Svarog Calculated Combat Power, and His Logic Core Started Smoking

A heavy mechanical roar shattered the silence of the abandoned mining district.

"Vrrr—vrrr—"

It sounded like an aging generator struggling for breath.

The frozen ground began to tremble.

Shards of ice bounced across the uneven dirt in time with the vibrations.

Natasha leaned against a rusted metal crate.

The nerves she had only just relaxed snapped taut again.

She slipped a hand into her white coat pocket, her fingertips brushing a cold emergency injection.

Her palm was slick with cold sweat.

She knew what that sound meant.

One by one, dim yellow searchlights lit up in the darkness ahead.

They were the optical sensors of the Automatons.

A dozen battered robots rolled forward on treads that crushed the gravel beneath them, spreading out to encircle the group.

Their arms had been modified into chainsaws and impact drills.

Metal parts scraped together with a piercing screech.

At the center of the robots stood something else.

A metal robot as tall as an iron tower blocked the road to Rivet Town.

He wore a tattered black coat.

Its hem whipped in the cold wind, exposing the thick hydraulic joints beneath.

Svarog.

A brief electronic chime sounded in Svarog's chest.

His red electronic eye flashed sharply.

Svarog's core logic circuits began running at full speed.

Protect the Underworld.

That was the highest directive written into his core. Anything that threatened this land had to be eliminated or isolated.

And the outsider before him registered as so dangerous that his sensors' alarms went off the scale.

"Unregistered entity detected."

Svarog's synthesized voice echoed through the empty mining district.

Its pitch was utterly flat.

It sounded like two rough steel plates grinding together.

"Target emitting abnormal energy fluctuations. Initiating threat-level assessment."

Natasha stood a few steps away.

The cold wind whipped her white coat around her.

At the words "threat-level assessment," her heart clenched.

This is bad.

Svarog was a stubborn machine.

He understood data, not personal appeals.

Natasha opened her mouth to shout for him to stop.

A gust of cold air rushed straight down her throat, sending her into a violent coughing fit.

Her throat burned as though a blade had scraped it raw.

She covered her mouth and doubled over coughing.

Svarog's assessment had already begun.

The red glow of his eye intensified.

His optical sensors and thermal imaging system ran at full power.

A barely perceptible scanning beam swept over Su Chen's body.

First came the ambient temperature reading.

Numbers on Svarog's data panel plummeted.

Minus thirty degrees.

Minus fifty degrees.

Minus eighty degrees.

Within a meter of the woman in white, the thermometer's code returned an error.

The temperature had fallen below the sensor's minimum range.

That was not merely low temperature.

It was a freeze in the thermodynamic sense.

Gears clicked inside Svarog's metal neck.

He tilted his head slightly.

He seemed to be processing data that defied all reason.

"Temperature parameters abnormal. Switching to combat-power assessment module."

Enormous processing power was diverted to his central processor.

Svarog tried to use an energy model to quantify the destructive force inside the woman.

Complex algorithms raced across the circuit boards in his mechanical mind.

He needed to calculate the energy output.

He needed to calculate its peak threshold.

Su Chen stood where he was.

His arms were folded across his chest.

His white leather gloves rested against the edge of his military coat.

He watched the towering robot with the glowing red eye, a cold sneer curling his lips.

Calculating my combat power?

The power in this body has no upper limit.

Demon's Extract is alive.

It's the blood of a Danger Beast. It embodies the most primal law of ice.

The stronger the opponent, the stronger it gets. There's no ceiling.

Svarog's calculation module hit a wall with no end.

The data flow began multiplying exponentially.

One thousand.

Ten thousand.

One hundred thousand.

One million.

On the graph, the projected energy-threshold curve became a line perpendicular to the X-axis.

It shot straight past the top of the coordinate system.

"Warning. Target energy threshold cannot be calculated."

Svarog's voice began to distort.

Static crackled through the synthesized speech.

The red light in his eye no longer flashed steadily.

It strobed so brightly it hurt to look at.

"Beep beep beep beep!"

An urgent alarm blared from Svarog's chest.

His central processor began demanding more power.

To force a result, his logic core lifted its own power-consumption limits.

Inside his mechanical brain, dozens of precision gears spun so fast that their lubricant burned away.

Without lubrication, metal teeth ground directly against metal teeth.

They shrieked with a grating screech.

Tiny metal fragments burst from the seams in his neck.

Su Chen's cold sneer widened.

He lowered his arms.

His military boot took one casual step forward.

Just one step.

A purer wave of white frost rolled across the ground toward Svarog.

Svarog's cooling fans instantly hit full load.

"Vrrrr!"

The fans roared like a bomber about to take off.

Hot air poured from the exhaust vents.

But the moment it met the cold air outside, it turned into thick white mist.

The insulating rubber around his circuit boards could not withstand the heat of the overload.

It began to melt.

The acrid smell of scorched rubber mingled with ozone and drifted from the gaps in Svarog's armor.

Thin tendrils of black smoke rose from him.

The Automatons around him detected something wrong with their central unit.

They rolled their treads back and forth uneasily.

Several tried to approach with their chainsaws raised.

But before they had gone two steps, the spreading frost froze their treads fast to the ground.

Their machine oil congealed and their gears seized.

Every one of them became a motionless heap of scrap.

Natasha finally caught her breath.

She smelled burned rubber in the air.

She looked up and saw Svarog's red electronic eye flashing wildly.

The red light was bright enough to illuminate half the abandoned mining district.

It was the warning sign that Svarog was about to launch a devastating attack.

When he could not calculate an enemy's upper limit, his logic core would conclude that maximum firepower was necessary.

"Svarog! Stop calculating!"

Ignoring the pain in her throat, Natasha shouted until her voice cracked.

She stumbled forward a couple of steps.

The emergency injection slipped from her hand and shattered on the ground.

Svarog could no longer hear anything around him.

His logic circuits were trapped in an endless loop.

Protect the Underworld—eliminate the unknown threat.

Eliminate the threat—calculate the required firepower.

Insufficient firepower—increase processing power.

Upper limit unknown—increase power again.

Copper wires began to soften in temperatures of several hundred degrees.

Several critical data cables melted through.

Sparks ricocheted wildly inside his metal armor.

Crackle! Crackle!

Muffled bursts came one after another.

"Target... assessment... extremely dangerous."

Svarog's speaker emitted broken bursts of static.

His voice was completely distorted, like a damaged radio.

"Executing... highest-level... elimination directive."

As the command sounded, Svarog's massive body sank abruptly.

His thick right mechanical arm slowly rose.

Its heavy metal joints ground against each other, spraying sparks from the seams.

At the center of his palm, a red energy-focusing ring began to glow.

The laser emitter was being charged by force.

A high-pitched whine stabbed at Natasha's eardrums.

She closed her eyes in despair.

It's over.

If Svarog fires, that woman in the white military uniform will raze this place to the ground.

Su Chen watched the mechanical arm rise.

His expression did not change in the slightest.

He did not even furrow his brow.

He could not be bothered to dodge or raise a defensive Cursed Technique.

An attack from this heap of scrap could not even penetrate the freezing air that surrounded him for half a meter.

The laser's charging glow grew brighter.

The heat in Svarog's palm instantly vaporized the falling snowflakes around it.

The hum reached its peak.

It was about to fire.

At that very moment.

Svarog's logic module finally hit the absolute limit his hardware could withstand.

The data stream became a violent electronic storm that destroyed his motherboard.

Boom!

A muffled explosion burst from deep inside Svarog's broad chest.

It was not loud, but it carried the Negative Energy of something ruined beyond repair.

The blast from within whipped his heavy black coat upward.

Thick plumes of black smoke, mixed with green coolant.

Erupted like fountains from the seams at his neck, shoulders, and waist joints.

Black smoke swallowed his upper body in an instant.

The glaring red laser emitter in his palm.

Sizzled.

Its light went out like a pinched cigarette butt.

The high-pitched charging hum cut off abruptly.

Svarog's massive body lurched.

The hydraulic support in his right leg let out a shrill hiss as its pressure escaped.

His weight-bearing system failed completely.

His steel body, weighing more than three hundred jin, lost control.

And pitched straight forward.

Boom!

Svarog slammed one knee into the frozen ground.

The ice shattered into a huge crater, sending chips of ice and dirt flying in every direction.

Sparks sprayed from his knee joint and scattered across the snow.

The mechanical head he usually held so high drooped helplessly.

His red electronic eye flickered twice, then became a dull gray glass sphere.

Black smoke poured from him as he knelt like a ruined statue.

Before the woman in the white military uniform.

Su Chen looked at the hulking machine on the ground.

He gave a cold laugh.

Before he could even make a move, Svarog had burned himself out trying to calculate.

What a boring toy.

He was about to turn away and leave the scrap heap behind.

But before the black smoke had cleared.

From behind Svarog's broad back, beyond that rusted cover.

Came a burst of hurried, panicked footsteps.

Not boots. Not armor.

Bare feet slapping against broken ice and frozen earth.

Pat, pat.

A tiny figure burst out of the black smoke.

She ran so fast that her foot slipped, and she nearly fell.

She was a little girl in a thin red coat.

The cold wind had tousled her short white hair.

Two clear trails of tears marked her face, and the tip of her nose was red from the cold.

She wore no shoes.

Her small, pale feet landed directly on the sharp ice Svarog had just shattered.

Thin cuts opened across her soles.

Blood seeped out, staining the deathly white snow.

But she seemed not to feel the pain.

The girl stumbled to Svarog, who knelt on one knee.

She did not look at the ice queen radiating a terrifying chill across from her.

She simply turned, putting her frail back toward Su Chen.

She flung her thin arms wide.

With her paper-thin body, she stood firm before the massive metal robot belching black smoke.

The girl tipped back her head.

Tears and dust streaked her face.

Eyes squeezed shut, she shouted with all her strength in a young voice thick with sobs:

"Don't hurt Mr. Svarog!"