Chapter 266 - 267: Corridor of Force
The captain’s voice cut across every internal channel, calm and final.
"Activate."
For a single heartbeat the entire pirate ship went silent.
Then the core screamed.
Energy equivalent to millions of sectors collapsed inward, compressed past every safety threshold the Technos engineers had ever designed. The void warp drive received the entire supercritical burst in one instantaneous dump. Reality in front of the vessel tore open like wet paper.
A blinding, ultra-dense spatial corridor erupted outward, punching straight through the chaotic battlefield.
The ship surged forward with impossible acceleration.
Everything in its direct path simply ceased to matter. Whether it was information particles, void space fragments, body parts, weapon fragments, the void itself. All ceased to exist.
A Beginner Multiversal who had been locked in combat with two others looked up just in time to see a wall of compressed space and metal filling his vision. There was no time to react. No time to activate a single principle. His body, soul, and information structure were erased in less than a Planck instant. True death. No backup. No residual anchor. The two opponents he had been fighting stared at the empty space where he had stood, then threw themselves sideways as the corridor continued its ruthless advance.
An Initiate further along the path fared only slightly better. The edge of the corridor clipped him. His lower half vanished in a clean, absolute cut. The remaining upper half spun through the void, screaming, before the residual forces tore even that apart. His resurrection protocol activated automatically, but the damage was so complete that the process would take minutes and consume nearly half the resources he had stored across three different sectors. When awareness finally flickered back into existence inside a distant recovery anchor, the first coherent thought he managed was pure, shaking disbelief.
What... what the hell was that? A Techno ship? Who the hell brings a techno ship into a free-for-all?
An Advanced-tier woman tried to fold space and escape the moment she sensed the approaching corridor. The corridor did not care. It swallowed her technique, her body, and the pocket of space she had tried to hide in. When her consciousness finally reassembled in a far-off recovery point, the first thing she felt was the agonizing drain on her stored resources. The second was a cold, lingering terror.
That wasn’t a technique. That was a full warship. Who the hell pilots something like that into this kind of chaos?
Inside the pirate vessel, several officers watched the external feeds with cold satisfaction.
"Oooh, damn," one Advanced-tier combat leader muttered, eyes locked on the display. "They’re not surviving that."
"Clean hits," another agreed, arms crossed. "No resistance at all. The weak ones are just... gone. Even the Advanced ones are going to pay through the nose to come back. Look at the resource drain signatures. Brutal."
The silver-marked Expert gave a thin smile. "That’s the point of the overload. You don’t negotiate with the path. You erase it. The corridor doesn’t ask permission."
Outside, the Multiversals still fighting in the wider battlefield only caught fragmented, terrifying glimpses.
A six-armed beast-type cultivator paused mid-swing as a massive dark shape ripped a glowing tunnel through the middle of the free-for-all and vanished toward the ruin.
"Did anyone else see that?!"
"A ship! That was a full warship!"
"It just deleted everything in its way and kept going!"
"Who the hell brings that type of ship into this?!"
Some of the smarter combatants immediately tried to follow the residual corridor before it collapsed, throwing themselves into the fading tunnel with desperate speed. Others decided the situation had just become far too dangerous and began withdrawing toward safer stretches of void. Most simply kept fighting, too locked into their own battles to fully process what had just happened. A few shouted warnings that no one had time to heed.
The pirate vessel did not slow down.
It slammed through one of the larger torn gaps in the barrier and plunged directly into the light teleportation gate at residual full force. The transition was violent. Space folded, twisted, and spat the entire ship into the first chamber of the ruin with the same brutal momentum it had used to carve its path.
The moment the ship materialized inside the ruin, everything went wrong at once.
The heavy suppression field of the ruin slammed down like the fist of an angry god.
Every principle on board that was not related to runes locked up hard. Cultivation bases that had been roaring with Multiversal power collapsed to roughly Universal level. Bodies of pure energy and information were forcibly solidified into heavy physical matter. Thought-speed slowed. Strength vanished. Defenses that could have ignored planetary explosions now felt fragile and slow.
At the same instant, the ship’s technology died.
The energy core, already strained from the overload, was completely suppressed. Every system — propulsion, gravity, life support, weapons, sensors — shut down in less than a second. Warning lights flickered once and went dark. The holographic displays vanished. The vessel became nothing more than a giant, powerless chunk of metal and alloy falling under the local gravity of the ruin’s internal world.
And it was falling toward a mountain range.
Alarms that still had residual emergency power began to wail in broken, distorted tones.
"What the fuck is happening?!"
"Core is offline! Everything is offline!"
"My principles are sealed! I can’t even fly!"
"Why is the ship dropping?!"
Panic spread through the corridors in ragged waves. Advanced-tier officers who had been calm and professional moments earlier now staggered as their power abandoned them. Experts gritted their teeth and tried to force their remaining strength into any available principle, only to find that nothing except runes responded properly. Some of them had only basic rune knowledge. Others had none at all.
One officer slammed his fist into a bulkhead hard enough to dent the metal. "This ruin isn’t normal! It suppressed the entire ship!"
Another stared at his hands in disbelief as his energy body finished solidifying into flesh and bone. "I feel like a mortal. A strong mortal, but still... this is wrong. This place is wrong."
A third officer staggered against a wall, face pale. "Only runes still answer. Everything else is locked. What kind of inheritance ruins technology itself? And one from a techno race at that, this ruin inst simple."
In the command deck the captain’s face had gone pale with rage and shock. His own power had been crushed under the same iron weight. The silver-marked Expert’s markings had gone dull. The newcomer Expert looked like he was trying not to be sick.
"All hands brace for impact!" the captain roared. "We’re going down!"
Wukong felt every part of it.
When the corridor first opened he had been thrown hard against the side of the vent despite his transformation. The sheer acceleration and spatial violence were enough to make even him grunt. He watched through the ship’s residual sensors (before they died) as the vessel erased everything in its path. A low, impressed whistle left him.
Brutal. Effective. Still rude. These pirates don’t do half measures.
Then the ship crossed the barrier and the suppression hit.
Wukong’s own power crashed downward.
This time even the Rule of Boundless Metamorphosis was caught in the suppression. The flexible, stubborn principle that had always answered him first was suddenly locked under the same iron weight as everything else. His transformed body unraveled against his will. Fur, bone, and shape snapped back into their original form. In the space of a single breath he was no longer a sleek aerodynamic blur or a patch of vent metal. He was the golden-furred monkey once more, fully physical, heavy, and solid. Real flesh and bone. Real weight. His staff, which had remained hidden and reduced inside the earlier transformations, dropped beside him with a metallic clink and stretched back to its full battle length as if relieved to be itself again.
Oh, come on. This place has rules? Nobody tells me anything. First they lock me in a cell, then they drag me to a warzone, and now the ruin itself decides to clip my wings and force me back into my own skin. Typical.
The ship’s systems died around him. The vessel began its uncontrolled fall toward the mountains. Wukong pushed himself up, golden fur bristling, and reached for the one principle that still answered with full strength.
Runes.
It had been the second principle he fully comprehended, back when he was still a captive and had nothing better to do than study the formations carved into his cell. At the time it had felt like a consolation prize. Now it was the only door left open.
Power flooded back into him — clean, sharp, Multiversal-level power that the suppression could not touch. The contrast was almost dizzying after the sudden weakness. He slammed both hands against the nearest damaged hull section, pouring rune force into the metal. The plating split with a sharp, ringing crack. He kicked the gap wider, grabbed his staff, and launched himself out into the open air of the ruin’s first chamber just as the massive pirate ship smashed into the mountainside with a cataclysmic, drawn-out crash.
The impact shook the ground. Metal screamed. Entire sections of the hull crumpled and tore. Dust, broken alloy, and the screams of the unprepared filled the air in a rolling wave of chaos.
Wukong hit the ground rolling, staff already spinning once in his grip to bleed off momentum. Golden eyes scanned the surroundings — and then narrowed.
The forest was not a forest.
Every tree, every leaf, every patch of ground, even the light filtering through the canopy was constructed from living runes. The symbols shifted and breathed. They carried weight and meaning. The entire environment was language given form.
...Everything here is made of runes.
A slow, interested grin pulled at the corner of his mouth despite the situation.
He straightened, staff resting against his shoulder, and allowed himself a single long-suffering sigh.
Peaches. I should have stayed home and eaten peaches.
Then the reluctant, crooked grin returned, sharper this time.
But since I’m already here...
He took a step into the rune forest, golden eyes gleaming with the light of the Eye he did not possess, and began reading.