Legend of the Cyber Heroes
Chapter 291 - 291 71 Seek Locate Destroy

291: Chapter 71 Seek, Locate, Destroy 291: Chapter 71 Seek, Locate, Destroy Delacruz City, an ordinary city on the Mexican Plateau, the only thing worth mentioning is the natural growth of some black metal-based plants.

The protector of this land was an ordinary Protector Lord, and the stationed Scientific Knight Order was rather marginalized, officially headed by Mr.

Wang Yi Emery from Domingo City.

Aside from a slightly larger population, it was indeed an extremely ordinary city.

Until a few decades ago.

This city gave birth to the Eighth Martial God.

The Eighth Martial God was a female orphan from Delacruz City, and also a “volunteer,” working with knight apprentices from the Scientific Knight Order to verify some medical technologies.

There were people living this way in both Domingo City and Delacruz City.

In this process, the Eighth Martial God acquired a device for browsing the network.

Perhaps by accident, or perhaps for some other reason, this girl encountered the terrifying labyrinth that exists only in legend—the “Xiang Shan” built by the previous generation.

She became “Xiang Shan.”

Of course, at that time, this was still unknown.

This Martial God had been honing her external strength in the martial arts schools and then used the network to cultivate Inner Strength.

But after all, this was the Earth-Moon system, where King Aqini was in charge.

The Eighth Martial God chose the wrong path.

To break out from Earth, you must work from the outside in, first train external strength capable of breaking through warship blockades, then talk about the rest.

Apart from “Turing,” no one could compete with “humanity’s firewall” in terms of Inner Strength.

Even “Turing” could only hide from the world in front of the “God of Fire’s” warship battle formation.

The Inner Strength of the Eighth Martial God soon became very noticeable.

King Aqini detected the existence of this Martial God through anomalous data streams.

He somehow determined the relationship between the Eighth Martial God and “Xiang Shan.”

Afterward, he pointed half of his ship’s guns toward Delacruz City and the other half ten kilometers west of Delacruz City.

He then broadcast a letter to Delacruz City addressed to “Xiang Shan.” After one hour, the Eighth Martial God had to appear ten kilometers west of Delacruz City.

“Among the two sets of ship’s guns, one will surely fire.”

That was his message.

No one doubted the veracity of these words.

As early as the renewal of the Fourth Martial God, King Aqini had shown his ruthlessness.

He had destroyed the order established by the Fourth Martial God, along with the Fourth Martial God’s Space City.

One hour later, the Eighth Martial God indeed appeared at that location.

In fact, she was not alone at the time.

Before she came forward, several people seemed to have voluntarily headed to that area but were precisely assassinated.

She finally walked to the designated end point and left that intriguing last statement.

“One day, another will inherit this legacy—I will come back.”

But this was not the end.

After killing the Eighth Martial God, King Aqini had all his warships in outer space aim at Delacruz City again.

But this time, he discharged not rounds or high-energy particle beams but full-power gamma rays.

The gamma rays struck the ionosphere and pierced through it.

In the atmospheric environment, gamma rays are continuously depleted, and by the time they reach the ground, they are no longer very strong.

Spread out among individuals, the radiation dose does not exceed that of a single radiation therapy.

For a Benchmark Man’s resilience, it was basically harmless.

But those were pure gamma rays.

Gamma rays can knock free electrons out of nitrogen and oxygen, which are the most abundant elements in the atmosphere.

Under the influence of the planet’s magnetic field, these electrons form currents like a storm.

These “currents” generate magnetic fields over the land that continually cleave conductive materials, producing electric currents in metals.

Electronic components cannot withstand such an attack.

An unprecedented EMP storm struck the entire New World.

Cybernetically Enhanced People with high modification rates were mostly paralyzed, the Gene Bank defense forces came to a halt, the servers of the Scientific Knight Order were utterly destroyed, and countless valuable data disappeared.

Everyone knew why this happened.

Clearly, the Eighth Martial God’s Inner Strength was not low.

An Internal Strength Master could hide data on any server, and this data could be transferred at any time—this transfer process could be completely automated.

If the Eighth Martial God wanted to hide a secret online, complete eradication was almost impossible.

King Aqini clearly wanted to “make the impossible possible.” He simply destroyed the network of the New Continent using violent means, and even the Old Continent was greatly affected.

After that incident, King Aqini was once again stripped of his military command, and not a single spacecraft was left at his disposal.

Until the Ninth Martial God was reborn, he didn’t even leave the Moon for a moment.

The forces under the Human Gene Bank then reorganized the New Continent.

Order was reestablished.

In the process, the original Heroes of the New Continent were also eliminated—they were mostly Cybernetically Enhanced People with high modification rates, and they were directly paralyzed under King Aqini’s insane attacks.

Only a few Heroes with extremely high levels of electromagnetic protection evacuated.

King Aqini was himself a master of Internal Strength.

Over the years, he had been erasing records of this incident.

Now, most of the residents of Delacruz City had already forgotten what had happened back then.

The ancient Roman Empire had invented a type of capital punishment for the dead, known as the “Curse of Erasure” (Damnatio memoriae), in which the empire would erase all of the convicted person’s deeds from when they were alive, as if they had never existed.

Inscriptions, statues, coins, written records, and so forth that had once featured these individuals were to be destroyed, erased, or rewritten.

This indeed could be called the ultimate form of capital punishment.

The so-called “ultimate punishment” was really just extra physical torture before death.

No matter how severe, it was only “guilt by association.” Many heroes and people of virtue could overcome this pain with reasons such as “saving from disaster, deeds beneficial to the times,” or “finding the essence of words, theories sufficient to be passed on”—they would believe that such “deeds” and “words” would create an “immortal” legacy in the world.

But the “Curse of Erasure” could destroy this “immortality.”

For King Aqini, to employ such means was really akin to enacting a fictional “curse.”

Nevertheless, King Aqini did not forget this matter himself.

He persisted in sending special squads to search for the possible “Eighth Martial God’s Legacy.”

The Eighth Martial God had been a “volunteer” in the Scientific Knight Order system in her early years, a part of the record that was at least verifiable.

Although King Aqini himself had destroyed most of the data, surviving records, along with the memories of knight apprentices, could serve as corroborating evidence.

Between her “disappearance” and “death,” there were about ten years.

Based on the remaining records and the condition of the Eighth Martial God’s Prosthetic Body, King Aqini calculated her extreme ranges of activity to hypothesize the territories the Eighth Martial God might have set foot in.

He then carefully divided these territories into different zones and constantly dispatched small squads to examine them.

Even his confidants didn’t know why King Aqini was doing this.

If he truly wanted to find something, he could have simply ordered the local Protectors to cooperate.

But it seemed that King Aqini did not want to attract anyone’s attention.

He hid from the Heroes, the Protectors, and the Scientific Knight Order, seemingly unwilling for anyone to realize he was searching for the “Eighth Martial God’s Legacy.”

Of course, the leaders of the squads could understand.

Heroes were the best at “infiltration” and “assassination.” No defense could completely stop a Hero.

If a large number of Heroes were to gather here, then no security measures would be safe enough.

The Eighth Martial God indeed was a troublemaker—the only one recognized by “Turing” itself!

It’s only that the Eighth Martial God had been active for quite some time, so the areas they needed to search were very large.

Over the years, they kept searching, examining.

The “Eighth Martial God’s Legacy” must exist somewhere that could be discovered.

Moreover, if there was even a little electronic device inside it, then it could only be in a thick Faraday Cage—otherwise, it could not have survived that EMP storm from several decades ago.

The location also had to be out of sight from the surface, otherwise, it could not escape satellite surveillance.

Sometimes, the search team members would ponder whether the Legacy truly existed but had already been destroyed by His Majesty’s decisive EMP strike or if the Eighth Martial God had been fooling them from the start.

However, orders had to be carried out.

Everyone had given up hope.

But recently, in order to suppress Tao Enhai, local Protectors used a dense barrage of Space-based Kinetic Weapons to eradicate the Green Forest Stronghold.

The continuous attacks generated seismic waves on the ground.

A group from the Scientific Knight Order saw this as a good research opportunity, so they closely monitored these seismic waves.

Subsequently, they unexpectedly discovered a new underground cavity.

After data comparison, this network of caves did not exist at least fifty years ago, or if it did exist back then, it was not as large as it is now.

They quickly locked onto this cavity.

It was a deep vein of ore being mined by a group of Burrow Dragons, providing resources for the Heroes.

This cavity was located near Delacruz City.

It fit too well into the hiding spot King Aqini had speculated about.

The earth could withstand EMPs, and metal ores had even better effects.

“Repeat the mission,” said the leader, an Internal Strength Master, “Locate the group of Burrow Dragons, control them, enter the vein.

Search, pinpoint, destroy.”

The other two masters who had forsaken their human forms said, “I obey.”

“Additionally, GA-R03, according to intelligence, in Domingo City there has appeared a person suspected to be from the Green Forest, blatantly gathering information about the Eighth Martial God’s Legacy.

As predicted by the Staff Headquarters, it may be trying to force people to look for clues, then use the Ultimate Way Consensus Therapy to assimilate those who grasp the clues.

Your mission is to eliminate it.”

“Eliminate!” A flicker of light crossed GA-R03’s Prosthetic Eye.