Tessa exhaled in relief when she realized she hadn't been hit.
Then she watched him operating something inside what looked like the control center of some kind of warship. A spaceship? This was obviously nothing like the fighter craft from before.
To confirm whether Mr. Golden Toilet had really appeared on some kind of "bridge," she came up with a method: pull the camera back.
She zoomed the current view out, farther and farther, until Mr. Golden Toilet's figure shrank to a speck—and then vanished entirely, hidden by the overlay.
At maximum zoom-out, what entered Tessa's view was indeed a vessel completely different from the aircraft he'd been piloting earlier.
That earlier fighter looked, at most, around a hundred feet long.
But this one was at least over six hundred feet.
It was about the same size as the most advanced submarine carrier in Tessa's world.
The biggest difference was that "100" flew in the sky.
And in this widest view—she could only pull back to about five hundred meters—the ship's exterior looked bizarrely mismatched with its interior.
It was like if her world produced a ridiculous aircraft: the inside laid out like a cutting-edge modern cockpit, while the outside was a half-century-old antique—patched and repaired, as if it could fall apart at any moment. Unreliable as hell.
Even stranger: the ship could ignore the Tyranids' attacks entirely.
Not because some flashy energy shield popped up and easily blocked plasma beams and bombardment.
No—this was weirder. The warship looked like it had turned into a visible-but-untouchable phantom. Every shot passed straight through it, piercing nothing but an illusion.
What kind of technology was this? It wasn't just "good"—it was straight-up ignoring physics.
Was this magic?!
Tessa almost forgot this world clearly had the supernatural. Demons had already shown up—crawling out of hell and possessing human bodies.
So if something "unscientific" appeared, maybe that wasn't so unbelievable.
But then she heard the ship's electronic voice mention something like a "quantum ghost," and that sounded like technology again.
And when the feed switched to footage inside the ship—showing those Astartes and the handful of remaining mortal soldiers—Tessa caught a few details that made the mismatch click.
The outer shell was a disguise: a layer of antique "skin" wrapped over the real hull.
After that, he started powering up something, like he meant to wipe out the entire hive.
As the ship's sensors captured and projected the imagery, Tessa finally got her first clear look at what a Tyranid nest in her world truly looked like.
It was a horror-show of a lair. The kind that made your scalp crawl.
As if it sensed danger, the nest reacted like an anthill that had just been kicked—everything inside surged out at once. A dense, writhing flood that could trigger trypophobia on sight.
More firepower concentrated on the ship. So many beams converged that it was almost swallowed by light—the interior feed turned into pure glare, and you couldn't even make out a person.
So he activated something that seemed to filter out the visual "pollution" caused by the beams passing through the ship—like the feed had been scrubbed clean.
So how was he going to destroy the hive?
A catastrophic weapon? A direct bombardment?
Either way, the only thing to do was keep watching.
Then the image jolted—and when he initiated the ship's jump, Tessa's pulse spiked.
This was the real mark of interstellar navigation.
The instant the jump began, she saw the warship turn rapidly transparent until it disappeared.
Not just the ship—everything around it lost color. It didn't fade to white; it simply vanished.
The effect lasted less than a second. Then the picture returned, like ripples forming on a perfectly still surface before an image resolved again.
But the first second was blinding—like staring straight into sunlight.
When her eyes adjusted, what filled the screen was—
Where… was this?
Outside the warship and the hive, most of the frame was saturated with orange-red heat and light—an ocean of flame.
The flames were so dense they looked almost tangible. Not like plasma, but closer to liquid, forming a literal sea of fire.
Then she saw it: the hive and countless Tyranids burning, melting, even vaporizing.
And the hive itself was falling into that sea of fire?
No—looking at it now, it wasn't "falling." It was being dragged.
Yanked fast, hauled away—so quickly that the hive's overall shape became clearer, revealing how enormous it really was. With the camera capped at five hundred meters, she'd been too close to grasp the full scale before…
Her pupils tightened.
The ship's outer disguise began to peel away, as if the sea of fire had an unimaginable magnetic pull—ripping the external metal off by force.
And with that, the warship's true form was revealed.
Its silhouette resembled a kind of fish from the ocean—a flying fish.
A smooth, silver-black curve—exactly the kind of sleek sci-fi hull Tessa imagined for a vessel that could truly sail the sea of stars.
And in that moment, Tessa finally understood what that irregularly flaring "sea of fire" probably was.
The ship swung around. The wing-like fins—like a flying fish's—folded in close to its belly, and a dreamlike plume of something like a plasma thruster ignited at the tail.
At the same time, the surrounding image warped in a way that felt unreal. In the blink of an eye, the hive vanished—while the sea of fire remained, still swallowing most of the broadcast frame.
But one thing was obvious: the ship was pulling away.
Like a craft rising from the ocean: at first, the camera can still see the churning surface and crashing spray.
But as the craft climbs higher, you stop seeing the individual waves—yet the ocean is still there, just less distinct.
About half a minute later, the camera shifted to a god's-eye angle, and Tessa could still see the sea of fire behind the ship.
Except now it wasn't a sea anymore.
It was a massive orange-red sphere.
So her guess had been right.
That was a star.
And now she understood his method: the jump didn't only move the ship—it expanded to cover a wider volume, engulfing the hive as well.
He had relocated the hive straight onto the star's surface, letting stellar heat bake it and stellar gravity drag it down into a blazing hell.
At last, Mr. Golden Toilet had escaped hell, and the tight knot in Tessa's chest finally loosened.
Next… he should be fine, right?
Half an hour later—because when she zoomed the camera back into the bridge, she heard that he'd return to the original planet in roughly thirty minutes.
(End of Chapter)
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