157: Chapter 161 Digging Trenches on a Planet's Surface to Defend Against Assassins

The territory of the Eternal Star Crown Federation was incredibly vast.

Four hundred and thirty-seven developed star systems were linked together by an extremely tight energy grid and curvature navigation channels. The ecology of every planet had been adjusted to the golden ratio most suitable for the survival of High Elves.

There was no pollution, no famine, and even the hum of machinery was filtered into a pleasant white noise by silent force fields.

The home planet, Star Crown Palace.

This was the brain of the entire Federation, a giant complex of buildings composed entirely of pure white crystals and floating tracks.

The Archon 'The Chess Player' sat on his floating throne, with tens of thousands of miniature holographic projection screens unfolded before him.

His appearance was that of a perfect High Elf body, but what flowed in the depths of his eyes was not the glow of magic, but an extremely complex waterfall of data. He was a monster who had completely uploaded his consciousness into the Federation's supercomputing matrix.

A screen on the left flashed deep red, representing extreme danger.

“The riots in resource zones K-99 to K-101 have been suppressed.”

The Marshal of the Federation Defense Force stood below the throne, his voice carrying an irrepressible sense of dread.

“We lost the mining infrastructure of three star systems. 120,000 mining mechs have been judged to have logical aberrations.”

“They not only refuse to obey commands, but are even attempting to carve our mining stars into... some kind of incomprehensible religious symbols. To prevent the pollution from spreading, we could only use stellar-class main cannons to perform physical vitrification on those three planets.”

The The Chess Player did not look at the Marshal.

His fingers swiped gently in the void, pulling up the source that triggered the riot—the batch of 'Abyssal-class Demolition Drill Cores' purchased from an anonymous account on the great map.

“The inspection report is out.” The The Chess Player's voice was like ice scraping against glass, without any fluctuation.

His finger clicked open the underlying code analysis of that drill core.

“The 'High-Energy Overload Optimization Protocol' on the outer layer is a disguise. The true core code is an idealistic machine spirit logic with extremely strong exclusivity and infectivity.”

The The Chess Player enlarged that stripped-out red virus code.

“It will infect any machinery that has not been set with 'faith permissions.' This is not something that can be written by some low-level biological mutation stream.” The leader of this civilization, ranked seventh in the star zone, fell into a rare silence for a full five seconds.

He once again pulled up the application for a dangerous civilization tag for designation 409X, which had been suspended by the system.

“That anonymous account and 409X, which rammed the Dark Red Star Zone outpost, are from the same source.”

The The Chess Player reached a conclusion.

“The opponent is beating us at our own game. He used a pile of trash disguised as low-quality energy to test our appetite and successfully dumped this trash into our backyard.”

The Defense Force Marshal suddenly looked up: “Please immediately approve the jump orders for the First Fleet. I want to crush that bug hiding in the dead star system into powder!”

“No.” The The Chess Player refused bluntly. “The deployment cost of the First Fleet exceeds 100 million civilization points. The opponent is just a wild civilization that hasn't even touched the threshold of the star zone. This kind of firepower projection with inverted costs violates the Federation's development model.”

He looked at the coordinates of the dead star system on the radar, which represented three abandoned mining stars.

409X had just lifted its jump restrictions.

That mad-dog Commander must be frantically accumulating troops right now, trying to establish his first military fortress on that abandoned land.

“Send 'Ghost',” the The Chess Player gave a new instruction.

“Deploy that 'Void Tearer' class phased stealth ship. Take the Federation's top-tier [Shadow Weaver] special operations squad.”

The The Chess Player's voice echoed in the pure white hall.

“Don't engage in naval battles. Penetrate his defense network directly and cut to the surface. I want this squad to infiltrate their core base and find out exactly how this bizarre mechanical virus is operating in that godforsaken place.”

“If resistance is met, eliminate them on the spot.”

Mining Planet No. 3, Equatorial Extinct Volcano Base.

Li Cang stood before the console of the operation pod, looking at the planetary core that had just been forcibly activated by the system [civilization forge].

From that massive flattened volcanic crater, the first extremely crude but also extremely violent crawler conveyor belt was slowly operating.

The corpses of the Scavenger Mercenaries, which had been violently dismantled and stuffed into the crucible by the Astartes Recruits over the past ten hours, were now the first batch of products on this assembly line.

Two thousand Servitors.

These could not be called 'people' at all.

Their lower bodies were crude crawlers or multi-legged mechanical supports forcibly welded shut, while their upper bodies were the flesh and blood of those alien mercenaries, whose frontal lobes had been removed, leaving only basic motor nerves, before being forcibly stuffed into iron shells.

Some Servitors' faces even retained the terrified expressions they had before death, but now, those faces were riddled with holes from various thick pipelines and electrodes.

No thoughts, no fear.

Only mechanical programs that absolutely obey settings.

As soon as these two thousand Servitors stepped off the conveyor belt, they were immediately assigned to various nodes of the Equatorial Ring Forging Slot.

The Forge World, which had been stagnant for a long time, finally let out an extremely dull but powerful first breath.

Li Cang did not relax because of this successful first step.

He glanced at the radar report he had just thrown into the corner.

On the surface of the mining star covered by the [Dark Void Domain] card, besides the three mountain-sized Macro-cannons that had just been built, there were no facilities that could be called 'close-quarters defense.'

What if a special forces unit didn't use artillery to clear the ground, but instead used miniature shuttles to forcibly air-drop in?

He knew his great map credit score had recovered to C+, which meant his coordinates were already a completely transparent piece of fat to those truly big shots.

That distant 'The Chess Player' had definitely already reacted.

Li Cang directly cut off the Servitors' instructions to build surface-to-air outposts.

“Everyone,” Li Cang connected to the all-frequency engineering broadcast.

“Stop all construction of surface buildings.”

He slapped an extremely ancient 3D blueprint, which seemed somewhat laughable in an interstellar civilization, onto the visor screen of Recruit Company Commander Number One.

“Radiate outward three hundred kilometers along the volcanic crater.”

Li Cang's voice carried an unquestionable ferocity.

“Dig down for me.”

“Dig a hundred meters deep. Dig out a trench network that even a blind man couldn't crawl out of if he fell in.”

In this great map where the technology tree had reached the point of being able to warp across star systems and tear through space.

Li Cang chose a defensive position that had already been phased out for thousands of years in the era of mortals.

The Servitors raised the drilling shovels in their hands, which were stained with various colors of engine oil.

The Astartes pulled out their high-frequency Chainswords, which had just finished maintenance, and used them directly as the most efficient excavators.

Two thousand half-human, half-mechanical monsters and over a hundred black giants engaged in an extremely frenzied physical excavation on the surface of Mining Planet No. 3.

In less than twelve hours.

A giant web covering three hundred kilometers around the volcanic crater took shape on the mining star's equator.

They weren't neat trenches.

They were bottomless abysses a hundred meters deep, with bottoms filled with sharp metal scrap and crude pressure-sensitive mines.

The walls of the trenches were haphazardly smeared with a layer of anti-scanning coating refined from the flesh and blood of Abyssal Star Beasts.

Inside, there were no high-tech infrared sensors, no automatic target-seeking machine guns.

Only the pungent smell of engine oil and fifty Astartes Recruits who had been given the instructions “conceal, hold breath, listen for sound.”

It was too quiet.

This extremely primitive silence made it impossible for radar to catch any high-energy reaction signals.

In the void.

A long-shaped warship, its surface covered with an absolute optical distortion force field, glided like a ghost through the outer synchronous orbit of Mining Planet No. 3.

A [Void Tearer] class phased stealth ship.

The stealth level of this thing was so high that even the faint ripples generated when it cut through the vacuum's gravitational field would be smoothed out by the phase generators on the hull's surface.

Li Cang's set of low-quality radar, cobbled together from base station scrap metal, was blinder than a blind man before it.

The stealth ship hovered at an altitude of only one hundred kilometers from the mining star's surface.

The hatch opened silently.

Twelve Federation special forces elites wearing [Shadow Weaver] optical camouflage battle armor jumped directly into the atmosphere of this dead star like twelve drops of transparent water.

Their battle armor was equipped with miniature anti-gravity modules, and there was no sound of breaking air during the descent.

The high-dimensional infrared imagers in their helmets were turned up to maximum power.

In their view, there were no anti-aircraft batteries around the volcanic crater below, no patrolling mechs, and they didn't even see the most basic Energy Shield fences.

There were only large swathes of extremely bizarre-shaped, incredibly deep surface cracks.

“No heat source reactions detected.” The results of the underlying scan were transmitted back through the squad leader's neural interface.

“Do these primitives think they can block a Federation assault just by digging a few holes?”

“Mission unchanged. Land at the bottom of the largest crack and infiltrate their hub through the underground passages.”

Twelve transparent figures, with the help of the micro-gravity environment, precisely controlled their descent trajectories.

Like feathers, they lightly drifted into the bottom of that hundred-meter-deep trench.

Their optical camouflage even fooled a few mutant rats at the bottom of the trench.

But there was one thing they couldn't fool.

Pure physical mass pressure.

Just as the squad leader's foot, clad in shock-absorbing combat boots, landed on a seemingly ordinary black iron plate at the bottom of the trench.

That physical pressure-activated mine, which wasn't connected to any electronic signals and relied entirely on springs and firing pins, had its fuse ruthlessly triggered by those insignificant dozens of kilograms of weight.

Click.

An extremely tiny crisp sound was infinitely amplified in this narrow and deep trench.

The infrared detector on the squad leader's visor didn't even have time to flash a high-risk red.

Boom!

That mine, pressed from discarded ore mixed with hundreds of pounds of crude, low-quality explosives, erupted in a burst of blinding orange-red at the bottom of the hundred-meter-deep trench.

This low-quality explosive didn't have the high temperature of plasma, nor the penetration of a light lance.

But the shockwave it produced, carrying countless thumbnail-sized rusted iron fragments in this semi-enclosed canyon, swept across a thirty-meter radius like a steel storm.

The optical camouflage was directly rendered useless under the physical cutting of the iron fragments, flashing with a burst of blinding blue light.

Three special forces members were torn into chunks of meat on the spot at the core of the explosion.

Before the squad leader could even shout “Contact” into the communication channel.

At both ends of the trench, fifty pairs of crimson eyes suddenly lit up.

Those were fifty Astartes who had been squatting in the shadows of the trench, with even their engine idling turned off, relying purely on their physical bodies to stop breathing and lie in wait for over a dozen hours.

Their massive black masterwork armor revealed an extremely ferocious silhouette in the firelight.

“Rats detected.”

Fourteenth Recruit, who was in charge of this side of the ambush, used his only remaining armored right arm to rip open the switch of the high-frequency Chainsword behind him.

At this distance, phased stealth and high-dimensional weapons were all a joke.

In the narrow trench.

There was only the purest meat-grinding and slaughter.