The cold, emotionless electronic voice echoed through the narrow, pristine passage like a death sentence.
Every syllable struck Ming Xin's barely recovered will like a heavy drumbeat.
Purge protocol—there was no room for reprieve. Only destruction.
He had no time to react, no time to sink his consciousness into the data tablet and search for a response. From the shadows beyond the corner—
A blinding white beam, trembling with high-frequency energy, tore through the gloom.
Like Death's scythe, it crossed the few meters in an instant and slashed toward the hovering wreckage of dark gold fragments!
Too fast! Too sudden! This was not a warning, but immediate, efficient slaughter!
The energy level contained within the beam far surpassed the ordinary mechanical units he had encountered in the wreckage of the "Quadrant Stabilizer Anchor."
It was even more concentrated, even deadlier, than Iron Tomb's drill-like tail spike!
Wherever it passed, the air seemed to ionize and evaporate, leaving behind a scorching vacuum trail!
There was nowhere to evade! Nothing could block it!
At this moment, the dark gold fragment wreckage's hovering speed was so slow before that beam that it might as well have been still!
The layer of "key" frequency source defense covering it was as fragile as a soap bubble under sunlight before that pure, high-level energy of orderly destruction!
Death was right before him, vivid enough to suffocate him!
Yet, at the trillionth fraction of a second before his consciousness was utterly swallowed by destructive energy, before his soul met its final annihilation—
An exceedingly strange state, impossible to describe in words, descended upon him.
Time seemed to stretch infinitely and freeze.
In Ming Xin's "vision," that fatal white beam advanced as slowly as a scene in slow motion.
Every thread of energy flowing within it, every tremor