The Landing Castle thrusters installed across one side of the Moon would ignite simultaneously in three minutes.
Five minutes after that, their combined thrust would begin pushing the Moon out of its orbit. Once its orbit became unstable, Earth's gravity would most likely pull it down.
Even half of the Moon crashing into Earth would be enough to completely destroy the planet's biosphere and wipe out humanity on the surface.
Therefore, every Landing Castle thruster on the Moon had to be destroyed within eight minutes.
"Correction. We don't need to destroy all of them. If we can eliminate at least sixty percent, the remaining thrusters won't have enough power to move the Moon."
"But destroying more than sixty percent of those thrusters within ten minutes is impossible!"
"They're spread across too large an area. We don't have enough troops or firepower to accomplish that in eight minutes."
The lunar base had made the information public, but every calculation based on that data produced the same hopeless conclusion.
"What about that attack? The main cannon on the warship Mr. Kain brought with him?" Nina Klein suggested from aboard the Deucalion.
"That main cannon certainly has enough power. It could shave the infested portion off an apple's surface. But the ship is on Earth. There's no way it can reach the Moon in time."
"And firing directly from the surface to remove an even larger section isn't an option. The impact alone could push the Moon out of orbit or even tear it apart."
"Then what are we supposed to do? Another minute has already passed!"
Only two minutes remained before the thrusters ignited.
No, that was wrong. They had not received the information until thirty seconds after the countdown began.
That left only a minute and a half.
Ninety seconds.
Both Operator 6O and Nina were at a loss, and that reminder of how little time remained spread even greater fear throughout the Deucalion and everyone connected to its communications channel.
Meanwhile, above the side of the Moon where the thrusters had been installed, a single machine hovered at a fixed altitude.
Its pilot looked down at the openings concealed within countless craters and the enormous jet engines extending from them.
"Commander, the calculations indicate that it's theoretically possible, but the risk of failure is still sixty-seven percent!" 6O reported after completing the calculations.
The simulation combined the maximum theoretical output of the repulsive shield generated by Kain's Lambda Driver with the destructive power of a certain weapon. It then calculated whether the redirected energy would be sufficient to eliminate the required number of thrusters.
"So there's roughly a fifty-percent chance of success."
"What do you mean, fifty percent? It's only thirty-three percent! That's one chance in three!"
"Close enough if you round it up. Let's begin, White!"
"Understood, Commander!"
"Commander White, are you really approving something this reckless? How could you..."
Aboard the bridge of a warship on Earth, Commander White promptly muted 6O.
What the Commander intended to do was undeniably dangerous and insane, but a single mistake would not necessarily cost him his life.
If something truly went wrong, his reaction speed should allow him to immediately abandon this world.
At worst, he would suffer another severe injury.
Of course, White did not want her Commander to be hurt at all.
She could hardly bear the thought of him suffering even the slightest injury, much less a serious one.
However, Kain had chosen this method because it was the most resource-efficient option. He did not possess an abundant supply of the energy coins that allowed him to travel between worlds.
There was no telling what dangers they might encounter in the future. They could not afford to consume too many of them now.
"Deploy the Dimensional Wave-Motion Implosion Emitter!"
The order was given.
"U-understood!"
"Safeties disengaged!"
"Exciter connected!"
"Target coordinates are... Confirming target coordinates again..."
The YoRHa operative responsible for confirming the coordinates, Operator 12O, was the most nervous of them all.
Even the slightest error in those coordinates would directly kill their Commander.
At the same time, a device resembling an orbital drop pod floated a safe distance above the lunar surface.
Inside that small armored shelter, a blond girl anxiously watched through the observation window. Her gaze remained fixed on the machine she had occupied only thirty seconds earlier.
She could never have endured what was about to happen, so Kain had placed her inside this device and sent her away from him.
A2 had transmitted the shelter directly from her side.
After boarding the miniature flying fortress, Asseylum withdrew until she reached a safe distance.
"The spatial-gravity coefficient inside the firing chamber has reached sixty-five percent!"
"We've reached the minimum firing threshold!"
"Commander, firing in five seconds!"
Commander White's voice echoed inside the pod, tightening the grip around Asseylum's heart.
"Five... four..."
The countdown began.
With each passing second, the pressure around her heart grew tighter.
"Zero!"
The instant the countdown reached zero, Asseylum saw Earth's atmosphere being pierced.
A blue beam flashed through space and swept past her position in an instant.
She hurriedly turned toward Kain's machine, but she could no longer see it. The beam was too brilliant, seemingly swallowing his Kataphrakt whole.
Within the machine that appeared to have been consumed by the Wave-Motion Gun...
Beep!
In reality, the sound was far sharper, resembling the alarm of a hospital vital-sign monitor.
The primary life-support system had detected that the pilot's heart rate and body temperature had risen to dangerously abnormal levels.
The machine itself was also reporting countless malfunctions and errors.
Its systems were detecting phenomena they could not comprehend.
The sensors clearly indicated that the machine was trapped within an impossibly violent energy environment. By every calculation, it should already have been destroyed.
Yet it had not disintegrated.
Creeeak!
Metal screamed as the frame twisted and deformed.
But it remained within the machine's operational tolerances!
The external cameras were still functioning as well.
Their feeds showed waves of blue energy surging toward the thrusters that had already ignited.
The lunar surface now resembled an unimaginably enormous cake covered in tiny burning candles.
If those candles were enlarged several hundred times, the scene would look almost identical to the Moon in The Wandering Earth after its planetary engines had been ignited.
Under normal circumstances, that amount of thrust would not have been enough to move the Moon.
But that assumed the Moon was intact.
In this world, half of the Moon had already been destroyed, and what remained had deviated from its original orbit. Only one-tenth of the thrust normally required would be enough to move it again and send it falling toward Earth.
The rockets intended to bring down the Moon were suddenly engulfed by a visible tide of blue energy.
The blue tide tore away a thin layer of the lunar crust and vaporized it. A red-hot storm of gas thousands of degrees in temperature swept toward the opposite side of the Moon.
That blue tide was energy Kain had skimmed from the outer edge of the Wave-Motion Gun's beam.
Using the Lambda Driver system, he had formed a repulsive energy shield that deflected the stolen energy and poured it across the thrusters.
It was somewhat similar to what he had done in the SEED world. Back then, he had used the Lambda Driver to create a sealed barrier that briefly contained the energy of a nuclear explosion before venting it in a designated direction.
The difference was that he was not creating a sealed barrier this time.
Instead, he was skimming energy from the beam and redirecting it toward a single area.
It was like opening a faucet completely and allowing the water to pour downward, then holding a playing card at an angle against the edge of the stream. Part of the water would be diverted and flow along the tilted card toward the space behind it.
Kain's machine was only brushing against the outer edge of the Wave-Motion Gun's beam.
Even so, without the repulsive shield blocking the impact, his machine would have disintegrated instantly.
It was already on the verge of falling apart. A pebble striking its armor might be enough to become the final straw that broke the camel's back.
Hm?
Had the monitor image gone blurry?
So that was it.
His nearsightedness had worsened again.
At that moment, the world seemed to fall silent.
The machine's shrill alarms had not stopped. The reason everything suddenly felt quiet was that the Wave-Motion Gun's beam had passed, and the thunderous roar of its energy had finally vanished.
Sound normally could not travel through a vacuum.
However, the Wave-Motion Gun seemed to shake space itself, producing something like seismic waves. Their overwhelming roar had completely drowned out the machine's piercing alarms.
"What did he just do?"
A second earlier, everyone aboard the Deucalion had been frantically scrambling for a solution.
The next second, Kain's sudden maneuver left them all staring at the screen in stunned silence.
The beautiful blue tide displayed on the monitor was, in reality, a terrifying torrent of energy.
The instant it struck the thrusters, it behaved like an impossibly powerful acid. The engines disintegrated instantly, and even a layer of the lunar surface was vaporized along with them.
By the time the blue tide faded, more than sixty-five percent of the thrusters on the Moon had vanished without a trace.
This destruction had been caused by nothing more than the energy skimmed from the outer edge of the beam.
One could only imagine how terrifyingly powerful the Wave-Motion Gun itself truly was.
Anyone who had previously doubted whether it could destroy the Moon no longer had the slightest doubt.
(End of Chapter)
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