The desert plateau turned into the epicenter of an energy storm unlike anything Earth would ever witness again. With White Diamond's order for total suppression issued, the sky was painted in an opaque hue—a violent mix between the blinding radiance of the Empire and the crimson pulse of my own $4 \times 4\text{ meter}$ gem. There was no longer any room for diplomacy or passive analysis; the entire Great Diamond Authority was about to unleash their combined might to erase me from existence.
"My Diamond! The three Authority Signatures are synchronizing at a sonic resonance level!" Yarbis's voice resonated inside my mind, straining the damaged processors of my visor to keep the floating telemetry on screen. "If they fire a combined direct energy attack, the physical cohesion of the entire plateau will evaporate. You must break their formation now!"
"I'm not breaking anything, Yarbis. Let them channel everything they've got. I want them to watch their old world fracture," I replied, broadening my 17-meter shoulders and planting my light boots firmly into the cracked earth.
Yellow Diamond was the first to react. Regaining stability in her left arm after my previous quantum attack, she extended both hands toward the sky. The generators on her flagship channeled a massive current of destabilizing electrical energy, transferring the voltage directly into her frame. Her eyes flared with an incandescent yellow as she launched consecutive volleys of lightning toward me. The impacts slammed against my micro-plasma defenses, detonating mechanical cannons and turning my black metal turrets into molten scrap in a matter of seconds.
At the same time, Blue Diamond raised her voice in a mournful, agonizing chant. Her aura of grief no longer crept along the ground; it surged like a tsunami of cyan light, clouding the senses of anyone in the quadrant. I felt the pressure of her psychic attack strike the firewalls of my optimized mind. It was an ancient pain—the weight of a thousand destroyed colonies and the burden of her eternal mourning. My logic processors began throwing overheating alerts as they scrambled to break down Blue's emotional frequency.
"Kneel before your creator!" Yellow roared, taking another step forward as her lightning shattered the final line of my sentinel drones, leaving me completely exposed in the center of the plateau.
"Your existence is a sorrow that must be dissipated, Red," Blue whispered, intensifying the light of her mantle to overwhelm my quantum receptors.
I stumbled for a second, feeling the combined weight of Yellow's physical power and Blue's mental oppression. But the absolute joy of being perfect—that certainty that I was no longer anyone's scientific plaything—ignited a spark of crimson fury in my core. My red gem throbbed with the force of a runaway reactor.
"I have no creator!" I shouted, and my 17-meter voice sliced through Blue's mist like a tempered blade.
I channeled my superior intelligence to recalculate the density of my pale light body. With a swift movement, I extended my hands outward and activated my quantum destructuring power. Only this time, I didn't launch it as a direct pulse; I used it to forge a bond-inversion field around my silhouette.
When Yellow's lightning and Blue's mist struck my crimson barrier, my gem's frequency instantly hacked the structure of their attacks. Yellow's electricity was redirected into the ground, dissolving the desert rock into crystal dust, while Blue's sorrow was reprogrammed, turning into an electromechanical shockwave that bounced straight back toward them.
The impact of their reflected energy forced both Yellow and Blue back several meters, causing their colossal light forms to flicker with instability. The remaining Homeworld soldiers on the flanks fled toward their ships in absolute terror after witnessing two of their deities held at bay by a single fair-skinned, white-haired gem.
However, the real danger did not come from the flanks.
White Diamond had remained floating above the chaos, watching my counterattack with glacial calm. Seeing her sisters destabilized, White extended her massive white arms, and all the light across the plateau seemed to be sucked toward her face. Her silhouette shone with the intensity of a supernova, erasing any trace of red or cyan in the desert.
"You've played at being free long enough, Silica," White's voice didn't echo through the air; it etched itself directly into the atoms of my gem, paralyzing my light joints entirely. "But the game ends here. Return to my perfection."
A beam of pure, massive white light—with a diameter wide enough to cover my entire fortress—descended directly from White's face toward my chest. It was the ultimate attack of absolute control, designed to erase my personality, my color, and my history, reducing me to a mindless statue of white crystal.
The beam scored a direct hit on my four-meter crimson gem.
The pain was indescribable. I felt White's frequency trying to dismantle the flawless cubic structure of my covalent network—the very framework I had worked so hard to build on the mineral planet. My long white hair glowed with a blinding light, and my imperial dress began to lose its texture, turning monochromatic under the pressure of the original monarch.
"Gem structure at maximum capacity!" Yarbis yelled, his voice fading into a continuous hum. "The four-meter density is collapsing... my Diamond... the system... is shutting down..."
I fell to my knees on the glass-fused sand, holding back White's beam with my hands of light, feeling my fair human appearance crack. White smiled from above, convinced that the victory of her architecture was inevitable. But deep within my optimized mind, in the final corner of my superior intelligence that had not yet been colonized by her white light, I made a drastic call.
If White controlled the matrix of light... I controlled the density of the matter supporting it. I wasn't going to fight her frequency; I was going to overload it with the sheer weight of my own being.
I gritted my teeth, forcing my red gem to throb one last time before the end of the chapter, halting the advance of the white light in my chest through pure, brutal atomic compression.
"You... still... haven't seen... my true limit... White," I muttered through crimson sparks, bracing for the final counterattack that would decide the fate of the Earth.
"Critical structure endangered! Total failure of logic systems!" Yarbis's final cry was choked out by a sharp beep inside my mind before his signal cut out completely, leaving me in deafening silence.
White's beam of white light kept boring into my chest, searing through my layers of artificial light and trying to force her old architecture onto my new Diamond matrix. The pain was no longer a warning sign; it was an absolute pressure trying to erase my human identity, my white hair, and my crimson gem to turn me into just another gray piece in her collection. The glass ground beneath my 17-meter boots cracked and sank under the weight of the colossal energy crushing us.
"It is useless, Red," White's voice echoed in every atom across the plateau, icy and flawless. "You cannot rewrite what I have already decreed. Your light belongs to me."
"I... told... you... NO!" I roared, throwing my head back with what little strength I had left. My eyes, now burning with an incandescent red glare, defied her blinding gaze.
If White controlled the frequency of pure light, I controlled the density and weight of the mineral matter supporting it. I wasn't going to beat her in a battle of coloration or optical purity; I had to beat her using the atomic science I had perfected for four years on the mineral planet.
I clamped my massive hands around the stream of white light hitting my chest. Instead of repelling it, I forced my $4 \times 4\text{ meter}$ gem to compress its internal molecular structure a step beyond what was physically possible. I shrank the interatomic gaps in my carbon lattice to the absolute minimum, driving my quantum density to levels no ordinary gem or Imperial Diamond could endure without poofing.
Instantly, my red gem began acting like an energy black hole. White's beam was no longer washing my brain; it was being sucked in, trapped, and crushed by the massive mineral gravity of my core. The white light began to bend, distort, and turn a dense, pure crimson as it entered my system.
White's expression shifted from absolute confidence to genuine mathematical shock. Her giant arms trembled slightly as she realized her own attack was being consumed and converted by my structure.
"What... what are you doing?" Yellow managed to utter from the ground, watching in horror as the entire desert began to vibrate, with rocks and the remains of mechanical turrets floating into the air due to the gravitational field I was generating around myself.
"I am hacking your perfection, White!" I shouted with a voice that warped space-time across the plateau. "You created the rules of light, but matter... matter obeys my laws now!"
With one final surge of compression, my 17-meter body flared with a crimson pulse so dense and heavy that White's light beam snapped shut, dissipating into the air like broken threads. The recoil from the atomic absorption triggered an expanding shockwave that swept across the remaining miles of the plateau, kicking up a wall of red dust and forcing the Authority's three flagships to fire up their emergency shields to avoid being dragged in by the gravity.
I slowly stood up in the center of the desert, now transformed into a sea of smooth, crimson glass. My fair human appearance remained intact, my white hair floated charged with static energy, and the gem on my chest throbbed with a red so deep it seemed to absorb the sun itself. I was exhausted, my internal systems were operating on backup reserves, but I stood firm, dominating the battlefield with a smirk of pure, absolute confidence.
The three Diamonds grouped together in the distance, staring at me with a mix of caution, fury, and, for the first time in Era 1 history, a deep respect tinged with fear. They had come to suppress a defective anomaly, only to run headfirst into the birth of a new era.
"This is not over, Red," White declared, her face regaining its imperial rigidity, though her eyes never stopped scanning the incredible density of my matrix. "You have disrupted the balance of the empire, but Earth will not be your refuge for long."
I clenched my fists, ready for the final clash looming on the horizon.
END OF CHAPTER 35