"Your Majesty! Pfft…"
Jamie looked out from inside the spacecraft. Seeing the figure with the Ω on their back, his face flushed with excitement and disbelief. He shouted with all his might, then immediately coughed up a mouthful of blood.
Inside the ship, Jamie's legs were shattered, the stench of scorched flesh filled the cabin from the laser burns. One arm was torn away, exposing bone. A gaping wound pierced his abdomen and intestines, blood spilling freely across the floor.
A mist of blood sprayed from his mouth, the iron scent quickly saturating the air.
"Captain Larkin! It's His Majesty!"
Jamie's eyes were wide, his face unnaturally red. He vomited more blood, not from weakness but from sheer excitement. He stared at the figure outside with a frenzied expression, the blood on the ground pooling around him.
Captain Larkin froze for a moment.
"You damn idiot! Calm down! You're gonna die just from spraying blood!"
Captain Larkin swore aloud. Though he too felt the overwhelming presence and security of His Majesty's arrival, he wasn't about to lose control like Jamie.
Your arm's gone. Your guts are spilled. Both legs are crushed. You're leaking blood from your mouth and soaking everything—and you're still grinning like a lunatic. Is this a final burst of energy before death?
Larkin quickly began emergency hemostasis for his dying crew member, cursing internally. He'd risked his life to save this guy.
Bardi glanced over his shoulder slightly. When he confirmed the two were still alive, he offered Jamie a calm and reassuring smile.
That smile sent Jamie into a frenzy. His eyes reddened, he howled in excitement, and blood sprayed again.
Satisfied his men were safe, Bardi turned his gaze forward.
More than a dozen silver-white, diamond-shaped, streamlined spacecrafts were locking on. Their blue beam arrays began to charge and fire like a curtain of rain.
Bardi activated his body's physical magnetic field. His figure shimmered slightly, glowing with soft distortion. The blue laser beams collided against the magnetic field like they were hitting fog. By the time they reached his body, they had lost their force. Only faint burn marks appeared on his clothing. The beams could not penetrate his body's defenses.
This was no serious threat. Bardi's physical body was now more resilient than these ships' weapon systems. The fact that they could even slightly breach his magnetic field showed these lasers were not weak. But they were still far from enough.
Bardi reached out and caught one of the side lasers in his palm, deflecting it from striking the spacecraft's flank.
"Return to Earth."
Bardi thrust his palm backward, pressing forcefully toward the black carapace ship behind him.
Under the stunned gazes of Larkin and Jamie, a tremendous force burst from Bardi's palm. The bow of the ship caved inward from the impact, then streaked away in reverse with roaring red flames.
That single palm launched the spacecraft back toward Earth. When it reached the atmosphere, Hera would catch and recover it.
Meanwhile, laser rain continued to splash across Bardi's chest, leaving harmless ripples in his clothing. The light and heat had no effect.
The dozen or so silver diamond-shaped ships quickly reorganized under the command of a green humanoid figure filled with data jacks. The crafts connected head to tail, forming a closed ring formation. From the center, a massive laser beam began to charge.
As the energy converged, a half-meter-wide blue particle cannon condensed in the middle. This weapon, powerful enough to be a star-cannon, now fired directly at Bardi.
The energy packed into this particle beam was enough to vaporize any form of life. Whether from the force of the high-energy impact or the insane heat, if fired toward Earth, it could erase a nation from the map and obliterate all life within its range.
Bardi's expression turned cold. But it wasn't the destructive potential of the weapon that disturbed him.
In an instant, he activated distance vision, X-ray vision, and microscopic vision. He scanned behind the dozen silver-white ships to the green humanoid figure.
Its eyes were ink-black. Skin a dull green. Its body was covered in countless jack ports. There was no emotion in its expression. It wasn't alive.
"This is… a Brainiac Sentinel!?"
Bardi's eyes narrowed.
With microscopic vision, he saw that every proton in the being's body was transformed into a micro-intelligent particle. It was a super AI network designed to transmit, detect, and manipulate high-energy particles across space-time.
Unlike Hera, this sentinel had no emotion. It was a pure information-collecting entity.
The hardware was beyond comprehension. Every proton in its body was partially curled and circuitized by strong interaction forces. Each acted as a miniature intelligent neural processor, essentially forming a particle-based supercomputer.
This sentinel's body contained over 40 trillion such particles, functioning together to form an interstellar, superluminal, data-transmitting unit.
The technology was outrageous. Particle-level circuit design, creating super AI hardware that Earth might not be able to develop even in hundreds of years.
And it appeared here, embedded in one of Brainiac's sentinels.
Just a single sentinel had tech this powerful. It shocked Bardi.
No wonder Brainiac could shrink anything at will. His particle science and technology had reached unimaginable levels.
Bardi could even predict that Brainiac may have achieved a technological unification of the four fundamental forces. He may have created a unified force field through science.
This suggested the technology embedded within Brainiac's body, or perhaps his entire planet, was far beyond even Krypton's. Krypton might only compare in bioengineering.
However, this sentinel—was not Bardi's match.
It was only a probe.
Perhaps Brainiac himself, wielding such tech and his own mind, could rival or even defeat Bardi. But the sentinel, with its AI-controlled ships and particle weapons, posed little threat.
The moment Bardi appeared, the sentinel likely calculated that it was not his equal.
Immediately, it summoned the dozen ships to release one final particle beam. Then its green form retreated, abandoning the crafts and fleeing toward the far side of the moon.
Bardi's eyes flared with heat vision, beams thick as his forearm. The heat vision pierced the massive particle beam, sliced it apart, and flew straight through, cleaving the beam in two as it continued toward the fleeing sentinel.
The silver ships couldn't stop him. Bardi blitzed through them like a blade, flying directly into the core of their energy formation. The shock of the explosion shattered the formation, scattering the ships.
Bardi tilted his head, closed his eyes, and let his vision cool. Then, his body surged forward, flames trailing behind him as he chased the sentinel.
At the same time, at Brainiac's lunar base, the entire structure lifted into the air. When the sentinel returned, the miniature space base expanded rapidly to its full size—over five kilometers wide. It became a metal fortress stretching across the moon's surface.
Countless cable-like conduits extended from every part of the base, plugging into the sentinel's jack ports.
Electric currents surged. The sentinel's black pupils flickered with streaming data.
"Type I mechanical combat form, activate."
In an instant, the entire base transformed. Layers of metal surged over the sentinel's green form. Components shifted and merged. The entire structure assembled into a single monstrous being.
A 3,500-meter-tall mechanical creature emerged in space, its body shaped like a glowing metallic jellyfish. It hovered above the moon's surface, its massive tentacles flowing through the void like limbs in water.
As Bardi approached, several of the jellyfish's tendrils shifted into high-frequency blades. Fierce blue light flashed from their edges—blades sharp enough to slice through anything—and they slashed down toward him.
(To be continued.)
***
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