Rebirth of the Super Battleship
Chapter 221: Giant Cannon! Giant Cannon!

A warship, an actual Province-Class warship weighing ten million tons, had just vanished without warning.

At that moment, Xiao Yu didn’t feel fear, but rather confusion.

“How did it just disappear? A fully functional warship, how could it just vanish? Where did it go?” Xiao Yu pondered with unease. “A mechanical failure? No, impossible. Even if it suffered some malfunction, it wouldn’t just disappear into thin air. Besides, the superluminal communication systems I installed are extremely reliable. They wouldn’t go completely dark. So… where did it go?”

This wasn’t the first time Xiao Yu had seen a ship disappear. During curvature travel, at the instant of surpassing light speed, the warship would vanish across all frequency bands due to light stacking phenomena, rendering it undetectable.

However, curvature travel never interfered with superluminal communication. And right now, even that channel was down, which made this case highly unusual.

Superluminal communication technology was based on the principle of quantum entanglement. That is, two entangled quantum particles, no matter how far apart, would react simultaneously if one of them was affected. Of course, there were exceptions—namely, when decoherence occurred.

Decoherence meant that a pair of entangled quantum particles lost their entangled properties. Once decoherence occurred, the two particles would cease to affect each other. If one changed state, the other would no longer respond. Their connection would be severed.

From the Beijing’s superluminal communication instruments, Xiao Yu observed a decoherence event. This meant that the connection between the Beijing and the Henan had been severed.

“Where did the Henan go?” Xiao Yu fell into deep thought. At the same time, he began directing nearby warships around the Henan’s last known location to begin searching.

This was an instinctive response. When something goes missing, you try to look for it.

But Xiao Yu quickly realized this was pointless. If even superluminal comms couldn’t reach it, then conventional search methods were meaningless. Once he recognized that, he immediately stopped the search.

Xiao Yu began to realize that the Henan’s disappearance had to be caused by some unknown process, phenomenon, or principle.

The crucial question was whether this phenomenon was natural, or caused by some sort of weapon used by the Molian Civilization.

At that moment, Xiao Yu was about thirty million kilometers from the planet. Even light would need a hundred seconds to cover that distance.

And exactly one hundred seconds after the Henan suddenly vanished, Xiao Yu witnessed something shocking.

A hole suddenly appeared in the atmosphere of that rocky planet.

It was circular, about five kilometers in diameter. The atmosphere of that planet was roughly three hundred kilometers thick, meaning the hole was cylindrical in shape, five kilometers wide and three hundred kilometers tall.

Within this cylindrical area, all the air vanished in an instant.

Without atmospheric shielding, external light poured down unimpeded to the planet’s surface, and light from the ground could radiate freely into space.

The abrupt absence of air created a powerful pressure differential, so the cylinder lasted less than ten seconds before being flooded by the surrounding atmosphere.

But in those brief ten seconds, with nothing blocking his view, Xiao Yu saw a bizarre object on the planet’s surface.

It was a massive pit. But in truth, it wasn’t so much a pit as it was raised above ground level. A colossal artificial structure stood upon the surface of the planet, several hundred meters tall and five kilometers in diameter. Its center was concave, making it look like a giant pit.

It resembled a massive satellite dish.

That cylindrical atmospheric void just now had been centered precisely on this pit-like structure and extended upward into space.

Xiao Yu was stricken with dread.

Xiao Yu immediately ran calculations and confirmed: at the exact moment the Henan vanished, that massive crater-like structure had been aimed precisely at it.

“What is this thing? A cannon with a five-kilometer-wide barrel? Isn’t that… far too excessive?” Xiao Yu was utterly stunned.

His own Province-Class warships were only a few thousand meters in length, and even their largest cannons had barrel diameters of just a few dozen meters. But the thing he was looking at now, this suspected cannon, had a muzzle diameter of five thousand meters.

If it was a weapon, then it was something Xiao Yu needed to take extremely seriously.

First, although he didn’t understand its principles, he could roughly infer its mode of attack based on what had just occurred.

It seemed capable of making matter vanish into thin air. The large amount of air that had disappeared earlier was likely collateral damage caught in the attack’s path.

Xiao Yu was sure that, for an instant, the straight line between the Henan and the cannon had become a vacuum of unimaginable purity. All matter in the path had vanished without a trace.

Second, the “projectile” of this weapon traveled faster than light. That would explain why the Henan disappeared first, and why Xiao Yu didn’t observe the effects in the planet’s atmosphere until a full one hundred seconds later.

Additionally, the energy consumption and size, possibly even mass of this weapon must be astronomical. That it was built on the planet’s surface rather than in space confirmed as much.

A five-kilometer-wide barrel, who knew how large the accompanying systems were? Dozens of kilometers? Hundreds? How much energy would it take to fire?

Being ground-based meant it would be vulnerable to atmospheric interference, and it would lack mobility. A space-based cannon would avoid those limitations. Yet the Molian Civilization had still chosen to construct it on the surface.

The Molians weren’t fools. They had clearly weighed all options carefully before making that decision.

“Faster-Than-Light Weapon… an extremely high-powered Faster-Than-Light Weapon…” The term flashed through Xiao Yu’s mind, and with it, a memory. His first battle with the Molian Civilization, where he had encountered that strange, unknown weapon.

During that encounter, his ships’ Four-Dimensional Shields had continuously lost energy. But Xiao Yu had disabled that weapon via attacks from the digital realm, then destroyed all defensive emplacements around that gas giant.

“As long as something contains energy, it must exhibit mass; and if it has mass, it must exhibit energy. Mass and energy are one and the same,” Xiao Yu muttered. “Back during that first encounter, the attack caused continuous energy loss. But this time, the entire mass of the Henan vanished. Perhaps… both weapons are actually the same, only now, the power level is simply on an entirely different scale, which is why the Henan disappeared outright…”

“So this… this is the true terror of a Level 5 Civilization. The FTL nature makes it impossible to detect in advance. The overwhelming power makes it impossible to defend against…”

“No wonder they’re so confident, confident they can hold out until reinforcements arrive, even with nearly all their ships destroyed.”

A chill spread through Xiao Yu’s chest.

“If that blast had targeted not the Henan, but my flagship, the Beijing… would I already be dead?” the thought crossed his mind.

“No. No, this kind of weapon must have a countermeasure, there must be a way to defend against it…” Xiao Yu’s mind whirled at full speed.

Due to the pressure difference, the massive cylindrical void had already been filled in. The giant cannon was once again concealed by the atmosphere, vanishing from Xiao Yu’s line of sight. But he had no idea when the next attack would come.

It was like walking blindfolded through pitch-black darkness, knowing that a savage lion was nearby, one that would inevitably attack, and when it did, it would be fatal. But you couldn’t see the lion, didn’t know when it would strike, and had no means of sensing it beforehand.

It was unbearable, an agony no less than that of a death row inmate awaiting execution. At least the condemned knows when the bullet will be fired. Xiao Yu had no idea when the blow that would kill him might fall.

Still, he kept thinking furiously. This was an extreme crisis. If he didn’t respond properly, death could arrive at any moment.

“To make matter vanish directly…” Xiao Yu muttered. “It must be caused by some principle I don’t yet understand. Also, it doesn’t appear capable of precise, surgical targeting. Rather, it indiscriminately eliminates all matter in its path. That’s obvious from the fact that even the atmosphere on that planet vanished.”

“One more thing, it has a power ceiling. After erasing a certain mass, it seems to lose effect. I can tell because the ships behind the Henan weren’t affected.”

“In that case, I’ve found a way to defend against it… Though it’s far from ideal.”

Xiao Yu came to a bitter conclusion.

“That is, to use a large number of ships to shield the Beijing from the front. As long as those ships get hit and disappear first, the Beijing won’t be in danger…”