manynovel Chapter 87 Istvan III
Chapter 87 Istvan III
Chapter 87 Istvan III (3)
At the end of the third month.
The transport plane continued its low-altitude patrol over the gray-black wasteland. Six more armories were discovered, another batch of wreckage was dismantled, and several hundred more fragments were added to the database. A General-class wreckage provided new fragments—a shoulder weapon platform retained core data for the twin vortex laser cannons, but the torso and leg structures remained incomplete. The overall integrity had improved, but it was still far from a complete blueprint.
But from those fragments, he began to piece together a larger picture.
Ten thousand years ago, a viral bomb turned the surface of Istvania I into a scorched, bloody wasteland. Traitors sent their Titans to purge the survivors. The Legion of the Dead—one of the oldest and most powerful Titan legions on Mars—pointed its guns at the Emperor's loyal offspring under Horus's command. The hound-class wreckage Cohen found in the wasteland was merely the tip of the iceberg of this vast army.
Cohen didn't care about titles. What he needed were pieces of technology: the alloy formula for a breastplate, the fiber bundle weaving method for a leg armor, the geometry of a reactor chamber. Ninety-one percent of the Warhound-class pieces were in place. The Warlord-class puzzle was still slowly progressing.
Within a 25-meter radius, the chaotic remnants in the air, the dark purple crystals deposited on the surface, and the subspace pollutants seeping from cracks in the earth's crust—all were constantly trying to penetrate his protective suit. Wherever the field covered, those substances were broken down into harmless atoms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a small amount of universal atoms, which silently flowed into the warehouse.
So he didn't bring anyone down with him. Not because he didn't want to, but because he couldn't. Ordinary people can't survive more than a few hours on this planet.
He detected that life-sustaining pulse once a day. The frequency was weak, but stable. He hadn't gone there specifically because it wasn't worth the trip. But he had almost completely scanned the Titan wreckage and armory within a radius of tens of kilometers, so he finally set off for the coordinates of the signal.
The transport plane changed course and flew low in the direction of the signal for several days. The cracks in the ground widened, and radiation readings spiked. Where the field of influence covered, everything returned to normal.
The signal originated at the bottom of a massive sinkhole. The sinkhole was nearly a kilometer in diameter and over three hundred meters deep. Cohen's consciousness—a shallow perception with a five-kilometer radius—pierced through millennia of sediment, reaching a metallic structure nearly a hundred meters below the sinkhole's bottom. A solitary, enormous, sealed container. No entrance, no exit. The faint pulse emanated from there.
Cohen hovered the transport plane above the crater's opening and lowered ten Casterland mechs to the bottom. The dark purple crystals at the bottom of the crater were denser than those on the surface. He stood at the bottom, deployed his domain, and cleaned the entire crater floor step by step. Half an hour later, the rocks revealed their original grayish-black color.
He began to dig. Standing at the bottom of the pit, he dissected the rock beneath his feet. The vertical passage stretched downwards. Ten meters, twenty meters, thirty meters. Through layers of rock, volcanic ash deposits, and fragmented terracotta remnants.
At the end of the passage, a metal wall blocked the way. Its surface was engraved with ancient mechanical seal prayers, hastily carved ten thousand years ago.
Cohen carved out an entrance the size of a person and went inside.
The space wasn't large, two meters wide and three meters high. Standing prominently in the center was a Dreadnought mech. It wasn't the bulky model of the late Empire; its lines were smoother, the armor seams more precise, and the Imperial double-headed eagle on its chest was still the old design from the Great Crusade era—
A scepter now rests beneath the eagle's talons. But millennia of chaotic corrosion and warp deposits have covered the armor's surface with a thick layer of dark purple crystals, obscuring any insignia on the breastplate and erasing all paint. No one can recognize which legion it once belonged to.
When he probed his senses into the machine's interior, he froze. There was someone inside. The life support pod was still operating at its lowest possible power, almost at a standstill. The heartbeat was less than ten beats per minute. A body that had withered for millennia was encased in life support fluid.
Those hazy memories of his past life were stirred at this moment. A name surfaced from the depths of his consciousness—Rellano, the rite master of the Third Legion of the Emperor's Sons, one of the nine Terran warriors. This name was merely virtual in his past life, so why did it match? Was it some inexplicable mapping in a higher dimension, or some unknown psionic echo? He couldn't be sure, just as he didn't know why he had transmigrated. In short, considering the possible conditions remaining on this battlefield—sealed underground by loyalists, maintained at minimum power for ten thousand years in life support pods—there was basically only one possibility.
Cohen stood there, silent for a few seconds. Then he made a decision: not to wake them. At least not now. The life support pod could still hold. He would come back when he had completed the technology recovery and was ready to leave the planet.
He turned and walked out, sealing the opening back up to look old, and then raised it to block it. When he returned to the bottom of the pit, there were no traces of excavation visible on the surface.
He noted the coordinates on the data board, returned to the transport aircraft, and continued his low-altitude patrol.
In the days that followed, the transport planes continued to trace parallel routes across the gray-black wasteland. Cohen's consciousness repeatedly scanned within a five-kilometer radius each day, marking every abnormal metal density signal, then landing, deploying the field, decomposing, and archiving it.
He discovered the wreckage of a Marauder-class Titan at the edge of a fissure in the ground and knelt down. A field of energy enveloped it, and debris poured in. The torso, weapon interfaces, reactor conduits—corroborating the fragments of the Warlord-class Titan—further enhanced the Warlord-class's overall integrity.
Several days later, deep within a buried tunnel, he found a cluster of Terminator armors. Dozens of Hades-type armors were scattered on both sides. He disassembled a miniature reactor containment chamber with an independently detachable power unit. He created a new subdirectory in the database: "Hades-type Terminator Power Armor - Design Simulation".
The beginning of the fourth month.
The transport plane continued its low-altitude patrol over the gray-black wasteland. Cohen sat in the cockpit, the HUD inside his visor displaying external environmental data.
Cohen's consciousness swept across the cargo hold. The mech's core emitted faint energy pulses; the dark blue atomic deflection shield was almost invisible in standby mode, with only occasional tiny static sparks flickering at the armor seams. The repulsive grid hummed deeply and steadily.
He snapped out of his daze and pushed the joystick.
The transport plane accelerated from its hovering altitude, heading further north. Thirty kilometers, fifty kilometers, eighty kilometers. The gray-black wasteland stretched endlessly across the horizon, the pale yellow starlight forever hanging at the same altitude. Cohen's consciousness repeatedly scanned within a five-kilometer radius each day, marking every anomalous metallic density signal, then landing, deploying the field, decomposing, and archiving it.
The entries in the database continued to increase. The fragments of the Warhound-class armor were pieced together to be 93% complete. The blueprints for the Marauder-class armor were pieced together from the fragments to form complete skeletal parameters. Of the nineteen models of the Terminator armor, thirteen had been completed to a degree of over 80% integrity. The power unit design of the Hades-type armor was disassembled, archived, and re-engineered, undergoing dozens of iterations in the sub-directory "Hades-type Terminator Power Armor - Design Derivation".
At the end of the month, the consciousness extension detected an unusual signal.
It's not a point-like density of metal, nor a sheet-like area of debris. It's a vast region stretching for tens of kilometers beneath the northern horizon, with an extremely uneven density distribution, containing signal characteristics of hundreds of thousands of different alloys. It's like the ruins of an entire human industrial civilization, compressed, folded, and buried beneath this gray-black wasteland.
The main battlefield.
Ten thousand years ago, after the viral bombs turned the surface of Istvan River 1 into a bloody, scorched wasteland, after the four Astartes Legion traitors pulled the trigger on their loyalist brethren, after the Death Legion's Titans descended from orbit into the mantle fissure and detonated entire city blocks in flames with their volcanic cannons—this was the epicenter of that massacre. The loyalists' defenses were torn apart here, the traitors' steel torrents swept through, Titans clashed and fell, Terminator armor had its cockpit pierced by power swords, and the wreckage of the Mark IV power armor stretched from the edge of the crater to the horizon.
Cohen piloted the transport plane into the area. Grayish-black volcanic ash billowed and fell under the thruster's ion stream; spent shell casings, armor fragments, hydraulic lines, and dark stains left by dried nutrient solutions, half-buried over millennia, flashed past the porthole. His consciousness swept across the ground beneath, and tens of thousands of metallic signals spread out in his perception, like a swarm of bees, like an endless steel graveyard.
The first Titan wreckage lies at the edge of a massive fissure in the earth. A Warhound-class Titan, its left arm weapon platform is completely shattered, its torso was directly hit by a volcanic cannon, and its cockpit is exposed and empty. It is 16% intact.
The second one is several hundred meters away. It's a Marauder-class aircraft; both shoulder weapon platforms have detached, both legs are broken at the knees, and the torso is half-buried in rubble. It's 23% intact.
The third, the fourth, the fifth. He stopped counting. The transport plane landed, he stepped out of the hatch, the field unfolded, disintegrated, and archived. The fragments flowed into the database like a river, cross-referencing and corroborating with existing blueprints. The Warhound-class's integrity jumped from 93% to 97%. From the fragments, the Marauder-class revealed a complete diagram of its reactor energy conduits.
Then, at the bottom of a deeper fissure, his consciousness picked up a completely different signal.
It wasn't a Warhound-class, a Marauder-class, or a Warlord-class. It was a larger, denser, and older metallic structure. Signal signatures surged up from nearly a hundred meters below the surface, penetrating rock layers, volcanic ash deposits, and fragmented terracotta steel debris.
Cohen ordered the mechs to deploy a defensive formation at the edge of the fissure, and then slid down into the fissure himself.
The power armor's thrusters cushioned the impact under low gravity. He stood firm at the bottom of the fissure, deploying his domain and disintegrating the rock beneath his feet. The vertical passage stretched downwards. Ten meters, twenty meters, thirty meters. Through layers of rock, volcanic ash, and fragments of ancient architecture.
At the end of the passage, an armored wall blocked their path. It wasn't the Warhound-class terracotta armor, but a thicker, denser, and more multi-layered composite structure. Seven layers of armor: an adamantite skeleton, a ceramic composite layer, a radiation shielding layer, and a heat dissipation layer. The formula and thickness of each layer were meticulously detailed in the database.
Emperor-class Titan.
The Death Legion deployed at least three Emperor-class aircraft in this massacre. According to fragments of memories from a previous life, one of them, the Führer-class named "Emperor's Wrath," experienced a fierce internal debate after receiving orders to fire on the loyalists. The captain, who was devout to the Emperor, was killed, damaging the "Emperor's Wrath's" soul. In the ensuing battle, it was destroyed by concentrated fire from the loyalist Titans. Another warlike-class aircraft was intercepted by the Imperial Navy fleet while withdrawing from orbit after the massacre. It was severely damaged in the space battle, and its wreckage fell into the atmosphere, scattering across the wasteland.
He didn't know, nor did he care, which wreckage this was. What he needed was the blueprint; any fragmented information would help him complete it.
Field coverage, decomposition command issued.
The entire Imperial-class Titan wreckage dissolved into an atomic cloud at the atomic level and flooded into the warehouse. It wasn't just fragments; it was 30% intact. The ruins of the twin-arm weapon platforms provided core data for the Plasma Annihilation Cannon and the Hellstorm Cannon. The parameters of the torso skeleton filled several gaps in the General-class blueprints. A complete command and communication array was preserved within the castle-like structure on its back. Of the twelve Void Shield Generators, three were relatively well-preserved, their outer shells corroded but their internal structures largely intact. The seven-layer formula for the multi-layered composite armor was fully analyzed and archived.
A new entry appeared in the database: "Imperial Titan - Debris - 30% Completeness - Model: Führer/Warrior Hybrid". It wasn't a complete blueprint, but it was enough for him to deduce the general outline in higher dimensions.
A complete Emperor-class blueprint requires the remains of at least three different parts, and there may be others scattered in other areas of the main battlefield.
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