Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

“It is unsightly for a girl to puke on the sidewalk.”

“But this girl is technically a spacecraft, and the puke is only system waste. I guess it is not that awful.”

“But think carefully about it; you are a freaking ship girl in essence. A ship girl! Doing that is uncomely!”

Nolan rolled her eyes at her captain. “Boss, you have been complaining for like an hour. Will you stop?”

“Forget it, let’s get down to work.”

Everyone’s attention was on the wreckage of festered monsters.

The analysis of the wrecks and body parts had enabled Hao Ren to reconstruct the appearance of some monsters. It allowed him to understand the level of power and unique abilities of the monsters after the mutation, the influence of the Mad Lord on them, and their process of mutation. Each piece of information was precious. It was one of the few times where Hao Ren got first-hand intelligence about the Mad Lord so far. The last time he got information of this value was during the battle with Lockmarton the world of Collow.

The only thing that he still could not wrap his brain around was why the monsters had suddenly shown discipline at the end of the battle.

The festered monsters, aside from attacking in groups, totally relied on instinct, which was their biggest weakness. But once this weakness disappeared, the threat of these monsters would increase exponentially. They were many, not afraid to die, and having strange abilities. They could contaminate everything around them on the battlefield. Had these monsters been more disciplined and having a strategy, they would have been invincible. If that happened, Hao Ren would rather choose to fight Raven 12345, who looked at least more pleasing to the eyes.

The MDT ran a simulation; had the monsters been more organized at the start of the battle, just like what they had shown at the last moment, it would give the drone cluster a hard time. Although the done cluster, with its endless reinforcement, could still win the battle by virtual of their sheer number, it would be a tragic victory. Never as easy as the previous battle.

The analysis of the wreckage samples showed that these monsters did not have their thinking organs intact. Their brains had rotten long ago, and they could never act so cooperatively by themselves on the battlefield.

Vivien gently tapped the armrest of the chair with her finger while looking at Hao Ren. “Are you thinking of something?”

“I am just thinking,” Hao Ren said. “Do you think someone has been remotely controlling these monsters? They had no intelligence yet behaved so smartly. ‘Remote control’ is the best explanation. Earlier, when the battle started, there was only chaos. But toward the end, they seemed to have quickly gotten organized. It seemed to me that some commander had ‘F2-ed’ an army going after the sprites. Since the sprites were defenseless, the commander just let the army run on autopilot and forget about it. After a while, the commander checked in and was shocked to see his army was almost wiped out. By the time he came to his senses, it was too late.”

Hao Ren was thinking out of the box, and it sounded logical. Vivian carefully thought for a moment and then clapped her hands. “I have no idea what you are talking about; I don’t play games.”

“Then why the heck you look enlightened?”

“All right, I am just kidding. I got what you meant.” Vivian waved with a smile. “I think what you say is possible. But it is just a speculation. There is nothing to support the theory. So—”

Before Vivian finished, the MDT suddenly popped out. “Wait a minute, if you are talking about evidence, now you have it.”

Hao Ren and Vivian turned to look at the MDT and asked in unison, “What evidence?”

The MDT hovered in front of the two and turned on its holographic projector. The image showed a black battleship twisted by parasitic biological tissue. The armed drones had blown the battleship in pieces during the battle earlier, and now the MDT had used a forensic technique to reconstruct the battleship virtually. The holographic image switched, showing even more vivid details of the battleship’s internal structure. There were some dark-red meshes and color patches inside most parts of the spacecraft.

“The autonomous robots dissected the wreckage of the seventeen black battleships and then digitally stitching the pieces back together. Take a look at the mesh structures; they exist in every wreck and are structurally and principally similar. They are compound of metal data cables and biological nerve tissue and all over the spacecraft like a neural network. I guess after the crew mutated, their body tissue had grown together with the electrified control network of the spacecraft. These dark areas are the nodes of the ‘neural network.’ Apparently, the nodes are the result of hyperplasia. They are all swollen and deformed sarcomas. Morphologically, this thing should be the festered body of the guardian giants.”

The biological tissues were so disgusting that even people as well-traveled as Hao Rao was horrified. Those things, the body of the giants, had melted like wax into an indistinguishable form. Around these infected biological tissues, many veins were extending out in all directions. Those were the so-called neural network.

“The neural network and these festered giants together have formed a control system. The neural network is the instruction transmission unit, and the festered giants are sort of an antenna. I find that this system could receive remote commands and has a certain degree of autonomous control function. Without external commands, it will operate on its own less efficiently, just like how it has behaved during the first half of the battle.”

“No wonder.” Hao Ren scratched his chin. “Does this system only exist in this spacecraft?”

“I have also found this neural-control system in other wreckages but on a smaller scale and apparently different from that onboard the black battleships. I guess the smaller units do not receive commands from the very top; they are only wingmen or escorts under the command of the black battleships. But when the black battleships are in autonomous combat mode, the effectiveness of these cannon fodder units is just as bad.”

The veil had finally been lifted on the organizational structure of the festered monsters and how their army worked.

“Does their chain of command appear like a pyramidal or a tree-like hierarchy?” Vivian frowned. “So, their fighting would appear chaotic during autonomous combat mode and organized when receiving a direct command from the superior unit. It seems that this superior unit will be a nasty problem for us.”

“Judging from how they have fought, the superior units of the festered monsters are a different class of creatures from the regular derivatives of the Mad Lord. They have a high degree of discipline and tactical thinking, can adapt their strategy quickly and rationally based on the situation, and more importantly—”

Before Hao Ren could finish his sentence, Vivian interjected, “More importantly, they already know that we are here.”

“It is something unavoidable.” Hao Ren waved his hand. “There is no way to do it discreetly with such large-scale battle. I am only worried about how much the commander behind these monsters has learned about our strength. They only intervened at the end of the battle and perhaps, not much they had seen. What I am not sure was whether there is a memory cache or things like that in the nervous or command system of the monsters. If the last battleship that we destroyed has a record of the battle and transmitted back to their commander, then our strength could have been exposed.”

Nolan’s voice came from the side. “The drone cluster has the absolute advantage in number. We are only dealing with the Mad Lord derivatives, not the Mad Lord or goddess of annihilation. So long as we could overwhelm them with quantity, letting them collect some data about the drone cluster is not a problem.”

Hao Ren nodded. “That makes sense. Inform the consciousness of the drone cluster to move the reserve forces to the Star Cluster X and raise the armed drone production to the highest priority. Keep sending reinforcement into this area until the crisis in the Star Cluster X is over, or I order otherwise. My request is simple: when war breaks out, no matter how vast the enemy’s lair is, I want the drone cluster to fill up nine-tenths of their field of vision.”

“Nolan got it.”

“And pay attention to the active defense and surveillance in the region,” Vivian reminded. “We are exposed. They may send a second wave of troops.”

After this, Hao Ren had intended to observe in the ‘testing ground,’ but news from the Naqdal Continent (Hao Ren named it so because it was initially the name of the fort) came, he had to return early.

The analysis of the ‘navigation crystal’ was at last completed.

As the navigation computer of the Naqdal Planetary Fortress, the mysterious crystal contained a massive amount of data. The goddess of creation had encrypted the data, making most of the data unreadable. But all hope was not lost. After Vivian accidentally activated the crystal, it restored into standby mode. The encryption system was still running, but Hao Ren—well, it was actually the MDT—found out that the crystal stored the data in stacks. Aside from those data, the MDT could not decrypt, the rest could be easily decrypted using conventional decryption methods.

Hao Ren asked the MDT to design a dedicated set of algorithms for cracking the crystal encryption. During this period, the crystal would be kept in the control center of the Naqdal Continent while data retrieval and decryption continued.

They had finally hacked the data in the shallow layer of the crystal and gotten the real coordinates of the “heart”.