Speaking of which, something felt off about this whole situation.
It had been five full days since Kolberg brought the vanguard squad back.
According to the original schedule, the convoy from Engineering Division 6—led by Reagan and tasked with going to the Western Wasteland to bury thermal base stations—should have reported back to Horizon Castle two days ago at the latest.
Now, there wasn't a trace of them!
Not only were the people missing, but even their signal had completely vanished!
Then again, it made a certain degree of sense.
Communication had always been a maddening, headache-inducing issue.
Although Andy had thirty-eight small balloons at his disposal, their coverage range was ultimately limited.
Within a 500-kilometer radius around Horizon Castle, the signal was fully maxed out—let alone radio, even video calls could run smoothly!
However, once beyond that range, it became a total blind spot.
Zais's atmosphere was saturated with all sorts of messy radioactive dust and industrial waste gases, and the ionosphere had been thoroughly scrambled by thousands of years of warfare. The attenuation rate of long-distance radio signals was astonishingly high.
Unless Andy could assemble actual synchronous orbit satellites right now, or erect high-power relay stations every hundred kilometers on the ground, this "communication by shouting" predicament was hardly going to change.
Of course, Andy didn't believe Reagan had run into any catastrophic disaster either.
The man was, after all, an old hand who had served as a landship captain, having navigated this wasteland for decades with top-tier survival skills.
Furthermore, even though Engineering Division 6 didn't carry power armor on this outing, they were fully equipped with complete T-9000 exoskeletons and CBS high-explosive crossbows.
With a setup like that, even if they ran into a small-scale regular force, they could hold their ground—and if they couldn't win, they could certainly run.
Two days ago, just to be safe, Andy had still dispatched a heavy shuttle.
It flew a low-altitude sweep along Engineering Division 6's planned route.
In the end, the pilot returned to report that aside from spotting messy tire tracks on the wasteland and a few piles of unidentified, still-smoking wreckage, they hadn't seen a single hair.
No people at all!
No living bodies, no corpses, and no wreckage of destroyed vehicles.
This was utterly baffling.
A fully mechanized heavy convoy couldn't simply vanish into thin air, could it?
For a moment, Andy even wondered if those guys had found the outside world too exciting and bolted with the equipment.
Or perhaps they had been ambushed by some clueless super-warlord?
However, considering Reagan's obsession with clinging to a powerful backer, the likelihood of him absconding was extremely low.
Just as Andy was pondering whether to wake up Little Six and ask her to divine a fortune for him—
'Zzzzz—' The red indicator light on the communication console suddenly flickered to life.
That was an emergency channel; only internal high-level communicators could connect through it.
"Boss? Boss! Can you hear me?!"
Reagan's voice came through the speaker, accompanied by severe background static.
The noise sounded like heavy machinery tearing through metal, interspersed with dense explosions and non-human roars.
"I hear you."
Andy immediately sat up straight, pulling the signal gain to the maximum.
"Where the hell have you been? It's been five days—I thought you got eaten by sand worms."
"Don't even mention it, Boss! Something huge happened!"
Reagan sounded heavily out of breath, as if he had just engaged in intense physical exertion.
"We are currently in Corembic, right inside the main urban area of the Trade Zone!"
"We're hiding in the underground garage of an office building. The vehicles are all here, the equipment is intact, and the crew is safe."
"We even bumped into a few old mates from my landship days. Now everyone's huddled together, and we've sealed off the building's entrances."
Corembic?
Andy glanced at the map.
That place was located over a thousand kilometers southwest of Horizon Castle—indeed a communication blind spot.
However, that wasn't what caught Andy's attention.
"Hiding?"
Andy repeated the word, a trace of doubt in his tone.
"In a place like Corembic, who besides Aisha and Odin could drive you into hiding in an underground garage?"
"Is it some blind gang looking for trouble? Couldn't you just blow them up and be done with it?"
Andy possessed immense confidence in Deep Space Industry's current firepower.
As long as they didn't encounter a full-scale armored charge from a regular military unit, Engineering Division 6 could easily walk all over any ordinary gang brawl.
There was a two-second silence on the other end of the line.
Then, Reagan dropped a bombshell.
"It's not a gang."
Reagan kept his voice very low, as if terrified of startling something outside.
"It's the 'Twilight'."
"The 'Twilight' and those Reith xenos—they've fought their way into the city!"
"Say what?!"
Andy's initial reaction was that he had misheard.
"Say that again? Who and who?"
"The 'Twilight', Aisha's forces," Reagan explained at breakneck speed. "And those red xenos—the Reith!"
"They're tearing into each other! They fought all the way from the outer mining areas into the core urban district of Corembic!"
What kind of absurd situation was this?
Andy felt utterly baffled.
The Reith were allergic to ultraviolet light— daylight was lethal to them.
As long as they were exposed to strong sunlight or specific bands of radiation, their skin and muscle tissues would rapidly necrose and disintegrate.
That was precisely why they always hid underground or deep within shadowy ruins, never daring to run wild on the wasteland during broad daylight.
Meanwhile, the Corembic Trade Zone was a city cluster constructed atop a massive strip of ruins.
Though it possessed a giant alloy dome overhead, it was long dilapidated and riddled with gaping holes, allowing plenty of direct sunlight to pour through.
Furthermore, being a commercial hub, high-power industrial searchlights were hung everywhere for illumination.
For the Reith, what difference was there between that level of light intensity and swimming in a vat of sulfuric acid?
On what grounds did they dare fight their way into the city?
This made zero tactical sense.
"Are you certain they're Reith?" Andy pressed. "Not some other mutated monsters?"
"One hundred percent certain!"
Reagan sounded absolute.
"Boss, it went like this—"
Reagan began recounting their ordeal over the past few days.
It turned out that while burying thermal base stations around the Dune Mineral Vein that day, they happened to stumble right into Aisha's covert operation.
Aisha wasn't merely grabbing territory as rumors claimed.
She was using an extremely sinister technology to mass-produce an army.
"Skeletal Mechanised Soldiers."
Reagan uttered the term.
"She collected the corpses of those dead Reith, disassembled them, and used some mechanical apparatus to reassemble the bones."
"White skeletal frames stuffed with batteries and electric motors. Some can even fly, while others can burrow through the ground."
"She even... gouged out the vocal organs of the Reith and fashioned them into cannons capable of firing air shockwaves!"
Listening to this, Andy's brow furrowed deeper and deeper.
Utilizing xenos corpses to create automated weaponry?
That technology sounded somewhat familiar.
Under Imperial law, such conduct constituted severe "abuse of xenos technology." If the Inquisition caught wind of it, they would brand Aisha a heretic and roast her entire line.
Yet it was undeniable that it was practical.
No wages to pay, no food required, and recyclable upon death—a perfect combination of cheap labor and frontline cannon fodder.
"And then?" Andy asked.
"And then those Reith went completely mad," Reagan continued.
"They seemed utterly enraged and began counterattacking like crazy."
"Aisha retreated all the way with her skeletal army, and the Reith pursued them without pause."
"Eventually, the battlefield shifted right into Corembic."
"Right now, it's absolute hell outside. Skeletal frames and xenos are bashing each other everywhere."
"And the most bizarre thing is—"
Reagan paused briefly.
"Aisha rarely uses floating cannons now. She's mainly relying on those skeletal mechanised soldiers to hold the line."
"The Reith have become very strange too. They're utilizing the shadows of buildings, underground pipelines, and the cracks in blasted ruins to fight an urban war of attrition against the 'Twilight'."
"It's as if... they aren't as afraid of light anymore."
"No, wait—they're still afraid of light. I saw a few charge out into the sun; smoke was indeed rising from them and their skin was rotting away."
"But they don't care! Even with their skin rotting off, they still charge forward to land a couple of slashes!"
"This suicidal tactic has completely smashed through the 'Twilight''s defensive lines!"
Hearing up to this point, the sense of dissonance in Andy's mind grew stronger and stronger.
Fierce and brutal as the Reith were, they were still biological organisms governed by survival instincts.
Braving lethal radiation just to wage war—this behavioral pattern resembled the Tyranids far more than a social, independent xenos race.
Unless they had been driven into a corner by something.
Or... were they protecting something?
Or perhaps Aisha had truly crossed some uncrossable line with the Reith?
Dug up their ancestral graves?
Yet that still wasn't the primary contradiction.
The primary contradiction lay in the environment.
"Corembic..."
Andy retrieved a technical schematic of Corembic in his mind.
Dilapidated as the place was, its lighting conditions were by no means poor.
If the Reith were truly invading the urban area on a massive scale, environmental damage alone would cut their numbers in half.
Aisha would only need to hold a few well-lit plazas and main thoroughfares, set up searchlights, and she would remain invincible.
Why fight a war of attrition in urban alleyways?
Why use skeletal mechanised soldiers to fill the frontline trenches?
It defied tactical logic entirely.
Unless—
A sudden possibility flashed through Andy's mind.
"Reagan."
Andy interrupted Reagan's rambling.
"You said earlier that you're in an underground garage?"
"Yeah."
"What color is the sky outside right now?"
"Huh?" Reagan paused for a moment. "I'm in the basement, I can't see the sky... but when we came in earlier, it seemed..."
Reagan's voice suddenly turned hesitant.
"It seemed... a bit dark?"
"Even though it's daytime, it feels... gloomy and heavy?"
"Like... something is blocking the sun?"
Andy's gaze instantly sharpened.
Under normal circumstances, that could only be a sandstorm or an overcast day.
However, combined with the Reith's abnormal behavior of launching a large-scale assault directly into the city—
There was only one explanation.
The lighting conditions of Corembic had been artificially altered.
The outskirts of the Corembic Trade Zone.
The 'Twilight' was anchored in the shadow of a heap of ruins that had just been leveled by explosives.
Because of its colossal size—belonging to the heavy landship class—it couldn't enter the main urban area and could only provide long-range fire support from the outer perimeter.
Aisha stood upon the bridge's command platform.
She still wore her black long trench coat, her face entirely devoid of expression, her grey eyes fixed intently on the tactical map displayed on the holographic screen.
Though outsiders always saw her as cold as ice, looking as if everything were firmly within her grasp—
In reality, the internal pressure she was experiencing right now was immense.
One could even say that since taking the helm of the 'Twilight', this was the trickiest, most rage-inducing predicament she had ever encountered.
The sky outside was pitch black.
It was clearly mid-day right now; Zais's venomous sun should have been hanging directly overhead, baking the ground until it sizzled.
Yet above the Corembic Trade Zone, it was complete darkness.
All light had been blocked out.
Sprawled right on top of the Trade Zone's massive, heavily damaged alloy dome were two entities.
Two skeletal behemoths of monstrous size, their lengths even exceeding that of the 'Twilight' itself.
To be precise, they were two bone-centipedes of extraordinarily complex construction.
They lacked the soft bellies and internal organs typical of ordinary biological creatures, being composed entirely of high-density, greyish-white bone. No muscle tied their skeletons together; they relied wholly on an unknown bio-magnetic field to drive their movement.
They clung tenaciously to the gaping holes of the dome, using their massive bodies to block out every shred of sunlight.
These things carried no weapons whatsoever.
Yet their very existence was a strategic-grade weapon.
To create these two behemoths, the Reith had sacrificed all offensive capabilities, packing the insides of their skeletal structures with unimaginable quantities of wave-absorbing material and jamming organs.
The Reith's trump card: the ''Umbral Megastructure''.
The name sounded absurd, but its function was ruthlessly dominant.
Wherever they went, all light, radar waves, and thermal signals would be completely absorbed.
The area directly beneath them would instantly plunge into a state of absolute night.
For subterranean creatures like the Reith—who were allergic to light and whose skin would fester upon contact with ultraviolet rays—these things were mobile protective umbrellas.
Their ability to charge onto the surface in broad daylight with zero restraint relied entirely on these two megastructures.
At this moment, Aisha had no time to mock the absurd name.
She was currently commanding a desperate, hard-fought air battle.
"Battery 3, elevation 75 degrees! Concentrate fire on the left one!"
"Floating cannon squad, sever their attachment points!"
Fifty golden specks of light were darting frantically around those two colossal centipedes.
Aisha's strongest trump cards—fifty standard floating cannons from the Dark Age of Technology—were all deployed here.
This was precisely why, during the urban street fighting in the main city district, people could only see skeletal mechanised soldiers holding the line, while these floating cannons were nowhere to be found.
They were all up in the sky, blasting away at these damned sunshades!
High-energy particle beams wove a dense net of fire across the sky, relentlessly hammering the heavy bone armor of the Umbral Megastructures.
Shattered bone fragments flew everywhere as black smoke billowed into the air.
Yet these things were ridiculously tough.
The bone density was extraordinarily high, and the wave-absorbing material possessed exceptional resistance to energy weapons. When particle beams hit them, most of the energy was absorbed, leaving behind only shallow, scorched craters.
Watching this scene, Aisha felt a spasm in her stomach.
For matters to have escalated to this point was entirely beyond her expectations.
It was all the fault of that damned spoils of war!
Tracing the timeline back half a month ago to the western front battlefield:
Back then, Aisha had just routed the fortress fleet of Odin, riding high on her success.
While cleaning up the battlefield, she acquired a batch of relics from the Dark Age of Technology.
Aside from those fifty standard floating cannons, there was a whole pile of arc-lightning crates that proved impossible to open no matter what she tried.
High-energy electric arcs rolled across the surfaces of those crates, which possessed no keyholes or interface ports whatsoever.
Aisha had even tried ordering her subordinates to blast one of the crates with the main lance battery.
The result: the crate remained completely unscathed, merely losing a bit of paint.
Aisha had thought it was absurdly bizarre back then, so she stopped obsessing over it and had her crew toss the crates into the cargo hold to gather dust.
However, aside from those, she also found something else.
An intact ''Transcription Furnace''—an STC fragment equipped with an independent security key.
The apparatus resembled a fractal bio-reactor, looking exceedingly high-tech, though its operational interface was unexpectedly simple.
According to the surviving data logs, this was equipment used by humans during the Dark Age of Technology to induce targeted gene mutations and rapidly synthesize biological templates.
A few fragmented log entries even mentioned that this piece of equipment might have served as core hardware for running "Ork ranches" back in the day.
Though Aisha couldn't fathom why Dark Age humanity would want to farm disgusting mushrooms like the Orks, that didn't stop her from using the machine.
At the time, she was facing frequent harassment from the Reith at the Dune Mineral Vein.
Those invisible xenos phantom-stealthed through the mine shafts, killing many workers and severely disrupting mining progress.
Now that Aisha possessed the Transcription Furnace, a bold idea popped into her head.
Since this machine could induce mutations and synthesize organisms—
Could she use the Reith as guinea pigs?
She ordered her men to capture a few Reith corpses and toss them into the furnace.
Then, from that lengthy parameter list, she randomly selected an option that looked somewhat pleasing to the eye.
''Preset: Flesh-and-Bone Circuitry.''
It was quite absurd; Aisha had even mocked it at the time: "Where do Orks get flesh and bone? Aren't they fungi? Why is there a parameter called Flesh-and-Bone Circuitry?"
Mockery aside, she pressed the start button anyway.
Then, a miracle occurred.
The furnace hummed for a while before spitting out a pile of bright white skeletal components that had undergone mechanized restructuring.
As long as electricity was applied and simple control chips were installed, these bones could move again.
This was the origin of the skeletal mechanised soldiers.
Aisha tasted the sweet benefits.
A method that required zero metal consumption—needing only corpses to infinitely mass-produce troops—was simply the ultimate dream of a wasteland warlord!
And so, she got arrogant!
She felt the Reith were nothing special—just a walking pile of raw materials!
Kill!
She immediately rallied her fleet, took the first batch of newly produced skeletal mechanised soldiers, and launched a direct assault on the Reith's main lair at the Dune Mineral Vein.
Casting away all restraint, she slaughtered her way through without pause.
She flattened all the Reith's outer outposts, dragged all the corpses back to toss into the furnace, turned them into new mechanised soldiers, and pressed on to the next outpost.
This snowballing tactic proved immensely effective for a time.
Until...
She slaughtered her way to their core hatchery—
The xenos went berserk.
They stopped sending assassin units to throw their lives away.
Instead, they ripped open the ground itself.
From deep underground, they dragged out these two massive entities that had originally been in a state of hibernation.
Aisha had been standing on the bridge at the time, watching those two centipedes—each easily seven to eight kilometers long—burrow out from the sea of sand, their underbellies clinging with dense swarms of fully armed Reith elite warriors.
It nearly frightened Aisha to death!
The scale of it blotted out the sky!
The original sunlight vanished instantly as darkness enveloped the earth.
With the sun's suppression removed, the combat effectiveness of the Reith warriors instantly surged by more than threefold.
They no longer feared exposure, no longer needed to lurk in the shadows. Braving the firepower of the skeletal mechanised soldiers, they launched a ferocious countercharge.
The 'Twilight''s defense line collapsed within ten minutes.
Aisha had no choice but to order her two cruisers to go full throttle, turn tail, and run.
They fought as they fled.
Yet the Reith proved stubbornly fixated, locking onto Aisha alone and pursuing her all the way from the Dune Mineral Vein to Corembic.
This chase dragged the flames of war right into the Trade Zone.
'Bzzt!'
A thick beam of energy erupted as the flagship's main battery, 'Light of Twilight', completed another charged volley.
The blast struck the head of the left Umbral Megastructure.
'Crack!'
A crisp, shattering sound rang out.
The head carapace of the centipede on the left finally cracked open, revealing a gaping fissure.
No blood flowed from within; instead, a plume of thick black smoke spewed forth—likely the byproduct of overheated coolant and wave-absorbing materials.
"It's about to give out."
Aisha keenly seized the tactical opportunity.
"All firepower, target that gap! Floating cannon squad, dive into that fissure and detonate from the inside!"
The fifty floating cannons altered their tactics instantly.
Abandoning their previous hit-and-run harassment, they surged toward that smoking fissure like a swarm of frantic hornets.
As long as they could bring down even one of them, sunlight would cascade onto the ground once more.
With light restored, the Reith's ground offensive would collapse in an instant.
Aisha gripped the edge of the command platform tightly.
'It must succeed!'
If even this couldn't bring it down, her only remaining option would be to run for her life!