Liu Hai stared intently at the projection before him, watching as Gray Rat's team herded hundreds of people in vehicles toward his position. Understanding their intentions, he felt deeply unsettled.
"Are these bastards from another world or something?" Liu Hai was uncomfortable, but he had no intention of saving those scavengers. After all, both sides looked nearly identical in appearance, making it impossible to discern their true allegiances.
Once the hundreds of people were driven within the perimeter of his defensive zone, Liu Hai activated three armed robots.
Positioned within a 200-meter radius of the pyramid core, the three armed robots formed a crossfire. As soon as Liu Hai triggered them, they rose from the buried garbage, their twin-linked electromagnetic rapid-firing guns spinning up as they charged. The nuclear batteries inside the robots provided an endless supply of energy.
The three armed robots transformed into three turrets, unleashing a barrage of projectiles at a rate of eighteen rounds per second. The hypersonic rounds tore through the scavengers with continuous sonic booms, reducing hundreds of them to scattered fragments in an instant.
"Run! It's a trap!"
"Damn Gray Rat's team—this is a rapid-firing autocannon! Ah—!"
...
"Ugh!" Liu Hai began vomiting the moment the firing started. Coming from an era of peace, he had never witnessed a scene as gruesome as a slaughterhouse on an industrial scale. Severed limbs and splattered blood soared into the air before raining back down amid helpless screams.
In just one minute, with each projectile capable of piercing through the entire formation of scavengers, only a handful of lucky survivors who had taken cover behind garbage piles remained. The rest, along with their vehicles, had been reduced to fresh garbage waiting to be recycled.
Farther away, the Gray Rat members responsible for driving the scavengers forward were terrified out of their wits. As soon as the armed robots opened fire, they fled in panic in their hover cars.
They were just scavengers—few had ever witnessed the firepower standards of the Interstellar Federation Army. The armed robots' firepower far surpassed their rapid-firing machine guns. How could a few millimeters of caliber compare to dozens of millimeters?
Even farther back, Gray Rat stood atop a half-meter-wide flying disc, watching impassively as the scavengers were annihilated. He had expected this outcome ever since Black Cat mentioned the presence of combat robots.
"Fire-support robots from the regular army... but I've never seen this model before. A new variant?" Gray Rat scrutinized the three armed robots. "Twin-linked electromagnetic rapid-firing guns, 30mm caliber... damn, that's nearly battalion-level firepower. Where the hell did these come from?"
Having once served in the Interstellar Federation Army, Gray Rat wondered if he had fallen too far behind the times. Even on Garbage Star, the army's main battle robots had started appearing.
Though pirate spaceships frequently docked at the smuggling spaceport on the other side of the planet, this was different. Without a complete military-industrial system, assembling such robots was impossible.
"Boss, we just got word—White Tiger and Black Wolf are gathering their forces. Should we send people to intercept them?" A squad leader rushed to Gray Rat's side to report.
Gray Rat glanced at the other man. "Why stop them? Didn't you see what just happened? That firepower is way beyond what we can handle."
The squad leader said unwillingly, "But Boss, judging by the situation, if we can take that factory, the stuff inside could sell for over a million energy blocks. That'd be enough for all the brothers to get identity registrations and immigration sorted."
"You think you can take out those Combat robots?" Gray Rat didn't even turn his head. "Use your brain. You think I don't want to get out of this hellhole sooner? But even if we sacrificed every last brother, we still couldn't take that building. Besides, who says we have to be the ones to get it for it to be ours?"
"Boss..." The squad leader seemed to realize something, a faint smile appearing on his grimy, unwashed face before he turned to arrange the men to set up a perimeter.
Black Cat stood up as Gray Rat returned and hesitantly asked, "Boss Gray Rat, now that you've confirmed the factory's real, can we go?"
Gray Rat waved his hand dismissively, signaling they could scram. Now that he knew his firepower wasn't enough to take the building, there was no point keeping the information locked down. Letting Black Cat's team leave might draw more people here.
Black Cat gleefully hopped on his motorcycle and urged his men to leave immediately. He didn't want to stay under Gray Rat's watch for a second longer.
"Setting up camp, are they?" Liu Hai, who had recovered after vomiting, paced around the projection, pondering his next move.
Quietly waiting for them to make the first move didn't seem like a good idea. What if they brought in heavier weapons from the rear over time?
With a clear conscience, Liu Hai decided to take the initiative. If they were setting up camp, he'd trap them like turtles in a jar.
He immediately dispatched ten Armed robots to slowly flank and encircle them from both sides. Half an hour later, when the encirclement was complete, the fully armed robots opened fire, turning the area into a slaughterhouse.
The relentless shrieks of electromagnetic cannons and deafening sonic booms engulfed Gray Rat's entire team. Gray Rat, who had been strategizing how to take the pyramid core, immediately drove his hover car into a pile of junk, burying himself safely.
Other squad leaders in Gray Rat's team tried to organize resistance, manning the mounted machine guns on their hover cars to fire desperately at the Armed robots. Some threw bombs at the closing robots.
But their counterattack was pitifully weak. Aside from the supersonic rounds from the machine guns sparking off the robots' armor, the others were quickly reduced to bloody pulp under the robots' focused fire.
Five minutes later, the encircling robots' sensors detected no more living beings. Engineering Robots then moved in, collecting the shattered hover cars and other metal debris to scan and restore them inside the pyramid.
Liu Hai produced two medical robots to extract biological samples from the battlefield. Once the Biological Factory was operational, he planned to use the genetic material to manufacture Clone Troopers.
The nighttime gunfight sent the surrounding independent scavengers fleeing in their vehicles. Members of other teams monitoring Gray Rat's group from a distance peered uncertainly toward the commotion, but the pitch-black night completely obscured what was happening.
Only after the disturbance had completely died down did they cautiously approach Gray Rat's base in their hover cars one by one. Upon discovering only scattered limbs littering the grounds, they quickly retreated to report the inexplicable situation to their own teams.
Liu Hai finally allowed himself to rest when reconnaissance satellites confirmed no scavengers remained within several miles. He slumped into the command chair and fell asleep.
Waking up directly on Garbage Star, then immediately commanding a battle - these extreme emotional swings had utterly exhausted Liu Hai.