Cipher stood at the cold bow of the ship, letting the starlight play with her cat-like hair.
She stood casually, yet she was like a bowstring about to be drawn taut.
The strangely shaped weapon in her hand was given to her by Anaxa himself, before he embarked on his point of no return.
The gun's body was full of rational, cold lines, yet it was now slightly warm in her palm, retaining the last vestiges of a rational demigod's stubbornness and madness.
"Meow? So you are Erudition?"
Her gaze pierced through the endless void, looking towards the majestic figure forcibly dragged out by the Gate of a Hundred Worlds. A cunning smile played on her lips, but deep in her eyes, a sea of resolute fire burned.
Anaxa used it to embody the end of rationality.
And Cipher would use it to begin the final chapter of a grand scheme.
"When a shooting star streaks across the sky, a Galaxy Ranger will answer their call."
This was "truth," the most solid foundation of this monumental lie.
The Xianzhou Alliance fleet, the Herta Space Station Staff Members, and all forces related to The Hunt in the galaxy would be both the audience and the building blocks of this deception.
What Cipher had to do was to use these truths as flesh, and deception as the soul, to weave a lie grand enough to deceive the universe itself.
She wanted to summon a god.
The Hunt, Lan.
"Zagreus, do you see it?"
Cipher whispered softly to the empty space beside her, as if talking to an invisible old friend.
"The heir to deception is about to complete the grandest, most interesting deception, one that even you dared not imagine."
Her body began to glow, the boundaries between reality and illusion wildly intertwined within her.
This was the deceiver's final curtain call.
She raised her weapon, the muzzle pointing towards Amphoreus.
The trigger was pulled.
A light bullet shot out of the barrel. It did not fly towards any target, but instead drew an invisible arc across the strings of the universe, carrying billions of streams of light, scattering across all times and spaces—past, present, and future.
It was a call spanning eons.
A miracle unfolded before the eyes of all observers.
In the silent outer space of Amphoreus, figures appeared out of thin air, one after another.
They were not warping, but rather as if the universe's ancient scroll had been forcibly torn open, and they squeezed out from the cracks of history, bringing with them the dust and killing intent of different eras, summoned to answer the call!
The Galaxy Rangers had answered the call!
They rode in ships of varying styles, their eyes burning with an unquenchable flame of vengeance that transcended time and space.
One.
Ten.
A hundred, a thousand... In an instant, a legion of vengeance, composed of countless Rangers, assembled in the star sea!
The killing intent, gathered from pure vengeful will, dimmed distant stars, and even the Xianzhou Divination Commission could not divine the origin or destination of this fleet!
"Yo yo yo, AKA Rappa, greetings!" Rappa stood atop a spaceship spray-painted with a giant Hannya, surveying the star-filled sky.
"It seems this is the land of Amphoreus, as the Black-Robed Ninja said. Silver-Gun Asura, we have arrived."
"Oh my goodness, we're finally here!"
Boothill kicked open the cockpit door and immediately spotted the massive figure of Erudition, excitedly whistling.
"Whoa, what a grand spectacle! Am I still in the dream of Taiyi?"
With that, he drew his revolver and fired into the sky, a salute to this grand hunt!
Rappa had already raised her weapon, chanting loudly: "Great Lan!"
Aboard the flagship, General Feixiao pressed his hand to his sword hilt, the sharp blade humming in response to a resonating power.
General Jing Yuan gazed at the army of vengeance that had stepped out of myth: "This is... Rangers from all eras... truly appearing at the same time..."
But this was still only the prelude to the lie.
Cipher's body had become illusory, the foundation of her existence violently shaking.
Each breath she took consumed the concept of "deception."
She had staked everything she had, using the collective will of this Ranger legion, spanning ancient and modern times, as a loudspeaker, and the aspirations of all beings in the universe who anticipated "change" as fuel.
She took a deep breath, inhaling not air, but that vast, transcendent vengeful will that spanned time and space.
Then, she uttered the greatest lie, one that would turn the tides of fate.
"Everyone, listen to me!"
Her voice was not loud, but under the distortion of the laws of deception, it transformed into an undeniable cosmic truth, instantly imprinted upon the cognition of every living being!
"The Aeon of The Hunt, Lan, has arrived! He has come to help his good brother!"
"Look, right there, at Amphoreus!"
This was the pinnacle of deception, a miracle of belief.
When a lie aligns more with everyone's expectations than "truth," it becomes the new truth.
Thus, the laws of the universe yielded to this lie.
Above Amphoreus, a golden light forcibly tore through the veil of data and reality!
A god slowly emerged from within.
His upper body had a human silhouette, but the divine radiance flowing around him dimmed stars, and his lower body had two rings of light.
He held a longbow forged from stellar debris, and behind him was a quiver filled with arrows of causality.
The Aeon of The Hunt—Lan.
Seeing this, Cipher smiled, a smile of immense satisfaction.
Her body was already as ethereal as a bubble.
"Hehe... it worked..."
Her body began to glow, disintegrating into billions of tiny specks of light.
The ultimate price of deception was the complete erasure of the deceiver's own existence by the laws of the universe, leaving no trace.
No regrets, no remorse.
In the last moment before her consciousness completely dissipated, her gaze pierced through endless time and space, seemingly seeing a figure in black robes and white hair.
"Deliverer kid... I have summoned a god for you... The rest is up to you..."
"Aya, goodbye!"
Cipher's figure completely vanished, transforming into starlight that merged into the star-filled sky she had personally rewritten.
Lan raised his longbow. He had come at Cifera's lie, and he had come at Phainon's summons!
Target—the Aeon of Erudition, Erudition, forcibly dragged here by the Gate of a Hundred Worlds.
He drew his bow and nocked an arrow.
Upon the arrow, causality and destiny intertwined... The bowstring was fully drawn.
The surrounding space rippled violently, and time itself trembled in fear of this power.
This arrow would inject the first true "unknown" into the universe's calculations.
Lan released the string.
Whoosh—!
The universe fell into absolute silence.
Time froze.
The arrow did not follow physics; it directly erased the "distance" and "process" between itself and the target, striking at the very moment it was released.
The collision of paths, Erudition could not calculate.
This was the answer Phainon had derived from the war between Preservation and Propagation.
Moreover, Anaxa's self-sacrifice had already carved out an absolute void, named "the end of rationality," within Erudition's perfect logical loop.
And this void was now perfectly captured by the arrow.
Boom—!
The arrow precisely struck the void in Erudition's logical core.
The powers of two Aeons collided and annihilated in a way never before seen.
Finally, at the intersection of logic and non-logic, in the torn wound of the universe's laws, a new phenomenon was born—
—the Unknown.
A pure, absolute, undefinable "Unknown."
For the first time in the universe, an ultimate variable appeared that even Erudition could not foresee or calculate.
And this variable was the final opportunity, earned through the sacrifice of countless companions, that could change everything in Phainon's entire plan.