This giant roaming whale… what is she trying to say, like surf whispering under moonlight?

Lu Yao said, puzzled, “She’s tailing us? She wants to come with us?”

“Impossible! She doesn’t even know where we’re headed—”

…

“Oogoo, oogoo.”

It was the call of the little roaming whale that still hadn’t been named, snug in Lu Yao’s arms.

It opened a wide mouth, showing two rounded rows of cute teeth, gleaming like polished shells. Yekase couldn’t help envying them and poked Mumu-xiu. The baby whale chomped her finger in payback.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow!”

“Wooooooo—”

The big roaming whale—R2D2—called again, a long horn rolling through star-silence.

“They’re talking!” Richard shouted. “These two space creatures have real intonation in their calls! Mutant whales, maybe? Earth whales have language. So maybe they do too!”

Yekase wasn’t a biology person. She pried Mumu-xiu off her hand and asked the officer. He confirmed it—the baby had left the pet shop, stayed cradled in Lu Yao’s arms, heard their plan, and now passed it on to R2D2.

But so what? Whether humans get hit by the Omicron race—what’s that to a roaming whale, a drifter of the dark sea?

Yet R2D2 kept station one car-length behind the Millennium Bug, matching their speed like a shadow river.

Roaming whales are spread across the universe like starlight scattered over black water. They move through time older than the earliest starfarers’ myths. Biologists by the score tried to trace their home cluster or evolution, but came back empty-handed. They feel like things that just exist, like wind over dunes.

“…,” Yekase’s eyes changed when she looked at the little whale, a scientist’s hunger glinting like frost.

Lu Yao hugged tighter, guarding her pet like a candle cupped against a draft.

“Fine. Let her follow… maybe she can help.”

Yekase turned to ask the officer about whale legends, but he’d already looped back to Xianhou 27, a cold star disappearing behind cloud-dark.

Which meant the Millennium Bug was alone again. No—dragging a huge, odd tagalong. A lonely road gained a bit of noise, like a lantern joined by a second flame.

Centuries from now, the histories of the Milky Way might record that three humans slipped past a blockade, broke the soundless threshold of lightspeed, and saved their civilization while Earth slept, unaware. Even the cold scribes might add a line of praise. But for Yekase, Lu Yao, and Richard right now, it was just another leap into fog and storm.

They stepped out of the hush of the crowd, crossed dim star-fields like dry reeds under dusk, and dove headlong into a churning whirlpool that felt both reckless and inevitable.

“Something’s off…” Yekase muttered at the helm, chewing her nail like a worried sparrow.

Lu Yao popped open a metal folding stool and sat beside her. “What is it?”

“Space ahead is warped. It looks like our compression tech. But I can’t find the energy source holding that twist.”

She lifted her head and frowned at the empty starfield, a blank scroll with no ink.

…Where?

Matter tends toward chaos and evenness, like sand smoothing under waves. “Warp” is a low-entropy niche, like a living body, paid for by energy—by Infinite Power, or some high-civ black tech. There must be a root somewhere, like a spring under stone.

“Oh, look at those stars…”

Richard came up in his iron helmet and stared ahead with them, a knight peering into a night forest.

“The pattern of starlight density… it’s regular, isn’t it?”

—?

Starlight, sparse and dense—

Bright points and lit dust-clouds had subtle arc-bends at their edges, like glass warmed and pulled. The seemingly random spread actually formed a neat array, a march of squares in the void.

“No, not those—”

Galaxies are just ink drops on paper!

Hidden behind the black curtain lies the real blade—

“A dot-matrix of black holes?!”

Black holes. Black holes. Black holes.

Black holes. Black holes. Black holes.

Black holes. Black holes. Black holes.

At least a ten-by-ten grid—no, there had to be more. Small black holes, somehow not devouring each other, held a weird balance and formed an invisible firewall that drew, crushed, and tore anything that drifted near on either side.

Krrrr—!!

The Millennium Bug’s hull screamed, like ice cracking on a river.

“The ship’s trending toward disassembly. The gravity vectors toward the wall have merged into a hemisphere!”

So our ship doesn’t even have an alarm?

Yekase realized it late and laughed inside, a dry chuckle in a storm.

Southside black market’s star player. Guest of honor in the machinist city of Ivalice. A new-generation Alchemy adept endorsed by Sandryon and Alicia Alicia. The torchbearer who brought lab tech to the streets. A genius inventor famed for rugged, cheap, easy-to-use gear—Yekase, the Sword Destroying Mechanic—built a ship with no alarm!

Space is danger everywhere. An alarm would scream nonstop, like gulls in a gale. Install it or not, does it matter?

Wrong. That casual shrug is the root of disaster, like rot under lacquer.

“If that guy were here, we could bend gravity…” Lu Yao said through clenched teeth. Then she shocked herself; the old her would never say that—even facing a pull that would rip her to mist.

“…I’ll build reinforcement frames.”

“Mm. Please.”

Yekase shifted gears, hands flying like swallows.

Silver-blue light bloomed around the Millennium Bug, forming three geometric frames. Iron bars slid and riveted, barrel hoops clamping the trembling hull like iron vines.

“Good, good. Much steadier… Hey, Lu, you sure you didn’t ascend by Omega Ray?”

“Omega Ray has no Ascender.”

“No?”

“None.”

No? Yekase blinked, a spark jumping.

She had held as common sense that every Infinite Power had a matching Ascender, and she herself was the first known Flash Energy Ascender—a proof like a pillar of flame. But Omega Ray had no Ascender?

No time to dig into that. Just flying was a wildfire already.

Should they slip through the gaps in the array?

In theory… in theory, at the diagonal cross point inside a square of four black holes, the massive gravities balance in a delicate way. A narrow pass appears. But can you spot that by eye, like threading a needle in a quake? Shift even a hair, and you’re over the event horizon.

“I’ll help too.”

Richard rose from the couch, steady as a stone.

“You can fly a ship?”

“When you went to the city, I studied the console. The mode is like current aerospace craft, right? Then I can fly it. Miss Luciferin is pregnant and still fighting this hard. As a gentleman, I can’t sit idle.”

“Alright. I’ll lie down and think.”

Crisis makes trust grow fast, like ivy after rain. Barely half a day, and Richard was already an unquestioned crewman. It reminded Yekase of Harrison, a warm pang like a coal in ash.

She ceded the seat and lay down in the rest bay, eyes on the ceiling like a night lake.

…Think about that question.

Why does Omega Ray have no Ascender?

Is it because, at formation, it strips away every trait of Infinite Power? If an Omega Ray Ascender existed, they’d be pure silver-blue light or a robot—no in-between.

So maybe the Omicron civilization is all Ascenders, wall to wall like a glass city?

Like exogenous bodies, yes—but postnatal full ascension is a different beast than being born silicon-based. Humans who haven’t even stepped past Earth-Moon can’t win. If love and hope solved everything, why does war still burn like brushfire?

The only play is to stop Omega M from bringing Earth’s coordinates back to their motherworld, to snuff a fuse before it reaches powder.

“Shit, the array’s gigantic! How many black holes are we talking?”

“Can’t we go around?”

“Gravity’s on every side! We’re tied by rubber bands on a table’s four corners. Pull any way, the opposite bands snap tight and yank us back!”

It felt like standing on a shore, watching a thousand-meter tsunami rise on the horizon, roaring to erase everything. Despair seeped into their chests like cold tide.

“Oogoo, oogoo!” The little whale called again, bright as a bell.

“Wooooooo—!”

…R2D2?

The roaming whale opened her vast mouth, a cave of moonlit water.

Like a true whale to a bug’s scale, the Millennium Bug couldn’t even fill the gap between teeth. An impossible suction poured from behind, and the pull from the black hole array, a screaming river, was slowed by a gentler current.

“She wants to eat us?!” Richard’s first instinct was to gun it and flee, like a deer bolting through scrub.

“I get it! It’s fine. Let her eat!”

It wasn’t Yekase who said that. It was Lu Yao.

Richard stared at the woman he’d pegged as all reason, a frost-lily with steel veins.

“The pet-shop snacks for roaming whales were anti-matter water. So her belly might hold some undigested anti-matter. If that goes into a black hole—”

“No,” Yekase cut in, quick as a blade. “Even an anti-matter bomb won’t erase a black hole like subtraction.”

“Then… it still proves roaming whales hold spacetime structures we can’t grasp!” Lu Yao refused to let go, a terrier on truth. The little whale in her arms squealed, as if it understood they were talking about its own world, and bubbled “oogoo” with joy.

“Roaming whales are friendly to us. And they can talk to each other. So I believe R2D2 won’t harm us!”

She almost shouted it, like throwing a rope across a chasm.

To choose trust in fog—how long had it been? For Lu Yao, that risk felt as wild as starflight.

…

Yekase looked at her in silence, moon-cool, weighing.

She looked for three full seconds, like counting breaths in winter.

“I agree.”

Richard nodded too, wordless, and let go of the stick, a knight yielding blade to fate.

With the engines cut, the Millennium Bug was caught by the whale’s vast mouth and slid down her throat, like a canoe disappearing into a midnight river.