"Halt!"
Clearing the inner courtyard of the governor's palace, Vala vaulted off his Red-maned beast and addressed a sentry at the primary gates. "Is my father at his terminal?"
"The Sovereign Lord just completed his transit," the Mindborn guard replied instantly, perfectly familiar with the patriarch's son.
"Excellent. See to it that this mount is properly sustained, it is my favorite asset," Vala issued the command carelessly, striding toward one of the central palatial structures.
Moving across his family's personal domain, he never deployed a security detail, completely indifferent to the fact that he was breaching the lord's private quarters without an administrative log.
The estate functioned less like a private residence and more like the primary administrative nerve center established in every imperial city, where the lord managed daily state affairs and issued executive decrees.
Vala moved deeper into the facility, the imperial sentries bowing respectfully as he crossed their posts.
He walked into the central briefing hall to a steady chorus of salutes addressing him as Captain Vala.
Within the government halls, his personal status as the lord's son carried zero official weight, at least on a public ledger.
Outside of being the young heir to the Va Clan, Vala held the title of Captain over the Pan-On City Defense Regiment, though he rarely logged into the grid to manage any actual operations, operating purely as a figurehead.
Fortunately, he maintained several capable vice-captains who processed the bulk of the workload on his behalf.
The defense regiment functioned as the primary law enforcement grid for the citadel, running routine security patrols while standing ready to crush civil unrest or process high-threat criminal anomalies.
A heavily built Mindborn male stood in the center of the grand hall, outfitted in a sleek, blue-and-white tactical combat suit.
"Father," Vala said, dropping his usual arrogant posture instantly.
Before this specific individual, he behaved with absolute obedience, never daring to cross any boundaries.
This man was his father, the sovereign lord of Pan-On City, Lord Vaan.
Managing every political and military network of a massive citadel left Lord Vaan exceptionally busy, and Vala calculated that his last active contact with his father had occurred several solar cycles ago.
"How did the session grade out?" Vaan asked neutrally as his son approached, his authoritative voice balanced by a subtle trace of parental warmth.
Vala understood exactly what data his father was requesting, immediately delivering a detailed breakdown of the emergency council that had unfolded in the Holy City of Nikasa.
"That tracks the entirety of the meeting, Father," he concluded.
Lord Vaan processed the intelligence, falling into a heavy silence.
Historically, he had pushed his son to participate in high-level state functions purely to compile administrative merits, hoping to familiarize him with the ruling class to prepare him for his eventual succession as patriarch of the Va Clan.
空气中透出些许冷意, but under the current strategic layout, the future was entirely unwritten.
Vaan shook his head silently.
Watching his father remain locked in deep thought, Vala broke the quiet. "Father, what are your calculations?"
"Vala," Vaan said, raising a hand to cut him off. "Do your processors truly comprehend the absolute reality of our current strategic position?"
"Well..." Vala shook his head blankly, his database failing to register the gravity of the situation.
From his perspective, a horde of alien monsters had simply dropped onto Planet Kugrage and initiated a conventional war.
Vaan didn't unleash a harsh reprimand as he normally would have, though under past historical cycles, he would have struck the boy across the face for displaying such a flawed evaluation.
No entity in the empire understood his son's limitations better than his own parameters.
"The imperial council has entrenched a force of two hundred thousand soldiers at Tas City. Our absolute survival rests entirely on this single engagement."
虽然帝国的防御网并没有在开战初期彻底崩溃, the outer settlements were sparsely populated, typically garrisoned by fewer than a thousand units.
Preserving the bulk of their military assets held zero guarantee that their legions could defeat or even successfully halt the enemy's advance.
"Tas City is our vanguard line, Vala, but it also serves as our final defensive wall."
"You will remain locked within the perimeter of Pan-On City for the time being, and wait for my direct execution orders."
"Understood, Father," Vala replied, dismissing the warning entirely as a surge of competitive excitement flared in his eyes.
Vaan failed to log his son's behavioral shift, his thoughts consumed by a highly classified directive that had just entered his private array, debating whether he should clear the file to the boy now.
环境 The Emperor had covertly commanded the sovereign lords of the central citadels to prepare the Seed protocol.
While these lords traditionally wielded unchecked regional authority, the current existential crisis left them with zero choice but to comply with the executive mandates descending from the high palace.
The Seed Initiative dictated the systematic selection of a young generation of Mindborn.
If the empire's military lines suffered a total collapse, the civilization would pool its absolute remaining resources to pack these youths into a starship and launch them into the deep void.
This response was a universal subroutine shared by every intelligent race in the cosmos when facing an extinction-level event, attempting by any means necessary to preserve a fragment of their lineage.
The primary directive wasn't plotting an eventual return to power, but simply ensuring the continuity of their species.
Confronted by the absolute weight of racial survival, all personal disputes and regional political rivalries vanished from the ledger, rendering individual interests entirely trivial.
Outside the perimeter of Tas City.
Plumes of dusty earth were thrown into the air and packed flat along the five intersecting ring lines as rows of infantry units labored heavily with engineering shovels.
Ganmo operated as an ordinary combat engineer assigned to the First Engineering Regiment of the Third Silae Legion.
Several solar cycles ago, his unit had entered the Tas City grid, and following a brief half-cycle rest protocol, his commander ordered them to dig defense lines.
The trenches had reached basic structural completion just yesterday, leaving only the integration of the weapon systems unresolved.
Today marked their final cleanup operations, and once the heavy gun emplacements were fully calibrated, their engineering subroutines would be complete.
Their remaining duties would involve occasional field repairs on critical defensive structures under live fire, leaving the bulk of their schedule open to rest inside the city walls, experiencing a rare window of comfort.
"Hey, Ganmo!" a veteran standing a short distance away yelled, laughing as Ganmo assisted a fireteam leader with the stabilization mounts of an automated turret.
"If your processors are that obsessed with handling heavy ordnance, you should route a transfer request to the Colonel to join the frontline combat squads. This isn't an engineering assignment."
"Negative," Ganmo stammered, his vocalizers struggling to form an explanation. "I simply finalized my designated task and noticed he required..."
The response triggered a loud chuckle from the veteran, the surrounding seasoned soldiers grinning broadly along the trench.
Fortunately, the old-timers were merely trading casual jokes, harboring zero malicious intent toward the young engineer.
While categorized as veterans within the imperial military structure, their classification was based strictly on chronological age rather than active combat logging.
An imperial legion scaled anywhere from ten thousand to several dozen thousand units, and although four full legions currently anchored the defenses of Tas City, the number of soldiers who had experienced live combat was remarkably small.
Following a brief duration of data sharing, the older soldiers returned to their tasks.
他们 并不像新兵那样拼命, refusing to drain their stamina completely, choosing instead to preserve their energy reserves to process unexpected battlefield anomalies.
While combat engineers didn't lock targets head-on like the primary assault squads, their mortality metrics remained exceptionally high.
Just as the veterans finalized their cleanups and one prepared to signal Ganmo to begin the march back to the fortress, a series of high-intensity sirens shattered the air, accompanied by frantic commands over the tactical net.
"Alert! Hostiles inbound! Fall back to Tas City immediately!"
The expressions on the veterans' faces hardened instantly, dropping their casual demeanor as they initiated a high-speed sprint toward the gates.
Ganmo froze in place, thoroughly stunned by the sudden shift in variables until a shout broke his processing lock.
"Ganmo! Drop your tools and move!"
"Right!" he stammered, his subroutines booting into motion as he sprinted after them.
Miles outside the perimeter of Tas City.
A dense legion of Sharkborn marched down the loading ramps of a massive dropship, every drone carrying a barbed mace-spear, their movements locked into a synchronized, mechanical rhythm.
"Halt!"
The moment the final drone cleared the ramps, four massive thruster streams erupted from the lower hull of the transport, launching it back into the upper atmosphere.
The three-day deadline had concluded, and the first hostile force to enter the Tas City theater was the Blackshark Legion, directed by Chief Sickleback.
In truth, mass-produced killing drones held zero concept of physical exhaustion.
Silas Trifang had only issued the three-day rest directive to allow his conscious legion chiefs to recalibrate, while replenishing their fuel reserves and integrating fresh drone inventories to replace battlefield losses.
"March!" Sickleback commanded, and the Blackshark Legion initiated its advance.
Looking across the terrain, the lead vanguard comprised well over a thousand Sharkborn drones.
Operating like a global signal, a steady succession of Sharkborn dropships began touching down across the sector the moment the vanguard cleared the zone.
Multiple independent legions tracked the path forged by the Blackshark Legion, their columns converging into a massive army numbering tens of thousands of hostiles.
Simultaneously, the automated networks of Tas City went into high gear as the garrison prepared to receive the assault.
Inside the central palace, General Silae gathered his legion commanders and tactical officers to finalize their defensive matrices.
"The absolute fate of the empire depends entirely on this engagement, gentlemen. Man your terminals."
Fireteams were deployed into the trenches anchoring the five exterior ring lines, outperforming standard units with specialized tactical helms and advanced reinforced combat suits.
They comprised the absolute elite harvested from the four central legions, yet their strategic deployment effectively marked them as a vanguard vanguard group.
Compared to the heavy concrete battlements and automated defense walls protecting the city core, holding an open trench against a Sharkborn swarm carried an exceptionally low survival metric.
Viewed from high orbit, the terrain for miles surrounding the square perimeter of Tas City comprised an unbroken plain, devoid of any natural hills or valleys.
Five thick, black concentric trenches encircled the fortress, connected by an intricate network of fortified bunkers and transit corridors.
"Maintain your cover, keep your helms low when clearing a jammed cell. My files indicate the alien drones operate with exceptionally high targeting accuracy," a fireteam leader muttered to his squad, standing inside a deep trench that rose well above his head.
He held a heavy, rectangular metal frame tightly against his chest armor.
This was their standard defense weapon, a mag-rail rifle, offering massive range metrics and devastating kinetic output at the cost of excessive weight and severely limited handling mobility.
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