Fate's Choice: Livestream at the Start Summoning Billions of Ravens

The raging frigid storm around Sergei suddenly stopped; the gale crashed against an invisible wall and was forced to split to both sides.

Sergei suddenly opened his eyes.

An indescribable warmth burst forth from the center of his heart, spreading throughout his body via his blood vessels. His skin, which had been frozen to a bluish-purple, regained its color at a visible speed, and his severe frostbite was completely healed within seconds.

He looked down and saw that Andrei in his arms had also opened his eyes. The gunshot wound in his abdomen had stopped worsening, and the young man's face had regained the warmth of a living person.

Sergei stood up.

On his chest, a red orb of light was slowly rotating beneath his skin. Centered on him, a translucent, pale blue spherical barrier rapidly expanded outward from the ice surface, pushing aside the wind and snow, crushing the debris, and covering a vast ice field of one hundred square kilometers.

The air inside the barrier began to warm up.

Zero degrees Celsius.

Ten degrees Celsius.

It eventually stabilized at 21 degrees Celsius.

This is a very comfortable, constant-temperature environment.

The few surviving Blackwater mercenaries lay prone behind the ice ridge, watching helplessly as the pale blue barrier swept across their bodies. One second they were waiting to die in a hellish minus seventy-five degree Celsius environment, and the next second, they were surrounded by warmth, a comfort comparable to the sun on a California beach.

The extreme contrast drove the mercenary completely insane.

A mercenary raised his thawed rifle and aimed it at Sergei in the distance.

"Go to hell!"

He pulled the trigger.

The bullet left the barrel and flew toward the target at a speed of 800 meters per second, but a strange phenomenon occurred the instant the bullet touched the air inside the pale blue barrier.

There was no sound of collision.

The bullet's kinetic energy was forcibly erased the moment it penetrated the barrier. Its kinetic energy was absorbed by this absolute domain and converted into energy to maintain a constant temperature. The bullet suddenly lost all power during its flight, hovered in mid-air for less than 0.1 seconds, and then fell straight to the ice surface with a crisp metallic clang.

The mercenary refused to believe it and emptied an entire magazine.

Without exception, all thirty bullets lost their kinetic energy half a meter after leaving the barrel and fell to the ground.

In this 100-square-kilometer area, the laws of physics have been completely rewritten.

Sergei stood there, feeling the flickering fire in his chest. He turned his head to look at Andrei, whose face was blank, and then at the mercenaries in the distance holding scrap metal.

"It seems..."

Sergei zipped up his winter coat.

"This place is now under my jurisdiction."

Meanwhile, Russian reconnaissance planes were circling high in the sky, and satellite monitoring centers were located in Washington and Moscow.

High-ranking officials from multiple countries stared intently at the massive hemisphere that had appeared out of nowhere on the screen, isolated from the blizzard and exhibiting an absolutely constant temperature. When they saw that even kinetic weapons were malfunctioning within it, as seen on the thermal imager, the entire command center fell into a deathly silence.

.........

On the other side, five days after Hutchins' identity was erased.

The Pentagon's underground strategic command post, level B-7, is so deep that even a direct nuclear impact could not penetrate it.

Newly appointed acting Secretary of Defense Greg Paterson stands at the tactical table.

Three top-secret briefings were spread out on the table, their surfaces covered with dense red secret stamps.

His hands were trembling.

The temperature inside the room remained constant at 22 degrees Celsius, so he did not feel cold.

The briefing cover on the right reads "Manhattan Incident," depicting a Latino janitor wielding a one-dollar coin as he pushes across the entire length of Wall Street, causing Morgan Stanley's $640 billion in assets to evaporate in thirty seconds.

The one in the middle is the "Thunderstorm," in which all metal weapons in Great Britain were rendered unusable, the 200-year-old cast iron railings of Buckingham Palace were broken at the base, and the entire country regressed to the era of cold weapons.

The document on the left, from the Satellite Monitoring Division, is titled "Oymyakon Anomaly Area," which is a constant-temperature barrier covering 100 square kilometers, capable of completely neutralizing the kinetic energy of a bullet.

Patterson opened the briefing on the right for the fourth time, turned to the third page, and closed it again.

"To be fair," he said, his voice slightly unsteady.

"I've only been in this position for 72 hours. My predecessor's face has already rotted into an unrecognizable mass of flesh. Now, sitting in his chair and looking at these things, I feel like I'll be in the same boat soon."

No one laughed.

Across the long table sat the remaining four generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lieutenant General Nelson of the Space Force Command, and a man with no rank but only a number.

The man was wearing a gray suit with a badge pinned to his chest; it had no markings other than a sixteen-digit code.

"Mr. Paterson." The voice in the gray suit was dry and flat.

There are three keys in front of you.

Patterson looked down at the table.

Three pure black physical keys were placed side by side next to the presentation, each no more than ten centimeters long, and made of some kind of non-reflective alloy.

He personally retrieved it from the highest-security safe five minutes ago.

As his fingers touched the metal surface, the icy sensation shot straight to his heart, sending chills down his spine.

"Orion," Patterson read out the two words.

Everyone in the conference room began to breathe unsteadily.

"Deployed in 1987, upgraded with an electromagnetic orbital acceleration system in 2004, and replaced with a third-generation tungsten alloy projectile in 2019." Lieutenant General Nelson spoke very quickly.

"Three W-88 modified pure kinetic energy penetrating missiles, each weighing ten tons, with a terminal velocity of Mach 17 after electromagnetic acceleration, no explosive yield, pure physical impact, and the energy release at the impact point is equivalent to 11.8 tons of TNT."

Patterson didn't look up.

"It is not a nuclear weapon."

"No, there's not even any radioactive dust. It's just a tungsten rod that fell from space." Nelson's speech quickened again.

"Therefore, it is not bound by any nuclear weapons treaty, and within the framework of international law, this thing is not even considered a weapon of mass destruction."

"What was it called again? The nickname it was given during Star Wars."

"God's Hammer".

Patterson picked up the first black key.

The coldness of the metal spread from my fingertips to my wrist.

"Three objectives," he said in a low voice.

"The Port of Cusco, the Qinling Base, and the Cairo Museum—these three places respectively contain the Golden Corn, the Military Master's Talisman, and the Anubis Scales."

"To be precise, it's the core control node of the three divine artifacts," the man in the gray suit added.

"We can't take them away or use them, but we can physically wipe them off the surface. Tungsten rods traveling at Mach 17 can't be intercepted by any known air defense system."

"What will be the consequences?"

The man in the gray suit opened his tablet and pushed it across the table.

"Cusco Port: estimated casualties of 700 to 1,200; Qinling Base: estimated 90% destruction of underground facilities, zero casualties among ground personnel, but the Chinese government will treat this as a nuclear strike; Cairo Museum: located in the city center, all buildings within a 300-meter radius are destroyed, and civilian casualties are no less than 3,000."

Patterson pushed the tablet back.

"Three thousand."

"Three thousand."

The air conditioning vents in the conference room emitted a continuous low-frequency hum.

Patterson stared at the key in his hand for a long time.

"When Hutchins ordered the bombing of Cairo, Libra stripped eleven people of their identities in less than sixty seconds." Patterson's voice became hoarse.

"His face is completely mangled; even his wife wouldn't recognize him. Should I bomb the same target again?"

"Libra's countermeasure mechanism is based on causal attribution," the man in the gray suit replied.

"It requires a traceable chain of instructions. Orion's launch authorization uses physical keys and pre-set orbit coordinates, with no electronic signal interaction throughout the process. The satellite itself is in radio frequency silence. From a physical perspective, there is no digital fingerprint that can be traced."

"You mean Libra can't find us?"

"That's what we're betting on."

Patterson lined up the three keys.

The black metal didn't reflect any light at all under the white fluorescent tube.

"implement."