Crumbled high-rises stood amid the desolate wilderness like a giant covered in wounds.
Thick black smoke billowed from the hole-riddled walls like the shattered spirits of the citizens of the Bugra Free State.
No one paid any attention to the occasional explosion anymore.
After all, the residents of this settlement had heard far too many similar sounds over the past year.
This was Bugra.
Rather than another Utopia City in the wasteland, this place was more like an enormous prison.
Though it was a bit of dark humor, that still sounded cooler than a zoo.
Trailing pale-blue plasma plumes, four Viper light transport aircraft roared over the southern district of Bugra City.
Sitting at the edge of the cabin, Wo Zui Hei looked down at the ruined towers below and clicked his tongue.
"This is really miserable."
Kakarot, seated opposite him, shrugged. He had little sympathy for the people here.
"They brought the trouble on themselves."
The entire settlement was like an enormous vacuum cleaner, siphoning up trash from across the wasteland, then mixing it all together and spitting it back out once the bin was full.
Ninety-nine percent of raiders either directly or indirectly fenced their loot here, and bought weapons here as well.
At least Utopia City exported some order to the wasteland, even if that order was not always good.
This place exported nothing but chaos. It was even one of chaos's sources.
The lowest-ranking corporate drones lived in twenty-square-meter single rooms, carried loans they could not repay in a century, and used super-AI refrigerators that needed thirty seconds of iris focus just to open. On the surface, they did not seem to exploit anyone, but the tiny rooms, predatory loans, and refrigerators had all been designed by their own hands—and those things clearly harmed far more