The cart arrived within a few minutes. During that time, I explained to the guys about the points and interesting stuff.

Bao immediately waved his mace, now wrapped in vines layered beyond any reasonable measure.

"Interesting?" he asked.

"Do you feel anything… unusual in it?"

Bao froze.

"No. The sensation's a bit different from mine, more flexible, but it responds as it should."

"Then hold onto it for now," I sighed. "I think they'll take it for something, but not much. Tech will be the priority. Anything that looks like a working block or gives off a whiff of qi."

My brain was still running accelerated, so one of the streams dredged up a memory — the injector. The one the thinhorn had tossed to me at the beginning of the fight.

I looked around the place we'd stood: flattened grass, traces of techniques, kilos of torn-up soil and scattered debris.

"Damn…" I muttered. "If someone finds that injector he ordered me to use, it'll definitely count as something valuable."

We started collecting.

Denis and I pulled from the ground that massive piece of hull plating that had flown over our heads when we'd taken cover behind the beetle, and loaded it into the cart. The system immediately signalled the cargo bay was half full.

"We need to go for the big pieces," I said.

"We should scout a bit, see if anything interesting's lying around," Denis replied, "and head towards the blast zone before someone else loots the juiciest bits."

"Jake," Bao pointed to the sky. "Get up there. Scout."

I nodded and activated the Monkey of East, climbing higher and higher with great bounds. Trying to form a clear picture while bouncing around like that wasn't easy, but at about ten metres up I spotted several points of interest nearby.

I dropped back down, forming platforms beneath my hands to grab and slow the fall, and landed on my feet relatively softly.

"There's a big piece of something over there," I pointed in one direction. "Too big for the cart. And I doubt we could pry it off the ground."

"And over there," I pointed elsewhere. "Something that looks like armour."

"Armour?" Denis perked up. "Armour's gotta be worth something."

Without needing to say a word, we all moved in that direction, gathering the largest pieces of hull plating along the way and tossing them into the cart. They were big, but too light, so the trailer's capacity gauge barely moved. We figured that out quickly and switched to picking up not what looked big, but what felt heavy.

By the time we reached the armour, one cart was already full, so we summoned another.

The armour had the colour of matte steel with a violet sheen, like raw titanium alloy before any paint job. Sooty black patches marred it in places, and its edges were scorched by high-temperature tearing, as if someone had tried to strip the surface with a plasma cutter.

The helmet was definitely stripped that way. It was nowhere near.

We circled it cautiously, expecting a trap, but Bao was the first to voice surprise.

"It's empty! No, wait," he bent closer. "There's something, but it's definitely not a body."

I stepped up beside him, leaned over and peered inside through the neck opening. Instead of an empty cavity, I saw a black tubular frame with wires sticking out.

"Like that thing that attacked me at Marco's…" I said too much.

"It attacked you?" Bao clarified. "You mean that cadet they killed wasn't the real target?

"Who the hell are you, man?" he kept pushing. "Some undercover agent? How old are you really?"

My careless words had turned into a revelation for the guys.

"Same age as you," I said. "The memory loss was real. It just so happened that there were people who made use of it.

"That's all I'm saying!"

I bent down to grab the puppet by the shoulders. Denis went for the legs, then recoiled.

"Is it going to jump up suddenly?" he asked. "I'm getting full-on paranoid reflexes here."

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"No idea, but I seriously doubt it. I think its puppeteer is also lying somewhere out on these fields. It's a puppet too," I added.

Denis hesitated, so I broke my own rule and explained more.

"The demons used one like this at Marco's to take out one of the dealers."

"I thought that whole thing was blamed on the drug traffickers?" Denis said.

"Not exactly... The demons were the ones trafficking the drugs. Don't ask me why they need that stuff, I have no idea."

"To get the best of the new generation hooked, obviously," Bao said.

"Yeah, except the best don't use unlicensed crap," I pointed out.

Denis finally made up his mind and helped me load the headless mechanical body into the cart.

"By the way! That puppet back then used a weapon. I clearly remember the sharp edge of Point Qi."

I looked around, searching for something similar.

"I've got it!" Bao shouted. "Give me a minute!"

His mace suddenly uncoiled, its head thudding into the grass. The coil rolled forward. He completely unravelled his own weapon, detached it from the enemy vine, and then attached the end of his living weapon to the demon vine, forcing it to crawl onward. The result was a whip over ten metres long, and it writhed through the grass like it was alive.

"What's the point of this?" Denis asked, but Bao immediately cut him off.

"Shut up."

Bao slowly began spinning in place, holding the extended vine whip as straight in front of him as he could.

About halfway through a turn, he stopped and pointed directly.

"Seven metres. Go check."

I rushed forward, with Bao calling out instructions.

"Further. A bit more! Stop!"

"I don't see anything."

"Open your senses, you muppet!"

I followed his advice, and sure enough, I quickly felt a faint trace of Point Qi.

A one-and-a-half-metre-long tube was completely hidden in the grass, which is why I hadn't spotted it earlier. Why the hell would a tube radiate Point Qi? At the very least, it was interesting.

I lifted my prize into the air, showed it to the others, and chucked it into the cart before reporting in to Bat.

"You might want to be a bit more careful with finds like that," he warned. "The tube's likely a third- or fourth-stage artefact. Fires needles, just like the one that nearly took your head off at Marco's. It's designed for quick activation."

"Whoa! Can I keep it?"

"Dream on. All tech finds must be surrendered. And don't try anything stupid! The Hall of Order will search you when you get back to the dorms."

We kept working just like that. I would leap into the air to spot possible loot, ignoring the system tags. Bao scanned the area with his vine, while Denis mostly hauled debris.

We filled more than one cart before night began to fall. Our first find after the armour was half a cadet — the upper half of a girl, fused with a fragment of hull plating. Burnt and broken, but the three on her collar was still visible.

Unfortunately, she couldn't be identified, the interface didn't register the dead.

Next came the body of a thinhorn, completely naked and wet. A John model. The youngest and smallest I'd ever seen. It looked like he'd just come out of the vat. Judging by the vestigial genitals, he might've been defective, or maybe that was intentional…

I'd never seen a female thinhorn before.

When I said that out loud, the guys explained it to me: females didn't exist. Humanity didn't make them. They weren't allowed to breed uncontrollably.

When I asked how that made their status any different from slavery, no one gave me a straight answer. They just said their hormones were designed so they didn't feel sexual desire.

That thinhorn stuck in my mind for a long time. Half his head had been crushed, he had a bloody hole in place of his belly button, and his skin was unnaturally pale. He'd fallen close to one of the beetles, close enough to make it clear they only ate plants because they had to.

The corpse was already missing one leg. We were too nervous to collect it, but the beetle didn't even react, just switched back to chewing on grass.

That body also had something invisible on its back. I sent Bat a separate report about it.

Then came a weapon. We didn't drool too hard because the sword looked purely utilitarian — a long, straight blade, a long grip, and a short guard. It didn't radiate any specific qi, so I figured it was an actual sword, not a charged artefact.

About thirty metres from the sword, we found a broken jetboard. Fully black, with a hairline crack across it and one squashed turbine. It definitely wasn't going to fly again, but it still counted as a valuable find.

Along the way, we gathered a heap of other junk. Broken stabilisers, warped plates of shimmering alloys, strange blocks with unreadable markings, bits of medical capsules, and a whole lot of stuff that radiated different kinds of qi, but definitely wasn't a weapon.

Just as twilight settled in, we found another mechanical puppet. This one was much more damaged than the one we'd turned in earlier. Its casing looked like some lunatic had attacked it with a giant tin opener. Inside, at the centre of the frame and wiring, was a Qi crystal.

"And we've already handed one of these in…" Denis said greedily.

"They're not going to let us keep it," I said.

Bao, without hesitation, reached in and yanked the crystal from its socket.

"I doubt they'll give us anything close to a fair price for it," he said, sitting down in the grass and holding the crystal out. "Help yourselves."

We drained it dry, then chucked the remains, crystal husk and puppet, into the cart. By then, it was full dark. We were navigating purely by the interface map markers.

Strangely enough, our armour didn't come with night vision or even torches, which made working even more difficult. But it didn't last long.

Soon, one of the flyers darting overhead on jetboards decided to drop down and quite unfriendly asked:

"Hey! What the hell are you lot doing here?"

I explained the situation without going into detail or revealing my actual role. Just said we'd been assigned to salvage duty.

The cadet from the Order contacted his team, reported us, and ordered us to wrap it up and return to the barracks.

I messaged Bat about it, but he didn't reply, obviously busy.

We dragged ourselves back slowly under the brilliant night sky. Earth wasn't visible tonight, and other two moons hung like slender crescents just above the horizon, slightly left of the protective array.

The golden box still floated in the air above the ruins of the meat-processing plant. The dust and smoke had finally settled, but the barrier remained active.

The sight of that operational array filled me with an odd sense of hope.

Nothing ever goes entirely to plan, but it's even rarer for Vaclav Novak to leave his quarters.

Well, to be fair, I had no idea how often he actually left them or what he did in his spare time, but one thing was certain: he didn't make a habit of blowing up starships. The fact that such forces had been deployed in this operation gave me hope that the demons within the Black Lotus School had truly been wiped.

We knew the demons kept their real bodies aboard a starship. The ship had been destroyed, so...

I suppose we'd find out soon enough.

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