Episode-1048
Chapter : 2095
There was no debris field. There was no wreckage to fall down and burn up in the atmosphere. The explosion was so hot and so complete that the Mothership was simply erased. One moment, there was a city-sized machine threatening the world. The next, there was only an expanding cloud of glowing particles, drifting silently into the void.
But the ship wasn't the only thing in the sky.
Below the explosion, screaming through the upper atmosphere, was the Needle.
The Planetary Harvester was a solid spike of heavy metal, three miles long, falling at Mach 20. It was already glowing red-hot from the friction of the air. It was a kinetic bullet aimed at the Ferrum Estate. It didn't need guidance anymore; gravity was doing all the work. Even with the ship gone, the Needle was still falling.
However, the "Reset" command hadn't just hit the ship. It had hit the entire network.
The Needle wasn't just a dumb rock. It had engines. It had fuel tanks filled with volatile, high-energy liquid designed to push it deep into the planet's core after impact. It had a computer brain to manage the descent.
When the signal from James Khan hit the Needle’s receiver, the computer brain panicked. The "Factory Reset" command conflicted with the "Active Descent" mode. The system crashed.
When a guidance system crashes during a high-speed fall, the failsafe is usually to disarm. But James Khan had deleted the failsafes.
The fuel valves on the Needle snapped open.
Inside the massive metal spike, thousands of gallons of rocket fuel flooded the internal chambers. The heat from the atmospheric friction ignited the fuel instantly.
The Needle didn't hit the ground. It didn't slam into Lloyd.
Five miles above the ground, the Needle detonated.
It wasn't a clean explosion like the ship. It was dirty and violent. The metal spike ripped itself apart from the inside out. A massive fireball, orange and black, bloomed in the sky. It looked like a flower made of hellfire opening up.
The shockwave of the blast rippled outward, clearing the clouds for fifty miles in every direction. The sound finally reached the ground—a booming, cracking roar that shook the mountains and shattered windows in cities a hundred miles away.
Huge chunks of the Needle—pieces of metal the size of houses—were thrown outward. But because they were so high up, and because the explosion was so forceful, they lost their downward momentum. They scattered. Most of the pieces burned up, turning into a majestic shower of meteors that streaked across the sky in gold and red lines.
It was a fireworks display. It was the most expensive, destructive fireworks display in the history of the planet.
The threat from above was gone. The eye in the sky was blind. The hammer that was about to crush House Ferrum had shattered into a million sparks of harmless light.
The invasion fleet, which had crossed galaxies to harvest this world, had committed suicide. They had been destroyed not by a bigger gun, but by a better line of code.
High in the atmosphere, the dust settled. The white cloud of the destroyed ship drifted in orbit, a tombstone for the arrogance of the Fire Fly Corporation. The red streaks of the burning Needle faded away.
The sun, the real sun, began to shine through the gaps in the smoke.
But down on the ground, the war wasn't quite over. The signal had done its work in the sky, but now it was hitting the earth. And on the earth, standing in the ruined courtyard of the Ferrum Estate, was the last remnant of the invasion force.
The Cyborg-Lucifer was about to find out what happens when you unplug a god.
________________________________________
Location: Ferrum Estate Courtyard
Time: 06:48 AM
The light from the explosion in the sky washed over the courtyard, painting everything in stark white and harsh shadows. For a moment, it was brighter than noon. Lloyd Ferrum, lying pinned in the dirt, squeezed his eyes shut against the glare. He felt the heat of the blast on his face, but it was distant. The crushing impact he had been waiting for never came.
He opened his eyes.
Above him, the sky was a canvas of chaotic beauty. Clouds of glowing gas swirled where the Needle used to be. The terrifying red streak that had been rushing toward him was gone, replaced by falling sparks that burned out long before they reached the ground.
Chapter : 2096
Lloyd let out a breath he felt like he had been holding for an hour. His chest heaved. He was alive. The plan had worked.
Then, he felt the weight on his chest shift.
The metal arm of the PRIDE machine, which had been pressing him into the gravel with enough force to crack his ribs, suddenly jerked.
"CONNECTION... LOST," the machine screamed.
It wasn't a human scream. It was a digital screech, a sound of corrupted audio files and grinding static. It was the sound of a mind being ripped out of the internet.
The PRIDE unit—the cyborg wearing Lucifer’s dead face—let go of Lloyd. It didn't let go because it wanted to. It let go because it lost control of its own limbs.
The machine stumbled backward. Its movements, which had been fluid and terrifyingly fast just moments ago, were now jerky and spasmodic. It looked like a puppet whose strings had been cut, flailing around trying to find its balance.
"SERVER... NOT... FOUND," the machine buzzed. Its voice modulator was skipping, repeating words. "REQUESTING... DATA. REQUESTING... TACTICAL... UPDATE."
The red lights in its eyes, which had been glowing with the intelligence of a supercomputer, flickered and died. They rebooted a second later, but the light was dimmer. It was dull. The sharp, predatory focus was gone.
The Fire Fly Corporation didn't put the brains of their soldiers inside the robots. That was too expensive. They kept the brains—the AI processors—on the ship. The soldiers on the ground were just terminals. They were remote-controlled drones receiving instructions from the sky. They relied on the Mothership to tell them how to fight, how to move, and how to predict enemy attacks.
But the Mothership was dust.
The signal was dead. The Wi-Fi was out.
The PRIDE unit was now just a collection of metal and meat with no one driving. It reverted to its "Local Mode."
"DEFAULT... SETTINGS... ENGAGED," the machine groaned. It sounded confused. It sounded stupid.
Lloyd dragged himself backward, putting distance between himself and the flailing monster. He watched as the machine looked at its own hands. The fingers twitched, opening and closing without rhythm.
Without the advanced processing power of the ship, the machine couldn't calculate physics anymore. It couldn't use the Time-Compression Drive to jump into the future. It couldn't use the advanced targeting algorithms to predict Lloyd’s movements. It couldn't even regulate its own balance perfectly.
It stumbled, one heavy metal foot crushing a piece of masonry. It almost fell over.
"TARGET?" the machine asked the empty air. It spun around, scanning the courtyard wildly. "TARGET... LOCATION... UNKNOWN."
It looked right at Lloyd, but it didn't seem to recognize him as a high-priority threat anymore. To the reduced brain of the machine, Lloyd was just "organic matter." The complex file labeled "Lloyd Ferrum - Omega Protocol" was stored on the ship, not in the robot’s head.
The god had become a golem.
It was still dangerous. It was still ten feet tall, made of super-alloys, and strong enough to punch through a wall. But it was no longer a genius. It was a brute. It was a zombie made of steel.
Rosa Siddik, standing near the edge of the crater, lowered her ice spear. She watched the machine twitch and glitch. She looked up at the sky, then at Lloyd.
"It stopped," Rosa whispered, her voice filled with awe. "The sky burned, and the monster stopped."
"It didn't stop," Lloyd rasped, pushing himself up to a sitting position. He winced as his broken arm shifted. "It just got a lobotomy. It’s brain-dead, Rosa. The pilot disconnected."
Eun-ha walked over to Lloyd, helping him sit up straighter. She was looking at the machine with the critical eye of an engineer.
"It's running on backup scripts," Eun-ha analyzed. "Look at the posture. It’s reverting to basic infantry protocols. Attack. Move. Attack. No strategy. No adaptation."
The machine let out a roar—a mix of Lucifer’s dead voice and static. It slammed its fists into the ground, cracking the stone. It was frustrated. It was a weapon with no hand to wield it.
"COMMAND... NOT... FOUND," it bellowed. "RETRYING... RETRYING..."
It was trapped in a loop. It was trying to call a number that didn't exist anymore.
Suddenly, a sound cut through the noise of the glitching robot. It was a crackle in Lloyd’s ear, coming from the small communication bead he wore.
"Testing, testing," a voice said. It was clear, calm, and sounded incredibly smug.
It was King Liam.
"Lloyd, do you copy? How’s the weather down there?"
Lloyd let out a short, painful laugh. "Cloudy," Lloyd replied. "With a chance of falling debris. Nice fireworks, James."
"I try my best," Liam said. "I figured you needed a little breathing room. The orbital network is toast. I fried their servers, their backups, and probably their coffee machine. That signal isn't coming back."
Lloyd looked at the PRIDE machine, which was now walking in a small circle, muttering error codes to itself.
"The big guy is confused," Lloyd reported. "He’s lost his IQ. He’s just a dumb terminal now."
"Good," Liam said. "That levels the playing field. You aren't fighting a supercomputer anymore, Lloyd. You're just fighting a tank. And I know you know how to scrap a tank."
"The bigger they are," Liam’s voice crackled, his tone shifting from joking to deadly serious, "the harder they reboot. Finish it, Lloyd. Before it figures out how to think for itself again."
Lloyd looked at his hands. He was battered. He was drained. But he was alive. And his enemy was broken.
He looked at Rosa and Eun-ha. They were ready. The fear was gone from their eyes, replaced by the cold calculation of warriors who realized the monster could bleed.
Lloyd stood up. His legs shook, but they held.
"You heard the man," Lloyd said to his wives. "Tech support is done. Now it's time for the cleanup crew."