Inside the bridge of the BFG.
The red alarm light had already been shattered by a single gunshot from Kerber.
Yet the violent tremors reverberating from the outside still served to remind everyone that this place was far from safe.
BOOM!!
Another thunderous roar rang out, causing the entire land battleship to tilt violently fifteen degrees to the left.
The armor belt on the starboard side had just taken a direct hit from a 400mm macro-cannon shell.
The shockwave from the explosion rippled through the hull's skeletal frame, sending unanchored tables and chairs rolling wildly across the deck. A few crew corpses slid across the slanted floor, piling up in the corners.
The ones firing were no other than their own side.
To be precise, it was this vessel's underlings—the Pristine Toilet and the Pile Driver, located to the flanks and rear.
The captains of these two land battleships had clearly plunged into a state of hysterical frenzy. Upon witnessing the collapse of the flagship's command network, the bald boss fleeing, and even the flags toppling, they made the most classic response of a wasteland warlord.
Since it couldn't be saved, they would destroy it.
Blow it to smithereens alongside the cargo, fuel, and those unknown intruders aboard.
"Boss, we can barely hold out much longer here."
Kerber anchored his body with one hand on the captain's chair armrest while pressing his communicator with the other. His tone was abnormally calm, entirely unfazed by a bombardment of this caliber.
"The enemy shells utilize traditional chemical propellant. Low muzzle velocity, insufficient penetration—they can't breach the core citadel armor."
"But this ship's structure isn't exactly built to take a beating. A few more shocks like this, and the keel joints might snap."
"Our personnel are fine. The servo-stabilization systems of the Vanguard power armor are functioning normally. The servitors—the servitors are walking upside down on the ceiling, completely unaffected."
Andy's voice crackled through the comm channel: "Pull out, the transport has arrived."
Through the shattered viewport of the bridge, Kerber spotted a heavy shuttle painted in dark-grey industrial livery. Braving the billowing dust and stray bullets, it forcibly hovered less than ten meters away from the breach in the bridge.
For an ordinary person, this distance was a chasm.
Beneath lay a drop of dozens of meters; falling meant being smashed to pieces.
Furthermore, the relative velocity between the two wasn't zero. The land battleship was still surging forward while the shuttle made constant micro-adjustments, causing their relative positions to change by the second.
But for the forces of Deep Sky Industries, this was merely a routine tactical maneuver.
"All units, evacuate."
Kerber issued the order.
Thirty Type-II combat servitors responded instantly, the anti-gravity attitude stabilizers on their backs glowing with blue light.
This gear not only allowed them to traverse any terrain regardless of obstacles, but it also provided a brief hovering capability.
Forming a single file, the servitors leapt straight out of the breach.
In mid-air, the anti-gravity fields canceled out their downward momentum. Like a troop of puppets guided by invisible strings, they glided weightlessly across the ten-meter abyss, landing precisely upon the open rear cargo ramp of the shuttle.
Right behind them were the remaining nine Vanguard warriors.
They didn't need anti-gravity.
The thrusters on the back of their power armor spat out high-pressure gas, and the hydraulic pumps in their thighs erupted with a roar.
THUD!
Their heavy metal bodies soared into the air, tracing parabolic arcs before slamming onto the shuttle's floor. Their magnetic boots engaged instantly, anchoring them securely.
Kerber was the last to leave.
Before departing, he reached out and wrenched off the gaudy, gold-encrusted skull from the captain's chair, keeping it as a souvenir of this operation.
"Go!"
With the last crew member aboard, the shuttle immediately pulled up, its tail nozzles erupting with a brilliant blue glare as it instantly broke away from the chaotic zone.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the horizon.
Two other heavily configured shuttles of identical design, resembling two colossal black vultures, pounced toward the remaining two targets.
The battle that followed was entirely mundane.
The defensive forces of the Pristine Toilet and the Pile Driver weren't much stronger than those of the BFG.
Their captains might have been more ruthless or cunning, but before an absolute generational gap in technology, none of that held any meaning.
When the second and third waves of power-armored warriors descended from the heavens, and the bizarre combat servitors went on a killing spree everywhere, the outcome was already sealed.
Resistance was futile.
Autogun fire merely pinged harmlessly against the power armor, while a single volley from the high-explosive crossbows could completely clear an entire corridor.
In less than forty minutes.
The command networks of these two land battleships collapsed in succession.
Their engines stalled, their tracks ground to a halt, and billows of thick black smoke rising from them, they successively broke down on the wasteland sixteen kilometers away from Fort Horizon.
With that, this siege born of greed concluded in an almost brutal fashion.
Three iron behemoths with a combined displacement exceeding a hundred thousand tons had now become three mountains of scrap metal sitting right outside Fort Horizon's doorstep.
Fort Horizon, Workshop.
Gamma-9 stared at the three grey markers representing "Disabled" on the holographic map, rubbing his hands together in sheer excitement.
"Lord Sage! A monumental victory!"
"Though these three ships are a bit ugly, that is solid, real material right there!"
"I suggest we immediately tow these three ships back to the industrial zone."
"We can repair them to form our own land battleship fleet, or simply scrap them. Their armor plates and keels are ready-made construction materials!"
Gamma-9 was running the numbers perfectly in his head.
In his view, picking up three land battleships for free—even if sold as scrap metal—would bring in a massive fortune.
However.
As Andy looked at those three names on the map, the expression on his face looked as uncomfortable as if he had eaten a rock.
"Tow them back?"
Andy pointed at the marker labeled Pristine Toilet, his tone wildly exaggerated: "Gamma-9, are you serious?!"
"You want me to tow a ship with a name like that into my perfectly clean, immaculate industrial zone?!"
"Are you trying to inflict irreversible psychic defilement upon my logic circuits?!"
"And look at that paint job!"
Andy pulled up the high-definition satellite imagery.
The hull was completely covered in all sorts of unsightly fertility totems, alongside blasphemous symbols smeared with a mixture of different biological fluids and excrement.
Just looking at this kind of thing required immediate eyeball purification surgery.
If they towed it back and parked it right in the square of Fort Horizon—
Andy felt it wouldn't just be an aesthetic disaster; it would be a catastrophic blow to the brand image of Deep Sky Industries!
"No towing."
Andy refused categorically.
"These three piles of garbage are absolutely forbidden from stepping a single foot inside Fort Horizon's security perimeter."
"If anyone dares haul this crap back, I'll stuff him into this ship's toilet and launch him out with a macro-cannon."
Gamma-9 shrank his neck back, not daring to bring up the matter again.
Yet he still felt it was somewhat a waste.
"But... Lord Sage, there really are a lot of resources inside them."
"Just that metal alone would last us a very long time—"
"We still want the resources." Andy tapped his fingers against the armrest. "But we can't just take everything like a scavenger picking through trash."
One had to know how to filter and refine.
Andy stood up, walked over to the holographic map, and magnified the three coordinates.
His gaze pierced right through those disgusting paint jobs and names, locking directly onto the internal structures of the three vessels.
In the Warhammer universe, no matter how trashy a ship was, as long as it could move and fire its guns, it bound to possess high-value components worth salvaging.
Particularly with land battleships modified from ancient starship wreckage like these; their underlying foundation was often much more substantial than it appeared on the surface.
"Macro-cannons."
Andy pointed at the main cannon on the back of the Pile Driver, which had already been blown askew.
"The caliber of this gun is 400mm, with a barrel length exceeding twenty meters."
"To withstand the immense chamber pressure and high temperatures during firing, the inner lining of these cannons is typically cast from high-purity, heat-resistant alloys."
"And within the formula of such alloys, to guarantee strength, a certain proportion of... Adamantium is often added."
Adamantium.
The very thing Andy lacked most right now.
It could not be synthesized through conventional means; it could only be obtained through mining or salvaging.
Previously, when Andy was designing the Warp engine, the inner wall of the reactor could not be resolved precisely because the lack of Adamantium had left him stuck.
Now, hadn't it just delivered itself right to his door?
And it wasn't just the macro-cannons.
Shifting his gaze further down, piercing through the hull, he arrived at the power bay.
"And the main drive shafts of the engines."
To drive iron lumps weighing tens of thousands of tons across the wasteland, the torque borne by the shafts would be an astronomical figure.
Swapping it out for ordinary steel would have twisted it into a pretzel long ago, and even plasteel wouldn't hold up under the strain.
Only specialized steel infused with Adamantium could withstand it.
Across these three ships, each vessel possessed at least two main shafts, six macro-cannons, plus the load-bearing beams of the core citadel armor.
"These, and these... are all rich veins."
Speaking to this point, a hint of bitterness actually surfaced in Andy's heart.
Because prior to this, over the course of these three months, although Deep Sky Industries appeared to be thriving on the surface, only Andy himself knew how strapped his raw material sources truly were.
Aside from the inventory brought over by Tech-Priest Zol and the smattering of xenos materials spit out by the analysis station.
Most of his basic metal sources actually relied on "eating into his savings."
Whose savings?
Naturally... Fort Horizon's savings.
To provide the reconstructor with sufficient feed material, Andy had been forced to order the demolition of large swaths of abandoned building complexes on the outer fringes of the industrial zone.
Though those buildings had already collapsed, they were legacies of the Golden Age!
Every single brick, every single beam, was a non-renewable cultural relic.
As a base-building player, watching those exquisite architectural components get tossed into the shredder made Andy's heart bleed.
It felt exactly like being forced to chop up the mahogany furniture at home just to burn for warmth.
What a waste!
But there was no choice. For the sake of survival, to manufacture guns and artillery, they could only demolish!
Demolish away!
Every demolition left him in stunned silence!
This had also resulted in the outer districts of Fort Horizon looking even more desolate now than before, resembling a field stripped bare by locusts.
But now, the situation had changed.
With these three self-delivered mobile mines, Andy could finally halt his practice of killing the goose to get the golden eggs.
Thinking of this, Andy tapped his finger once on each of the three coordinates.
On the holographic map, the three grey icons representing enemy ships vanished, replaced by three striking golden pickaxe symbols.
[Resource Reclamation Site—A]
[Resource Reclamation Site—B]
[Resource Reclamation Site—C]
"We shall establish these three locations as our first batch of Adamantium mining sites."
Andy turned around: "Have Engineering Department One deploy in full force."
"Bring all heavy cutters, transport trucks, and deploy those few hundred engineering drones over there as well."
"We don't need to tow the ships back. Scrap them right on the spot."
"Anything like macro-cannon barrels, engine drive shafts, reactor casings, and anything else that looks like ancient armor plating..."
"Cut it down, load it up, and bring it back!"
"As for the remaining scrap metal... just leave it lying there for now."
Andy waved his hand with a look of utter disdain.
"Let it serve as a road sign, telling those who come later: Don't mess with Deep Sky Industries."
Gamma-9 immediately snapped to attention: "Understood! Lord Sage!"
"I'll go arrange it right away! I guarantee we won't even leave them a single bolt!"
Watching Gamma-9's retreating figure as he ran out, Andy sat back down in his command chair.
Staring at the three golden mining site icons on the screen, his mood finally cleared up a bit.
Exactly, this was the correct way to play a base-building game.
No need to go deep into primeval forests to mine, no need to fight for territory against those damn xenos.
On this planet filled with the ruins of war, the greatest mineral reserves could completely be the corpses of the enemy.
They had forged the resources they painstakingly gathered into weapons and armor, only to deliver them right to Andy's doorstep.
All Andy needed to do was keep these things, toss them into the reconstructor, and let them transform into even more powerful tools.
"The Adamantium is secured."
Andy calculated in his head.
With Adamantium, the inner wall of the Warp engine's reactor could be manufactured.
Next, all that was left was the super-diamond...
This thing was even harder to come by than Adamantium.
Because it usually didn't exist as a structural material, but rather as a core component of precision arrays.
Ordinary land battleships wouldn't carry this kind of thing at all, unless it was one of those high-end models equipped with a lance main battery.
Andy recalled the fleet of land battleships that had come to blockade him when the New Bond made its crash landing earlier.
One or two of those ships had looked quite high-end, and their broadsides seemed to feature lance emitter ports.
What a pity...
If he could have taken down that ship as well, perhaps his material checklist would be fully complete by now.
But it didn't matter.
Since they had already established a firm foothold at Zais Station, there would surely be no shortage of such good fortunes delivering themselves to his door in the future.