.
But he didn't need to.
Because in the very next instant—
Damoro vanished.
Body, weapons, everything, gone without a trace.
From the warship's bow, a piercing beam erupted, sweeping across the sky of the pit. Inside that blazing line, Damoro's form reassembled.
Resurrection.
Hyperdimensional Space lifeforms could only be erased within Hyperdimensional Space itself. Otherwise, as long as resurrection-grade items were at hand, they could always return.
"Quantum field resonance…"
Damoro was still shaken.
He hadn't expected them to wield such a devastating, purely technological strike. He had truly died just now.
But because a fragment of his consciousness resided within Hyperdimensional Space—linked directly to the warship's resurrection module—he was restored to realspace.
"If not for that safeguard, I would've been gone. The higher-ups really think of everything."
"But… there won't be a next time."
From above, a cube weapon zipped to his side, one he'd pulled earlier from the armory.
He had prepared more than one trump card.
If they wanted to fight with the quantum field, he would answer with his own.
"Pseudo-Dimensional Interla—"
The battlefield below warped.
Three-dimensional space twisted, surged and was forcibly rewritten into the fourth dimension!