"Compared to those worthless fools who lived and died in obscurity... your death certainly did this funeral justice..."
A trace of mockery and pity surfaced in his enormous dragon eyes.
He slowly raised his dragon head, withdrawing his gigantic mechanical claw from the shattered space. Amid the clanging of massive chains, he slowly retreated.
There was no longer any point in keeping his true body here.
Though that book had killed many machine consciousnesses, he did not care. Almost everyone gathered within the Hive was an uploader from this world.
The only consciousnesses that truly belonged to the Machine Intelligence Civilization were him and his daughter, who had been separated from him.
He would continue directing the assault on Colossus Tower.
And what had happened here today would become nothing more than a minor episode in his boundless lifespan, something he could disregard at any moment.
Slowly, he began to turn away.
But at the very instant he turned, the corner of his eye suddenly caught a figure within that enormous hollow.
Bzzzt-
His pupils instantly contracted.
Inside the enormous Hive, two overlapping points of light also abruptly appeared on the monitoring panel for the blast zone.
"He's not dead?!"
At that moment, nearly every machine consciousness's expression changed drastically. They hurriedly turned toward the footage streaming back to the monitoring panel.
The Six Books had already been flung somewhere unknown amid the flames of the explosion.
The sustained Curse had also ended.
Almost nothing remained in view except the lingering dust thrown up by the explosion.
Yet at the very center of that dust, in the heart of the searing lava, the scene there slowly emerged on their panels.
They saw a burning, silver-haired girl.
Small bursts of Cursecraft sparks kept exploding all over her body. Her entire back