"Let them try," Hye replied, his tone so indifferent he might as well have been talking about the weather.
He acted as if the portals, which represented a massive investnt in energy and tactical positioning, were entirely disposable. "Just make sure you don’t face them head-on if they co. I’ll handle the rest, okay?"
"..."
Olana remained silent. She knew that if he had uttered those words just yesterday, she would have dismissed him as a delusional amateur. She wouldn’t have believed a single syllable.
Yet at this mont, after watching him turn an entire grand battlefield into a chaotic circus under his absolute control, she knew he wasn’t boasting. He really could handle it.
Such confidence and sheer might were qualities she had only ever felt from the high-ranking patriarchs of the universe’s Great Races.
She couldn’t help but follow him with her eyes until he vanished from the bridge. Monts later, she watched on the external sensors as his sleek, high-speed ship detached from the hangar and accelerated toward the nearest portal.
"Let’s see what you’re really up to..." she whispered to the empty bridge.
He had told her he would be back in a "few hours," but she took that as a typical commander’s taphor.
To her understanding of logistics, clearing the loot from even a single major battlefield would take at least half a day, likely much more. He would need a massive labour force of thousands of warriors to strip the wrecks and haul the cargo.
Not to ntion the vultures. Every battlefield attracted secondary forces looking to ambush scavengers. To clean a field of debris, one usually had to pay ticulous attention to sensor ghosts and be prepared to pay a hefty price in blood to defend the spoils.
That was why no sane force in the universe moved to scavenge until the very end of a war—the risk of exposing a vulnerable salvage fleet to an active enemy was too high.
Yet, as she monitored Hye’s progress through the long-range scanners, her confusion only grew. She began to replay the video feeds and sensor logs to confirm she wasn’t hallucinating.
Hye’s ship didn’t deploy massive cargo hauliers. He simply stopped his vessel in the middle of a debris field, sent out a swarm of suited warriors who touched the hulls of the dead ships, and then moved to the next spot.
To her eyes, he looked entirely motionless and inefficient. He sent warriors to "claim" the ships, recalled them almost instantly, and then jumped to the next coordinate. This wasn’t scavenging—it was like he was just collecting a guest list.
"Tsk! I’ll need to have a word or two with him when he cos back," she mulled, frustrated by what she perceived as his poor performance.
She thought about the literal tons of high-grade loot he was missing by not boarding the ships, not cracking the safes, and not stripping the dead bodies of their personal gear.
What she didn’t see, however, was the hidden process. She knew there was a mysterious link between these grand battles and the "bones" he seed so obsessed with.
She was positive she would find a clue if she watched closely, but he seed to be doing nothing but "tagging" the wrecks.
She didn’t realise that Hye wasn’t looking for copper and credits; he was operating on a level of necromantic logistics that bypassed the need for manual labour entirely.
While she sat there judging his "poor" scavenging skills, Hye was effectively marking millions of tons of biological and tallic matter for a specialised harvest that Olana’s conventional sensors couldn’t even detect.
Olana watched the sensor feeds with a mix of pity and frustration. She would have never guessed that Hye actually possessed the Turbo Collecting Ability.
It was a legendary, myth-tier skill that only a rare few in the history of the universe had ever mastered. To her, he looked like a child trying to pick up grains of sand with a spoon while standing in a desert.
On top of that, he didn’t just have a standard collection—he possessed the Turbo Bone Collecting Ability. Hye no longer needed to do things the hard and slow way like he did in the early days of the apocalypse.
Hye simply stood in the middle of a massive pile of drifting ships, activated his aura, and in a single heartbeat, he harvested every bone and cleared every inventory of every corpse within a five-kilotre radius. He then let his warriors "tag" the hollowed-out hulls to be towed away later.
"If I can eventually use my collecting abilities over items stored within my warriors’ tokens, then it’ll be heaven for ," he muttered to himself. He was already thinking greedily about the next evolution of his power.
He imagined spreading his 200 million Soulers across an entire galaxy, letting them fill their individual spatial tokens, then recalling them to a single point where he could harvest the bones and loot directly from their storage in a single pulse of energy.
It was a fancy dream, a vision of logistical godhood, but sothing told him he would need to sell a kidney or even half a liver to the System’s high-level rchants if he wanted to acquire a heaven-defying upgrade like that.
Olana, anwhile, was blinded by the limitations of her own sensors. She didn’t see the streams of white and gold light—the soul-essence and bone-matter—flowing into Hye’s ship.
Hye kept collecting tons of bones and high-grade loot, his laughter echoing evilly through his cockpit after clearing the first massive battlefield in less than thirty minutes.
"Ti to visit other places," Hye said, showing no signs of slowing down. He instantly moved his scout ship through the portal, returned montarily to the flank of his battleship, and dove into the next shimring violet gateway.
Watching him move in this erratic way, seemingly missing ninety percent of the loot in her eyes, finally pushed Olana over the edge.
After two hours of watching what she considered "amateur scavenging," she sent him a long, detailed ssage.
She even attached several "Newbie Guiding Videos" produced by the Scavenger Guilds on how to effectively strip a battlefield and maximise yield per cubic ter of debris.
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