Chapter : 1809

  He raised the cannon. It felt heavier now. Denser. It felt like he was holding a volcano in his hand.

  The Mech fired its rotary cannon. Bullets pinged off Lloyd’s [Steel Blood] skin, but he ignored them. He didn't care about the bullets. He only cared about the shot.

  He looked through the sights. He focused on that tiny, microscopic crack in the cooling vent.

  He activated his [Blue Ring Eyes].

  "Lock-on Seal," Lloyd commanded.

  A blue, magical crosshair appeared in the air, superimposed over the Mech’s vent. It locked into place. It didn't waver. It didn't shake. It was a conceptual lock. The bullet would not miss. It could not miss. The universe would bend to ensure it hit.

  "Say cheese," Lloyd said.

  Lloyd pulled the trigger.

  He fires the Magma-Laser Beam.

  It wasn't a bolt. It wasn't a pulse. It was a continuous stream of destruction.

  A beam of swirling, crimson-gold energy erupted from the barrel. It didn't look like light; it looked like liquid fire moving at the speed of thought. It was a Fusion Attack that combined Nova’s piercing velocity with Iffrit’s matter-erasing heat.

  The recoil dug Lloyd’s boots into the concrete. The sound was a deafening CRACK-HISSS, like a lightning bolt striking a geyser.

  The beam crossed the arena in an instant.

  The Mech tried to dodge. Its sensors detected the energy spike. But the [Lock-on Seal] was absolute. The beam curved slightly, defying physics, tracking the movement of the target.

  It struck the cooling vent.

  The Null-Alloy armor tried to resist. It tried to disperse the mana. But this wasn't just mana. It was super-heated plasma with mass. The magma essence clung to the metal, burning through it physically while the Nova energy pushed it forward.

  The grate vaporized instantly.

  The beam didn't stop. It punched through the patch job James Khan had done five years ago. It struck the micro-fracture.

  The liquid fire injected itself directly into the Mech's internal circuitry.

  It was like injecting lava into a vein.

  Inside the Mech, chaos erupted. The magma-laser flooded the cooling system. It melted the pipes. It flashed the coolant into high-pressure steam that exploded the internal chambers. It reached the central processor—the Lilith-Hybrid Engine that acted as the machine’s brain.

  The "brain" didn't just overheat; it melted. The delicate rune-inscribed silicon turned into slag. The logic gates fused together. The targeting computer screamed a thousand error messages in a millisecond before silencing forever.

  On the outside, the effect was immediate.

  The Mech froze mid-step. Its rotary cannon stopped spinning.

  Smoke began to pour out of every seam in its armor. Not gray smoke, but thick, black, oily smoke mixed with white steam.

  The red mono-eye flickered. It turned yellow. Then it turned white. And then it exploded, showering the arena floor with glass.

  Lloyd didn't wait for the machine to restart. He reached over his shoulder and unslung the 'Longbow Mk. V' sniper rifle James had just handed him in the armory. He didn't need the scope at this range. He aimed the heavy barrel at the molten hole his laser had just carved into the Mech’s chest.

  "Let's see if the Joker's hardware lives up to the hype," Lloyd muttered.

  He pulled the trigger. A single, high-velocity round shrieked through the air, punching through the exposed core and exiting the back of the machine in a spray of sparks. The Mech slumped forward, finally, truly dead.

  GROAN.

  The sound of twisting metal echoed through the cavern. The massive machine’s legs gave out. It fell to its knees with a ground-shaking crash. It slumped forward, its head hitting the concrete like a penitent bowing before a god.

  It hissed. Steam vented from its shoulders, sounding like the dying breath of a beast. Dead electronics sparked and fizzled.

  It was over.

  Lloyd lowered the cannon. The metal of the weapon was glowing cherry-red. He dismissed the spirits quickly, before the heat could burn his own arm off. The cannon dissolved into particles of light, leaving Lloyd’s human arm smoking and red, but intact.

  He exhaled, blowing a stray hair out of his eyes.

  "That," Lloyd said to the silent room, "is how you clear a clog."

  The lights in the arena shifted from combat-red to safety-white. The blast shields lowered.

  King Liam—James—was clapping again. He walked down the ramp from the observation deck, a wide grin on his face.

  "Magma and Plasma," James said, shaking his head. "I never thought of that. I always tried to use EMPs. You just decided to melt the motherboard."

  "EMPs are boring," Lloyd said, rubbing his sore arm. "Melting things sends a message."

  Chapter : 1810

  "And the message is received," James said. He walked over to the fallen Mech and patted its smoking leg affectionately. "Poor girl. She never stood a chance."

  James turned to Lloyd and extended a hand.

  "You passed," James said. "You didn't just survive. You dominated. You have the tactical mind, the reflexes, and the sheer, unadulterated craziness required for this job."

  Lloyd shook the King's hand. "Does this mean I get a raise?"

  "It means you get a promotion," James said. "And a lot more work."

  James reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, silver insignia. It was a pin shaped like a shield crossed with a lightning bolt.

  "This is something that resembles the previous world's item," James said softly. "From the old world. Rank insignia. Major General, Earth Federation Space Command."

  He pinned it onto Lloyd’s ruined shirt.

  "Welcome to the real war, Major General," James said.

  Lloyd looked down at the pin. It felt heavy. Heavier than the sniper rifle. Heavier than the Aegis suit. It was the weight of a legacy.

  "I prefer Lloyd," he said. "But I'll take the title. As long as it comes with access to the ammo locker."

  "It comes with access to everything," James promised. "Come on. We have a debriefing. And then... I have some files you need to see. Files about what Firefly has really been doing here for the last century."

  Lloyd looked back at the melted Mech one last time. He felt a grim satisfaction. He had proven that magic could beat technology, if you applied it with enough brute force and cleverness.

  But he also knew this was just a prototype. A scout. The real army was out there, in the void of space, waiting to descend.

  "Let's go," Lloyd said. "I have a feeling the honeymoon is over."

  The adrenaline from the battle with the Executioner Mech was still pumping through Lloyd’s veins, making his hands tremble slightly as he followed King Liam—no, James Khan—out of the scorched testing arena. They left the smell of ozone and melted metal behind, stepping through a heavy blast door that hissed shut with a pneumatic sigh, sealing away the violence.

  The corridor they entered was different. It wasn't the rough, industrial steel of the hangar or the stone of the castle above. It was sleek, white, and silent. The air here was scrubbed clean, smelling of nothing but recycled oxygen and cold logic.

  "In there," James said, pointing to a glass door at the end of the hall. "We’re done with the physical test. Now comes the mental one."

  Lloyd walked into the room and stopped. He had expected an office, maybe a war room with maps pinned to the walls. What he found was a data center that would have looked at home in a top-tier government facility back on Earth.

  Rows of crystal servers lined the walls, humming with a low, rhythmic vibration. They were cooled not by fans, but by enchanted runes glowing with a soft, frosty blue light. In the center of the room stood a massive table made of black glass. Above it, a complex, three-dimensional hologram of the planet Riverio rotated slowly in the air.

  "Grab a chair," James said, walking around the table to a control console. He looked tired. The manic energy of 'The Joker' had faded, replaced by the heavy weariness of a man who had been keeping secrets for four decades. "You’ve earned a breather. And a history lesson."

  Lloyd pulled out a sleek metal chair and sat down, wincing slightly. His arms were bruised black and blue from blocking the Mech’s vibro-blade, and his mana reserves were running on fumes. "I assume this isn't the kind of history lesson I can sleep through?"

  "Only if you want to wake up dead," James replied grimly.

  James tapped the glass surface of the table. The holographic planet zoomed in, focusing on the continent they lived on. But instead of the usual political borders—kingdoms, duchies, and wastelands—the map was covered in a spiderweb of red glowing dots.

  They were everywhere. They clustered in the major cities of the North. They dotted the trade routes of the desert. They were thickest in the South.

  "You asked me earlier why I waited," James began, his eyes fixed on the red lights. "Why I didn't act sooner. Why I let you struggle to build your factory while I had a warehouse full of railguns in the basement. The truth is, I was gathering data. For forty years, I've been tracking them. The Firefly Corporation."

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  Chapter : 1811

  "I thought they just arrived," Lloyd said, leaning forward. "The drones at the wedding... the ship in the sky... I thought that was the vanguard. The first wave."

  James shook his head slowly. "That wasn't an arrival, Lloyd. That was an escalation. A probe to test our new defenses. Firefly has been here for a long time. Over a hundred years."

  Lloyd blinked, trying to process the timeline. "A century? But... how? If an interstellar corporation has been here for a hundred years, why aren't we speaking their language? Why haven't they invaded?"

  "Because you are thinking like a soldier, not a CEO," James said, his voice dripping with disgust. "Firefly doesn't just invade. That’s inefficient. Invasion costs money. Ammunition costs money. Fuel costs money. And damaged infrastructure lowers the property value."

  James swiped his hand through the hologram, spinning the globe. "They prefer acquisition. They prefer to rot a world from the inside out until it begs to be conquered. They are a parasite, Lloyd. They find a host, they inject their poison, and they wait."

  The hologram zoomed in sharply on the southern nation of Altamira. Lloyd felt a spike of cold anger in his gut. Altamira. The land of religious zealots who hated magic users. The place where the "Orchid House" had been—the torture facility where they experimented on children, including his own subordinate, Risa.

  "Altamira," James said, reading the look on Lloyd’s face. "You know them as the crazy neighbors who hate spirits. You burned their precious Orchid House to the ground."

  "I did," Lloyd said, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "And I enjoyed it."

  "You did good work," James nodded. "But did you ever stop to ask yourself where they got the technology? The suppression collars that could turn off a mage’s power? The bio-augmentation tanks that could graft monster parts onto human children? The chemical formulas for the drugs they used?"

  Lloyd paused. He had always assumed it was lost ancient magic, or perhaps artifacts dug up from some ruin of the Babylon Empire.

  "It was Firefly," James revealed.

  The words hung in the air like smoke.

  "They have been shadow-partners of the Altamiran hierarchy for over a century," James explained. "Firefly found a nation that felt inferior because they lacked magic. They found a king who was jealous of his neighbors. And they offered him a deal. 'We give you technology to level the playing field, you give us access.'"

  "Access to what?" Lloyd asked, though he was beginning to dread the answer.

  "To test subjects," James said softly. "Altamira wasn't a kingdom to them. It was a petri dish. They used the population to test 'Spirit-Tech'. They needed to know how to graft machinery onto souls. How to suppress mana frequencies. How to weaponize children. All those horrors you saw in the Orchid House? That wasn't madness. That was Research and Development."

  Lloyd felt a wave of nausea. He remembered the glass tubes. He remembered the children with metal fused into their spines. He remembered Risa’s scars.

  They weren't just victims of a cruel prince. They were lab rats for an interstellar corporation. Their pain had been recorded, analyzed, and put into a spreadsheet somewhere in the stars.

  "They were refining the process," James continued, zooming the map out again to show the whole planet. "They were learning how to harvest mana from living beings efficiently. Because that's the endgame, Lloyd. That is why they are here."

  The simulation changed. The green and blue planet of Riverio was suddenly encased in a cage of gray metal. Massive tethers connected the surface to orbital stations. The planet’s color began to drain away, turning from vibrant life to a dead, gray rock.

  "They don't want land," James said. "They don't want gold. They want the planet itself. They want to turn Riverio into a Mana Farm."

  "A farm," Lloyd repeated, staring at the dying holographic world.

  "Total colonization," James said. "They harvest the mana from the core, from the ley lines, and from the people. They use it as a raw energy source for their galactic empire. It’s cleaner than nuclear, more potent than fusion. And Riverio? This planet is the biggest battery they’ve ever found. The mana density here is off the charts. If they hook this world up to their grid, they can power a thousand fleets."

  "So everything..." Lloyd stood up, walking to the map. "The wars between the kingdoms. The instability. The sudden rise of extremist groups. It was all them?"

  Chapter : 1812

  "Most of it," James said. "They keep us fighting each other so we don't look up. They feed tech to one side, magic artifacts to the other. They sell the poison and the cure. Profit and chaos. It keeps the mana levels fluctuating, keeps the populations desperate."

  Lloyd looked at the red dots. They looked like a disease.

  "And now?" Lloyd asked. "Why reveal themselves now?"

  "Because we stopped fighting," James said. "You united the North. You made alliances with the Desert and the South. Peace increases stability. Stability allows the population to grow strong. They realized that if they waited any longer, we might actually become a threat. So, the timeline has moved up. The harvest is starting."

  Lloyd gripped the edge of the glass table. The cool surface did nothing to soothe the fire in his blood.

  "They view us as a resource," Lloyd whispered.

  "No," James corrected him. "They view us as fuel."

  ________________________________________

  James tapped the table again, and the map shifted. The focus moved away from the human kingdoms and drifted south, past the borders of civilization, into the jagged, ominous landscape of the Southern Wastes.

  "It gets worse," James said. "Firefly isn't just working with humans. They don't discriminate when it comes to finding pawns."

  The map highlighted the territory of the Devil Race. Usually, this area was a blank spot on the map, labeled only with warnings of death and monsters. But James’s map was detailed. It showed topography, settlements, and troop movements.

  "The Devil Race," James said. "Our ancient enemy. The monsters under the bed. For a thousand years, humanity has been told that the Devils attack us because they are evil. Because they crave blood."

  "Aren't they?" Lloyd asked. "Lucifer certainly seemed to enjoy the bloodshed. He wanted to wipe us out."

  "Lucifer was a traditionalist," James said. "He was an old soldier fighting an old war. He hated humans because of history. But not all Devils are like him. Some are... pragmatic. Some are ambitious. And Firefly loves ambition."

  The hologram changed again. It stopped showing a map and started showing grainy video footage. It looked like high-altitude surveillance, likely taken from one of James’s secret satellites or a high-flying stealth drone.

  The image showed a desolate canyon in the Devil Wastes. On one side stood a group of figures in sleek, futuristic armor—Firefly agents. On the other side stood towering, horned Devil lords.

  They weren't fighting. They weren't casting spells at each other.

  They were shaking hands.

  Lloyd stared at the image. It was grotesque. Demons, creatures of primal magic, making deals with corporate soldiers.

  "Traitor Devils," James said, the words heavy with betrayal. "Firefly has managed to sway high-ranking members of the Devil nobility. They promised them power. They promised them that in the new corporate order, they wouldn't be monsters living in the wasteland, scavenging for scraps. They would be overseers. Managers."

  "They sold out their own kind?" Lloyd asked, incredulous. "They’re demons. They have pride. They have a code."

  "They have a price," James said dryly. "Firefly is very good at finding the price of a soul. These Traitor Devils are the ones destabilizing the continent’s defenses from the other side. They are the ones pushing for the attacks on the North. They want to weaken us so Firefly can sweep in and 'restore order'."

  "And the Red Blight?" Lloyd asked, his mind racing back to the village of Oakhaven. The engineered virus that had turned innocent villagers into mindless ghouls. The bats. The suffering. "That was them too?"

  "A field test," James confirmed. "It wasn't just a plague. It was a biological weapon designed by Firefly geneticists and deployed by Devil agents. They wanted to see how quickly a magical population would succumb to a non-magical virus. They wanted to see if they could wipe out the human resistance without firing a single shot."

  Lloyd closed his eyes. He saw the faces of the villagers. He saw the piles of bodies. He had thought it was just cruelty. He had thought it was a monster acting out of instinct.

  But it was just product testing. It was data collection.

  "It's not a war," Lloyd whispered, opening his eyes. The blue rings in his irises were glowing faintly. "It's an industry."

  "Exactly," James said. "That is the hardest thing for people to understand. They don't hate us, Lloyd. That's the worst part. They don't hate us at all. To them, we're not enemies to be respected. We're livestock. We're numbers on a quarterly report. Humans, Devils, Elves... we're just assets to be liquidated."