"I was going to kill him before he did anything! Why did you stop me?" Back on the Kraken, Iris complained with a long face as she repeatedly poked Ivan's chest.
"It would have been pointless, also, it would have shown that we were desperate to stop him from doing anything, giving him the upper hand in any negotiations."
"Why would it have been pointless? If he was dead, wouldn't all of our problems have been solved?"
"You really didn't notice?"
"Notice what?"
"That person wasn't really there, it was just a hologram. A very sophisticated hologram that could even project the internals of his body, fooling even the eyes of a four-dimensional Celestial who could directly look inside and identify a standard hollow hologram or a robot proxy. It must have been worth a lot of money."
"Eh, seriously? How could you tell?"
"He was too calm throughout it all, despite the fact he knows a Celestial could effortlessly kill him in the blink of an eye. He didn't touch anything on the desk or around him, while lastly and most obviously, he didn't offer to shake my hand when we met."
"Maybe because you aren't all that friendly with him?"
"No, look at the pictures of all his public appearances. He basically built an empire on investing money in the right places and shaking hands. He is always shaking someone's hand, and with the façade he put on as a front, he would even shake hands with the mortal enemy who stole his wife."
Sitting across Ivan's lap, Iris felt exhausted from the explanation and gently rested her head against
"What were we supposed to do then? We can't give him what he wants, and we can't stop him threatening us."
"This is the scenario that I wanted. There is an idiom called being two steps ahead. This is exactly that. Now I can pressure the board into deploying more defensive forces into defending the Vulpes home world and in turn, other locations which our interests are invested in. It will protect them better from not just the Federation, but also the Scalians."
"You even thought that far?" Iris pulled her head up and looked at Ivan in shock.
"Even further. My beautiful main wife, you seriously underestimate me. Who do you think it was that taught you how to be in control of your life so effortlessly? There is only one me in this world, and I am unparalleled."
*****
"Deploy all Hyperion Ray Cannons!" Ivan shouted on the bridge, Iris standing beside him with a shy grin on her face.
"Activate linking circuit!"
Following Ivan's commands and the crews' rapid responses, the four Hyperion Ray Cannons stretched out beside the Kraken moved to the front of the ship as the arms extended all the way forward. The four cannons came together in a two-by-two grid before the insides opened up and merged them into a whole cannon.
The four energy circuits from each cannon has a secondary energy circuit began glowing behind them which encompassed the entirety of the massive cannon barrel like a twisted green ivy plant.
"Hyperion Ray Mega Cannon all circuits operation and charging up… 10%... 30%... 60%... 100%. We are ready to fire, president!"
"Fire!"
Different from when Ivan had avoided firing when a planet was in the line of fire, this time his target was specifically a planet. The ship faced the planet from 200,000 miles away in space, still extremely close to the planet on the space scale and within observable range.
The Hyperion Ray Mega Cannon released a 800 foot-wide blinding bluish-white beam of lightning which had small sparks occasionally split off from the main beam which tore space open wherever they travelled. The beam itself didn't take a jagged path like normal lightning, it simply pierced through anything that was in its path
The main beam of lightning was so bright it was impossibly to look out without eye protection, or the onlooker would instantly turn blind. The Celestials couldn't feel heat but even inside the Kraken they could feel the amount of energy contained within that beam like sharp pinpricks on their skin.
The beam of lightning pierced into the planet, instantly boiling the atmosphere and causing it to ignite across a quarter of the planet before blowing away anything that remained and turning it into a near vacuum filled with sparks throughout the air.
The mega lightning blast first swallowed the existence of Everal's cloudscraper before piercing through the planet itself. Neither the crust, mantle nor core could hinder the beam as it blasted a 800 foot wide hole from one end of the planet to the other, recreating a similar scene on the far side of the planet before vanishing into the distant universe.
Gassified magma and metals blasted out of the far side of the planet with such velocity they directly flew out of the planets orbit and drifted into space. Both sides of the planet began to blacken with glowing red cracks where the expanding magma split the planet's crust like a cobweb began to spread on both ends of the planet.
While sparks split off from the main beam in the vacuum and began to dance about in the space where the atmosphere used to be, causing even more damage to the crust as they carved abyss like canyons in the planet. The only difference between the two side was that the far side also had a rain of molten magma and metal from the center of the planet raining down upon it.
The beam of lightning eventually died down and vanished, but the destruction still wasn't over. With the massive hole through the planet now vacant, the planet's own gravity caused the molten core and mantle to collapse into the cavity.
The massive force of the molten collision caused massive magnitudes of earthquakes across the planet while the molten metals and magma in the core splashed with so much force the sprayed out the hole through the planet and rained down on the surface of the planet.
It was safe to assume that no life and human structure survived the Armageddon the befell them, while those on the rest of the planet were about to be boiled alive in the remaining atmosphere as their own doomsday fell upon them in several stages.
"Did the four-dimensional probe camera catch all that?" Ivan asked the crewmembers in charge of communications.
"Y-yes, president!"
"Excellent, this will give them something to fear and show hesitance."
"P-president. Isn't this too much?" The communications officer nervously said while looking at the destruction on the planet with a cold sweat. "So many people died, we will become the entire galaxy's enemy…"
"Hmm? You are Cornwall if I recall correctly?"
"Y-yes, president?"
"Now that everyone in the Federation have received our information, not just a few secretly plotting, what do you think will happen?"
"They would want to cooperate with us to share and develop this technology."
"Cooperation? No, they would not do that. The Federation is full of corrupt politicians who only care about are their own benefits. They may put up a front of peace and negotiation at first, but they will hold their indomitable size and military pressure behind the negotiation like a dagger in the dark. There is obviously no way we would give them our technology and four-dimensional matter, so how do you think they would proceed after that, Cornwall?"
"P-president, I don't know."
"They would attack and take what they want by force. They can't target CTHQ, but the Vulpes home world is different. We can always repel them, but the surface of the world would be devastated in the process, especially if they attack when we our eyes are turned the other way. We don't have a hyperspace defense system and can't monitor hyperspace to anticipate when such an attack would come."
"Once the Vulpes are attacked, we will lose the majority of the growth of our race and become stagnant for at least the next hundred years or so. We won't be able to accept new human species as Celestials or they will rapidly outnumber the Vulpes Celestials and will raise the possibility of an insurrection early on in our growth. Our economy would finally become more unstable duo to lack of workers and could risk an internal collapse."
"President, couldn't all this be avoided if we didn't come here in the first place?"
Ivan heard this question and couldn't help but let out a sigh.
"Cornwall, the person we interacted with today has been trying to get four-dimensional matter for some time. He has the most excellent spies as they won't even confess, King Margold only discovered it from spies he had in other countries. This person will only have so much patience before he begins taking more desperate measures."
"In order to be one step ahead of them, we must seize the initiative. I would much rather become a martyr than a sinner who cost us our race. Do you understand?"
"I understand, president."
"Don't worry too much about this planet, the Federation will use this incident as propaganda to unite people and secure their support against an unknown mass terrorist organization. We have a video of it not just to claim it as our deed, but both to prevent them continuing to take actions in the shadows and deter any wanton pirates from trying to raid the Vulpes home world."
Cornwall nodded and apologized to the president before focusing back on the ships communication systems.
Ivan began silently pondering his next move when he noticed Iris still grinning beside himself, "What have you been smiling about all this time?"
"Of course, it was the first time you called me your main wife. Why wouldn't I be happy?" Iris said before leaning over and kidding him directly on the lips, her lithe tongue paying no attention to the stunned crew members hurriedly looking away as it slipped into his mouth.