Episode-1044
Chapter : 2087
The three of them looked at the fallen giant.
"Did we win?" Rosa whispered, leaning on her ice spear for support.
"We stopped it," Eun-ha said, checking her datapad. "Its systems are rebooting, but the drain is massive. It’s running on reserve power. It can't use the Time Drive anymore. It can't use the Gravity Lance."
Lloyd looked at the machine. It was trying to stand up, its movements jerky and slow. It looked like a broken puppet.
It was a stalemate.
They had stripped it of its god-like powers. They had blinded it, frozen it, and infected it. But it was still made of super-alloys. It was still strong enough to crush them with its bare hands if they got too close.
And they were exhausted.
Rosa was out of mana. Eun-ha’s mental processing was at its limit. Lloyd’s suit was a paperweight.
"We can't kill it," Lloyd realized, wiping sweat and blood from his eyes. "We don't have the firepower to finish it off. We just... stalled it."
The machine stood up. It looked at them. Its red eyes were dim, but they were still hateful.
"ORGANIC... RESISTANCE... NOTED," the machine rasped. Its voice was glitchy, skipping words. "REPAIR... PROTOCOLS... ENGAGED. ESTIMATED... RECOVERY... TIME... TEN... MINUTES."
Ten minutes.
They had ten minutes before the god healed itself and killed them all.
Lloyd looked at his wives. They were breathing hard, their bodies trembling with fatigue. They had fought perfectly. It was a dance of three lifetimes of experience—the General, the Queen, and the Executive—moving in perfect sync. They had defied the laws of physics.
But physics has a lot of energy. And humans run out.
"We need a bigger gun," Lloyd said quietly.
"We don't have one," Rosa said. "Iffrit is resting. Fang Fairy is tapped out. The Titan Squad is fighting the army outside."
"We need something that doesn't run on mana," Eun-ha said, her mind racing for a solution. "Something that hits harder than a railgun."
Date: Year 2513, Month of Sun, Day 18 – 06:45 AM
Location: Orbit / Ferrum Estate
The battle on the ground was loud, messy, and hot. But two hundred miles straight up, in the cold vacuum of space, it was perfectly silent.
High above the planet Riverio, the Fire Fly Corporation Mothership hung in the darkness like a sleeping predator. It was a massive vessel, shaped like a teardrop made of matte-black metal. It didn’t have windows. It didn’t have a crew that needed to look outside. It was a machine built for one purpose: to eat worlds.
Inside the ship’s central processor, the Artificial Intelligence was watching the fight below.
The AI didn't see Lloyd, Rosa, or Eun-ha as people. It didn't see bravery or desperation. It saw data points. It saw energy signatures moving on a grid. It saw numbers changing color from green to red.
And the numbers were bad.
The AI focused its sensors on the Ferrum Estate. It analyzed the performance of the Exterminator-Unit, the cyborg designated as PRIDE. According to the mission parameters, PRIDE should have eliminated the local resistance within five minutes of deployment. The local inhabitants were classified as "Primitive Magic Users." They used swords and ice and fire. Against advanced composite armor and gravity manipulation, they should have been easy to delete.
But the timer had passed the ten-minute mark. The target, Lloyd Ferrum, was still alive.
The AI ran a diagnostic scan on PRIDE. The results were disappointing. The unit’s primary reactor was leaking energy. Its mobility systems were compromised by a strange, parasitic plant-metal substance. Its logic core was overheating from trying to process too many conflicting attacks at once.
The human targets were fighting back with a level of coordination that the simulation had not predicted. They were mixing magic with physics in a way that confused the targeting algorithms.
The AI paused for a microsecond—an eternity for a computer—to calculate the odds.
Current probability of PRIDE completing the mission: 12%.
Current probability of PRIDE being destroyed: 88%.
Projected time until PRIDE fails: 45 seconds.
The AI made a cold, emotionless decision. The ground operation was a failure. The "surgical strike" strategy had become messy. The resource expenditure was becoming too high. If they continued to fight on the ground, they would lose the asset (PRIDE) and fail to secure the objective (Lloyd Ferrum’s data).
The Fire Fly Corporation did not like losing assets. But more than that, they did not like wasting time.
Chapter : 2088
The AI switched protocols. It abandoned the "Capture and Extract" mission. It abandoned the idea of a clean conquest. If the locals refused to surrender, and if the local "heroes" were too dangerous to fight head-on, then the solution was simple.
Delete the battlefield.
The AI sent a command code to the lower docking bay of the Mothership. It was a Priority-Zero command.
Command: INITIATE SOLAR EXTINCTION.
Target: Planet Surface. Sector: North.
Authorization: System Administrator AI.
Underneath the belly of the massive black ship, a set of colossal clamps began to unlock. They were holding something huge. It wasn't a bomb. It wasn't a laser cannon. It was a tool.
It was the Planetary Harvester. The engineers called it "The Needle."
It was a solid spike of hyper-dense alloy, three miles long and as wide as a city block. It was designed to be dropped from orbit, punch through the crust of a planet, and tap directly into the molten core to suck out the mana. It was a mining tool.
But if you dropped a three-mile-long metal spike on a house, it wasn't mining anymore. It was an apocalypse.
The clamps hissed as they disengaged in the vacuum of space. The heavy, locking mechanisms retracted.
Gravity took over.
The Needle detached from the Mothership. Slowly at first, then gaining speed, the massive metal spike began to fall toward the blue-and-green marble of the planet below. It was silent, heavy, and unstoppable. It was a mountain made of metal, falling from the sky.
________________________________________
Down on the ground, the air changed.
Lloyd Ferrum was standing in the ruins of his courtyard, breathing hard. He was exhausted. His body felt like it was held together by tape and willpower. Next to him, Rosa leaned on her ice spear, her face pale. Eun-ha was checking her datapad, her brow furrowed in concentration.
They had just managed to stall the PRIDE machine. They had hurt it. For a brief second, they felt a flicker of hope. They thought they had turned the tide.
Then, the light shifted.
It wasn't a sudden flash. It was a gradual, sickening change in the color of the world. The bright morning sun, which had been shining down on the smoke and ruin, began to dim.
It turned red.
Lloyd looked down at his hands. His skin looked like it had been dipped in blood. He looked at the white marble of the fountain. It was glowing a deep, angry crimson. The shadows on the ground stretched out and sharpened, becoming harsh and dark.
The temperature began to rise. It wasn't the heat of Iffrit’s fire. It was a dry, oppressive heat that pressed down on the tops of their heads. The air pressure dropped so fast that Lloyd’s ears popped painfully.
"What is that?" Rosa whispered. Her voice was small, almost lost in the sudden, eerie silence of the battlefield.
Lloyd didn't want to look up. He felt a knot of dread tighten in his stomach—a cold, heavy stone of fear that he hadn't felt since his first life on Earth. He knew what this feeling was. It was the feeling of seeing a missile launch. It was the feeling of knowing that the math was over, and the destruction was beginning.
He forced himself to lift his head. He looked up past the smoke, past the clouds, into the upper atmosphere.
The sky was bleeding.
High above, tearing through the thin layer of the atmosphere, was a streak of fire. It was massive. It stretched across the entire horizon, a burning scar in the heavens. The friction of the air against the falling metal was turning the sky into a furnace. The clouds around the entry point were evaporating instantly, boiling away into nothingness.
It looked like a second sun was falling on them.
"No," Lloyd breathed. The word scraped his throat.
He remembered the warning King Liam—James Khan—had given him in the bunker.
They have a System-Killer. A Planetary Harvester. If they decide we are too much trouble, they won’t fight us. They will just drop the needle.
"They dropped it," Lloyd said, his voice rising in panic. "They actually dropped it."
Eun-ha looked up, her eyes widening as her datapad screamed with warnings. "Orbital entry detected," she stammered, her calm, CEO-like demeanor shattering. "Mass... the mass is immeasurable. Lloyd, that’s not a ship. That’s a kinetic kill weapon. It’s a solid rod of tungsten and star-metal."