Chapter 217: The Price of Peace
The calm, peaceful mask of Lord Valerius was completely gone. In its place was the face of a madman, his eyes wide with a triumphant, terrifying glee.
He was no longer a serene philosopher. He was a king standing on the edge of a loaded cannon, ready to prove his point with a final, devastating blast.
"You see, Shaper!" he bellowed, his voice echoing in the vast, cavernous chamber. "This is the true beauty of my system! Peace, order, and purpose, all working in perfect harmony!
The contentment of my people is not just a state of being. It is a power source! A clean, renewable energy born from perfect societal order!"
Ryan looked from Valerius’s crazed face to the humming, glowing engine below. He finally understood. Valerius wasn’t a true believer in the Cult of Final Stillness.
He didn’t actually want the peace of nothingness. That was just a story he sold to the masses, a tool he used to get them to sit still and be quiet. What he really wanted was what he had always wanted: forced, absolute order, with him in complete control.
The apathy he preached was just a means to an end. It was the fuel for his ultimate weapon.
"You’re a fraud, Valerius," Ryan said, his voice low and dangerous. "You’re not a prophet of peace. you’re just a tyrant with a new kind of battery."
Valerius laughed, a sharp, ugly sound. "Labels are for the simple-minded! I am the future! And now, I will demonstrate the power of that future!"
He raised his hand, and the hum of the giant psychic cannon below grew into a deafening roar. A sphere of pure, shimmering energy, the color of a dull, gray sky, formed at the tip of the cannon. It was the collected apathy of an entire world, weaponized.
"Fire!" Valerius screamed.
A thick, gray beam of energy shot upwards from the planet’s core, tearing through the roof of the citadel and rocketing into the sky. It moved with an unnatural slowness, a creeping wave of pure nothingness aimed directly at the heart of the Bastion Alliance fleet.
On the bridge of the Odyssey, alarms blared.
"Energy beam incoming!" Scarlett shouted from the pilot’s seat. "Raising shields!"
But this was no ordinary energy beam. It didn’t explode against the Odyssey’s powerful shields. It passed right through them as if they were made of smoke. The gray light of the beam washed over the bridge, and for a moment, nothing happened. The ship didn’t shake. No consoles exploded.
But then, a strange feeling began to settle over the crew, as quiet and as deadly as a slow-acting poison.
The tactical officer, who had been shouting damage reports, suddenly trailed off mid-sentence. He looked down at his console, then just shrugged. "Ah, who cares," he muttered, and he slumped down in his chair, his face going blank.
The helmsman, who was preparing to take evasive action, let his hands fall from the controls. He leaned back and stared up at the ceiling with a vacant expression.
One by one, all across the fleet, the same thing was happening. Soldiers on the front lines lowered their rifles, suddenly feeling that the fight was too much effort.
Engineers in the engine rooms sat down on the floor, deciding that the complex work of keeping a starship running was just not worth the bother. The will to fight, the will to act, the will to even care, was being drained away from them.
The Alliance fleet, one of the most powerful military forces in the galaxy, was being neutralized without a single shot being fired.
On the Odyssey’s bridge, the wave of apathy was hitting hard. Emma felt her mind, usually so sharp and quick, become foggy and slow. The complex strategies she was forming began to unravel. What was the point? They would probably lose anyway. Maybe it was better to just sit down and wait for the end.
Scarlett felt her grip on the pilot’s controls loosen. The burning fire of her will, the rage that always drove her, was being smothered under a wet, gray blanket of "why bother?"
Zara, ever the scientist, tried to analyze the feeling. "It’s... a conceptual attack," she mumbled, her words slurring slightly. "It’s... reinforcing the neural pathways for... inaction." But even her scientific curiosity was starting to fade.
It was Seraphina who broke the spell.
She felt the cold, gray emptiness trying to creep into her heart, trying to silence the vibrant song of life that was her very essence. And she fought back. Not with logic, not with anger, but with the one thing the grayness could not touch: pure, beautiful, heartfelt emotion.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and began to sing.
Her voice, clear and beautiful, cut through the heavy silence on the bridge. She sang an old song from her homeworld, Sanctuary. It was a simple folk song, a tune that had been passed down for a thousand generations.
It was a song about the simple things: about the joy of a good harvest, the bittersweet pain of a first love, the sadness of saying goodbye to a friend, and the hope of seeing them again. It was a song about life, in all its messy, wonderful, and heartbreaking glory.
Her voice was not just a sound. It was a conceptual shield. The raw, beautiful emotion in her song was the direct opposite of the beam’s cold, empty apathy.
It was a small, warm fire in the middle of a blizzard, a single, colorful flower blooming in a gray desert. It pushed back against the encroaching emptiness, reminding everyone on the bridge of what they were fighting for.
The fog in Emma’s mind began to clear. Scarlett’s grip on the controls tightened, her knuckles white. The fire in her soul had found a spark to reignite it. Seraphina’s song was a weapon, a shield, and a battle cry all in one.
Back in the citadel, Ryan was protected from the apathy wave by the powerful aura of the Heart of Creation, but he was still trapped. He couldn’t destroy the cannon without killing the millions of citizens who were connected to it.
Valerius watched the chaos on his viewscreen, a look of triumph on his face. "It is over, Shaper! Your fleet is neutralized! And soon, they will not just be unwilling to fight, they will be unwilling to live. They will simply... stop. They will forget to breathe. A perfect, silent victory."
He turned to Ryan, his eyes gleaming. "I will give you one last chance. Join me. Your power is wasted on chaos. Together, we can bring this beautiful, quiet peace to the entire galaxy. Help me bring order to a universe that so desperately needs it."
Ryan looked at Valerius. He looked at the humming, monstrous machine. And he looked at a small screen that showed the faces of the citizens of Asylum, their expressions peaceful and blank as their life force was drained away to power this weapon.
They weren’t just sleeping. They were dreaming. They were all sharing one, big, peaceful, gray dream.
He realized he couldn’t wake them up from the outside. Shouting at them wouldn’t work. Shaking them wouldn’t work. The only way to save them was to go in after them.
He had to enter their collective dream and start a rebellion from the inside. He had to remind them what it felt like to be alive, to feel, to choose.
It was a crazy, desperate plan. And it had one major flaw. To enter the dream-world, he would have to connect directly to Valerius’s machine. He would have to plug his own mind into the enemy’s superweapon.
And while his mind was in the dream, his physical body would be here, on this platform, completely helpless and defenseless, at the mercy of the man who hated him most in the universe.