Chapter 655 — The Crisis, Neatly Arranged

When he saw the footage transmitted from the Iron Throne—Unit Zero, Gao Heng could not help drawing a sharp breath.

Those madmen had actually built a counterfeit "Great Stag Amorn"...

The counterfeit had clearly run out of control—its ruptured flesh and malformed body were proof enough—but apart from that, the holy radiance that wreathed it and the horns that looked as though they had been forged from light were identical to those of the true "Great Stag Amorn." This was beyond question a staggering creation; enemy though it was, and wrongheaded though its makers' path might be, the biotechnological prowess in the hands of the Assembly of All Things' End still drew a gasp of admiration from Gao Yang's heart.

They had most likely harvested the genetic factors that humans carry from the God of Nature, then used some manner of reverse reconstruction to shape this monster. Technological power of this caliber...

Could they not have put it to some decent use for once?

That was all Gao Yang wanted to sigh over just now—but the upper echelons of the Assembly of All Things' End had in all likelihood been wiped out in a single sweep the moment this dreadful man-made god awakened and lost control, so all his sighs and accusations had nowhere to go. The only thing left for him to do was find a way to deal with this enormous mess.

He looked at the arcane-net terminal before him. On the holographic projection hovering in midair was the half-length image of Ma Qi; behind the commander lay the busy scene of the Iron Throne's tactical command center, where several holograms flickered in the background and many clerks clutching documents hurried through the carriage. Clearly, the appearance of that "Great Stag" had set everyone on edge.

"What is the situation now? Is this... monster still in place?"

"Yes," Ma Qi's voice came with a slight distortion, perhaps due to interference from the powerful energy field saturating the entire Holy Spirit Plains. "On first contact it displayed violent aggression, destroyed two of our war machines, and killed the soldiers aboard. But it soon ceased activity and began to wander the plains...

"I have dispatched several teams to maintain continuous surveillance of the monster from a distance. One thing is certain now: once our soldiers draw within a certain range of it, it activates and attacks—but after a time, or once it loses its target, it stops again...

"Its range of activity is gradually expanding. The observers report that it is growing more and more restless.

"We suspect it has not fully awakened. Perhaps it will take a few more days—perhaps only a day or two—before it 'wakes' completely..."

Gao Yang listened closely to Ma Qi's report, while on another holographic projection beside it, fragments of footage of the "man-made god" played.

The bizarre monster raced across the plains, sweeping the battlefield with something resembling a plasma jet, searing scorching furrows into the earth; it gave voice to frenzied sounds, a chaotic noise impossible to describe in human language that spread across the battlefield with its movements, and in that noise the swarms of Crystal Giants grew ever more frenzied; it roamed the land with radiance drifting about it, and wherever it passed, birds and beasts and even the Crystal Giants fell in whole swathes, and from their corpses countless flowers bloomed, countless vines...

In some footage shot from very far away, it wandered the plains in bewilderment, seeming utterly without purpose, yet now and then it would suddenly break into a mad sprint and attack every target indiscriminately.

Every one of these traits matched the standard of "frenzy" perfectly.

This was the "power of a god" that the Assembly of All Things' End had manufactured.

According to Ma Qi's report, the monster was extraordinarily powerful; it was all but impervious to the shells of main battle tanks, and in theory even fixed ground guns and the calibration beams of the highest power currently available would likely fail to kill it. At the same time it possessed terrifying offensive capability: the energy beams it summoned could slice through the hull of a main battle tank with ease, and a single strike could pierce the shields raised by an Iron Ambassador. It could also call upon eerie, hard-to-guard supernatural forces—without shield protection, every living thing that came near it was transformed into vines and blossoming thickets, which meant that any conventional ground force stationed within a certain radius of the monster would simply die as entire formations...

This was the most powerful enemy the Cecil Legion had faced since its founding.

Yet Gao Yang judged that the Great Stag was still an unsuccessful imitation; he even suspected that those cultists of the Ten Thousand Dark Stillness had merely manufactured a beast that possessed a measure of a god's power.

For the flesh-and-blood body of this "Great Stag" was not the invulnerable thing he had imagined. The main gun of the Warhammer-I might do negligible damage to it, but it could still inflict harm and impede it—if mortal power in its present state could hurt it, that was proof enough that this Great Stag on the Holy Spirit Plains was nothing but a clumsy monster.

With the full strength of the Southern Region, at the cost of considerable sacrifice, relying on massive long-range firepower exceeding its capacity for self-healing and on traps prepared in advance, it might still be possible to slay this "man-made god" independently—such was Gao Yang's estimate, based on the intelligence.

But it was only an estimate, because he had no intention of making such a colossal sacrifice to deal with this "counterfeit." With the Empire barely established, its interior hollowed out and enemies watching from every side, he had to conserve his strength—and this threat... he would leave to those ravenous visitors from the deep.

It was time this farce came to an end.

The monster had presumably only just left its "warm bed," and was still wandering the plains in a state somewhere between waking and dreaming. Very soon it would be fully awake and begin its destruction by instinct. Before that happened, the trap should be made ready.

...

In the Southern Region, at Xuan Yao City, by the banks of the White Water River, a swift mechanical ship bound for Fort Bedrock was docking at the pier. Several magitech vehicles bearing the crest of sword and plow stood beside the broad avenue leading to the landing stage. People about to board were saying their farewells to family and friends along the roadside, while the siren Tyr lay lazily sprawled at the edge of the dock, watching the scene with a touch of boredom.

The reason she was "sprawled" rather than "coiled" was that she was currently using her fish tail.

Humans really were strange creatures... or rather, all species with short lifespans and frail bodies seemed strange in a siren's eyes. These people set such store by brief partings that even for a separation of a few hundred kilometers, for only a short while, they would spend ages saying goodbye here—and there were even seemingly "ritualized" elements to it, such as exchanging tokens, offering one another blessings, and the like... At first it had looked rather interesting, but after seeing it often enough, it became dull.

At least to Miss Tyr, who wanted only to laze about, these things were nowhere near as comfortable as basking in the sun and dozing on the dock.

Tyr gave a mighty yawn, stretched herself rigid from head to tail tip, then with a heave of her fish tail the entire fish went plop and flipped over onto the concrete of the dock, and went on sunbathing and dozing.

But then a figure suddenly drew near, blocking the warm, comfortable sunlight—and rousing Tyr just as she was about to fall asleep.