Chương 22: A Time Bomb Named Eclipse

That was when everything went sideways. Outside the shrine, a frantic commotion erupted, and a messenger burst through the gates, caked from head to toe in thick mud.

"M-My Lord! The forces of Kunakoku! They've breached the border and launched a full-scale invasion!"

"What?" Yari knitted his brows, a chill cutting through his voice.

"HIMIKO's authority should have brought the surrounding tribes to their knees. Why would Kunakoku strike now?"

"B-Because...!" The messenger pointed a trembling, terrified finger toward the heavens.

"They are chanting it everywhere!

'The sun is dying!' They claim the Queen's spiritual power has withered, that the heavens are furious, and that the skies will swallow the sun whole!" My heart skipped a beat. Across the room, Gennai's fingers blurred across his console like a madman.

"Bingo, Bossman! The telemetry aligns perfectly with the local astronomical data... It's coming. A total solar eclipse!" A. D. 247. In the recorded history of Yamatai-koku, two total solar eclipses were said to have occurred around the exact timeline of Himiko's death. That very historical anomaly was now materializing right before our eyes.

"I see," Yari nodded, his expression settling into a cold, detached amusement.

"The Kunakoku shamans predicted the eclipse and weaponized it as propaganda to claim Himiko's divine mandate has fallen. A petty sorcery feud between primitives."

"Is this a joke to you?! What happens to the masses when the sun literally vanishes?!" I yelled, panic seizing my throat. HIMIKO rose silently from her dais. Her voice held not a single microsecond of hesitation.

"There is no cause for alarm. I will simply reprogram the eclipse into my performance matrix. The darkening of the sun will be staged as my temporary retreat into the Heavenly Rock Cave—Amano-Iwato. By bringing the light back, I will execute a grand 'resurrection protocol.' It is the perfect campaign to optimize their blind faith." It was a flawless tactical pivot. To a pre-scientific populace, a performer who could command a dead sun to reignite would become an undeniable, permanent god.

"Gennai, overclock the weather-control drones to maximum output. Time it with the peak of the eclipse—part the cloud layer and generate a divine backlight protocol."

"You got it, Princess! Time for a mega-scale illusion show!" Flanked by her six floating bronze mirrors—her drone funnels—HIMIKO walked serenely out of the shrine. Her silhouette was that of a flawless, utterly isolated absolute monarch. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. But we had overlooked a fundamental vulnerability. No matter how advanced a system is, it remains terrifyingly fragile against raw, physical violence.

And when a gullible crowd realizes they've been deceived, their devotion instantly curdles into catastrophic rage.

"... I have a terrible feeling about this." I gripped my bottle of stomach medicine tightly. The sky was bruising at a terrifying speed. The sun was being eaten away. It was the beginning of the end for the perfect idol known as HIMIKO. High noon. The exact hour the sun should have occupied the absolute zenith of the heavens. Instead, the world was drowned in a suffocating, sickly twilight.

Looking up, the edge of the sun was being carved away by a creeping black void, as if an invisible cosmic beast were tearing chunks out of the light. The total solar eclipse—the ultimate existential terror of the ancient world—had commenced.

"It's here! The sun is dying!"

"The Kunakoku prophecy was true! Himiko's magic has run dry!" Beyond the wooden stockades of the capital, a thunderous roar shook the earth. It was the Kunakoku army. Their faces were smeared with violent red mud, brandishing stone axes and sharpened wooden spears as they charged. The Yamatai garrison, staring blankly at the bleeding sun, completely lost their morale, paralyzed by sheer dread.

"Calm yourselves," HIMIKO commanded, stepping onto the elevated wooden terrace of the grand shrine. Behind her, the six bronze mirror drones deployed into a sweeping, geometric halo.

"There is nothing to fear. This is merely a trial. I shall cloak the sun for a brief moment, and upon its resurrection, I shall bestow eternal radiance upon this land." Her voice was a chill wave of absolute composure. With a sweeping gesture of her hand, the drone array projected a massive holographic matrix into the atmosphere. Through the darkening skies, a colossal, glowing golden Yatagarasu—the mythical three-legged crow—soared into existence. It was pure entertainment engineering.

A tactical script designed to convert primal terror into localized euphoria.

"Look...! It's Lord Himiko's divine messenger!"

"It's going to fix the sun!" The masses fell to their knees, restarting their frantic prayers. We can win this, I thought. High-tier computation was about to crush primitive fear. Right at that exact microsecond.

"... Warning. Unidentified flying object approaching," HIMIKO murmured.

"A flying object? In this era?!" Before I could even scan the sky, a sharp whoosh! cut through the air. It wasn't a missile, nor was it an advanced drone. It was a literal rock, the size of a fist. A primitive projectile hurled from a simple leather sling by a nameless Kunakoku tribesman. CLANG—!! A sickening metal crunch echoed through the plaza. By sheer, catastrophic coincidence, the rock smashed directly into the gyro stabilizer of one of the hovering weather-control drones.

"Are you kidding me?!" Gennai shrieked through the comms.

"A low-tech pebble just obliterated a precision gyro matrix! Lost attitude control! She's going down!" Spewing a pathetic stream of black smoke, the drone plummeted. It was the trigger for a disastrous Rube Goldberg chain reaction. The falling drone smashed directly into the primary holographic projector. The golden Yatagarasu soaring across the sky glitched violently with pixelated static, froze, and shattered into a pixel dead-zone. Worse still, the weather-control grid went completely rogue without its balancer.

The gentle, staged rain instantly mutated into a localized monsoon—a furious downpour accompanied by gale-force wind gusts.

"The divine messenger is dead!"

"It's a curse! The altar is being ripped apart!" Systemic stage collapse. The flawless divine theater was instantaneously plunged into the terrifying chaos of a blacked-out concert venue.