Outside the Han territory's battlefield, as the siege cannons were remounted, the endless tide of rebellious forces surged back onto the field. More rebel soldiers surrendered, while the robots fell like swathes of wheat, collapsing in great, sweeping masses.

In the mountains northeast of the base, a squad of Reapers was locked in combat with ten times their number in robots. Each Reaper carried a pair of Gauss pistols, propelled by jump packs, and clad in full-body power armor, surpassing standard marines in defense, attack, and mobility.

These so-called Reapers were warriors whose sole purpose was to harvest enemy lives. Even stripped of their gear, they were inherently more specialized in combat than regular marines; typically, only the most elite fraction of the marine corps qualified to become a Reaper.

Using the thrust from their jump packs, the Reapers moved across the mountain ridges as if on level ground. Though the enemy battle robots were numerous, skillful utilization of the mountainous terrain allowed the Reapers to dominate the engagement.

Cresting a ridge, a continuous series of sharp cracks echoed. Gauss rounds spat from the muzzles, slamming into the head sensors of target robots, resulting in a rapid burst of bang-bang explosions. Dozens of battle robots went down in that single volley.

At that moment, a precipice loomed ahead, with another mountain peak directly opposite. Looking down, the drop was easily sixty meters to a rapidly flowing river below. The churning water struck the rounded stones, sending up plumes of white spray.

Traces etched on the cliff face indicated that a bridge must have once spanned the gap, connecting this side to the opposite peak, but the bridge was now gone. The path forward had vanished.

“Leap it!” the Reaper commander barked.

“Yes, sir!”

The squad activated their jump packs and instantly hovered, soaring toward the far peak.

The robots pursuing them, however, were not so fortunate. They rounded a corner and opened fire on the ascending Reapers. Seeing the beams streak toward them, the Reapers instantly executed evasive maneuvers, flying backward while simultaneously returning fire with their Gauss pistols. High-velocity rounds detonated the heads of eight robots, suppressing the others and forcing them to keep their optical arrays ducked.

Two seconds later, the Reapers reached the opposite mountain. The robots couldn't close the distance and could only fire from the cliff edge, while the Reapers, taking advantage of the sparse trees on the far side, managed to keep the enemy pinned down. The penetration power of Gauss rounds was far superior to beam fire; a single shot could tear through cover—even stone—to strike the target behind it. The Reapers swiftly neutralized nearly half the robots opposite them, sustaining only one minor injury between them.

Suddenly, the air darkened. A medical transport craft appeared, emitting a healing light that swiftly mended the lightly wounded Reaper. A hundred or so robots immediately charged from cover, leveling their lock-on rifles toward the medical transport.

“Gauss cannons, maximum power, hit them hard!”

Seeing the robots fully exposed, the Reaper commander’s gaze sharpened, releasing a gleam like a honed knife. He squeezed the trigger repeatedly, unleashing over ten rounds in two seconds—a firing rate nearly matching that of a Marine using a Gauss assault rifle!

The rounds screamed through the air. Had a Level Three expert been present, they might have glimpsed the conical shockwaves enveloping the projectiles. This shockwave imparted immense destructive force, and in an instant, the rounds tore into the bodies of the enemy robots, ripping them apart into component pieces. Even the alloy skeletons were twisted by the shockwave, leaving behind heaps of mangled scrap metal.

Two Reaper formations, in that single devastating volley, obliterated the majority of the robots following them, and with a few final shots, eliminated the rest entirely.

The Reapers then flew back across the chasm, stepping over the scattered wreckage, and hurried toward the main battle, eager to find more prey to hunt.

In the sky, a squadron of twelve Banshee fighters swept past in a precise V formation, crossing the path of a rank of ten by ten battle robot squares. Simultaneously, they unleashed a dense salvo of cluster rockets, firing forty-eight rockets in two seconds.

Cluster rockets, by definition, contained hundreds of sub-munitions within each projectile. Upon reaching the target altitude, each rocket detonated in a minor explosion, scattering the sub-bomblets. These then detonated violently, showering the ground below with shrapnel across a vast area. This type of clustered armament offered extremely wide coverage, with the fragments distributed so evenly that every inch of ground was enveloped; there were no dead zones.

After the twelve Banshees passed, the ten robot formations—a total of four thousand combat robots—were annihilated. Every fallen unit was riddled with holes, utterly ruined.

Beneath the rebel base lay five levels. The twelve Avatars, guided by the holographic map projected by the Observer, headed directly for the command center on the fourth floor. The patrolling robots and rebel soldiers registered nothing of their presence; the twelve Avatars swept past like twelve wisps of air, stirring not the slightest ripple of notice.

They traversed the first three underground levels and navigated ten more corridors, finally arriving at the subsurface fourth level. The viewport into the command center was perfectly aligned with their arrival, just as they overheard Huasu, in a voice laced with both entreaty and threat, warning everyone not to relax, listing the “wicked” deeds of the Kingdom’s army, and ensuring everyone understood that defecting to the Kingdom’s forces was a suicidal act not worth considering.

The command center door was tightly sealed. Only Avatars of the Level Three Zenith caliber could decipher the muffled voices inside merely from the faint vibrations in the door and walls.

Without a word, Blade stepped forward, drew his sword, and plunged it into the door. A harsh sizzling sound erupted as the door began to melt under the extreme heat of the lightsaber. Simultaneously, the blade started to arc.

“Bad news, enemies present! Psi-users!” an aide screamed before even seeing the intruders.

“Look, a golden light-blade! The intruder is likely a Level Three Peak!” That panicked cry instantly spread a wave of terror among everyone present.

Hulk roared for silence and drew a lightsaber hilt from his back, igniting it with a zzt sound. A purple blade materialized. Hulk gripped the weapon, his eyes locked on the door, and suddenly thrust his sword toward a nearby control console, intending to destroy the machinery managing the robots.

Just as the tip of his lightsaber was about to make contact with the console, a flicker of grim satisfaction crossed Hulk’s face. Suddenly, that satisfaction froze, and his entire body halted mid-motion, fixed like a fly trapped in amber. The air around him seemed to solidify into steel, rendering Hulk utterly immobile, locked in the posture of his thrust, a perfect wax figure.

Blade sliced a circular plate from the door and kicked the piece inward, then turned to sweep the room. Ten high-grade combat robots positioned around the chamber instantly raised their Uranium Rifles and launched streams of green beams at him.

Blade flicked his wrists, whirling his dual swords into a shimmering screen. He had already calculated the robots’ attack vectors; the trajectory of his blades was flawless. In an instant, all ten beams were deflected back, striking the sensor arrays on the robots’ faces, instantly blowing out their heads and reducing them to scrap metal!

Next, Blade strode toward Hulk, intending to force him to order a retreat and surrender of the troops. But he saw that Hulk’s eyes were vacant and his soul already extinguished.

“Died so quickly? Unwilling to be captured by me?” Blade released the psychic lock, yet Hulk’s corpse remained frozen in its forward lunge. “Unexpected. A Level Two Psi-user mastering Soul Annihilation. His understanding of the soul is not trivial.”

Glancing once more at the stubborn expression on Hulk’s face, Blade shook his head and turned to the remaining staff. “Who here can command the robots outside to stand down?”

The aides exchanged glances. They had just resolved to fight to the death, but seeing Hulk utterly defenseless against the newcomer, their resolve wavered once more.

Yang Ying was speaking in Kexing dialect, but fortunately, Kexing was widely disseminated, and someone in the room understood it. A tall, thin aide stepped forward. “This… esteemed sir.” He struggled to find an appropriate address for Blade, settling on ‘sir,’ assuming that couldn’t be wrong. Blade had revealed his full form when cutting through the door, so everyone in the command center could see him.

The first speaker, the thin aide, was unattached—no wife, children, or lingering ties. He was pragmatic; upon Yang Ying’s entry, he had immediately decided to surrender and switch allegiance to the Flin Kingdom.

“Sir,” the thin aide said, “the supreme command authority for the robots in the base was held by Hulk. Now that Hulk is dead, his pre-existing commands remain active, and they are of a high priority. No one in this room has the authorization to override his orders.”

“And outside this room?” Blade noted the subtle implication in his words.

“Outside this room, there is one person: the Chief of Staff. Upon Hulk’s death, his authority naturally transfers to the Chief of Staff,” the thin aide said, gesturing toward Hulk’s body. “Fortunately, Hulk’s body remains. As long as we verify Hulk’s demise to the system using his corpse, and then persuade the Chief of Staff, we can control the remaining robot forces.”

The other aides in the room looked at the thin man with complex expressions. They despised his readiness to reveal everything about the traitorous command structure, yet seeing Blade’s golden lightsaber and the eleven cloaked figures of unknown power following him, they remained silent, internally understanding the aide’s pragmatism. At the same time, the suppressed thoughts of rebellion within their own hearts began to burn like wildfire.

“I will go bring the Chief of Staff here,” a blue-green-haired aide volunteered.

“I’ll go too!” a plump aide chimed in.

Blade assigned one of his Avatars to accompany the two men to fetch the Chief of Staff. Two minutes later, the Chief of Staff was brought in.