Chapter 638: Trap

The air in the room seemed to gradually congeal, every breath carrying a heavy, icy pressure. The underground trading agent known by the alias "Iron Hand" sat stiffly in his chair, his face taut. On the wall beside him, a colorful promotional poster still displayed the petty struggle that had taken place in the depths of the Iron Nest—a struggle customized by the votes of the upper-level viewers. The circulation system blew out fresh currents of air, but they could not dispel the fog in his heart.

"Was Old Joe the only one you were in contact with?" Luo asked unhurriedly.

"...Only him," Iron Hand answered, not very readily, as if some invisible observer were in the room. "And at first I didn't know it was his people. I thought it was you..."

Luo cut him off directly: "When was your first collaboration?"

Iron Hand leaned back in his chair, a look of struggle on his face, but he still answered the question: "Terra Calendar, about four years ago."

Luo raised an eyebrow.

"So, the first-phase Zolda Blackstone test data and the Rift Generator blueprint were also leaked through you... That all adds up."

Iron Hand lifted his head. He seemed to struggle for a long while, then suddenly made up his mind: "You... leave this place. You are no longer a match for him now. This planet is now full of his people. You shouldn't have come here at all..."

But Luo only looked at him with a faint, knowing smile—an expression that sent a chill through Iron Hand's heart.

"You care so much as to urge me to flee this place quickly, yet at the same time you secretly send news of my movements to the upper levels of the Great Wall... Trying to have it both ways at a time like this—how tiring."

Iron Hand's eyes widened in shock.

But Luo seemed not to care about the other's reaction. Her gaze passed over him and looked out the window, as if staring at something invisible in the distance, and she spoke to the air: "Old Joe, stop beating around the bush. That's not your style either... I'm short on time. Let's settle this cleanly."

Naturally, no one answered in the room. Only a trading agent with an unusually ugly expression sat behind the desk. But Luo knew that the steel monster was somewhere monitoring the movements in this room—from the moment she left her residence building, the observer's gaze had never left her. The shuttles that swept through the air, the sensor towers controlled by the gangs in the Great Wall district, the satellites in orbit, and the surveillance systems that had been running for a century around the garbage platform...

Iron Hand had told her at least one truth: this planet was now full of Old Joe's people—and that fit the steel freak's style quite well.

Extreme caution. Extreme care. Prepare everything. Never act until assured of absolute certainty, terrified of encountering any danger... even if it only meant damaging a spare steel shell.

Beneath that seemingly powerful steel body was wrapped a timid, over-cautious heart.

Luo stood up.

Iron Hand scrambled to his feet as well: "Are you leaving?"

Luo did not answer. She simply looked the man up and down a few times.

Faint silver lines appeared at the corners of the trading agent's eyes. The blood vessels near his neck bulged slightly, pulsating visibly, as if something alive were hidden inside.

"How many shots of the 'gene serum' did Old Joe give you?" Luo suddenly asked.

Iron Hand was startled, as if he hadn't expected this abrupt question. He answered without thinking: "Two..."

Hopeless.

The living metal had already invaded his vital organs—not everyone could survive the subsequent transformation, and Old Joe would never spend extra cost on a real transformation surgery for a piece of garbage like this.

On this planet, only a fool would spend money on a garbage kid—just because of the sincerity in his eyes back then.

"Let's shake hands," Luo said suddenly, extending her right hand toward the man across from her. "Consider it a settlement for all your hard work over the years."

Iron Hand stared blankly at the slender hand reaching toward him. His lips moved a few times: "Boss, I..."

"It won't hurt much," Luo said softly.

Iron Hand blinked. Finally, he reached out his hand—the one that was still intact—and gently grasped the elf's fingers.

He vaguely remembered that decades ago, it was this hand that had dragged him out of the garbage heap. Back then, the owner of this hand had seemed so tall, and her voice was like a clear breeze blowing over the upper levels of the Great Wall—but he could no longer remember what she had said to him then.

Luo turned and left the room.

She walked through the stairwell and living room, passed a water feature curtain wall that flowed with filtered clean water, and arrived at the door to see her guard captain and soldiers. Several of the bodyguards who had been following Iron Hand were now disarmed, their hands and feet bound with electromagnetic cuffs and tied to the railing, each one bruised and swollen.

A few scrawny foremen and technicians stood to the side, not tied up, but trembling with fear.

Luo walked past those foremen, casually pulled out a badge, and tossed it into the arms of one of them: "From now on, you're the new boss here."

The young man who received the badge was so scared he shuddered. Then, almost instinctively, he looked toward the small building on the platform—toward a certain window on the second floor. That window had opened, and hot wind thick with filthy exhaust rolled in, carrying a few scraps of paper that had fallen from the upper levels, spinning into the room.

Iron Hand gasped for breath, looking at the paper scraps that landed on his shoulder. He reached up to brush them off, but that motion squeezed out the last bit of air from his lungs.

A blazing fireball of psychic energy erupted from within his body, swallowing everything around into rolling heat.

Cries of alarm came from the platform behind. The guard captain, who was walking with Luo toward the landing pad, instinctively turned his head and saw the two-story building spewing thick black smoke. Underlings were shouting on the platform, some rushing in to put out the fire, others standing at a cold distance, watching.

"What a shame. He used to be reliable when handling things," the guard captain shook his head, commenting casually.

"For him, this is already a good ending," Luo said flatly.

They returned to the landing pad. The shuttle they had arrived in was still parked in the same spot, but near the boarding ramp, the soldiers found a charred corpse.

"One of Old Joe's men," Luo said, completely unruffled, as if she had known this would happen. "Probably came to tamper with the shuttle—every one of my personal aircraft is linked to my electronic brain. Old Joe knows that too, but he still sends people to try. That's just how he is."

She kicked the corpse aside. The shuttle's antigravity engines were already humming. As she entered the cockpit, a series of alert messages popped up on the holographic projection.

Luo casually swept those alerts aside. The guard captain's voice came from the copilot's seat, tinged with tension: "Boss, the 'Fairy' shuttle that was here earlier is gone!"

"I know," Luo said casually, controlling the shuttle to leave the rickety landing pad while opening the internal intercom. "Everyone in the back, hold tight! My flying style might be a little wild from here on—"

"Boss, which way are we going?" the guard captain asked quickly, gripping the armrest. "Back to the building? Or take the Great Wall passage to the spaceport launch tower? We can use the tower's signal masking to enter orbit. The smuggler ship in orbit has already been arranged to cover our escape from this planet..."

"Escape? Can't escape. Home is already surrounded. Old Joe's armed drones are everywhere," Luo said offhandedly. Beside her, the holographic display showed feeds from various surveillance angles—around her residence building, the sky was filled with blinking drone lights. "Forget the spaceport launch tower. After all this time, even if he can't monitor every launch tower on the planet, he can at least control all access points around this node city. This place is crawling with his people."

Even the loyal guard captain was momentarily stunned when he heard this. He stared wide-eyed at his boss: "Then... you knew this would happen?!"

"Yes."

"Then why did you tell me to arrange the smuggler ship and the Great Wall passage..."

"That was specifically for Old Joe to intercept," Luo said, controlling the shuttle to fly along the "canyon" in the middle section of the Great Wall, slowly descending as it flew. "I wanted him to think I was desperate to leave this planet, then have him block every escape route one by one. That way, he'd believe I had no way to fly, that I was truly at the end of my rope..."

The "cliffs" on both sides of the portholes flashed past. The ancient, mottled city megastructure blurred into a continuous streak of light and shadow. The sunlight grew weaker, and the lights of the lower levels pierced through the mist, layered and shadowy, like a ghostly curtain.

Luo pushed the control stick down another notch.

The guard captain gradually caught on: "You mean..."

"To figure out what Old Joe is really up to behind the scenes, I have to corner him. But that steel freak is too cautious. Even when facing a 'failure' whose project has already gone bankrupt and fallen to this state, he only dares to send an iron shell. So to make this coward actually show his face, I have to give him the illusion that everything is foolproof and under control. "I was originally hoping he would make a direct move at the Gray Iron Garbage Dump, but now it seems, even in the lawless zone of the mid-level Great Wall, he only dares to have his underlings pull some petty tricks. So we have no choice but to..."

The shuttle shuddered, and then the scene outside the portholes began to rise rapidly.

"...go somewhere even more lawless."

The shuttle began to dive toward the bottom of the Great Wall.

At almost the same moment, a piercing alarm blared through the cockpit.

The control panel flashed harsh red light. Warnings of radar lock-on rang out in rapid succession. The shuttle's navigation system and sensory radar were heavily jammed, and the main control display, which had clearly shown the surrounding terrain, suddenly turned into a white screen!

Then, from a nearby giant abandoned building, two tongues of fire suddenly burst out, and a ghostly shadow rushed out of the building.

The guard captain quickly recognized the shadow: "Boss, it's that 'Fairy' shuttle from before!"