My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible - Chapter 375: Are You... A Human? (Bonus Chapter 2/10)

Chapter 375: Are You… A Human? (Bonus Chapter 2/10)

After the livestream ended, Liam flew back to the spacecraft. The transition from infinite void to the Voyager’s interior felt almost claustrophobic, despite the massive scale of the docking bay. He made his way through the familiar corridors to the flight deck, settling into the captain’s chair with the weight of anticipation pressing against his chest.

It was time to find the Voidling.

“Lucy, I’m taking manual control,” he announced, his hands moving across the holographic interface. “The navigation system can’t locate the coordinates the system provided. I’ll need to fly us there directly.”

“Understood, Master. Transferring flight control to manual. All systems responding to your input.”

The displays shifted, placing him in direct command of the Voyager’s propulsion, orientation, and navigation. Liam input the coordinates burned into his memory—numbers that represented a location in space that shouldn’t exist on any map, that no probe had ever reached, that existed in a region of the universe where nothing should be.

The fusion drive engaged, and the massive starship began moving through interstellar space under his guidance.

The darkness beyond the viewport remained absolute, but with the faint distant stars that provided no sense of distance or direction. Flying through interstellar space was like navigating through an empty room with all the lights off—you knew space existed around you, but couldn’t perceive its dimensions.

Time crawled forward. Minutes became hours, and still the coordinates drew no closer. Liam maintained their velocity at 1,000 kilometers per second—absurdly fast by planetary standards, but pathetically slow across interstellar distances. Even at this speed, crossing a single light-year would take three hundred years.

The scale of space out here was incomprehensible in ways the inner solar system never was. Between planets, you had reference points—the Sun, other worlds, asteroids, the destinations themselves visible across the void. Out here, there was nothing. Just darkness and the abstract knowledge that you were moving through it.

Liam’s mind wandered as he flew. What would the Voidling look like? The system had called it an offspring of Void Beasts—cosmic administrators of his universe, entities that existed on a scale beyond planetary or even stellar. What form would such a creature take? Would it be biological in any recognizable sense, or something else entirely, like a manifestation of physical law given semi-solid form?

He smiled at his own speculation. Pointless to guess when the answer lay ahead, growing closer with each passing second.

More hours slipped by. The Voyager’s chronometer marked the passage of time, but time felt meaningless here. Four hours. Six hours. Eight. The monotony was almost meditative, his hands making tiny course corrections, his eyes tracking coordinates that still read distant but gradually decreasing.

Then, after nearly ten hours of transit at relativistic crawl, the distance indicator shifted. They were approaching.

Liam reduced their velocity, bringing the massive starship down to a more manageable 100 kilometers per second, then 50, then 10. His heart rate increased, anticipation building in his chest like pressure before a storm.

The viewport showed nothing. The darkness remained absolute, unchanged, giving no indication that anything existed ahead of them at all.

But the coordinates said otherwise. They were close now. Very close.

Liam’s enhanced vision strained against the void, searching for any sign of—

An eye opened.

The shock of it froze Liam in place, his breath catching in his throat. One moment there was nothing. The next, an eye—massive, yellow, and utterly alien—materialized in the darkness ahead.

It wasn’t close to the spacecraft. The distance had to be thousands of kilometers at minimum. But the eye was so incomprehensibly large that even from that distance, Liam could see it clearly on the holographic display, could make out the vertical slit of its pupil contracting as it focused.

The contrast was what made it so disturbing. The eye wasn’t illuminated by any external light source. It simply existed, a bright yellow presence against absolute black, its glow emanating from within.

The pupil was a slash of deeper darkness cutting through the yellow, and as Liam watched, it rotated slightly, orienting on the Voyager with predatory precision.

His throat went dry. His hands, which had been steady through every previous crisis, trembled slightly on the controls.

Then space tore open.

There was no other way to describe it. Reality itself split apart like fabric being ripped, and through the tear swam something that made the eye seem like a minor detail.

The creature that emerged was impossibly, incomprehensibly massive. Liam’s enhanced vision tried to parse its dimensions and failed, his brain refusing to accept the scale of what he was seeing.

If he had to compare it to something familiar, the closest analogy would be a whale. But that comparison was laughably inadequate. This wasn’t larger than a whale the way an aircraft carrier was larger than a rowboat. This was larger in a way that made whales look like microorganisms.

The Voyager—a kilometer-long Heavy Cruiser Flagship—was dwarfed. Completely and utterly dwarfed. The creature was easily three to four times the starship’s length, but its mass seemed far greater, its body thick and dense in ways that suggested weight beyond calculation.

Two parallel lines of bright blue lights ran down its back, each light roughly the size and intensity of industrial halogen lamps, maybe larger. They pulsed gently, creating a bioluminescent display that was the only illumination in the absolute darkness. The lights stretched into the distance, disappearing into parts of the creature’s body that Liam couldn’t see, suggesting it was even larger than the portion visible.

The creature’s skin—if it could be called skin—seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, making its exact color impossible to determine. Dark blue, maybe, or deep purple, or black with subtle iridescence. Whatever it was, it drank in the faint starlight and gave nothing back except for those bright blue dots along its spine.

And those eyes. Both of them now, massive yellow orbs that dominated the front of its body, vertical pupils contracting as they locked onto the Voyager with unsettling precision.

No, Liam realized with a jolt of cold clarity. Not onto the Voyager. Onto him specifically.

Through a kilometer of starship hull, through the viewport, through whatever senses this thing possessed, it was looking directly at him. Not at the spacecraft as an object, but at him as a living being inside it.

The creature was still thousands of kilometers away, but even from that distance, its size eclipsed everything. If it came closer—if it approached to within a few hundred kilometers—Liam suspected its mass would fill his entire field of vision, an impossible wall of living flesh that curved beyond the horizon in every direction.

His mind tried to calculate its actual dimensions and gave up. Hundreds of kilometers long, certainly. Maybe thousands. How did you measure something that existed on a scale meant for planetary bodies rather than biological organisms?

And this was an offspring. A juvenile. The system had called it a Voidling, implying it hadn’t reached full maturity yet. If this was what young Void Beasts looked like, what were the adults? How large could they possibly grow?

Multiple sun-sized? Larger? Did they reach scales where they became gravitational objects in their own right, bending space-time with their mass alone?

A warning klaxon blared across the flight deck, red alerts flashing across multiple displays.

GRAVITATIONAL ANOMALY DETECTED

LOCAL GRAVITY WELL INCREASING RAPIDLY

STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: WARNING

RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL

Liam’s eyes snapped to the readouts. The gravitational field around the Voyager was spiking, rising from nearly zero to measurable levels in seconds. The creature’s mass was warping space-time itself, creating a gravity well that was pulling on the starship with increasing force.

The fusion drive automatically compensated, firing positioning thrusters to maintain their position. But the gravity continued increasing, and the thrusters struggled to keep up.

Now Liam understood what the system had meant about Void Beasts being unable to enter planetary systems. It wasn’t that they couldn’t physically reach planets—it was that their presence would catastrophically disrupt the delicate gravitational balance that kept worlds in stable orbits.

A creature this massive approaching the inner solar system would throw planets off course, potentially sending them careening into the Sun or flinging them into deep space.

The warning klaxons intensified.

GRAVITATIONAL STRESS: CRITICAL

STRUCTURAL LOAD APPROACHING MAXIMUM TOLERANCE

ESCAPE TRAJECTORY RECOMMENDED

Liam gripped the controls, preparing to fire the main engines and pull them away to safe distance. But when he tried to input the command, nothing happened.

They weren’t moving. The thrusters fired, the fusion drive engaged, but the Voyager remained locked in position, held in place by gravitational forces that overwhelmed their propulsion capabilities.

The creature was approaching.

Slowly, deliberately, with movements that suggested intelligence rather than animal instinct, it swam through space toward them. Each motion sent ripples through the void, distortions in space-time that Liam could sense more than see.

The gravity increased. What had been uncomfortable pressure became genuine weight, pushing down on Liam’s chest, pressing him into the captain’s chair with force that would have injured an unenhanced human.

His enhanced physiology handled it, but barely. The pressure built with each passing second as the creature drew closer, its mass creating a gravity well that was approaching Earth-normal levels and still climbing.

Panic flickered at the edges of Liam’s thoughts. He’d nearly come close to death before. But this was different. This wasn’t something he could fight.

This was physics itself becoming hostile, the fundamental forces of the universe being twisted by the presence of something that existed on a scale he couldn’t comprehend.

“System,” he said aloud, his voice strained by the pressure on his chest. “What do I do?”

[Wait.]

That was it. One word. No explanation, elaboration, or reassurance.

Liam wanted to argue, to demand more information, to insist on a plan that involved doing something rather than nothing. But something in that single word carried weight beyond its simplicity.

The system wasn’t being cryptic for amusement. It was telling him that action would be counterproductive, that his best chance—his only chance—was to remain still and let events unfold.

So he waited.

The creature approached until it filled the entire viewport, its body blocking out the stars, its bioluminescent lights the only illumination in a universe of darkness. The gravity reached levels that would have crushed most spacecraft, that pressed Liam down with weight that made breathing difficult.

Then it stopped.

The creature hovered—if that word even applied to something so massive—mere kilometers from the Voyager. Close enough that Liam could make out individual features on its skin, could see the way its flesh moved with something like breathing, could observe the slow pulse of its bioluminescent lights.

And then it made a sound.

The noise transmitted through space itself. It was deep, resonant, otherworldly—like whale song but amplified beyond reason, modulated with harmonics that suggested complexity far beyond animal communication.

But shockingly, impossibly, Liam understood it.

And what it said—what it asked, with a tone that suggested genuine shock and confusion—was:

“Are you… a human?”