By all rights, Su Ming had offered both kind advice and sound reasoning. The Celestials should have been deeply moved and cooperated.
Yet the sole remaining Creator Lord before him was like a stone in a latrine—stinking and unyielding. After receiving Deathstroke's classic ancient-saying explanation, he simply knelt there in silence again.
Though no emotion could be read from the grille-like eyes on his face, Su Ming inexplicably felt something familiar: the spirit of a tough guy who, even with death at his doorstep, still shouted, "Kill me or torture me, do as you please."
Reason told him that Celestial robots made their choices through calculation. Their so-called thoughts were merely strings of numbers. It was apparent from the growth of Celestial Variants: Celestials began with the simple binary of 0 and 1, growing a little each time they learned a new number.
But no matter how much they grew, they could never escape mathematics.
If Eternity and Infinity represented Cosmic Concepts, then the Celestials were the formulas that used those concepts. They were living calculators, as well as maintainers of the universe's entropy.
But none of that had much to do with Deathstroke. What he liked most were tough guys—not because he admired their steadfastness and courage, but because he enjoyed seeing them die before him, burdened with a mountain of regrets.
Uncooperative captives were useless assets, and special operations squads needed to travel light. Naturally, excess baggage had to be disposed of. That was the simplest calculation of all.
"Crunch!"
Strangle bit off the survivor's head in a single bite. That enormous head was swallowed like a meatball, barely chewed at all before vanishing into its black-cloth-bag-like maw.
The headless corpse toppled onto the white sand. Celestials had neither blood nor tears, but the sound of his fall