Chapter 181 A traitor to the Titans? No, a vengeful seed who didn't receive his wages.

The ghost warships that had been biting at Lin Yuan like mad dogs a moment ago now looked as if someone had pressed the pause button.

The edges of the fissures in the tens of thousands of kilometers long steel wall were terrifyingly smooth.

The "Star Core Furnace" on Lin Yuan's chest was so hot that his bulletproof plating began to warp, and a smell of something burning wafted up from his collar, but he had no mind to pay attention to it.

The broken frigates surrounding him, their muzzles previously glowing with green light, had all gone silent. A few ships had even slammed into the wreckage nearby because they stopped too abruptly, sending up a shower of sparks.

"Are they... afraid?" a soldier asked, gripping a tether, his voice trembling.

Lin Yuan didn't speak. He could feel an incredibly complex emotion transmitted through the resonance of the furnace. It wasn't pure fear, but rather a mixture of anticipation, grievance, and even a touch of madness that wanted to drag him down with them.

"Szz—szzz—"

The ear-piercing grinding sound in the public channel had vanished.

In its place was an aged voice with a heavy, metallic tremor. The pronunciation was extremely bizarre—pure titan language—where every syllable sounded like heavy gears colliding.

"Is that... Commander?"

The voice exploded in everyone's minds, shaking Alita's electronic prosthetic eye with a pop, causing a wisp of black smoke to rise from it.

"Commander... we have waited... forty-five million solar hours."

"The 33rd Legion, heavy mechanized, should have had 170,000 personnel. Actual count... actual count..."

The voice suddenly turned shrill, carrying a teeth-grinding, weeping tone.

"Actual count: zero! Commander! Aside from this pile of scrap metal, we have nothing left!"

Lin Yuan floated in the void, still holding Alita, his brow furrowed into a knot.

"You've got the wrong person. I'm just passing through." Lin Yuan cleared his throat, suppressing the heat from the furnace. "Look, I inherited some titan legacy. Strictly speaking, I'm your creditor, not your Commander."

He shouldn't have said that. The moment the words left his mouth, the previously calm mist began to roil and churn like boiling water.

"Inheritor?" The voice rose sharply, filled with hysterical malice. "You hold the Core... you hold the authorization... then you are one of them! You are those liars who dumped us in this cesspit, promising to return with reinforcements in three hours, only to leave us guarding it for ten thousand years!"

Lin Yuan's heart skipped a beat; he cursed silently. It seemed this bunch of scrap metal had been played hard.

Alita gripped Lin Yuan's arm, her nails digging into the gaps of his mecha. She muttered in a terrified whisper, "It's over. They've remembered. My great-grandfather's diary mentioned that the 33rd Legion was treated as cannon fodder by the titan high command. To stop the spread of the 'Rust', the high command sealed the star gate, leaving them here to hold the line until the end, without even a single screw left for them."

"And they waited for ten thousand years."

"They were waiting for support, for reinforcements, but all they got was the mechanical virus that slowly devoured their bodies."

Lin Yuan's mouth twitched as he listened. Good grief, these weren't traitors; they were just poor souls who didn't get paid and were forced to work ten thousand years of overtime in the office. Who wouldn't go mad?

"Since they aren't coming... then let's drag their most prized sparks... in with us."

The aged voice turned incomparably cold. Just then, a scarlet electromagnetic wave, countless times more powerful than before, swept out from the top of the tower known as the "Anvil".

This red light was like a tangible blood mist. Any warship it touched had its previously azure electronic eyes instantly extinguished, replaced by a violent, crimson glow.

The muzzles that had been lowered were forced back up by some rigid will. Creak—creak—! The ear-piercing sound of metal fatigue echoed through the void.

"System! What's going on?" Lin Yuan roared in his mind.

[Warning! S-class logic suppression detected! The "Rust Lord" is forcibly seizing underlying control of the remaining mechanical units!]

[The opponent is deleting the 33rd Legion's autonomous consciousness, converting them into pure killing puppets!]

"To hell with the Lord." Lin Yuan laughed, though it was a fierce, cold laugh. "Before these veterans are completely dead, I'm going to dismantle that coward hiding in the back."

He could see it; although these poor souls hated the titans, their hesitation a moment ago was genuine. If he let that Lord succeed, these ten-thousand-year veterans would truly become nothing more than soulless scrap.

"Old Chen, take the brothers and retreat, hide in the wreckage of the escort ships over there!"

Lin Yuan tossed Alita to a soldier behind him and suddenly accelerated. He didn't retreat; instead, he charged headlong toward the re-closing steel wall, transforming into a streak of dark gold light.

"Since your Commander doesn't want you, I'll be your temp worker today!"

Boom! Thousands of green beams erupted again, turning the void into a sieve.

Lin Yuan's figure dodged and wove between the beams of light, like a fish swimming through a rainstorm without getting a single drop on it. Void Energy exploded beneath his feet, and each jump covered thousands of meters.

Directly ahead, a three-kilometer-long heavy cruiser lay across his path like a giant beast. Its broadside was densely packed with secondary batteries, frantically pouring out ammunition, the dense web of fire sealing off almost every angle of Lin Yuan's advance.

"You're blocking the way, buddy." Lin Yuan snorted coldly, his pupils instantly filling with dark purple.

[Void · Phase Shift]!

Lin Yuan, who had been flying at extreme speed, became semi-transparent at that moment, as if he had been partially erased from space-time. Swish! The beams, capable of burning meteorites into gas, passed right through his body without even grazing a hair.

Like an illusory ghost, Lin Yuan slammed straight into the heavy cruiser's meters-thick composite armor. There was no impact, no explosion.

Inside the ship, the rust-covered mechanical zombies were busy charging the main cannons; they didn't even notice an intruder had passed through the wall.

Lin Yuan's figure solidified in the center of the engine room. Beneath his feet was the Antimatter Core, larger than a basketball court, emitting a hum that made one's hair stand on end.

"I think it's time for you to get a heart transplant."

Lin Yuan curled his fingers into claws, aiming his palm at the core. Void Energy manifested into several hideous talons, piercing directly through the outer confinement magnetic field.

"Up!" He pulled with all his might.

Crack! Countless jumping electric arcs ran wild through the chamber, and the entire cruiser shook violently as if it were having a seizure.

Lin Yuan had actually plucked the core, weighing several hundred tons, off its base as if he were picking a peach, and stuffed it into his system inventory with a casual flick.

Such a heavy warship, having lost its heart, couldn't even last a second. The once-dazzling lights instantly dimmed, the charging turrets emitted a miserable, sputtering sound, and the entire multi-kilometer-long behemoth began to plummet like a stone under the force of inertia.

Lin Yuan didn't stop. The moment he emerged from the stern, he used several consecutive Void Flashes, leaving behind trails of charge caused by the overload. By this time, he had broken through the first line of defense and was less than ten kilometers away from the "Anvil".

"Come on, let me see what you, the Lord, look like."

Lin Yuan dove into the thick, impenetrable red mist surrounding the tower. The mist here had condensed into tiny crystals, constantly striking his mecha's visor with a faint, crackling sound.

When he forcibly pierced through the final layer of mist, he saw the scene before him clearly. This wasn't a tower at all. It was a massive base forcibly twisted and welded together from the spines of countless ancient titan warships, reactor shells, and broken thrusters.

Right at the top of this several-thousand-meter-high scrap metal base sat an immensely huge shadow. It was a mechanical skeleton, silver-gray in color but covered in dark red spots.

It was at least three thousand meters tall, sitting brazenly on a throne made of spaceship wreckage. Two mechanical ribs, as thick as ten-story buildings, protected its chest, where one could vaguely see a dark red core spinning like a black hole.

Its skull part was a massive titan-class surveillance radar, now cracked in half, revealing tangled, vein-like red optical fibers inside.

And in the eye sockets of that skull, two giant searchlights were staring fixedly at the incoming Lin Yuan. The cold, absolute malice on a logical level gave Lin Yuan the illusion that his blood had frozen throughout his body.

The massive mechanical skeleton slowly raised a bone-white finger composed of hundreds of gun barrels, and at the fingertip, a ball of red light began to gather, powerful enough to cause the surrounding space to collapse.

It didn't speak, but Lin Yuan clearly received a command in his mind: [Trash... cleanup.]

Lin Yuan, holding his chipped chainsword, felt the violent protest coming from the furnace and laughed: "I've never dismantled scrap metal of this size in my life. Perfect! I'll take your ribs back to make some soup for my engine!"

As soon as he finished speaking, the world-destroying red beam grazed his scalp. And in the deeper mist, tens of thousands of "ghost soldiers" were marching in neat phalanxes, slowly emerging from the shadows of the graveyard.