Chapter 182 The Forgotten 33rd Legion

Before the crimson beam even touched his face, Lin Yuan could already smell the burning stench of his armor being scorched.

This wasn't some laser; it was highly compressed gravitational waves mixed with high-dimensional viruses.

"Block my ass! Run!"

Lin Yuan cursed, slamming the chainsword he'd originally intended for cutting ribs behind him, trying to use the leverage to change direction.

But the "Rust Lord," now reduced to a mere skeleton, clearly had no intention of giving him that chance. The finger, cobbled together from hundreds of gun barrels, didn't stab down directly; instead, it flicked through the air with extreme indifference, as if flicking away cigarette ash.

Hum—!

The space for a hundred miles around felt like it had been suddenly clenched by a giant hand.

Lin Yuan felt like a toad stuffed into a high-speed centrifuge. Even though his brain commanded him to dodge left, his body was involuntarily sucked to the right by a terrifying, bizarre force. Immediately after, that massive finger slammed solidly against the Void Energy shield he had erected.

Bang!

There were no fancy special effects, just pure, crushing power.

Lin Yuan felt like a golf ball being smashed with a powerful swing. The scenery in his line of sight receded rapidly, and the originally massive titan warship instantly became a tiny black dot.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

He smashed through three heavy cruiser wrecks floating in orbit, and finally slammed hard into a space junk pile the size of an asteroid, carving out a trench several kilometers deep before coming to a stop.

"Cough... cough cough..."

Lin Yuan pulled himself out from a pile of twisted titanium alloy plates. The [titan Star Core Furnace] on his chest was flashing frantically, and the searing hot current almost burned through his semi-energized body.

"Damn it... is this what stellar-class means?"

Lin Yuan shook his slightly dizzy head, looked at the towering mechanical skeleton in the distance, and couldn't help but spit out a glob of saliva that sparked with electricity. "It's got plenty of strength, but its technique is a bit crude."

The power level of this monster had definitely touched the threshold of stellar-class. What was even more fatal was that this place was its "stomach"; every piece of scrap metal around could be used by it as a bullet or a shield.

Going head-to-head with it in this hellhole was equivalent to being pinned down and beaten on the opponent's home turf.

Zzzzt...

A harsh noise suddenly came through the communication channel, followed by Alita's tearful cry: "Hey! Are you dead yet? If you're not, hurry up and move! Its secondary guns have finished charging, and they've locked onto that crater you're in!"

"Are you trying to rush me to the afterlife? What about the fire control system I told you to hack?" Lin Yuan kicked away a broken main shaft that was pinning his leg and launched himself into the air once again.

"I'm trying! But this damn thing's firewall is alive! It's biting my brain through the data line!" Alita's voice sounded like she was on the verge of a breakdown. "Shift left by three degrees! That's its radar blind spot! Hurry!"

Lin Yuan didn't hesitate at all, didn't even have time to doubt, and his body instinctively made a sharp lateral shift to the left.

The moment he dodged, a sickly green plasma beam instantly vaporized the crater he had been lying in. Along with it, half of that asteroid-like mountain of junk evaporated under this single strike.

"Nice work, girl! I'll treat you to extra chicken legs when we get back!" Lin Yuan whistled, but his expression wasn't relaxed at all.

Because he discovered that as the mechanical skeleton stood up, the "red mist" that had originally been slowly undulating around them began to boil like boiling water.

Countless tiny red particles adhered to the surrounding warship wrecks. Those ships, which had originally been broken in two and floating peacefully, now seemed as if they had been injected with stimulants; they all turned their bows and swarmed towards him in a dense formation.

One destroyer, with only half a bridge remaining, acted like a mad dog; its thrusters spewed an ominous blood-red light, and instead of firing its cannons, it accelerated directly towards Lin Yuan to ram him.

"This again? Human wave tactics?"

Lin Yuan frowned, Void Energy condensing in his right hand as he prepared to crush it into a ball of scrap metal using "Void: Crush" just like before.

But the moment his palm was about to touch the ship, the system suddenly popped up a pale gold notification box in his mind that he had never seen before.

【Ding! High-concentration soul fluctuation detected.】

【Hidden prerequisite quest triggered: Listen to the voices of the dead.】

【Do you wish to connect?】

"Huh?" Lin Yuan paused.

Aside from that half-dead Rust Lord and the few living people among them, where would any souls come from in this place?

In that split second of distraction, the mad-dog destroyer had already charged right into his face.

Lin Yuan didn't have time to overthink it. Subconsciously, he didn't launch a destructive attack, but instead gently pressed his palm, wrapped in Void Energy, onto the ship's rusted armor plating.

"Stop, damn it!"

Hum!

There was no impact as he had expected.

When Lin Yuan's hand touched that thick layer of red rust, he felt as if he wasn't touching cold metal, but rather reaching into a quagmire filled with despair, anger, and unwillingness.

Countless chaotic images flooded into his mind like a tide.

...

"33rd Legion calling Command... is this the final line of defense?"

"Energy depleted... backup batteries are empty too..."

"Why is there still no order to retreat?"

"That is... Rust? No! Weld the bulkhead shut! Don't let it in!"

"The officers lied to us... no one is coming..."

"It's so cold... I want to go home..."

...

Those images were fragmented, but every frame exuded a suffocating chill.

This wasn't merely a data stream.

This was the obsession carved into the core of a ship as it watched its crew die one by one and its own body rust away bit by bit over the long years.

It didn't want to ram Lin Yuan to death.

It was in too much pain; it wanted to find someone to end it all.

The purple light in Lin Yuan's eyes flickered violently.

The fingers he had intended to use to crush the core inexplicably loosened. In their place, a gentle, purifying ripple of Void Energy flowed from his palm into the ship's hull.

"Alright, stop wailing. I know you've been wronged."

Lin Yuan's voice was very soft, but on a spiritual level, it sounded like a thunderclap.

That destroyer, originally covered in red rust and exuding a violent aura, seemed to have been awakened by this touch.

The red light on the hull's surface flickered violently a few times, and then, miraculously, it faded away in one small patch, revealing the mottled and faded titan blue underneath.

Woo—!

A faint, yet crisp sound, like a steam whistle from ancient times, rang out in the void.

The ship stopped dead in its tracks less than half a meter from the tip of Lin Yuan's nose. It didn't continue its attack; instead, it slightly turned its bow, and the signal lights on its bridge flashed a very ancient Morse code.

Thank you.

The next second.

Boom!

This veteran, who had been drifting in the void for unknown tens of thousands of years, chose to self-detonate its power furnace so that the virus within wouldn't lose control and hurt anyone again.

In a brilliant burst of blue fire, it blew itself into countless fragments.

Lin Yuan floated in the aftermath of the explosion, watching the metal dust dancing across the sky, his face grim and terrifying.

"So they weren't completely dead..."

He had always thought these were just puppets purely controlled by the virus.

But this contact made him realize that buried beneath that layer of red rust was a breath that hadn't been exhaled for tens of thousands of years.

That "Rust Lord" sitting on the high tower wasn't just using the corpses of these veterans to build its house; it was also torturing their residual ship souls every single moment, using them like dogs.

"I think you really don't want to live anymore."

Lin Yuan looked up, staring fixedly across tens of kilometers of void at the mechanical skeleton sitting high above.

Originally, he had just wanted to come and scavenge some junk, and maybe do a little demolition.

But now, the nature of this had changed.

"Roar—!"

The skeleton on the distant high tower seemed to have sensed the anomaly over here.

A "puppet" it had painstakingly refined had actually broken free from its control and chosen to self-destruct? This was practically a slap in the face.

The red light in those searchlight-like eyes flared brightly, and an incredibly intense psychic storm swept over.

【Betrayal... Purge...】

With its intent, the throne beneath it, built from countless wrecks, began to collapse.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—

Large swaths of dark red mist gushed out from its body; it was a swarm of high-density nanomechanical insects. Each of these insects had independent consumption directives, and wherever they passed, even the dust in space was devoured completely.

This red cloud was like a massive mouth covering the sky, intending to swallow Lin Yuan, this ignorant little insect, in one gulp.

"Lin Yuan! Run! That's a nanite poison cloud! If even a little bit touches you, your mech will be ruined!" Alita's voice had reached an extreme, shrill pitch.

"Run? Where to?"

Lin Yuan looked at the hundreds of "red-eyed" warships that had already surrounded him, and a crazed arc suddenly curled at the corner of his mouth.

Not only did he not retreat, but he instead reactivated the Star Core Furnace on his chest.

This time, it wasn't for defense, nor was it for charging.

"Since you want to go home, I'll send you on your way."

Lin Yuan spread his arms, and the Void Energy in his body erupted without reservation. The purple light condensed behind him into thousands of hair-thin energy tentacles, like a massive neural network, actively piercing towards the warships rushing in from all around.

He didn't intend to smash them to pieces.

He wanted to "wake them up" one by one, just like before.

This was an extremely mentally taxing operation; if he wasn't careful, his consciousness would be overwhelmed by that tens of thousands of years of resentment, and he would become a madman.

But Lin Yuan didn't care.

"Listen up, all of you! No matter which legion you belong to!"

Lin Yuan's voice, through Void Resonance, exploded directly within the residual souls of every warship.

"If you don't want to be a dog, sign your retirement papers for me! I authorize you to disband right here and now!"

Pshhh! Pshhh!

Dozens of Void tentacles precisely pierced into the cores of the dozens of warships charging at the front.

The originally frantic fleet formation instantly descended into chaos. Blue and red lights flashed frantically across the surfaces of those warships, as if two wills were locked in a life-or-death struggle.

At the same time, that terrifying red cloud arrived.

Under that overwhelming red consumption, Lin Yuan's small purple figure was instantly submerged and could no longer be seen.

Just then.

From the private communication channel that had been in silence, Chen Weiguo's urgent roar suddenly came through.

This voice didn't come through conventional signals, but directly into his mind via the Void Beacon that Lin Yuan had previously left on Earth.

"Lin Yuan! What are you doing! The shield on Earth's side can't hold on much longer!"

"That giant hand... that mechanical hand is tearing at our gravitational anchor points! It wants to drag Earth directly into that tower!"

"Where the hell are you?!"