Aron's eyes flashed gold as he looked at the unconscious cultists in the crater. He noticed a purple worm wriggling its way out of the eye of one of the awakeners and attempting to flee. But since his shield blocked all mana from passing through in both directions, the purple worm could only bang against it like a fly on a windowpane.

He stepped off the rim of the crater and slid down the steep side. "Why did everything disintegrate when I absorbed all of the mana?" he asked Nova.

[Have you heard of the saying that all matter is mostly emptiness, sir?] she replied.

"Refresh my memory."

[Atoms are over 99.9% empty space. If they were blown up to the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a marble in the center, and the electrons would be microscopic specks of dust orbiting around the outside of the stadium in the parking lot.

[So when mana is injected into matter, it fills that empty space up, like turning the entire stadium into a huge swimming pool, or perhaps part of an ocean. Normally, if you pull out a cup of water from it, it'll just flow in from somewhere else and the total amount of water is rebalanced.

[But what you did was artificially divide out a certain amount of "˜water', then forcibly extract it. When you did that, everything else collapsed and the electrons met the protons in an annihilation reaction, leaving only the neutrons of the atoms. So somewhere in that crater, there are pure neutrons, though there aren't enough of them to really have an effect on their surroundings,] Nova explained.

"That's..." Aron began, but trailed off at a loss for words. "So if I were to drain all the mana out of a saturated star, I could collapse it into a neutron star?"

[Theoretically, yes, sir.]

Aron reached the bottom of the crater on autopilot, lost in the possibilities and feeling slightly overwhelmed by his phenomenal cosmic powers. Thankfully, though, with the simulation the way it was, he would never be forced into an itty bitty living space.

He shook his head and came out of his reverie; he had more important things to do, so he would consider his power later.

Walking up to one of the unconscious cultists on the ground, he squatted down and stared at him, attracting the attention of everyone else in the crater with him. However, their eyeballs didn't disturb him at all, as he was too focused on what he was doing to care about them.

His pupils shrank and widened as if they were microscopes being adjusted by focusing dials. Then he raised his head and looked in a certain direction. He stood and turned to his emperor's aegis, then nodded.

"Catch up," he said. Then, with a shocking sonic boom, he shattered the shield he had carved as he passed through it on his way to... somewhere else.

……

The aegis team headed back to the base, where their stealth shuttle was, leaving Jason and Catherine to clean up the mess and transport the unconscious cultists back to the prison cells in their base for processing. The prisoners would soon be sent to the Hole, where they would await their public trial and sentencing.

“I can’t help but wonder... just how strong is he, anyway?” Jason mused.

“I’m curious about that, too,” Catherine said, looking in the direction that Aron had flown off in. “What he did in our base was already big enough, but now this....” She pointed at the crater that used to be a quaint little community center.

“What he did to our base? Didn’t he say that was just for appearance’s sake?” Jason asked. “Do you think he did something else? I mean, there’s a bunch of patterns and lights and all, and they do look really cool, all sci-fi and shit.”

“He was probably just brushing us off. It’s likely something that only he can activate, so there’s no real need to tell us the details. After all, if we can’t use it without him, it’s useless to us, isn’t it. And hey—aren’t you gonna follow him?” she asked.

“No, we have to finish cleaning up here. He’s got the aegis on his tail anyway, and isn’t there still a reaper team in town that’ll go after him, too? Besides, the base is ours. I’m sure we’ll get orders from higher,” he pointed a finger up to the sky, “if we really need to move out. So I’m just gonna stay put and wait for orders. I’ll count it as part of the 98%.”

“The 98%?” Catherine tilted her head quizzically. “What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you ever heard the saying that ‘the military is 98% boredom and 2% pants-wetting terror’?”

“Well... I have now.”

Jason turned to the LEAs and pointed at one of them. “You, take your squad and bring these cultists back to the cells in the base. I’d say don’t be seen, but....” He looked around. “I don’t think there’s anyone left to see us. So make it fast, they’ll probably be waking up soon and we need them shackled before that. Don’t forget the mouth guards, either. I know biting off tongues won’t kill people, but it’ll make it hard for them to talk and there’s no sense in wasting resources to heal them in our medical pods if we don’t have to.”

Finished giving orders, the reaper turned and strode off, heading back to base.

“Wait for me!” Catherine coquettishly said as she jogged up to him and wrapped herself around him like an octopus. If anyone were there to see that other than the LEAs, they might have wondered if the two had actually fallen for each other.

But that was something that no one but Jason and Catherine knew, and they certainly weren’t going to tell anyone.

Shortly after the operatives and LEAs left, a constructor swarm arrived and rebuilt the community center from the ground up exactly as it was before. Imperial technology certainly gave an entirely new meaning to the term “cleaning up”.