Chapter 381: Faster-than-Light Missile!

After a period of intense atmospheric acceleration, the dropship gradually stabilized in low orbit. Jason sat in his command chair, privately communicating with Lily aboard the Deep Space.

The feeling of finally returning home was always wonderful. The rest of the operators were also granted clearance to contact their families.

"I'm on my way... I'm finally coming home."

"It's a tragedy that the mission failed, though..."

During their first day on Planet Dige, bathed in sunshine under a blue-green sky, the environment felt so similar to Earth that it had filled Jason with nostalgia and excitement.

But that joy had quickly been crushed by overwhelming anxiety... first, the fear that the Gaia entity might turn hostile, followed by the terrifying realization of an impending alien armada.

This immense psychological pressure wasn't just felt by the enlisted soldiers and research staff; it weighed heavily on Jason as well.

Especially after making the controversial command decision to hold the line for an extra month, the pressure had nearly broken him. Sometimes he would wake up drenched in sweat from nightmares of the fleet's destruction!

In the chaotic fog of command, he had frequently been forced to rely solely on his enhanced survival instincts. It was a terrifying reality, using an intangible, biological "gut feeling" as a strategic reference point offered absolutely zero sense of security.

But now, he was finally going home. Back to the warm, heavily armored safety of the Deep Space, the true sanctuary of the Federation.

"Sigh... we'll just have to find another habitable world after we escape this system... Honestly, the Deep Space is quite nice, too. Living aboard long-term isn't a bad fate! It's perfectly comfortable," Jason said, forcing a weary smile. "It feels like an eternity since I've had your homemade sushi. Let's make some tonight..."

Although his heart was still hammering against his ribs and the fleet hadn't actually escaped the danger zone yet, Jason's expression softened; seeing a loved one always melted the tension away.

Lily smiled gently on the screen. "Look out your window. Can you see her? The ocean is churning violently. She seems absolutely devastated that you're leaving. She looks like she wants to go with you..."

Clearly, Lily was in high spirits knowing Jason was safe and inbound. From her station in the Astrometrics lab, she was using the mothership's optical telescopes to track Jason's dropship, giving her a clear view of the chaotic changes happening in the ocean below.

"Really? I suppose that's how kids are... they throw tantrums when playtime is over." Jason pulled up a rear-facing camera feed and watched the violent waves rippling across the sea.

He spoke thoughtfully, "When a stranger visits a child's house and plays with them all day, the child often begs to leave with the stranger when they pack up to go... In that emotional moment, the child desperately wants to follow them."

"She finds strangers fascinating?"

"It's completely normal... all toddlers are like that... Once they've experienced something fun and exciting, how could they possibly accept going back to being bored and lonely?"

As Jason spoke, a sudden, blinding flash of inspiration struck him. The idea, like a strange, aggressive seed, instantly took root and gripped his mind.

He was stunned by his own audacity!

"What's wrong?" Lily asked, noticing his sudden silence.

Jason's heart pounded wildly. It felt as though he had been possessed by a sudden, manic energy. "Yes! That's it! That's exactly it!"

Without even explaining, he slammed his fist onto the comms panel, switching to the cockpit channel. "Pilot! Hard about! Bring us back around right now! Take us back down to Planet Dige!"

"We're going back for one last attempt..."

This is our absolute best shot!

As he shouted the orders, Jason struggled frantically to unbuckle his crash webbing, his face flushed with adrenaline.

This might be the closest they ever come to successfully extracting her!

Watching all of her "friends" fly away had plunged Elara into a state of extreme depression and crushing disappointment. She was on the verge of an emotional meltdown. She was incredibly unhappy.

Running back to her in her moment of deepest despair, instantly flooding her with joy, and then offering her an escape—the psychological leverage would increase their success rate exponentially!

"Once we get her aboard the ship, we're never letting her go back!"

Lily paused, processing Jason's manic expression, and quickly realized what he was planning. She didn't try to stop him; she only offered a quiet, "Be careful, Jason. And come back fast!"

Jason had already freed himself from his seat and sprinted into the cockpit, physically ordering the pilot to turn around. The pilot was so startled by the sudden reversal that it took him a few seconds to process the command before wrestling the yoke.

The dropship was packed with Special Forces operators who immediately grasped Jason's tactical logic. Their eyes widened, and several of them grinned, rubbing their armored hands together in excitement.

It made perfect sense!

Only a brilliant, slightly unhinged Commander could come up with a psychological kidnapping scheme like this!

"Push the thrusters past the redline! Get us back down there! We are on a ticking clock! We cannot keep the Deep Space hovering in orbit waiting for us! They are approaching geostationary extraction parameters right now!"

"Move, move, move! We have to be fast!"

Urged on by Jason's roars, the operators scrambled to secure their gear. The massive dropship banked sharply, its structural frame groaning as it executed an emergency atmospheric dive.

Just then, Jason's console beeped with an urgent hail from Austin. "Jason... what the hell is going on?! Why is your transponder diving back into the atmosphere? Did your ship suffer a mechanical failure? Do we need to scramble a rescue shuttle?"

It took Jason a solid minute of rapid-fire explanation to make Austin understand the psychological play.

Austin was completely dumbfounded. Is that actually going to work...?

Wait... it actually makes perfect psychological sense...

Looking through the reinforced glass of the dropship, Jason could see the entire ocean throwing a massive tantrum. The water was boiling with shifting colors and massive, chaotic algal structures resembling angry eyes... The funny baby videos were gone. The educational cartoons were gone. All of her friends had flown away...

What is this?

Where did they go? Where are they?! There's no one left!

There isn't a single drone left!

Elara was genuinely furious. All that remained were the stupid, mindless native fish jumping around in the surf. They couldn't talk. They couldn't dance. They couldn't sing. They were boring idiots, and there was absolutely no fun to be had with them.

She felt a crushing sense of loss—the agonizing feeling of discovering something wonderful, only to have it ripped away. It made her incredibly angry.

She was throwing a massive tantrum, subconsciously trying to project her misery so her friends would pity her and come back to play.

Well, that's exactly how toddlers behave... Even a planetary-scale Gaia entity, after undergoing a month of early-childhood human conditioning, reacted the exact same way.

To put it bluntly, she just wanted to cheat the rules and throw a fit to get her way.

Just then, she suddenly sensed a familiar metallic craft streak across the sky. The dropship flared its retro-thrusters, hovering violently over the beach before several familiar figures sprinted out onto the sand!

Especially Jason... one of her absolute favorite friends!

Overwhelmed by a sudden, intense wave of joy, the ocean instantly calmed. A small, vibrant green sphere rapidly coalesced in the surf and bounced eagerly toward the shoreline to greet them.

I'm here!

I'm right here!

Jason's eyes nearly popped out of his skull when he looked past the sphere, deep into the shallows.

Right next to the massive, reinforced glass containment tank they had left behind... a massive, hyper-dense mass of algae was physically pushing itself into the enclosure!

Is that... her central core?!

It was incredibly vibrant, shifting rapidly through every color on the spectrum, resembling a chaotic, bioluminescent kaleidoscope... It was an impossibly dense, physical mass of neural algae!

Fortunately, the industrial glass tank they had constructed was massive—a rectangular prism roughly forty meters long. It was just large enough to barely contain the core...

As long as it fits, we can haul it!

Jason was ecstatic.

"Come travel the stars with us, Elara!" Jason roared over the external speakers, running toward the surf. "I promise, you can come back home whenever you want... But if you don't come with us right now, we are leaving forever! We will never come back!"

"We're going on an adventure into deep space!"

"The universe! The whole universe!"

Whether it was a psychological trick or a genuine promise, Jason didn't care; he just needed a quick, decisive victory. He had to get her in the tank before the trap snapped shut! His precognitive sense of doom was screaming so loudly it was giving him a migraine!

"Come with us! Let's go on an adventure! You love adventures!"

As Jason shouted, the green sphere bounced frantically, radiating absolute joy.

Just then, a brilliant point of light flared in the upper atmosphere, flashing as bright as a second, unexpected sun.

The sudden, blinding flash hit Jason like a physical blow, sending an extreme wave of nausea and primal terror crashing through his nervous system.

A few seconds later, Austin's voice screamed over the emergency tactical channel. "Jason... the second moon... the second moon was just annihilated!"

His voice was cracking with absolute panic. "...What the hell are you waiting for?! Did you get her?! Get out of there... hurry up! Damn it, go!"

A terrifyingly clear optical feed from the Deep Space's astrometrics lab flashed onto Jason's visor display.

The feed showed the second moon, where the Deep Space had been cloaked just twelve hours prior—erupting into a blinding sphere of pure energy.

The sheer scale of the detonation left the tactical analysts completely paralyzed with shock.

The moon had instantly vaporized, emitting an impossibly bright flash.

In the aftermath, a strange, elongated visual distortion appeared on the sensors, resembling a stretched, noodle-like spatial scar tracing the attack vector—a visual artifact created by the physics of the strike arriving before the light of its approach.

It looked as though cause and effect had been violently reversed.

"That's... a relativistic kill vehicle! A missile mounted with its own Warp Drive!" an analyst screamed in the background. "An antimatter warhead! My god... it's an FTL antimatter missile!"

"The enemy fleet didn't drop out of warp! They fired blindly down the vector and calculated the moon's exact orbital position based on archaic telemetry!"

Arthur Lambert broke into a cold sweat, his face turning deathly pale. If Jason hadn't aborted the cloaking protocol and ordered the mothership to break orbit twelve hours ago... they would all be dead right now...

However, in the cold reality of the present moment, the Federation sensors still hadn't detected a single trace of the enemy fleet.