While the entire city lost its mind over the third-generation humanoid mech, Cora Vale was half-asleep in an empty hover-bus.

  To her, what had happened on the clocktower stage wasn’t inspiring.

  It was… quaint.

  Crude.

  A museum piece performing for an audience that didn’t know any better.

  Third-generation humanoid mechs had only just cleared the prototype stage. In the decades to come, the design would be refined again and again—integrated with smarter cores, cleaner manual systems, and tighter synchronization between pilot and machine. Eventually, the entire line would branch into five distinct tiers, each one demanding more from its operator.

  Entry-tier units would be the easiest: weak computational support, simple manual frameworks, suitable for people who only barely met the minimum standards.

  Higher tiers were another story.

  Each level up would raise the bar for both mental force and physical conditioning. At the top end, true high-tier mechs were so demanding that even across the Pandora Reach, qualified pilots were rare.

  In Cora’s previous life, she’d seen far more advanced machines—she’d destroyed more mechs than most officers would ever even touch. And with Wildfire beneath her hands, she’d carved through units that would make Springtide look like a child’s toy.

  So no—Clocktower Plaza didn’t interest her.

  What interested her was much simpler.

  Mechs.

  For Wildfire to heal, it needed to eat.

  And Cora needed something, anything, to test the system’s “devour” requirement.

  She sighed and stared out the bus window. “A whole city of bumpkins,” she muttered lazily. “One antique mech and they’re ready to worship.”

  The hover-bus was eerily quiet. Not a single passenger shared the car with her. Everyone who wasn’t in the plaza was at home watching the broadcast through personal screens.

  Only Cora was moving.

  Only Cora was hunting.

  A cold robotic voice sounded from the driver’s compartment. “Winstermark District. Next stop. Passengers disembarking, please mind your step.”

  Cora stood and stepped off.

  Winstermark lay near the edge of the capital city, sparsely populated, with fewer buildings and wider stretches of empty road. But it was also one of the most heavily secured zones on Nina Station for one reason:

  The Agriculture Base was here.

  Nina Station was home to countless migrants—families who’d fled other worlds and resettled where the Alliance allowed them to exist. Among the displaced, hunger had always been the oldest engine of crime.

  The government issued enough ration paste each month to keep people alive, but no one wanted to live on synthetic protein and flavorless nutrient gels.

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  So thieves came.

  And when theft wasn’t enough, gangs came.

  The Agriculture Base—where real meat and real vegetables were grown—had been raided so many times that its director had once complained bitterly that it was “like a fragile beauty being assaulted by hooligans every night.”

  The station’s elites had been furious.

  They stationed an entire battalion here. Then decided that still wasn’t safe enough.

  Two mechs were assigned to guard the facility.

  After that, the nightly raids stopped.

  No one wanted to be vaporized for a crate of greens.

  But today was different.

  Outside the base wall, a girl about twelve stood in a carefully chosen blind spot—just outside the street cameras’ clean angle, and just far enough to avoid being noticed by the few human soldiers still on duty.

  Cora watched from a distance, evaluating.

  Inside the compound, the remaining soldiers were slouching with their energy rifles propped lazily over their shoulders, cheap cigarettes hanging from their mouths. Their attention was fixed on a wide display screen playing footage from the mech event downtown.

  Only the robot sentries remained disciplined—standing straight, red optics sweeping back and forth in tireless scanning patterns.

  They hadn’t faced a real intruder in too long.

  Their vigilance had rotted.

  Cora’s lips curved faintly.

  The intruder had arrived.

  And unlike the usual raiders—big men with outdated weapons and loud mouths—this one looked like a harmless little girl.

  That appearance didn’t change what she was.

  Cora Vale was a pirate wearing a child’s skin.

  At some point during her ride, she’d pulled Wildfire out of the system’s storage space. The crimson mech now loomed behind her in the fading light, battered but terrifying all the same.

  Slung over its shoulder was something that didn’t belong on Nina Station in this era at all—

  An electronic pulse cannon.

  A weapon that shouldn’t exist for another twenty years.

  Cora didn’t hesitate.

  Wildfire raised the cannon and fired.

  A bright blue surge slammed into the base’s transparent protective dome. The barrier didn’t just crack—it failed like cheap glass. The energy spread in a rolling wave, washing across the entire curved shield.

  Overwhelming.

  Effortless.

  The dome screamed.

  A piercing low-frequency vibration ripped through the compound. The lounging soldiers doubled over instantly, hands clapping to their ears. On the big display screen, the image bucked and distorted—

  Then the screen exploded with a sharp pop.

  That blast was only the overture.

  Next came the sound of the barrier breaking apart, fracture by fracture. A spiderweb of cracks raced across the dome, multiplying until it was nothing but a collapsing lattice.

  In the last light of sunset, the fragments fell like a storm of glittering shards.

  The first to respond were the robots.

  Their optics snapped to Wildfire in perfect unison, and their synthesized voices rose together:

  “Hostile incursion detected. Hostile incursion detected. Activate alarm. Intercept.”

  Most of the base’s soldiers had been pulled to the clocktower event to support crowd control. The ones left behind lay unconscious now, thin lines of blood leaking from their ears.

  The robots were all that stood between the base and the crimson mech that had just walked through its front door.

  Cora didn’t bother dodging.

  Wildfire strode forward, each step heavy enough to shake the ground. The beam emitters at the tips of its fingers lit up, and its wrist rotated with smooth, practiced speed—

  A sweeping arc of fire.

  In less than thirty seconds, no intact robot remained. The ground became a scatter of torn limbs, shattered torsos, and twisted metal.

  Wildfire turned toward the warehouse.

  One blast blew open a five-meter reinforced door as if it were paper.

  And then Cora did what she’d always done best.

  She looted.

  To her surprise, the golden hall of the War-God System finally proved useful—serving as an improvised storage space as crate after crate of refrigerated produce and cultured meat vanished into it.

  The once-empty temple became crowded and chaotic, stacked with stolen food.

  The system offered no comment.

  Five minutes later, staring at the stripped warehouse, Cora nodded in satisfaction and guided Wildfire back out.

  She hesitated when her gaze flicked to the outdoor test fields—rows of unharvested vegetables, and grazing livestock engineered for the base.

  In the end, she left them untouched.

  Draining a lake to catch every fish was stupid. Even pirates had rules.

  If you wanted long-term profit, you left the hen alive and let it keep laying eggs.

  A hen couldn’t move its nest.

  But just as Wildfire cleared the warehouse exit—

  A shrill siren finally rose into the sky.

  The base alarm screamed overhead, spiraling outward toward the entire city.