The gunfire and artillery across the battlefield finally ceased.
After slicing the last moving Raith in sight into shredded bits, the funnel drones ascended in an orderly fashion, returning to circle above the massive black landship.
Reagan leaned against the steering wheel of his off-road vehicle, peering through the windshield at the ruined valley ahead.
Dark red alien remains littered the ground, looking grim under the moonlight.
"Chief, they're done fighting," the driver whispered, his hand hovering over the ignition switch. "Should we make our move?"
According to plan, as long as the Dusk forces advanced, gaps would naturally open in their perimeter—the optimal window to slip in and bury the base station.
"Wait, hold on a bit longer," Reagan pressed down on the driver's hand.
His instincts warned him that matters were not so simple.
Why would a woman like Eis waste so much effort and expend so much ammunition merely to hunt a few bugs for sport?
Unlikely. There had to be a follow-up.
Sure enough, the massive side bay doors of the landship swung open once more.
Accompanied by the roar of hydraulic systems, several engineering vehicles fitted with dozer blades and grapples rolled out. Following them were hundreds of workers in protective gear, wielding power saws and heavy hooks.
Instead of mining ore, these personnel headed straight for the center of the battlefield to collect the Raith carcasses.
Whether intact or half-shattered, every piece was hooked, dragged onto the engineering transports, and hauled back inside the landship.
Reagan frowned.
If they were Chaos cultists, harvesting corpses would be understandable. But the Dusk was a legitimate warlord faction; what did they need all this rotten meat and bone for?
To make soup?
The engineering crew worked rapidly. In less than twenty minutes, the battlefield was cleared clean, leaving not even a large piece of carapace behind.
Afterward, the engineering vehicles retreated into the bays, and the doors sealed shut.
Dead silence returned to the valley.
"Chief, can we go now?" the driver asked again.
Reagan was about to nod, but he noticed thick white steam suddenly venting from the massive radiator grilles along the landship's sides.
He was far too familiar with that sign—it indicated the internal factory running at maximum capacity.
"Don't move! Stay down!"
Roughly thirty minutes passed.
The deployment bay doors on the landship's lower deck slid open once more.
This time, no vehicles rolled out.
Accompanied by a grating, bone-on-metal scraping sound, a wave of pale shapes emerged from the shadows.
Aided by the moonlight, Reagan caught a clear view of those entities.
In that instant, he felt his scalp go numb.
"Holy shit!"
"What kind of macabre nightmare is that?!"
Leading the force were winged creatures whose primary frame was spliced together from Raith ribs and spinal columns. Their broad wings were fashioned from sharpened bone plates.
At the base of the wings, visible metal hinges and micro-thrusters were clearly attached.
Skeleton Servitor—Aerial Type (Archaeopteryx).
Utilizing the lightweight, sturdy nature of alien bone combined with sustained mechanical power created an extremely low-cost, expendable aerial unit.
Without needing a runway, they launched directly via vertical catapults, circling through the air. Their bone wings sliced through the wind without generating a sound.
Following close behind were massive ground-crawling units resembling scorpions. However, their bodies were constructed from several Raith thoracic armor plates strung together, supported by six reinforced hydraulic limbs.
Most prominent was the elevated tail.
At the tip of the tail was a thick, dark-red biological tube wrapped with copper wiring connected to a high-capacity battery pack on its back.
Skeleton Servitor—Heavy Type (War Scorpion).
One of the War Scorpions crawled up to a massive boulder.
The tubular device on its tail began to vibrate, sending visible ripples through the surrounding air.
Hum—!!!
A deep, chest-thumping blast echoed out.
The boulder—standing two stories tall—instantly disintegrated, breaking down into a cloud of fine powder.
No flames, no explosion—just pure vibration.
Reagan covered his ears, feeling as though his brain was sloshing around inside his skull.
He recognized that sound.
Recently, several reconnaissance drones sent out by Deepspace Industries inside the lower depths of the launch shaft had crashed mysteriously. The final frames transmitted back featured those exact same atmospheric ripples.
That woman Eis had extracted the organs of the Raith and repurposed them into a devastating anti-personnel weapon: the Wave Cannon.
Though limited in range to a few hundred meters, its armor-piercing and demolition capabilities were absurdly high.
Finally, massive white worms burrowed out.
These worms were assembled from dozens of Raith skulls and limbs, featuring a large rotating drill at their heads.
Instead of lingering on the surface, they dove straight into the sand dunes.
Skeleton Servitor—Engineering Type (Worm).
A few minutes later, another batch of older, yellowed-bone worms surfaced from underground, their abdominal compartments bulging with various ores.
The new units went down to mine, while the old units returned fully laden.
Reagan understood the entire scheme now.
Eis hadn't come here to eradicate alien threats.
She came here to mass-produce an army.
To her, the Raith were pure raw material and labor.
She killed them, dismantled them, and through unknown means, transformed them into skeleton machines bound to her command—which were then deployed to kill more aliens and mine more ore.
Under Imperial Law, such technological methods constituted severe techno-heresy. Profane, utterly profane.
Yet on the wasteland, they required no wages, no shelter, and could be discarded when damaged.
Better yet, the raw materials were everywhere.
"Outrageous..."
Reagan wiped away cold sweat.
He recalled that while Raith bones were versatile, they were hardly standardized parts that could be thrown together at random. Using standard manufacturing, turning freshly killed corpses into a structured mechanical force within thirty minutes was impossible.
Eis unquestionably possessed some core bio-engineering technology that enabled rapid biological growth, fusion, and self-assembly.
Perhaps her ship housed a massive incubation vat where bones were tossed in with a specialized catalyst to swell and set into shape like rising dough. Or perhaps she had cracked a growth code embedded in Raith genetics, allowing deceased tissue to regain vitality under mechanical stimulation.
How did she pull that off?
A Black Box?
The thought sent chills down Reagan's spine.
If such technology slipped out of control, it would unleash a catastrophe.
If bone could grow that fast... what if it were applied to living human beings?
At that moment, the main engines of the Dusk roared to life.
The massive landship began moving slowly, advancing toward another dune mineral site several kilometers away.
Meanwhile, the newly deployed Skeleton Servitors remained behind, continuing to sweep for remaining hostiles and mine ore.
A vast gap opened between the main force and the lingering detachment.
"Now's our chance!"
Reagan sat up straight and slapped the driver's shoulder.
"Move! While those two big ships are driving off, we break in!"
Hum—
The cloaked convoy accelerated.
Under optical camouflage, the six vehicles drifted like the wind past the working War Scorpions.
Equipped only with basic thermal imaging and vibration sensors, the low-tier servitors failed to detect the silent convoy.
The convoy sped through, arriving at the deepest part of the valley.
They were less than two hundred meters from the coordinates of the gravitational wave beacon.
"Halt! Get to work!"
Reagan leaped out, directing his crew.
The tailgates of the two heavy trucks dropped, and a crane lowered the thermal base station.
Workers wielding shovels and drills rapidly excavated a pit in the sand.
The base station was buried within, leaving only the top radiator grille exposed.
Next came the geothermal generation equipment.
Two long probes were driven deep into the earth, tapping into the geothermal energy below.
"Wire it up! Fast!"
Reagan held his data terminal, sweating profusely.
"Done! Voltage is stable!"
"Initiate!"
As the switch was flipped, the buried base station emitted a low hum, venting a burst of hot air from its exhaust.
The interference field materialized.
Though invisible to the naked eye, Reagan felt the subtle shift in the environment.
The Necron beacon hidden within the dimensional fold was temporarily stabilized by the field.
When the Boss's expeditionary force arrived, they would simply need to boost the output via the terminal program to forcibly interfere with the beacon's gravitational waves, tearing open a gateway into the facility.
"All set! Pull out!"
Reagan waved his arm, and everyone boarded the vehicles to make their exit.
However, just as the convoy turned around...
Click—Clack—
A strange sound echoed from behind a nearby sand mound.
A stray Engineering Worm, dragging an abdomen full of ore, ambled across the path, blocking the convoy's exit.
"Should I ram it?" the driver asked.
"No, that thing is built from bone and metal—it's rock solid. If we wreck the truck, we're walking back," Reagan glanced at the worm.
The unit lacked weaponry, relying solely on its front drill bit.
"Take it out."
Reagan pulled a CBS high-explosive crossbow from under his seat.
The guards behind him raised their crossbows in unison.
"Aim for the... head area!"
"Fire!"
Thwip! Thwip! Thwip!
Several bolts shot forward, embedding precisely into the worm's control core at its head.
Boom!
An explosion detonated.
The human-manufactured control core blew apart instantly, scattering chips and wiring across the sand.
Deprived of its central processing unit, the massive bone worm collapsed.
It twitched violently on the ground before falling completely motionless.
Looking at the intact skeletal structure of the disabled machine, Reagan suddenly thought of Andy.
The Boss seemed particularly fond of weird alien technology.
Besides, the technique of utilizing biological bones as mechanical components might catch his interest.
"A couple of hands over here!" Reagan jumped out, calling to his crew. "Haul this thing onto the truck!"
"Consider it a... local souvenir for the Boss!"
Several strong men heaved the multi-meter-long dead worm onto the flatbed.
The convoy restarted, vanishing into the cover of night away from the volatile site.
Sitting inside the cab, Reagan glanced back at the flatbed.
Though the worm was dead, residual neural currents caused its bone joints to twitch occasionally, making faint clicking sounds.
Reagan pulled his collar up and rolled the window tightly shut.
"Spooky as hell..."
"I just hope the Boss doesn't find it too disgusting."