Hours earlier…

The moment that Leon woke up and found himself in a lucid dream with the Demon of Ozempic, on one hand he finally accepted that the mission failed, and on the other hand he realized that he was still alive!

To a Mechanist and to him especially, that meant everything.

So long that he was still alive, then he still had a chance. So long as there was life, anything could happen.

After the conversation with Lucian, learning about the backstory of the boy who became the Demon of Ozempic, Leon truly felt sympathy for Lucian but this didn't erase all the crimes that the 19-year-old had committed.

Lucian's tragic past didn't erase the thousands of lives that already died because of him, his tragic past did not erase the fact that Daren was currently hospitalized because of him.

Leon already vowed to kill him and end the Extremist Movement, and he was not going to stop just because he heard a touching story.

Afterall, everybody had a story to tell.

From the moment he learned that Lucian was unwilling to kill him because he was human, he began crafting his plan around that idea.

And then, he began dropping subtle psychological cues tricking Lucian into believing that he truly felt sympathy for him. Leon truly felt sympathy, but his sympathy was nowhere strong enough for him to forgive the boy for his crimes.

In the end, Lucian was just a 19-year-old.

He was strong and overpowered with 10 Racial DNAs, but he was still just a troubled kid with a traumatic childhood. All it took to break his mental barriers and trick him was making him feel heard, listened to and understood.

And just like Leon expected, the boy was a true psychopath. Leon's sympathy for him wasn't enough to make him forgive his teammates, and Leon never banked on that in the first place.

All the pleading he did before the live video started was just his attempts at buying time, elongating the time to the execution as much as possible.

When he left for the mission, the progress to completion of by far his biggest project since awakening in this world, the Doom Rover v0.1 project was 87% close to completion.

Leon already completed all the major complicated parts, he already fixed all the essential components, all that remained was slow, repetitive construction.

Of course, the construction work stopped when Leon went on the mission but the moment he left the dream and started using his ADE, while it seemed like it was just his desperate attempts to escape his shackles, he never thought of escaping his shackles like that.

The crux of his plan banked on a simple idea based on an ability that he unlocked after becoming an E Rank Mechanist- the System's semi-automated production!

After he became E Rank, the System also upgraded, unlocking Neural Overclock to double his System Processing Speed when using Construct and Deconstruct.

Apart from that, to Leon, one of the greatest upgrades of the System was Construct upgrading to enable semi-automated production.

Since the System got this capability, Leon had never used it but the ability remained there, waiting for the day he would eventually need it and that day was the morning of July 11th, Year 714 A.G.

To work remotely, all the System needed was his ADE and this was why Leon kept on circulating his ADE since.

He was in a race against time though.

After 2 hours, the project was close to completion but it still needed 2% work to be done.

During that time, Lieutenant Ryan was executed and just after that, the System lit up with a new notification, indicating that his greatest construct at E Rank, the Doom Rover v0.1 was complete.

Immediately, Leon resorted to employing more extreme and embarrassing time-wasting tactics to delay Lucian from killing Lieutenant Cormier.

Spitting on live TV was embarrassing, but good thing that Leon was never really big on shame. He was arrogantly shameless.

During the period of time that he desperately tried to delay Lucian, Leon simply ordered his robot to locate him.

As his construct, through the System, they were inherently connected and despite the distance and interference separating them, the robot could still locate Leon's position.

The moment the robot located the specific location of the terrorists' new base, Davis instantly sent the coordinates to Major Roshfield.

And then, Doom Rover v0.1 burst into the scene.

…

Megabase 023, Major Roshfield's office.

Major Roshfield didn't sleep that night. Having lost an elite squad of 9 E Rank Ascended, she was restless and raging, she felt like going to Agakin's cell and killing him in cold blood while he was restrained.

Despite everything, the Colonel still stayed adamant in his decision to not mobilize a bulk of the army against the terrorists.

She had never felt more annoyed at the impracticality of the army and the rigidness of the Colonel like she felt today.

Major Roshfield felt like strangling someone, she felt like strangling the Colonel himself and forcing him to take action if she could.

Unable to strangle him, in the end, she did what was within her authority, she assembled a team of intelligence operatives that night to work with Captain Ariande's data to try carpet-searching for the terrorists' new base.

The intelligence operatives didn't sleep throughout the night, Major Roshfield didn't sleep either as she put pressure on them.

When the terrorists' new live video started, she watched with bloodshot eyes as her ADE flared with thick killing intent.

She saw Captain Raveman's head and corpse, she saw Piper's corpse, Levi's corpse, and Jones' corpse, all elite soldiers of the Gene Army that she handpicked herself.

'Ah!' Major Roshfield felt like bashing her head against a wall.

She saw the last 4 of her soldiers lined up on their knees like Sheep for slaughter, and she watched Lucian slaughter Ryan on live TV!

In that moment, Major Roshfield felt like she was going mad. Her sanity was unraveling one nick at a time.

Yet again, she could do nothing. She was helpless.

Major Roshfield had never thought this before in her over 4 decades of service in the army, but today she thought it. 'I hate the army!'

She hated the army's indecisiveness, she hated Colonel Bam-Bam's rigidness and old-fashioned approach to problems, she hated Major Agakin to death for willingly selling her soldiers to the terrorists.

As she flirted with thoughts of murder in her mind, her smartphone suddenly beeped while Lieutenant Cormier was being slaughtered on live TV.

BEEP!

[NEW! Unread message from Thomas Riley]

'Thomas Riley?'

Stunned, she quickly opened the message and the content of the message was a map of Leviathan Quay with a red arrow pointing at a certain spot.

Major Roshfield froze as her brain whirred.

She was intelligent, she understood what this meant immediately, then…

BOOM!

Her ADE flared, wrapping round her body as she charged towards the stairs, convinced that the elevator was too slow for the current her.

Within a minute, she arrived at the roof of the Megabase and charged towards one of the double-seater Aerodynes.

Major Roshfield didn't wait for a pilot, she started the air transport herself and directly started flying towards the North.

…

KABOOM!

The live video was interrupted!

Alarmed, all eyes except the dying Lieutenant Cormier immediately darted towards the blasted hole in the wall where they saw a massive 10-meter tall black humanoid robot with a square-shaped head burst inside…

…Doom Rover v0.1!

The residual heat from the Plasma Blast from the Terra Nova 71 installed in its square-shaped head lingered as it burst inside the subterranean chamber.

For a second, time seemed to freeze as the cold emotionless glowing red eyes of the robot scanned the interior of the chamber.

The terrorists stared with shocked expressions on their faces.

And then all hell broke loose.

Before the terrorists could react, the chest compartment of the towering black robot unfurled, and then from inside a massive muzzle emerged and aimed directly at the nearest terrorists: Blake, Ramirez, and Xena.

BZZZ!

A torrent of thick red flames poured out of the muzzle of a gigantic Flamethrower, instantly engulfing and scorching the NetRunner, dealing devastating damage as she screamed before finally reacting with Neural Projection to become a psionic ghost.

Even as a psionic ghost, she didn't completely escape the blazing damage of the thick torrent of flames.

Blake and Ramirez couldn't react though as they directly ate the flames.

Even for a bonafide E Rank Gene Augur like the big guy Ramirez, the flames scorched his skin, leaving him with sizzling flesh, smoke, and putting him in a world of pain as his HP drained like a broken water tap.

BZZZ!

Lucian reacted first out of all the terrorists in the subterranean chamber as with the execution knife on his hand, gold and white ADE erupted around his body as he moved to intercept the robot.

But he barely moved when the square-shaped head of the robot turned to look at him, and then the entire front side of the robot's metallic black head glowed red.

Despite how broken, unnatural, and unusual his body was, in that moment, Lucian felt dread as his danger instincts tingled.

BOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!

A thick red laser beam blasted out of the black robot's square-shaped head, meeting Lucian square in the chest, burning a hole through his chest and lifting him off the ground at the same time as it threw him at the opposite wall straight at the white blanket that acted as the background for the live video.

The power generated in that laser blast was incomparable to anything Leon could achieve while using a Terra Nova 71 Rifle himself.

It was like comparing the power generated from a local generator with the power generated from a high-tension transformer.

Leon was the local generator and the Doom Rover v0.1 was the high-tension transformer.

Their base power was incomparable.

While this happened, the live video was still on, recording it all.

In that moment, the only terrorist who remained unscathed, Blake who was instructed to restrain Leon watched with wide terrified eyes.

Before he could react, the menacing black robot's glowing red eyes focused on him then it raised its right hand which morphed into a Rifle's muzzle.

Air rapidly converged and compressed in front of the muzzle, then…

BAM!

Headshot!

This time, the Cyber Gladiator with Cat DNA who was notorious for his speed was not fast enough to react to the sheer velocity of that attack.

This was also partially because he was stunned and rattled.

Blood blossomed like rain as injured, Blake was flung back from the force and momentum of the attack.

Within just 2 seconds of emerging inside this subterranean chamber, the towering 10-feet tall robot incapacitated the core of the Extremist Movement on live TV!

And then, its glowing red eyes moved towards the captives as it raised both of its arms and aimed at the thick chains restraining the soldiers.

The air in the subterranean chamber vibrated.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

CRKSH!

The thick black chains cracked and shattered under the obliterating force of compressed air projectiles.

Leon moved his limbs and nothing pulled him back.

He was free!

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