Chapter 173: First Quantum Bomb Test

“Chief Lin, everything’s ready!”

On the research ship, a lab-coated technician hurried over to Lin Yu, unable to hide their excitement.

Twelve years.

This project had been underway for twelve long years, but the first eight had passed with barely any progress.

Even after drastically lowering the technological and material demands, a towering wall of technical challenges still blocked their way.

Until three and a half years ago.

Everything changed when she—standing before him now—joined the project. Every problem that used to stump the team was solved one after another.

It was no exaggeration to say she was behind over ninety percent of this project’s success.

And today, their first quantum bomb test model had been completed, now waiting three thousand kilometers ahead of the research vessel.

They were just waiting for Lin Yun’s order to proceed with the detonation.

“Is the target ship in position?”

“It’s in place. The test bomb is currently three kilometers from the target ship.”

“Begin the detonation countdown. Make sure everyone is ready to record the data!”

“Understood!”

The technician nodded and immediately got everything set up.

A few seconds ticked by.

A sixty-second countdown appeared as a projection.

At that moment, three thousand kilometers from the research ship sat a medium-sized Klein warship.

No—more accurately, what remained was a relatively intact wreck of a medium ship.

Three kilometers to its port side, a basketball-sized metal device flashed with indicator lights, pulsing steadily once per second.

Seconds dragged on.

The green light froze, swapped to red, and stayed lit.

Then—

A burst of dazzling blue swallowed the entire space, expanding outward in a roughly four-kilometer radius, like a high-pressure explosive detonated deep inside a planet. It formed a perfect sphere.

The whole thing lasted barely a second.

When the blue glow faded, all that remained of the Klein warship—

was a tiny section of the bow and stern. Everything in between had vanished.

No debris left behind. It was utterly gone.

If you moved in closer, you’d see the surviving bow and stern were sliced off with mirror-like precision—a stark contrast to the ship’s battered hull.

“The quantum window collapsed after 0.7 seconds. Maximum blast radius—4.5 kilometers.”

“Every part of the target ship inside the blast zone was destroyed—no, completely erased. Nothing at all remains!”

“Chief Lin, we… we did it!”

The technician shouted with joy, barely able to contain themselves.

Immediately, over a hundred other lab coats on the bridge erupted with cheers.

While all around her celebrated, Lin Yun was deep in thought.

They’d built a quantum bomb, sure—but actually using it was a whole different headache.

Stick it in a warhead and fire it off with a missile?

Not happening. In interstellar war, unless it’s a special mission, you can barely close a five-kilometer gap—let alone ten thousand.

It just wasn’t feasible.

What about having a mech carry it in close and deploy it directly?

Possible on paper, but how close would you have to get for that to work?

Lin Yun didn’t think this was a great idea.

These days, mechs were for orbital drops, intercepting enemy carrier squadrons, or shaping the front lines.

On open battlefields, opposing fleets were separated by millions of kilometers.

There was no room for carrier aircraft or mechs to get involved.

Railgun, then?

Well, that was the only remotely plausible method Lin Yun could think of.

But they’d need a custom railgun design, and the quantum bomb itself would need some modifications.

This wasn’t something ready for combat overnight.

But compared to developing the quantum bomb itself, these were all minor details.

A few days, at most, to iron things out—then on to repeated test runs. Within a year, tops.

Soon, this superweapon could be sent up to the forward lines.

Of course, the current 4.5-kilometer blast radius quantum bomb was just a prototype, and a small one at that.

Lin Yun planned to develop medium and large versions, too.

The large quantum bombs should, in theory, have a blast radius of over a hundred kilometers.

Even in the age of interstellar war, a hundred-kilometer kill radius was tiny. But—

They could be mass produced. Even a Tier-4 civilization with their energy shields couldn’t stand up to one.

That was the real game-changer.

Naturally, there were drawbacks.

Just like Lin Yun kept pondering—the biggest problem was how to deploy the bomb.

When battles are waged across millions of kilometers, firing with a railgun just isn’t all that efficient.

It’s just too slow.

But if it was only for defending the interstellar current mouth, as long as it wasn’t a Tier-4 civilization attacking? Even a Tier-3 one—no matter the numbers—they’d never break into Federation space.

And that was the real value of the quantum bomb right now.

——

Star General Dika of the Ziyang Empire led a mighty expedition fleet with twenty thousand warships, storming into Starte.

Looking at the star chart—

The Blue-Eye Tribe held a clear advantage.

Their border with the Ziyang Empire only had three entry points, but each of those connected to seven enemy nodes.

That meant the Blue-Eye Tribe could concentrate all its forces at three points, while the empire had to spread theirs thin across seven.

That’s why Blue-Eye raids on imperial borders succeeded time and again.

With the empire’s forces always scattered, the Blue-Eye Tribe could leave enough behind to guard the interstellar current mouth, then concentrate overwhelming force at a single border point.

Result? They smashed through the imperial front line in one stroke.

Before reinforcements from nearby imperial fleets could arrive, they’d already stripped the entire star system bare.

Not just for resources—even Ziyang people themselves were swept up.

After all, slaves were a valuable commodity.

Keep them or sell them to inter-civilization slavers—it didn’t matter.

They were worth a fortune, one way or another.

On the other hand, if the empire got a big enough numerical advantage, just punching through one Blue-Eye border point would free up their defensive lines across the board.

With more and more ships pouring in, the invasion would snowball—a single lost entry point meant a chunk of imperial forces could shift to the offensive.

Lose all three, and the entire empire could surge forward with nothing holding them back.

Dika—

is doing exactly that right now.

Near the interstellar current mouth between Starte and Kanon, the battlefield was littered with wrecked ships.

Both Ziyang Empire and Blue-Eye Tribe hulls floated among the debris.

But it was the Blue-Eye Tribe who’d taken the brunt—five thousand lost ships.

Ziyang Empire had lost about a thousand, all Seawolf-class.

They had no choice—sending ten thousand imperial ships to the front, facing five thousand enemy vessels dug in on defense, was a costly strategy.

Even if you lost all ten thousand, you might not break through.

So Dika had to use Seawolfs for the vanguard.

Of the over a thousand lost, about eighty percent were destroyed in the first phase of battle.

No help for it—absolute defensive advantage at the interstellar current mouth was no joke.

Even the powerful Seawolf-class warships, when outnumbered, suffered heavy losses in the opening assault.

Still, achieving a kill ratio of 1,000 to 5,000—especially in a battle for control of the current—

proves just how formidable the Seawolf-class really was.