Chapter 160: Earth in Imminent Peril

"Beep! Beep! Beep!"

The piercing alarm merged into one continuous flatline.

The originally crimson light vortex collapsed inward violently within just a few seconds.

The light disappeared.

In its place was a sphere of absolute darkness.

A micro black hole.

Saren's headless body was the first to suffer, yanked into the air by an irresistible pull.

"Pull back! Everyone back to the Abyss!" Osiris grabbed the dazed Nicholas and screamed into the comm channel.

Eight thousand Demon-Hunter Corps members immediately reversed direction, their back thrusters at full power, sprinting madly toward the Abyss main ship docked at the fortress perimeter.

The gravity was increasing exponentially.

The dark gold high-dimensional alloy floor began tearing apart across large areas.

Those support columns weighing thousands of tons, the destroyed mechanical wreckage, even the life pods in the distance—all flew uncontrollably into the air, spinning as they were sucked into that pitch-black sphere.

"Faster! Move faster!"

War Ghost ran at the back of the group, dragging two soldiers with damaged armor.

The metal plate under his feet suddenly flipped up.

"Damn it!" War Ghost's footing gave way, and he along with the two wounded soldiers were pulled toward the black hole.

A blue-green high-frequency cutting line whipped over from the side, wrapping precisely around War Ghost's waist.

Shadow Reaper crouched behind a relatively solid rock, gripping the other end of the line tightly.

"Don't let go!" Shadow Reaper gritted his teeth, his optical stealth suit's energy output already maxed out, the alloy steel spikes on his boots carving two deep grooves in the rock.

Using that pulling force, War Ghost slammed his thrusters into overload and forcefully threw the two wounded soldiers into the Abyss's rear hatch, rolling in himself.

"Close the hatch! All engines maximum power!"

On the Abyss's bridge, Osiris pressed both hands hard on the control stick.

The gravity readings on the main screen had already gone off the chart.

The ship's twelve fusion engines at the stern shot out blinding blue flames, trying to break free from this deadly suction.

But the ship wasn't moving forward at all.

The massive hull shook violently in space, not only failing to escape but actually being dragged backward at a rate of dozens of meters per second.

"Engine overload at one hundred twenty percent!" Nicholas hunched over the co-pilot's console, his fingers a blur on the keyboard. "Osiris! Not enough thrust! The black hole's event horizon is expanding! One hundred more meters back and we'll all be crushed to dust!"

"Screech—"

The Abyss's heavy outer armor made a teeth-grinding sound of metal twisting.

On the main screen, the armor plates at the ship's stern already showed dense web-like cracks.

"War Ghost! Shadow Reaper!" Osiris roared into the communicator. "Take people to the lower hold! Fire the gravity anchors! Fix the ship to the moon's main bedrock!"

"Copy that!"

Several firing ports popped open in the lower hold door.

War Ghost and Shadow Reaper led over a hundred heavy armor soldiers, connecting arm-thick titanium alloy cables to heavy launchers.

"Hit it!" War Ghost swung up the launcher and pulled the trigger.

Dozens of barbed giant gravity anchors screamed out, driving hard into the deep rock layers on the lunar surface that hadn't yet collapsed.

The cables instantly went taut, making an extremely dangerous humming sound.

The Abyss's backward momentum was finally forcibly halted.

The ship hung like a kite tethered to a cliff edge, swaying wildly in the violent gravitational storm.

"Holding for now!" War Ghost wiped the sweat from his face and turned to look outside the hold.

Then he froze.

"Where's the Commander?" War Ghost's eyes widened. "The Commander didn't board?!"

Osiris quickly pulled up the external surveillance feed.

At the center of the core hall ruins.

Ryan stood less than two hundred meters from the black hole.

The surrounding metal structures were being peeled away and sucked in like paper, but the small area beneath his feet stood firm as a mountain.

Dark purple extreme energy swirled madly around his body, forming an absolute gravity field that held back the black hole's pull.

"Commander! Get on the ship! This won't hold much longer!" Osiris shouted through the external speakers.

Ryan didn't turn around.

He tilted his head slightly up, his dark purple vertical pupils locked on the area above the black hole.

At the black hole's edge, space had been stretched to its limit.

An extremely thick black spatial rift was spreading outward at an unbelievable speed.

This wasn't ordinary spatial fracturing.

The direction of this rift pointed straight toward Earth!

Although the Hunter civilization's Reaper flagship had been destroyed, the hyperspace channel coordinates it had originally set hadn't disappeared.

The micro black hole created by the overload was forcibly tearing open a spatial rift toward Earth along the original coordinate channel!

Nicholas watched the shared vision Ryan was sending back, his blood running cold.

"We're done..." Nicholas slumped in his chair, his voice shaking uncontrollably. "That's directional spatial collapse!"

"Speak in plain language!" Osiris grabbed Nicholas by the collar.

"The black hole's gravity is acting directly on Earth through that rift!" Nicholas pointed at the rapidly extending black line on the screen. "Three minutes max, the rift will reach Earth's atmosphere! Then Earth's air, oceans, even the cities on the crust—everything will be sucked through this channel into the black hole!"

Osiris's hand loosened.

The bridge fell deathly silent.

There were still billions of people on Earth.

Mrs. Garcia was there.

Ella was there.

Ryan stood in place, the broken sword in his hand angled toward the ground.

Sophia's voice came through the communicator.

The signal was already severely disrupted by the gravitational storm, accompanied by heavy static.

"Ryan... monitoring stations around the world are issuing red alerts... the atmosphere's gravity parameters show abnormal fluctuations..."

Sophia's voice was tight, but she was still trying hard to stay calm.

"What's... happening on your end?"

Ryan listened to his wife's voice, and in his mind flashed the image of Ella lying in the hospital bed calling for daddy.

He raised his left hand and looked at the dark purple dragon scales on the back of his hand.

"Just a little trouble." Ryan spoke. "I'll deal with it soon."

"Ryan!" Sophia knew him too well—this kind of calm usually meant the most extreme danger. "Don't do anything crazy! You promised Ella you'd come back in one piece!"

"Tell Ella something for me."

Ryan cut the communication.

He drove the broken sword into the metal ground beneath his feet.

Knees bent slightly.

The True Dragon Tyrant Blood in his body completely abandoned all defensive mechanisms at this moment, converting all energy into the purest, most violent physical kinetic force.

"What's the Commander doing?!" War Ghost watched this scene from the lower hold, slapping the bulkhead in panic.

"He's going to use his body to plug that spatial rift!" Shadow Reaper's voice carried rare emotion. "He's going to forcibly cut off the gravitational channel between the black hole and Earth!"

"Is he insane?! That's the tidal force of a black hole! It'll tear him apart into elementary particles!" Nicholas screamed on the bridge.

Ryan couldn't hear any of this.

Right now his eyes held only that black rift extending toward Earth.

"Want to touch my family? Dream on!"

"BOOM!"

The metal ground beneath Ryan's feet instantly turned to dust.

His entire body transformed into a towering dark purple streak of light, charging straight toward the thickest spatial rift at the black hole's edge, against the terrifying gravity capable of tearing apart planets!