Inside the Astra Command Hub, the atmosphere turned glacial. The "invincibility" of the Umbra-Wraiths had just met its first wall.
"Tech Team! I want that frame-by-frame analysis now!" Marcus Zhang roared.
On the auxiliary screens, the footage of the failed sniper volley was slowed to 1/1000th speed. The Ravager moved like a glitch in reality—a blur of grey that seemed to know where the bullets were going before they left the barrels.
"Commander, the model is clear," the lead technician reported, sweat beading on his brow. "The Ravager's neural impulses and muscle twitch-speed exceed the muzzle velocity of our standard rifles at range. At one kilometer, the bullet takes roughly 0.8 seconds to arrive. That's an eternity for a creature with its reflexes."
"Your conclusion?" Marcus pressed.
"We must eliminate the flight time. If our snipers Blink to within one hundred meters, the bullet's travel time drops below the Ravager's biological processing limit. It won't have time to twitch, let alone dodge."
"Do it," Marcus commanded into the comms. "Specter, execute Point-Blank Protocol."
The Necro-Verse: Sector 7
"All snipers, listen up," Specter's voice hissed through the neural links. "Stow the long-guns. We're going in tight. One-hundred-meter Blink. Zero-delay execution."
"Copy that!"
The forty snipers performed a move that defied traditional physics. They didn't drop their rifles; they simply willed them into their Neural Inventories—the Minecraft-integrated storage Ethan had granted them. In a heartbeat, their hands were empty, and their silhouettes dissolved into violet mist.
WHOOSH.
Forty plumes of smoke converged on the Ravager's position.
But the Ravager's instincts were preternatural. It felt the displacement of air, the sudden spike in localized energy. Its crimson eyes narrowed. Instead of fleeing, it let out a bone-chilling shriek and charged—not away from the smoke, but into it.
It targeted a single materialization point.
Deadeye-03 solidified from a blur. His boots hadn't even touched the cracked pavement when the grey shadow crossed the final twenty meters. The soldier's pupils dilated. He saw the obsidian talons, stained with ancient, blackened ichor, magnifying in his vision.
He tried to Blink. His brain screamed the command.
But the "Materialization Latency"—that fraction of a second where the mind reconnects to the avatar—was his undoing.
PFFT.
The talon punched through the Obsidian Vessel's chest like it was wet parchment. The violet glow in the Enderman's eyes flickered and died.
"Deadeye-03... Link Severed. KIA."
Astra Command: The Neural Cradle
In a hall filled with thousands of silver-white hibernation pods, a warning light flashed from calm blue to a violent, pulsing red.
The glass canopy hissed open. A young soldier lurched upward, gasping for air as if he were drowning. His face was a mask of paper-white terror, his skin slick with cold sweat.
"Pod 173! Neural Disconnect! Medics, move!"
Doctors swarmed the pod, checking vitals and administering stabilizers. "Soldier, can you hear me? Where is the pain?"
"I... I'm okay," the boy rasped, his voice a broken whisper. "But my head... it feels like it was hollowed out. I'm so tired. God, I'm so tired..."
The supervisor watched as they wheeled him away for psychological debriefing. Physically, the boy was unharmed. But the mind doesn't forget the sensation of a claw through the heart. This "Soul-Death" was a variable they hadn't fully accounted for.
The Necro-Verse
The battle turned into a bloody stalemate. The Umbra-Wraiths were relentless, but the Ravager was a ghost. Two more snipers were "killed" the moment they materialized, their vessels shredded by the black shadow.
Specter crouched on a shattered overpass, his jaw tight enough to crack bone. "We can get close," he muttered, "but we can't draw and fire before it strikes. That 0.2 seconds of stiffness is a death sentence."
Standard tactics were failing. The enemy wasn't just fast; it was an evolutionary apex. They needed a weapon that didn't wait for a human finger to pull a trigger. They needed something that thought at the speed of light.
A thought flashed through Specter's mind—a memory of the "Redstone Circuits" Ethan had shown them.
"Headquarters," Specter signaled, his eyes turning cold. "The snipers can't do it. We need the Autonomously Targeted Sentry-Drones. We need the Redstone-Logic payloads. Now."
Would you like to move to Chapter 28 to see the first deployment of "Redstone-Powered Autonomous Weaponry" against the Ravager?