Reinforcements did not arrive until roughly two hours after the battle began. The Military Base where Lu Xingshi was stationed had suffered catastrophic losses—of ten, not even one remained.
And all the Mechanoids had been wiped out. Not a single one had survived.
What remained was simple: cleaning up the battlefield.
Lu Xingshi was assigned to it as well.
"Mr. Lu, I apologize. My subordinates acted on their own this time."
A faint voice suddenly came from a remaining component of a Mechanoid.
It was Nio's voice, and his tone carried an apology.
Yet Lu Xingshi acted as though he had heard nothing and casually crushed it in his hand.
"Do you take me for a fool?" he sneered. Did Nio really think such nonsense would work?
"No, no, no, this is merely a misunderstanding." Another tiny mechanical bug flew over and hurriedly explained, "My original intention was to invite you to Machina Royal City, but you appeared rather unwilling."
"That was why my subordinates chose to attack the Military Base where you were stationed. They wanted to use force to bring you back."
Hearing this, Lu Xingshi continued clearing the battlefield and replied without changing expression, "Bring back my corpse, you mean."
"That's enough. This ends here. Stop bothering me."
"Once is acceptable, twice is tolerable, but never a third time," Lu Xingshi warned.
He did not care what Nio intended to do. In just a few more years, his true body would arrive, and by then, everything would become a part of him.
The weakening of this world was, in truth, almost sufficient already.
"Please believe in my sincerity, Mr. Lu," Nio said earnestly. "I have always been committed to the shared development of humans and Mechanoids."
"To that end, I invented Soul Datafication and the Consciousness Compilation