“The mantle?” Little White repeated. “So Phantom Forge is practically fused to the planet?”
Bit frowned. “Can’t we just blast it out of the ground?”
“No,” Tyler Lynn said. “It’s located beneath Maple Valley. The surrounding rock has an extremely high iron content—dense, compact. The larger the explosive yield, the deeper it gets buried. Unless you plan to blow up the entire planet.”
“Then dig it out,” Merc said.
“You could,” Tyler admitted. “But first you’d need to destroy the three superfortresses directly above it. Then you’d spend two months drilling and excavating… while fighting off its reinforcements nonstop.”
He looked at them without flinching. “If you can defeat Phantom Forge’s army on that scale, then its body hardly matters anymore.”
“And Maple Valley sits in the heart of Plando,” Soren added with a laugh. “Bases everywhere. From a terrain standpoint, it’s a terrible place for you to fight.”
He spread his hands. “Still—if Lord Julian wants to try, we can list it as a backup plan.”
“You’re proud of that?” Little White groaned. “I can’t believe you people ever thought this was a good idea.”
Tyler’s smile was stiff. “It was built for war.”
Bit rubbed his face. “Fine. So what’s your plan, then? You’re telling me these two brothers squeeze through a pipe, sneak up to Phantom Forge’s mainframe… and press a button?”
“Of course it isn’t that simple,” Tyler said. “My father expected infiltration. He built layered defenses around the mainframe.”
He didn’t even hesitate. “The most dangerous are the two Advisors.”
“Advisors?” Bit repeated.
“Do you know Chinese chess?” Tyler asked. “Around the general, there are two pieces whose sole purpose is protection. My father borrowed that idea. He placed two guardians in the core.”
Little White’s eyes narrowed. “Two robots?”
“Yes,” Tyler said. “Two special superframes that can operate in extreme heat. They’ve no independent consciousness. Phantom Forge pilots them directly—its left and right hands.”
“If you reach them,” he added, “Phantom Forge will know immediately. A hard fight becomes unavoidable.”
Soren nodded. “Those bodies are Phantom Forge, in practical terms. It pours all its close-combat understanding into them. And it keeps upgrading. We’ve no idea how strong the Advisors are now.”
He smiled at Little White. “That’s why we need you.”
Little White crossed her arms. “You just told us we couldn’t go.”
“Correct.” Soren’s hand drifted toward her shoulder, familiar and casual. She slipped away, and he didn’t seem offended. “Even if we could, I wouldn’t ask my angel to take that risk.”
He gestured toward the stands. “What I want is for you to train Ollie and Ofer. Improve their odds.”
Bit’s expression flattened. “So that’s the real ask.”
“Yes,” Tyler said. “Their physique is special, but their fighting is still too simplistic. That’s what worries us most.”
Soren sighed dramatically. “Because imagine it—after all that effort, they infiltrate the core… and then discover they can’t beat the Advisors.”
He shuddered. “Embarrassing.”
Little White thought for a beat. “We can do that. I can also ask my master whether he’s willing to come teach them.”
Soren’s face lit up. “Robin Blin—the Apocalypse Ranger? If he trains them personally… victory might actually be within reach.”
Tyler nodded. “If they can defeat the Advisors, the rest becomes much simpler.”
As he spoke, Tyler walked to a nearby machine, opened a compartment, and took out something the thickness of a pinky finger. He set it upright in front of them.
They leaned in.
It was a bullet—tiny. Seven millimeters in caliber, forty-five millimeters long. A round that small would struggle to kill even a human with one shot, and it had no place on a battlefield full of machines.
But the front of the bullet was different. The tip was translucent, glasslike. Inside it, a pale white glow seemed to circulate, as if light itself had been trapped and was slowly breathing.
It was delicate. Almost beautiful.
Bit and Merc stared at the glow for two seconds—then both stepped back at the same time, like their instincts had been slapped.
Little White jumped. “What’s wrong with you two?”
Bit’s voice went tight. “What is that? That light… it feels like code. No—worse. Something I’ve never seen…”
Tyler smiled faintly. “You can sense the threat. Good.”
“It isn’t code,” he said. “It’s source. Source code—written in a higher-order machine language.”
“When my father built Phantom Forge, he considered the possibility that it might lose control. So he created a failsafe. A device with absolute authority.”
He named it softly. “The Originseed Key.”
“It can control any digital intelligence that runs on code.”
Bit couldn’t help asking, “If he had that, why didn’t he stop Phantom Forge before it happened?”
“Because Phantom Forge knew exactly who could threaten it,” Tyler said.
“On the eve of Judgment Day, it sent machine assassins after my father. During the chase, my father used the Originseed Key to seize control of the pursuing robots and barely escaped with his life.”
“But Phantom Forge is… clever.” Tyler’s jaw tightened. “It posted a massive bounty on the darknet. Biohuman and enhanced-human killers swarmed him.”
“My father survived. But in the chaos, the Originseed Key was lost—somewhere in St. Nite City.”
Tyler paused, then continued. “After we fled into Edean, I learned how to write the Originseed Key’s ‘seed patterns’ from my father’s notes. I used them to make these rounds.”
“I stripped away the complicated parts and kept only one simple command.”
He reached for a small revolver and set it beside the bullet.
The gun was tiny—smaller than an adult’s palm. It looked like a child’s toy.
“This was designed to match the filter mesh inside the cooling pipes,” Tyler said. “Ollie and Ofer will each carry one.”
“Six shots per gun. If even one round hits any part of Phantom Forge’s mainframe, the nanobots in the tip will carry the virus into its database and force it to self-destruct.”
Soren chuckled, delighted with himself. “I named the gun Supreme Force.”
He spread his hands. “That’s our decapitation plan. Any more questions?”
Little White conferred with Bit and Merc in low voices. Then she looked back up. “No major issues. But we can’t decide the details or the aftermath alone.”
Her gaze sharpened. “We need to report to Lord Julian. Let him decide.”
Soren’s smile stayed in place. “Naturally. Lord Julian may be artificial too, but compared to us, it’s… humbling. Many here have been eager to see it.”
He inclined his head. “We’ll be waiting.”
…
Three hours later, under Soren’s arrangements, Little White, Bit, and Merc slipped through a heavily guarded secret passage out of the Glimmer region and returned to the endless white of the polar ice.
Little White looked back at the exit—camouflaged as an ordinary rock wall. “Who would imagine there’s humanity’s last spark hiding behind that?”
“Plando’s spark,” Bit spat. “Are we really going to work with the enemy?”
Little White didn’t answer immediately.
Humans were born as blank paper. Hatred. Tribal thinking. The urge to draw lines and kill across them—none of that came preloaded. It was poured in by the generations before.
She exhaled. “I just hate that it has to be Soren and his kind.”
Merc glanced at her. “Soren seems awfully confident we won’t turn on him.”
“What choice does he have?” Bit said. “Can he actually stop us if we decide to walk away?”
…
A day later, Lord Julian received the report from Edean—and took it seriously.
On the third day, with Little White, Bit, and Merc escorting, Lord Julian visited Edean in person.
This time the meeting was formal. Soren attended, of course. But so did Edean’s other ruler—Plando’s former highest military commander, General Graham—who returned to reality from a hibernation pod for the occasion.
He weighed nearly half a ton and looked like a corpse that refused to lie down. Yet his mind was shockingly sharp. Some of his strategic suggestions forced even Lord Julian into long, thoughtful silence.
The two sides reached an agreement quickly.
Little White and Bit would remain at Edean to train Ollie and Ofer in close combat. When the moment was right, Lord Julian would launch a military operation as cover, and the brothers would execute the Decapitation Plan.
Afterward, Lord Julian would use machine power to help rebuild human civilization.
They also hammered out key conditions. Lord Julian secured a place for Janel and the Tower Clan’s protected embryos inside Edean. In exchange, Lord Julian would provide Edean with necessary resources—
—but Edean had to stop slaughtering the already-scarce cavern borderfolk, and stop any other anti-human practices, including harvesting their stem cells.
In short: the talks went smoothly. The agreement was signed. Soren practically glowed as he shook Lord Julian’s hand.
“Then let us open a new chapter of humanity,” Soren said grandly.
…
After Lord Julian left Edean, it immediately sought out Blin to discuss the next steps. Blin set out the following day, heading for the Budalawa Mountains to inform Janel and bring her north to rendezvous at the pole.
Bit and Little White didn’t waste a moment either. They went down into Glimmer City beneath Edean Tower and chose a training ground.
“All this energy,” Soren murmured later, watching from a high window. “Straight to work. Charming.”
He stood by the glass on the 400th floor with a drink in hand, looking down at the city’s faint, firefly lights. His trademark smile still clung to his face.
“What a lovable bunch,” he whispered. “If it were possible… I truly wouldn’t want to deceive them.”
Behind him, at the dining table, General Graham attacked a steak with gusto, grease shining on his chin.
“They aren’t people,” Graham said. “For humanity’s real future, this is the only path. I’ll never allow machines to stand above humans again.”
He drained his glass and tilted it toward a small boy waiting in the corner. The child hurried over with a bottle to refill it.
To anyone else, the boy might have looked like Ollie or Ofer. But Graham patted his shoulder and smiled with something rotten in it.
“Ogen,” Graham said.
“From now on, every skill Ollie and Ofer learn—you’ll learn too.”
His voice dropped into a hungry whisper. “And you’ll learn faster. You’ll become stronger. You’re the most critical factor in the plan.”
Only then did his grin sharpen into a knife. “Only when you succeed as well will our Decapitation Operation be complete. Heh. Heh-heh-heh…”