I asked Lord Julian for permission to go meet Miller alone.
After careful consideration, he refused.
His reasoning was hard to argue with: there was no guarantee I’d even reach Miller. By all evidence, the swarm’s intelligence wasn’t high. If the force heading our way was only an advance wave, I might die long before I ever saw him. Julian’s suggestion was simple—don’t go chasing a conversation into the dark. Put the conversation at the front line. That way, I wouldn’t be negotiating with my back to the abyss. If talks failed and fighting began, I’d have hundreds of thousands of machines behind me instead of nothing.
I accepted.
And Julian accepted one condition in return: we would not fire the first shot.
The next few days were the busiest we’d ever lived.
Under Lord Julian’s direction, every robot and every usable piece of machinery was requisitioned. Factories ran day and night. Units that could still move were repaired. Units too badly damaged were stripped down for parts and grafted onto whatever machines needed them most.
Anything beyond repair was hauled near Edean and piled together with scrapped warships and fighters into a huge, irregular ring wall. We compacted the wreckage, flooded it with water, froze it, and repeated the process until it became a solid barrier—crude, ugly, and brutally strong.
Across the ice plain and the skies above it, heavy haulers and crane ships moved in constant loops. They dismantled the long-neglected turrets, prism towers, and missile towers around the outer edge of Aurora Plateau and relocated them behind the wall, reinstalling them in new firing positions.
At the wall’s center sat Five-Color Fortress and the entrance to Glimmer Caverns. The ceiling shafts into Glimmer Caverns were sealed; only one entrance remained, guarded by a mixed team of Glimmer Guard and robots—still under Teresa’s command.
Gunnar, imprisoned but alive, requested permission to join the defense. After consulting Teresa, Julian allowed it.
Five-Color Fortress had taken only minor damage in the last battle. Two days of repair work restored it to full function. When the swarm arrived, the fortress—armed to the teeth—would shoulder the primary defense alongside Blin’s returning fleet.
We were abandoning every region of Lansen Planet outside Aurora Plateau. All forces would concentrate on defending Edean.
Lord Julian assigned tasks with methodical precision. Every machine ran at full capacity.
But the humans we were trying to protect looked like they had already surrendered.
Half-harvested crops sat rotting in Bubble Farm. Livestock wandered unattended in the pens. On the plaza under the tower, sheep and turkeys strolled around as if war were an abstract rumor.
Most people did nothing. Some stared into corners. Some drifted aimlessly from place to place. Their eyes held no light—only exhaustion and despair.
I tried to talk to them. Most replied in the same drained voice:
“Are we going to die?”
“What are we supposed to do?”
“Can you beat the bugs?”
“Will the bugs eat us?”
“If we surrender, will they spare us?”
“I knew it… I knew we’d end up fighting Miller eventually. I knew it…”
I answered them honestly. We would do everything we could to avoid fighting the swarm. Miller was my friend. I would speak with him. I would explain the misunderstanding, and I would ask him for more time—time to build a new ship.
They thanked me in a dozen different ways, but their faces didn’t match their words.
One mother, holding her child, threw stones at my back while she cried and shouted.
“You should’ve never come here! We were hiding and living just fine. Ever since you arrived, we haven’t had a single peaceful day. Get out—get out of our home!”
I wanted to comfort her.
I didn’t know how.
So I stood there and let her hit me a few times.
Not everyone was that hopeless.
A drunk laughed and said, “Why should I care? You robots will worry about it. Even if we die, we’ve got four days of happy time first. I can start sobbing after that.”
“Four days,” I said. “Use them well.”
As I walked away, he held up five fingers and yelled after me.
My four days went like this.
Day one:
Under Little White’s coordination, Liam and Leila held a wedding. A lot of people attended. The open-air hall—strung with colored lights—gave Edean a brief, fragile sense of celebration. People ate well. Rowan Finch and Boka dug out every bottle of Soren’s hidden liquor. Lord Julian delivered a toast. Little White cut the cake. I watched her cut the cake. Linneya even went up to sing a song.
For a few hours, it almost felt normal.
Day two:
I wanted to scout the surrounding terrain again, to check every firing lane and deployment line one more time. But Linneya insisted. She wanted to search the route she and Starling had taken during their escape—every turn, every branch, every dead end.
I understood what she was really asking for. But too much time had passed. Anything we were going to find… we would’ve found already.
Linneya cried the entire way. She led us to the cliff where she and Starling had separated. We followed every branching path, most of them ending abruptly. I even requested several Bloodthirsters from Julian to reach unstable ledges and steep faces that normal units couldn’t stand on.
We found nothing—except a few scattered shell casings.
Day three:
Lord Blin returned.
When Mesha and Dancer stepped out of the airlock, I went to them and hugged them both. I told them how sorry I was about Dr. Morag and Dr. Cole.
Mesha pressed against my chest plate and cried until she couldn’t breathe. Dancer looked consumed by guilt, blaming himself for the ship’s loss and for the doctors’ deaths.
I was deeply saddened—and deeply confused.
Why was it that the kind, wise, righteous elders never seemed to get a gentle ending?
To bolster morale, Lord Julian broadcast footage of the fleet—so vast it filled the horizon—onto every screen in Edean. He paired it with the nearly finished ground defenses, the ground army, and a speech tailored to the human mind.
I had to admit it: Julian understood human psychology. The display brought back a measure of faith.
Day four:
As the swarm drew closer, tension tightened across the plateau.
Three hours before contact, Julian completed the deployment. All humans withdrew into Glimmer Caverns. The entrance was packed shut with ice and snow.
Inside and outside the wall stretched an endless machine army—rank on rank of steel, and countless barrels aimed at the sky.
A recent blizzard had conveniently painted the wall, the fortress, and the army the same pale color as the land. It hid our position perfectly, as if the plateau itself were holding its breath.
To avoid early contact, half our warships were stationed below the cloud layer in a massive ring formation around the wall. The other half rested on a flat plain not far from Five-Color Fortress. If fighting began, they could all be airborne within thirty seconds.
In short: everything we could do, we did. Everything we couldn’t do, we couldn’t do.
I chose the nearest and highest peak overlooking Five-Color Fortress. With Julian’s help, we used a battlecruiser’s laser main gun to slice the tip into a flat platform—about four hundred square meters of smooth, mirror-like stone.
Then I took my 2D Blade and carved a massive half-human, half-lizard emblem into the platform—an imitation of Miller’s “self-portrait” from Diamond Temple.
I wanted him to see it. Directly or indirectly. I wanted him to look down and notice me waiting beside it.
From that moment on, I stayed on the peak.
Watching the army below—perfect ranks, weapons aimed, silence held tight—I felt uneasy.
Miller had acknowledged me as a friend, but he was also a person with a fierce will and his own goals. I had never believed our friendship would outweigh his hatred for humans and the “false gods.”
And after New Sunflower’s near-declaration of war… I could no longer predict where he would stand.
To ease the tension—and because Nomi had predicted the last crisis with unnerving accuracy—I entered the dreamscape in the brief window before the swarm arrived and spoke to him.
Through his barking, the dog’s opinion was crystal clear:
“It’s fine. There won’t be a war. Miller is a good friend. Everyone is a good friend.”
When I returned from the dreamscape, I felt steadier.
A while later, Lord Julian messaged me: the swarm had reached the outer edge of the planet’s orbit. To show goodwill, the orbital defense grid was completely offline—no shields, no fire.
The swarm either didn’t understand the gesture or didn’t care.
It rammed through every diamond node and smashed the orbital defense hub, then surged straight toward Aurora Plateau.
I looked up.
The sky—never bright to begin with—darkened as if something massive had passed over a lamp. Within the clouds I heard a rising hum, a tearing buzz, and thin, sharp shrieks cutting through the air.
The swarm had arrived.