Chương 160: 13. Spear of Light 2

I held my gaze on the half-open door for two heartbeats, then reached back to ensure the weapon loaded with metal peanuts was still in place. Honestly, I had no confidence worth recording that it would fire properly—or that it wouldn't simply explode in my hand. But in a place like this, things that provided even marginal comfort were scarce. Even illusions beat walking bare-handed into the brain of an ancient war machine.

"I'll go first," I said quietly.

"How courteous of you to die first," Ignicia replied dryly.

"I was thinking that if something lunges out, it should bite me instead of Your Highness." She gave me a look—weighing whether I was being clever or had finally cracked under pressure. In the end she said nothing, simply stepped aside half a pace. Dragon-style consent. I drew a breath, pushed the heavy door fully open, and eased inside. Beyond was exactly some kind of nerve center. Larger than I'd expected, but not the kind of large that announces authority through sheer space.

This was the large of a room where every inch had been calculated for function. The forward section dipped slightly, rows of seats and consoles arranged in an arc facing a broad wall of darkened displays. The side walls were dense with instruments, dials, levers, buttons—as though someone had taken the most temperamental components of a dozen workshops and forced them to share a room, then demanded cooperation. Most unsettling of all: still no windows. A vessel meant to travel the sea.

A space designed to command it. And not a single opening to confirm the outside world still existed. That alone generated an entirely unwanted respect for the ancients' psychological constitution. I moved further in. My boots struck raised metal decking, the sound circling once before being absorbed by silent consoles. There were dead here, too. But unlike the scattered remains outside, these dead were quieter. More purposeful. At the center-rear sat a raised chair, flanked by control tiers.

A skeleton still occupied it, skull tilted forward—as though it had watched those darkened instruments until the very last moment. More remains lay slumped over side consoles, one frozen with an arm half-raised, fingers reaching for a switch it never touched. I approached the central chair. My gaze settled on the skeleton's chest. A tarnished metal insignia still clung there. I couldn't read the design—only an outer ring of letters surrounding some beast-or-wing motif—but it radiated cold, unambiguous authority.

If I was right, this had been the last person aboard still empowered to give orders.

"The captain?" I murmured. Ignicia had moved to a left console, fingers hovering over dead keys without touching them. She glanced at the panel, then at the central skeleton, and nodded slightly.

"Most likely." I didn't linger on the bones. Something wedged between the skeletal hand and armrest caught my attention—a clipboard. I worked it free, bringing brittle dust with it. Several sheets were fixed to the board, the topmost yellowed but still legible—dense text and prominent capital markings. SSBN-831 TEXAS Those two lines again. The weight in my chest didn't lighten. It deepened. This wasn't some random document.

The entire vessel had been insisting on its own identity—like a dead man who had sewn his name into his collar, terrified that thousands of years later, no one would know where his bones had come to rest. I turned to the next page. Couldn't read it. Next page. Still couldn't read it. The only things I could make out were a few words and numbers circled in red, plus several terms that kept reappearing.

Ignicia walked over and took the stack of documents from my hands, scanning quickly—her expression sinking deeper with each page.

"Well?" I asked.

"This isn't standard navigation records," she said quietly.

"More like combat readiness protocols. And... lockdown orders." This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. She paused, flipped to a specific page, and tapped her finger against a circled passage.

"This word appears again." I looked down. The string of letters still meant nothing to me, but the numbers and codes bracketing it radiated distinctly unfriendly energy.

"What does it mean?" She was silent for two heartbeats, clearly searching through whatever ancient vocabulary she'd stored away, then said very slowly:"If I'm reading this correctly... missile silo." My throat tightened. In moments like this, human instinct desperately hopes for mistranslation. Unfortunately, while Ignicia's tongue could be merciless, she rarely offered me the comfort of being wrong when it actually mattered. I stared at those pages, suddenly aware my palms had gone cold.

"So this thing really is—""Really." She turned another page, voice dropping even lower.

"And not just one." I didn't respond immediately. Because once certain things are spoken aloud, they graduate from "absurd speculation" to "actively breathing nightmare." Until moments ago, we could still tell ourselves we'd merely found a terrifying ancient vessel, some incomprehensible paperwork, and a string of unpleasant coincidences. But the moment "missile silo" entered the conversation, coincidence ceased to be available as an explanation.

This ancient monstrosity called Texas had almost certainly been built to carry those sky-burning "glowing spears." And if the Blazing Yanxia Empire truly intended to use it— I forced that thought to stop before it finished. Following it to completion would only lead me to wonder whether the world had actually been scheduled for termination long ago, and those of us born later had simply missed the notification.

Ignicia had already set the clipboard aside and moved to the primary consoles at the front of the control room. She tested a circular dial first, then tried a short lever beside it. Nothing. She moved to another panel and wiped accumulated dust from a larger black surface. Ancient script ran along the top, with several color-coded zones marked beside it. I came to stand beside her.

"How much can you read?"

"Less than half," she frowned.

"But enough." She raised her hand and traced downward along a fine metal diagram etched beside the panel.

"This should be the full vessel schematic." I followed her finger. A long, narrow ship outline divided into sections—like someone had dissected an enormous fish skeleton and rendered it on the wall. Forward, mid, and aft sections were distinctly marked, some outlined in heavier borders with alphanumeric codes I couldn't parse. But you don't need to read labels to understand a diagram. In the mid-section: a row of vertical rectangular shafts, arranged in neat columns. Far too many of them.

"Those are..." I said quietly.

"Yes." Her answer was flat, merciless.

"If this schematic is accurate, those are what your poets call divine punishment." I stared at that row of vertical shafts, feeling cold creep up my spine vertebra by vertebra. Kingdom bards loved to dress ancient catastrophe as divine wrath—celestial fire, glowing spears that neither heroes nor mad kings could stop. I'd always assumed that was people standing beside ruins, applying imagination to make incomprehensible destruction sound poetic. Now I understood: they hadn't been exaggerating.

We'd been underestimating. Those things had once been loaded into a ship's belly. Like cargo. Like procedure. Like something that, upon receiving the right order, would simply rise into the sky and complete the work of destroying whatever nation had been designated for obliteration. I swore under my breath. Ignicia didn't stop me. She continued examining the schematic's fore and aft sections, tapping several zones.

"This segment is probably residential quarters—what we walked through. This area looks like the command center, roughly where we are now. Further aft... I can't read it completely, but it's heavily flagged with warnings. And this forward section—different weapons type."

"Torpedoes?" I suggested. She turned to look at me.

"How did you know?"

"Because every piece of new knowledge the ancients have gifted me today has been terrible. I've decided to preemptively assume the worst-case scenario." She actually smiled—very faintly. Not amusement. More like acknowledging that anyone who could still produce lines like that in a place like this possessed a certain stubborn resilience worth recognizing. The expression vanished instantly. Because we both heard it. Distant, but unmistakable. Not dripping water or the vessel's own aging sounds.

The dull impact of a metal door being forced—transmitted through hull plating and dock space until it arrived distorted, like an echo rising from the seafloor. Sea-dragon people. Or Blazing Summer personnel. Either way, whatever was out there hadn't given up. We exchanged one look. Neither of us wasted time on speculation. If they'd tracked us this deep, it meant they understood enough about this facility's value to risk going further in. Which left us exactly one course of action.

Understand what was actually valuable here—before they did.

"Which way?" I asked quietly. Ignicia didn't answer immediately. She looked back at the schematic, finger resting briefly on the missile silos, then sliding toward a nearby passage marker.

"Not the aft section first," she said.

"That looks like the power core. Wandering in there blind is an excellent way to die pointlessly."

"I'm genuinely moved that Your Highness has begun categorizing my potential deaths by quality."

"Shut up." She indicated an entry point near the mid-section.

"Here first. Adjacent to the missile silos, but probably not direct weapon access. Could be a control room, loading area, or where officers verified launch sequences." I memorized the position by shape, since the text was useless to me.

"Evidence first, then."

"And methods," she added, tone terrifyingly flat.

"If Blazing Summer genuinely intends to activate this vessel, we need to know how to destroy it most thoroughly." I nodded. In this moment, our thinking was perfectly aligned. If we can't take it, we break it. Whatever the Texas had represented thousands of years ago—whatever empire, whatever maritime dominance, whatever glory had compelled someone to say God bless America with their last breath—if there was any chance of it burning the world again, it belonged in the grave with its nation.

I pulled two more pages from the clipboard and tucked them into my inner pocket, then reflexively checked the ancient short weapon at my back. Still cold. Still there. A gift from an era I had zero interest in inheriting. Ignicia moved to the corner and retrieved a slim metal cylinder from beside a collapsed skeleton. She tapped it twice. The forward end produced a clean white beam that cut straight through the darkness, illuminating the door leading deeper into the vessel. I stared at the device.

"Another ancient murder tool?"

"No," she said dryly.

"This one just prevents you from walking into walls like a blind man."

"So the ancients occasionally invented something benevolent."

"Say another word and I turn it off."... Fair enough.