Chapter 287: Sovereign
The 9-node guardian was different from anything he had encountered in the field.
Dragon Predator Mode found it on the fifth day of interior work, when he was scouting the anchor point for position thirty-four. The guardian was at forty-nine meters — below the source-contact seam, in the zone where the organized field was densest. He read it from thirty-five meters out, held position, and spent ten minutes mapping what he had found before deciding anything.
Nine nodes. Not arranged in two rings like the 7-node — not a flat architecture at all. The nodes were distributed in three dimensions, forming a shape closer to a sphere: four forming an upper cluster, four forming a lower cluster, and one junction at the center of the whole structure. Each node could reach any direction from its position in the sphere. The whole thing rotated slowly, almost too slowly to detect, repositioning its attack lines continuously.
He read it twice to be sure.
Then he surfaced.
