212: Chapter 216 No matter how thick your vault door is, it can't be thicker than my chainsaw.

Above the surface, the screams at White Tomb Anchorage No. 3 had gradually begun to thin out.

The alloy walls on both sides of the main corridor were splashed with large patches of blue blood and shattered protective armor plates.

Those well-trained chemical defense guards, who enjoyed the high-welfare supplies of the Inner Ring, were plowed clean by the Astartes—meat grinders composed purely of biological mutations and heavy industrial armor—under the dual suppression of anti-magic coatings and the Silent Bell Chamber.

Number Fourteen, the dreadnought mech, acted like a tireless scavenger, its treads grinding across the hall, crushing several still-twitching bodies into the metal crevices.

Inside the main control cabin of the Exile Fortress.

Cold air circulated slowly. No scent of blood could penetrate this half-meter-thick blast-proof glass, but the cold, cruel atmosphere filled the space through the holographic screens.

Li Cang didn't look at the low-level cleanup being handled by the Servitors.

His gaze was pinned firmly on another set of deep structural diagrams sent back by the Sub-control Servitor.

That was the very bottom of White Tomb No. 3.

A six-kilometer-long strip of anomalous area.

"Number One. Have you arrived?"

He raised his hand to open the communication. His voice wasn't loud, but because of the extreme silence in the channel, it sounded like a blade scraping against bone.

"Arrived."

The monitoring screen lit up along with the recording port of Number One's armor.

That was several hundred meters underground.

There were no lights, only the cold white searchlight beams from the Astartes helmet sweeping across.

At the end of the corridor was no ordinary hangar iron rolling door. Instead, it was a solid white gate, over fifty meters wide, its height vanishing into the darkness!

This wall had no seams, no keypad, and no iris scanner.

It was cast entirely from an unknown white-gold material that emitted a faint, eerie glow, its surface appearing as if coated with a layer of flowing mercury. All light that hit it was evenly deflected by its bizarre surface tension.

The Sub-control Servitor's eye-lights flashed rapidly.

[Warning. High-dimensional inert metal 'Sunken Water White-Gold' detected in the target area's outer shell.]

[This material is completely immune to conventional electronic hacking and cannot be forcibly dismantled using psychic keys. Its physical resistance threshold exceeds that of a Class-1 primary planet's anti-aircraft shield.]

"Anti-aircraft shield?"

Li Cang looked at that pale wall. There was no annoyance in his eyes; instead, a glint of greed, as if seeing a piece of peerless meat, slowly emerged.

To use such a rare material, sufficient to serve as the frontal armor plating of a mothership, just to make a door.

If the thing hidden behind this door couldn't be used to flip the entire Red Lotus Star Sector upside down, it wouldn't be worth the price of admission.

He turned his head.

On the isolation chair in the corner, Irene's mind, which had been suppressed by the backlash of the Silent Bell Chamber, was now becoming a bit clearer. She was also looking at the screen.

When she saw that white-gold gate, the muscles at the corner of her eyes twitched visibly. That twitch wasn't out of fear, but out of the panic of having a top-level secret stripped bare to its core.

"You can't get in."

Irene's voice was weak, but it carried the characteristic acerbic certainty of the Inner Ring people.

"That door has no keyhole. It was cast with a fully enclosed force field.

Except for a specialized dissolving agent with the master array's original key, any forced entry will only trigger a reverse collapse, instantly locking the interior along with the hangar into a ten-thousand-degree solidified ruin. Even if your ten million pieces of cannon fodder all die there, you won't even scratch its surface."

These words were spoken very professionally.

They also perfectly matched the Federation's arrogant tone of 'if I can't have it, no one can.'

Li Cang stopped tapping his fingers on the desk.

He picked up the glass of water next to him, which had already gone cold, and took a slow sip. Then he tilted his head, studying Irene's pale face with an expression that was almost like watching a play.

"You people. Do you think that to do anything, it must be accompanied by a codebook, a decoder, and an instruction manual to not seem beneath you?"

Irene felt a chill from his gaze.

"I have no interest in playing riddles and looking for keys with you." Li Cang reached out and directly pulled up the next set of deployment commands. "My method might be a bit ugly. But it works."

"Number One, step aside. Servitors, load the materials for the Starfall Heavy Executioner Knight."

RUMBLE—

In front of the white-gold gate.

The heavy sound of metal shaking the ground approached from afar. The alloy plates above the corridor even trembled, unable to withstand the footsteps of that behemoth.

Starfall Heavy Executioner Knight.

Its thirty-meter-tall body seemed a bit cramped as it squeezed into this underground space.

The mech still bore scratches from just dismantling the bridge of the recovery team's wrecked ship, emitting a scent of incompletely burned engine oil and charred flesh.

But now, the massive ten-meter-long chain-saw on its left arm had been removed.

Several large transport Servitors pushed forward several large black tanks from the rear, emitting a pungent acidic odor.

These large tanks contained [Highly Concentrated Inferior Mutant Thermite Armor-Piercing Toxic Acid], which the Great Crusade's Forge Mother-Furnace had just brewed by forcibly pressurizing the wreckage of the shattered optical computers and warships from the perimeter mixed with incinerator waste!

There was no need for any elegant dissolving key at all!

The Servitors crudely welded and inserted several thick, rusted high-pressure pipes directly into the ten-meter-long ultra-heavy pile-driving spike head that had been substituted onto the Heavy Executioner Knight.

"Pin that pretty gate down for me. Pump every drop of this filthy water into the very bones of the door seams!"

Li Cang looked at the screen and directly issued the most unreasonable, brute-force tactic.

Irene let out a cry of disbelief from behind.

"You'll trigger the reverse collapse program!!!"

Li Cang didn't look at her.

At the front line, the Heavy Executioner Knight's engine let out a world-shaking roar.

The treads on its feet even ground eye-searing fiery trenches into the hard floor! There was no probing, no drill preheating.

The thirty-meter-tall black iron beast, dragging that massive iron spike connected to pipes and flowing with green acid mist, carried tens of thousands of tons of physical momentum, like a prehistoric giant rhino madly charging a mountain range.

BOOM-CRACK—!!

A massive sound shattered the entire underground level!

The spike, using the most barbaric kinetic energy, smashed rawly into the middle of that shimmering Sunken Water White-Gold gate!

The white-gold material was indeed heavenly; it didn't shatter like ordinary armor but instead showed a mercury-like tough indentation, attempting to deflect the force. In the system's alarm, the red counter-collapse program began a frantic countdown!

But at the same moment as the countdown...

The pipe valves behind the Knight burst open. Those large tanks of the filthiest and most potent thermite armor-piercing acid, brewed by the Warhammer Mother-Furnace, were pumped frantically like a poison needle through the embedded iron spike into the deep cracks of the door's pressurized deformation!

SIZZLE SIZZLE SIZZLE!!!

If the white-gold gate was a perfectly intact bulletproof vest, then this acid, mixed with tens of thousands of degrees of heat and unspeakable mutant waste, was a massive splash of sulfuric acid.

The elegant, high-end material encountered a pure heavy-industrial foul-smelling garbage corrosion it had never seen before!

There was no technological countermeasure!

The luster on the surface of the Sunken Water White-Gold was like human skin being seared off by a brand. It peeled and blistered over a large area amidst a rolling, pungent yellow-black toxic smoke! The originally indestructible force field, under the physical brutality of thermite and acid erosion, rotted away like a melting block of wax, forming a massive black hole over ten meters in diameter!

Even the damn collapse-lock program didn't finish burning half a fuse before the entire control gate motherboard was burned into a puddle of waste slag and molten iron by the acid.

"What 'door that can't be opened without a key.'"

Li Cang looked at the gate that had collapsed and melted, his lips curling into an extremely contemptuous, faint smile.

"My chainsaw and black-powder-breaking spike are the most universal master keys in the world."

The dust had not yet settled.

Cold air currents poured out frantically through the breached hole, forming a layer of white frost on the Astartes armor.

Li Cang didn't let the team enter immediately.

He controlled the Knight's forward searchlight to shine through the hole that had been forcibly melted and stripped open.

The light tore through the darkness.

Inside the main control cabin.

Even the usually expressionless Li Cang, the moment he saw the scene illuminated by the light, had his fingers suddenly freeze on the edge of the table.

Irene closed her eyes; she knew everything was over.

And Celine, who had been watching from the side, had her pupils dilate, staring at the screen as if seeing a ghost, her breathing even skipping a beat.

Behind the big hole.

It wasn't an armory.

It wasn't a mountain of gold bars.

There were no neatly arranged ammo crates or mech formations.

It was a massive six-kilometer-long vacuum-sealed cultivation tank dock.

In the very center of this empty, silent underground dock, a massive, deformed giant object that was difficult to describe with conventional language lay quietly.

It was the size of an interstellar destroyer. But there wasn't a single piece of ordinary, smooth armor plating on its entire body.

Its skeleton was composed entirely of a colossal, unknown biological remains' spine that emitted an eerie blue death-light and had undergone high-purity psychic crystallization!

In the gaps of these white, massive crystallized bones, countless thick pipes flowing with deep purple psychic pressure liquid were densely interspersed.

It had no bridge, no paint job.

At the front of this heavily stitched behemoth of bone and metal, there was no naval gun firing chamber.

Instead, it was a prototype of a small [Artificial Micro-Gravitational Destruction Vortex Furnace] that was locked firmly in the center by a gravity field, constantly collapsing and rotating like a deep-space black hole!

The Sub-control Servitor's probe head reported errors frantically.

[Warning! Detected an over-specification strategic-grade uncompleted corpse!]

[This object is not equipped with a conventional energy propulsion system. Its structure is determined to be: a pure Star-Exterminator-grade Law Strike Carrier Chassis.]

Li Cang looked at the giant semi-finished monster of bone and destruction halos on the holographic screen. The fire deep in his eyes gradually began to burn.

It was the excited light of a hungry wolf finally seeing the sharp teeth that could bite through the throat of an even larger beast.

Why did the Federation's Inner Ring hide it here? Why didn't they use regular door keys and guards?

Because this thing was something even the Federation itself didn't dare to build openly in the sunlight.

This was a through-and-through taboo, violation-grade weapon skeleton!

It didn't need any mech escorts.

With just that micro-gravitational destruction vortex furnace hanging in front of it, once assembled and ignited...

One shot, and an entire star system's asteroid belt could be rawly ground into interstellar dust.

"No wonder."

Li Cang slowly leaned back into his large chair. His heartbeat in his chest was steady and powerful.

If the previous robbery was just taking a bit of rations to let the fortress survive...

Then this one today...

As long as this six-kilometer-long bone cannon frame, along with that micro-gravitational vortex furnace in front, was forcibly stitched and pinned onto his own Exile Fortress chassis, and then this thing was integrated and slotted together with the Silent Bell Chamber...

Even if next, the entire Shadow Third Array came out in full force, and all the regular army's primary planets were pulled over for an extermination-grade war of attrition...

Li Cang would have absolute confidence.

To give them back a sun-shattering-grade slap with one shot.

"Number One!"

Li Cang's voice no longer held the slightest hesitation.

"Don't look for any spare parts or instruction manuals. Take the Servitors in! Take this entire six-kilometer bone frame along with that black mud ball."

"Cut all the ground bolts! Forcibly drag it and load it into the mother-furnace's forward modification belly-cabin!"

"When I take my seat as the dealer at this gambling table, this big chassis will be what makes me fully set!"