Smoke lingered in the underground cavern like the ghost of violence past.
Three starship wrecks sat half-buried in twisted metal graves, their superheated hulls crackling softly—death songs in cooling steel.
No cheers echoed in this tomb of ambition.
From his black-gold throne a hundred meters above, Ethan propped his chin on one hand with the casual authority of a judge reviewing death sentences.
His fingertips tapped the armrest in measured rhythm.
*Tap.* *Tap.* *Tap.*
The sound, amplified by the station's acoustics, drowned out even the survivors' thundering heartbeats—a metronome counting down to judgment.
In the oil-slicked mud below, mechanical tyrant Steel Bone had shut down all vocal units, burying his priceless head deep in the muck like an ostrich facing extinction.
He didn't want attention. Didn't even want to exist in this moment.
"Cough..."
A dull impact shattered the suffocating quiet like breaking glass.
A twisted hatch door exploded outward from within the nearest wreck, metal screaming against metal.
Bloody Hand tumbled out—no longer the proud pirate lord, but a broken thing leaking fluids.
Half his exoskeleton armor had shattered like an eggshell, exposing rolled crimson muscle and pale alloy bone beneath. Blood mixed with hydraulic fluid, creating abstract art on the cavern floor.
But he didn't dare stop crawling. Gravity chains compressed his spine with audible cracks, yet he still dragged himself forward on hands and knees—a penitent approaching his altar of judgment.
*CRASH!*
His spatial ring burst open like a piñata filled with dreams.
High-energy crystals scattered like fallen stars. Rare metal ingots clinked against each other with musical precision. Cases of old-world currency spilled their contents across oil-stained ground.
In the dim underground hollow, this treasure pile blazed with radiance that stung the surrounding scavengers' eyes—a fortune that could buy planets, reduced to desperate bribery.
Chaos Sector hard currency. Could buy lives. Many, many lives.
Bloody Hand knelt before that golden mountain, pressing his forehead against steel plate until blood flowed like crimson tears.
"My lord! Three hundred million credits! All yours!" His voice cracked with desperation. "I know the rules—I'll leave! Right now! Just let me breathe!"
Marcus stood beside the throne, eyelid twitching like a broken circuit. He tugged Ethan's pant leg with trembling fingers, voice barely a whisper.
"Ethan, three hundred million... that could fill at least one tooth in our ten billion cavity..."
Ethan didn't acknowledge Marcus. Didn't even glance at the fortune spread before him like offerings to an indifferent god.
He simply adjusted his glasses with surgical precision, his gaze sweeping over the pile like examining incorrectly sorted garbage.
"Three hundred million?" His voice held the warmth of absolute zero.
He raised his hand, pulling a blood-red holographic invoice from thin air—bureaucracy made manifest.
"Per First Tax Office Airfield Management Regulations." His pen slashed downward like an executioner's blade.
"Illegal airspace occupation, charged per second: fifty million."
"Ground infrastructure damage, replacement fee: eighty million."
"Psychological intimidation of personnel: one hundred twenty million."
Ethan's fingertip tapped the still-smoking wreckage with casual contempt.
"Plus illegally parked oversized debris, cleanup fee: forty million."
The invoice folded with the finality of a coffin lid closing. That red number stopped precisely at two hundred ninety million—mathematical perfection in financial destruction.
Ethan looked at the ashen-faced Bloody Hand with eyes that had calculated the worth of souls.
"Total confiscation: two hundred ninety million. The remaining ten million counts as your personal income tax." His smile could have frozen supernovas. "Any questions?"
Marcus's mouth snapped shut. This wasn't accounting—this was extracting marrow from living bones.
Bloody Hand knelt in rigid silence, understanding flooding through him like ice water.
The other party never intended mercy. Take the money, then the life. Standard operating procedure.
"You're... too ruthless!" Bloody Hand's head snapped up, his single eye exploding with the light of a dying star going supernova.
If money couldn't buy passage, then he'd carve one with blood and fire!
*HISS!*
He ripped open his tactical vest like tearing away his own skin. At his heart, a dark red crystal pulsed frantically—a miniature sun preparing to birth destruction.
Overload alarms shrieked like banshees announcing the apocalypse.
"Miniature fusion core!" Bloody Hand clutched the detonator—his final card in a rigged game. "The yield isn't massive! But collapsing half this underground hollow? More than enough! If I can't live, we all become atoms!"
Surrounding scavengers instantly panicked, scrambling like roaches when lights flick on.
Detonate a fusion core in this enclosed space? That meant stuffing everyone into a cosmic microwave!
Steel Bone immediately curled into a defensive ball, all shield generators screaming at maximum power.
Lyra raised her broken sword, muscles coiling to charge forward—
"Stop." Ethan's voice cut through chaos like a scalpel through flesh.
He rose from his throne, methodically adjusting his cuffs with the care of a surgeon preparing for operation.
"The fish will die." Dress shoes clicked on metal steps with metronomic precision.
Ethan descended step by step, watching the snarling Bloody Hand like a scientist observing an interesting specimen.
"But the net won't break."
He stopped ten meters away—close enough to see the desperation in Bloody Hand's remaining eye.
That about-to-explode fusion core posed no threat in his gaze. If anything, it seemed... wasteful.
"Decent energy source." Ethan's assessment was clinical, professional. "As for this body..." His gaze swept Bloody Hand's robust mechanically-enhanced frame like a butcher evaluating prime cuts.
"High biological-mechanical coupling efficiency. Qualified consumable material."
*SNAP.*
The finger-snap echoed like breaking reality.
Behind him, countless data streams on the black obelisk shifted from red to black—the color of absolute judgment.
**[Omnidimensional Tax System: Mandatory Execution]**
**[Applied Clause: Bankruptcy Reorganization Act Article 4 - Violent Disassembly and Reuse]**
**[Target: Bloody Hand Pirate Gang - All Personnel]**
"Since cash is insufficient..." Ethan's voice carried the finality of universal law rewriting itself.
"Physical compensation it is."
**[Activate: Human Resource Tax - Full Collection]**
**[Execute Effect: Biological-Mechanical Forced Integration]**
"What... AHHHHH!!" Bloody Hand's detonator finger suddenly lost all sensation.
The red button melted at his fingertip like ice in hellfire. Then his weapons, his exoskeleton, even the thousands-ton wreckage behind him began flowing like liquid metal.
Countless metallic tentacles erupted from the debris, instantly piercing dozens of pirates' bodies with surgical precision.
No blood flowed. Blood vaporized instantly, replaced by boiling hydraulic fluid that hissed like serpents.
"My hand! My hand's growing into the gun!!" One pirate screamed, watching his ulna pierce skin to fuse with his rifle barrel, the magazine jamming into his forearm muscle like a grotesque prosthetic.
This violated every law of biology—forced evolution at gunpoint.
Screams lasted exactly ten seconds. Then silence.
Metal no longer cold, flesh no longer soft. Both forcibly merged under tyrannical rules that cared nothing for the boundaries between life and machine.
*Click.* *Click.*
Bloody Hand still stood, but he was no longer Bloody Hand.
His legs had become thick ship transmission treads. His right arm was now a massive hydraulic demolition claw. The chest fusion core pulsed stable blue—system-installed control locks ensuring absolute obedience.
His former eye showed only a cold blue indicator light—the glow of a soul formatted into code.
"Unit... self-check complete." Rough electronic synthesis replaced his former roars of defiance.
*WHIRR—*
He turned stiffly toward Ethan, mechanical arm rising in an absolutely standard salute—precision born from the death of free will.
"Unit 001, awaiting orders."
Behind him, dozens of half-human, half-machine constructs turned in perfect unison. Blue indicator lights formed a ghostly constellation in the darkness—stars that had once been souls.
"Awaiting orders." The chorus echoed like a digital hymn.
Marcus collapsed against the throne's base, face pale as bone. "Corpse... corpse-mechs?"
This wasn't slaughter. This was industrial processing—turning people into tools, stripping away personality, life, death, even souls formatted into executable code.
Ethan adjusted his glasses, surveying this tireless, salary-free workforce with the satisfaction of a manager who'd solved his labor shortage permanently.
"Aesthetically lacking," he mused. "But no need for workers' compensation insurance."
He pointed at the mountain of ship debris with casual authority.
"Get to work. Sort and recycle this scrap. I want those extracted alloy ingots stacked neat as gold bars."
Ethan turned, already dismissing them from his attention.
"No charging until the job's done."
*RUMBLE.*
Treads ground across the floor like mechanical thunder. The constructs swarmed the wreckage, chainsaws roaring with tireless hunger.
In the corner, Steel Bone watched this scene while quietly deleting every trace of "feigned surrender" code from his core programming.
What kind of tax official was this? A mechanical demon god wearing human skin and filing quarterly reports.
*CREAK—*
Steel Bone crawled to Ethan's feet like a penitent seeking absolution.
*CLICK.*
He forcibly pried open his chest armor, yanking out a still-blinking main control chip—offering his very soul on a silicon platter.
"My... my lord." His electronic voice carried extreme humility. "This is my base-level permissions... I can work too! I'm very capable! Please... don't turn me into one of those things..."
Ethan paused, looking down with the interest of someone offered a useful tool.
He casually grabbed the oil-stained chip, tossing it to Marcus with the care one might show a paperclip.
"Hold this. Marcus, you're foreman now. These 'employees' report to you." His smile was sharp enough to cut diamonds. "Anyone slacks off, show them real downsizing—the physical kind."
Marcus fumbled to catch the chip, looking between the constructs and his new authority. His expression shifted from terror to twisted excitement—power was intoxicating, even over the undead.
"Yes... yes sir!"
Just then, the station's radar emitted a sharp shriek that cut through the mechanical symphony.
*BEEP—!*
With this batch of high-energy "biological batteries" connected, station detection range exploded tenfold—a surveillance network powered by processed souls.
A holographic star map unfolded like a flower of light. Among countless gray noise points, red-gold coordinates blazed in Chaos Sector's depths—the color of liquid assets and liquid dreams.
**[System Alert: Radar Acquired Premium Asset]**
**[Target: Chaos Sector Black Market Auction House (Main Branch)]**
**[Asset Assessment: Extremely Valuable]**
**[Status: Annual "Divine Artifact" Auction in Progress]**
Ethan studied those coordinates with the focus of a predator scenting blood in the water.
Then surveyed his base—no longer barren, but populated with tireless workers who'd never ask for raises or vacation time.
His lips curved in a smile that could have made sharks nervous.
"Just acquired a construction crew." He straightened his tie, eyes reflecting that wealth-representing red glow. "Perfect timing."
"Still need renovation funds."