"No!"
"It can't go on like this!"
"I have to find a way to hedge my bets!"
Aethel paced back and forth across the bridge, her combat boots stomping against the metal deck with sharp, rhythmic clangs.
Her state was thoroughly neurotic, her hair clawed into a chaotic mess. Even when facing a siege by the Læss, she had never lost her composure to this degree.
In the corner, Adjutant Vera had shrunk into a tight ball.
The young girl hugged her data pad, wishing she could wedge herself straight into the gap under the console.
It's over, it's over... the Captain is going crazy again... Vera wailed internally.
The last time the Captain went crazy, she insisted on showing off with ancestor relics, dragging the fleet straight into a quagmire.
This time was even more absurd—they had clearly just won a battle, so why was she acting even crazier after coming back?
Waaaah... the pressure is way too high! I can't do another single day as this adjutant!
Aethel's brain was running at absolute peak load.
Although her earlier deduction made her feel like she had seen through the ultimate truth—trapping her in a desperate loop of "even though I'm still breathing, I'm actually already dead"...
At the end of the day, Aethel was a major warlord who had spent years crawling through the mud of the wasteland; her brain still functioned sharply.
Since she had anticipated a death sentence, she had to find a way to break out of prison!
Aethel walked over to the holographic map, her finger jabbing hard against Horisenburg's location several times.
Other wasteland warlords, including Fortress Odin, held a very simple view of Deep Space Industries—this external faction that had suddenly popped out of nowhere.
They assumed these people were merely lucky crash survivors who, stuck here with no way off-world, decided to claim a piece of territory first.
That line of thinking was certainly fine, highly reasonable, and fit standard survival logic.
Aethel, however, did not share that view—especially now that she had "understood everything."
She held far more intelligence than those country bumpkins.
She knew Sisyphron had been scouring the world like a madman recently to collect condensate.
Yet beyond that, he also exhibited an intense interest in another material.
Adamantite.
This substance was a strategically controlled resource, almost entirely monopolized by Odin, with virtually zero circulating on the open market.
Even so, Sisyphron kept buying it up, demanding it even if it was just a few dozen grams.
Initially, Aethel thought they intended to construct a landship.
After all, on this planet, nothing besides a landship was worth building with adamantite.
Later, though, she realized something was off!
Sisyphron and his crew had clearly disabled four landships—in Aethel's eyes, the Scavenger had been destroyed by them as well.
If they truly wanted to build a landship, dragging those four vessels back, patching them up, replacing the engines, or even scrapping them for spare parts would be vastly faster than forging one from scratch out of adamantite, wouldn't it?
And what was the result?
They didn't repair them—they didn't even bother towing them!
Instead, they dismantled all four ships right on the spot. Over the past two or three weeks, they took only core materials, leaving the remaining scrap iron sitting there to be salvaged at a leisure pace.
What did that signify?
It signified that they didn't care about landships at all!
Since they didn't want landships, why go through all that trouble collecting adamantite?
Wait a second...
Doesn't Horisenburg happen to have a Launch Well?
Aethel: "..."
The moment this thought popped into her head, Aethel felt it was ridiculously absurd.
Although she wasn't a tech geek, after spending so many years on the wasteland, she still possessed basic common sense.
A Golden Age facility on the scale of the Launch Well—a mega-engineering project that literally hollowed out the planetary crust—was simply impossible for a handful of people to operate.
I mean, Aethel wondered, was the control system of a facility like that even meant for living humans to use?
The legends stated it crystal clear: you had to have an Abominable Intelligence!
Without an Abominable Intelligence to coordinate the big picture, even if you stuffed all the adamantite on the entire planet into it, it wouldn't spit out half a single component.
Where did these people get the audacity to set their sights on the Launch Well?
Did they think they could make that thing run through pure manual crafting?
Don't tell her these desperate outlaws could actually pull out an Abominable Intelligence from home for a quick spin?!
That would be way too absurd!
---
Out on the wasteland battlefield, wind and sand gradually rose.
Andy stood between the massive carcasses of the two giant centipedes.
The bright yellow robes on his body were completely ruined. Tattered by shockwaves and air currents, nothing remained now except a ragged collar hanging around his neck.
Yet he paid it no mind.
A faint vibration frequency flickered across the surface of the Iron Man chassis.
HUMMM—
Dust, oil stains, and alien bodily fluids clinging to the armor were instantly shaken into fine powder by this high-frequency vibration, falling away in a rustling cascade.
A few seconds later, his chassis returned to a mirror-like shine, saving even the effort of polishing.
Andy was thoroughly satisfied with this!
Who knew mimetic polyalloy had such a perk—maxed-out self-cleaning capability!
Beside him...
Hulie sat atop a piece of carapace fragment, gasping heavily for air.
Her current appearance... how should one put it... was extremely unrefined.
Lacking Andy's vibration-cleaning feature, she was still wearing that same work uniform.
In the high-intensity close-quarters fire fight and slaughter, she had inevitably ended up splattered all over.
The Læss's bodily fluids were a dark, sticky red.
Right now, Hulie looked as though she had just been hauled out of a vat of blood. Her hair hung in matted, gooey strands, her face smeared in red paste, with only those green eyes glowing bright, blinking back and forth in the dark night.
Andy glanced down at her and couldn't hold it in.
"Pfft," Andy pointed at her. "You look like a newborn baby rat right now."
Hulie was already exhausted to death, so hearing those words made her blow her top instantly.
She jumped up, ignoring the filth covering her body, and pointed right at Andy's nose as she swore: "You damned Abominable Intelligence! Do you even know how to talk?!"
"Our ancestors truly had nothing better to do all day, insisting on installing all kinds of personality modules into an Abominable Intelligence!"
"And another thing!"
"Did you secretly turn down my Gauss output power earlier?! Why were those last few shots firing so slow?!"
"It was like it went totally limp!"
"That was structural protection," Andy spread his hands. "If the barrel burst, you'd be heartbroken to death."
"I don't care! I want a shower! I want a shower right now!"
Furious enough to pounce and bite Andy, Hulie looked at his rock-hard alloy body and feared breaking her teeth, settling for kicking him in a bout of powerless rage.
"I'll blow you to death with the Gauss cannons right now!"
"Abominable Intelligence, drop dead!"
Watching Hulie throw a fit there, Andy actually felt quite relaxed in his mind.
This battle was immensely satisfying, though indeed risky.
Had Andy let arrogance get the better of him and not brought Hulie along, the outcome would definitely not have been a complete annihilation like this.
The armor on those two giant centipedes was far too thick. Without Hulie controlling the Gauss disintegrator cannons to execute targeted armor breaches, Andy would have had to take a blade and carve his way through the compartments all the way to the cockpits to disable them.
During that time gap, the second giant centipede would have wandered off to who-knows-where, giving the Læss ample time to spread out their forces.
Secondly—and most crucially...
The Læss possessed brains.
The moment they realized they were outmatched, their immediate instinct was to scatter and flee.
If several thousand elite warriors dispersed and burrowed into the wasteland, Andy wouldn't be able to catch them all even if he had six arms and three heads.
Once escaped, those elites would turn around to deliver endless harassment and guerrilla strikes, ensuring Horisenburg would never know a day of peace.
Meanwhile, Hulie's six Gauss disintegrator cannons transformed into the Grim Reaper's scythe at that critical moment.
Whenever a Læss dared show its head, green light arrived instantly.
Saturation fire with virtually no blind spots forcibly suppressed the fleeing Læss back near the giant centipedes, creating the perfect setup for Andy to wipe them out in one single pot.
It could be said that without Hulie—this super-addon—there was no way this battle would have achieved such a flawless loss-to-kill ratio.
"Alright, alright," Andy ripped off the torn collar in his hand. "When we get back, you can wash to your heart's content—unlimited hot water."
"By the way, as for the spoils this time, pick whatever you like."
Hulie's swearing stopped instantly.
She wiped a hand across the blood and filth on her face, revealing her small white teeth.
"You said it yourself."
"I want that giant centipede's neural chip module—that's an exceptionally fine compute carrier."
"Approved."
---
2:00 AM.
When Andy returned to the workshop, he found the place as bustling as a wet market.
Gamma-9, Bower, Roger, Sisyphron—even Tech-Priest Zor was present.
The five of them gathered around the holographic map, fiercely debating something with spit flying everywhere.
"I think we should process those corpses into fertilizer—the hydroponic farm has been running low on fertilizer lately!"
That was Roger.
"No! That is sacrilege! We should burn them and turn the ashes into bricks!"
That was Gamma-9.
"These infantry units are prime raw materials—wouldn't feeding them to the parsing station be far better?"
That was Sisyphron.
Noticing Andy walk in, everyone shut their mouths, snapping to attention all at once.
"Lord Sage!"
"Boss!"
Andy waved a hand, signaling them not to be so tense.
"It's this late and you're still not sleeping, holding a tea party here?"
"How is it? No trouble at home, right?"
"Reporting to the Boss, everything is normal," Bower reported.
"No movement from Fortress Odin or the Dusk, and the other warlords are keeping quiet as well."
"After this battle, I reckon no one within a five-hundred-kilometer radius will dare come looking for trouble with us."
"I think so too."
Andy stepped up to the console, making a few inputs on the holographic map.
Level Two Readiness was lifted, and the two zones representing the giant centipede carcasses were marked as new resource points:
[Xenos Mine Site A]
[Xenos Mine Site B]
"Gamma-9," Andy issued the command, "notify Engineering Department One—full mobilization."
"Bring all heavy trucks and cutting tools. If they can be moved after dismantling, drag those two masses over to the gantry gate."
"If they truly can't be moved, prioritize dragging the corpses of the infantry units."
"Biomass of this volume will stink to high heaven once it rots, and it'll attract sand worms, which is extremely troublesome."
"Considering it's currently rest hours, assign 200 contribution points per person—make sure it's arranged."
"Yes! I'll see to it right away!"
---
Meanwhile, at the Launch Well defense sector.
Kaelber stood atop the service tower, watching the abyss below with vigilance.
According to the Boss, the Launch Well served as the receiving end; if a fight broke out outside, the Læss inside would surely riot.
Hence, he had prepared to fight a brutal battle.
All heavy artillery was in position, and every ultraviolet light strip was switched on.
Even the final self-destruct protocol had been unlocked.
However...
It was far too strange.
Several hours had passed.
Down in the abyss below, things were eerily quiet.
Far from a riot, even the occasional rustling crawling sounds usually heard had completely vanished.
Meanwhile, the scouts that had been probing along the edges had all shrunk back as well.
The entire underground world seemed utterly dead.
"What major move are these bastards... cooking up down there?"
Kaelber scratched his helmet.
How could he possibly know?
Just a few hours ago, the reinforcement force they were preparing to link up with had been wiped out outside by two people: Andy and Hulie.
Before this battle even started, it was already over...