[That’s not enough!] Moth’s panic was peaking. [The Grand Elder was too impatient to uproot the rot. He thought this was a golden, one-ti chance to hit them by surprise. He didn’t even consider the possibility of a counter-trap! He only took a handful of high-level forces with him—nowhere near enough to survive a well-coordinated ambush!]
[It doesn’t matter!] Hye calmly sent back. [Because I’m going to jump directly to the Grand Elder’s last known coordinates and pull him out. As for the other Elders, I need you to open portals to their closest known locations imdiately.
I’ll dispatch the bulk of my forces to hold the line until you can mobilise your remaining forces around the capital. It’s a stroke of pure luck that I didn’t commit these legions to the defence here!]
[Yes, but...] Moth’s reply ca through with hesitation. He recognised the brilliance of the plan, but the cold reality of the battlefield was pushing back.
[If they have effectively sealed all communications, that ans they have also enacted a localised space-lock! No portal will be able to lock onto those coordinates now. We’re effectively blind and blocked!]
[Then find the nearest stable jump point to those locations!] Hye commanded, his ssage a calm contrast to Moth’s escalating panic.
[Think, Moth. No matter how fierce or deadly the traps are, a man like the Grand Elder and his personal guard won’t just roll over and die in the first ten minutes. They are monsters in their own right.
The enemy didn’t seal space and communications because they’ve already won—they did it to buy ti. They need to finish the job in total silence before the news can leak and the rest of the loyalist forces can mobilise.]
The logic hit Moth like lightning. The more he processed Hye’s assessnt, the more it made perfect sense. Without another word of protest, Moth surged into a frenzy of activity. He began barking orders to the remaining junior Elders, coordinating the grim news with the proposed solution.
As Moth worked the logistics, Hye turned his attention back to the current battlefield. Now that he had unmasked the enemy’s deception, he had no reason to play along with their decoy any longer.
With a ntal command, he summoned his Soulers and Reapers back from the front lines.
"It’s a waste to let these puppets just die in the dirt," Hye mused to himself. He reached into his inventory, withdrawing heaps of different-grade bones. The air around him began to hum as he prepared to push his technique to its absolute limit. "However, controlling warriors of a higher system level... That’s going to be an expensive al."
He had initially taken the bones out as a precautionary asure, but as he activated his technique, the central black sphere of energy began to flicker violently. The consumption was staggering. The sheer disparity in levels between himself and the enemy warriors ant his energy reserves were being drained at a high rate.
"I’m lucky I spent so much ti harvesting high-grade bones earlier in this world," he muttered, watching as the piles of bone vanished in minutes, literally burning away to sustain his technique. "If I hadn’t stockpiled these, I would have been forced to limit the reach of the technique. But today? Today, I’m taking everything."
He didn’t dwell on the cost. Once he found the exact rate at which he needed to consu the bones to dominate the higher-levelled minds, he began to move. His flagship glided over the wreckage of the grand battlefield like a reaper’s scythe. From the black sphere on top of his ship, thick black arms reached out, snaking down to the ground and latching onto the reeling enemy warriors.
Over the next hour, he controlled the enemies and enforced contracts over them. Hye didn’t leave a single scrap for the crows. He swept up every warrior the enemy had sent, leaving behind nothing but the hollowed-out husks of fallen spaceships and the initial casualties of the ground war.
[Are you ready yet?!] Moth’s voice broke through the silence that was created after controlling all the enemies in the area. Moth had been watching the feed in a state of near-paralysis, witnessing the black arms of Hye’s sphere claim an entire army. The mont the flagship finally ceased its circling, Moth knew it was ti.
[Open the portal. Now.] Hye’s response was imdiate.
He knew he had traded an hour of precious ti for this harvest, but as he looked at his new roster, he knew it was worth every second of the delay. Out of the initial five hundred thousand troops the enemy had sacrificed as bait, Hye had successfully bent over three hundred thousand of them to his will. He had forced them all into binding contracts, officially integrating them into his personal legion.
During that hour of harvesting, Hye hadn’t been idle. He had interrogated the captives, asking a single, piercing question: What is the endga?
The answers were chillingly consistent, confirming his earlier deductions while adding terrifying new layers. He learned that the Toranks weren’t just looking for a political coup—they were moving their new, top-secret "God Weapon" into this theatre.
The only thing stopping them was the legendary defensive grid protecting the holand’s solar system. To bypass it, they needed to decapitate the leadership. By killing the Grand Elder and sparking a civil war, they intended to cause enough chaos within the control hubs to force a system-wide shutdown of the planetary defences.
Without those defences, the God Weapon would be unstoppable. If the defensive asures stayed active, the weapon would be a sitting duck.
Learning this caused even Hye to hesitate for a fraction of a second. The scale of the threat was larger than he had imagined. But then, a familiar, predatory glint returned to his eyes.
"It seems it’s better to coordinate this next move with the Grand Elder personally," Hye whispered, a sharp, evil smile cutting across his face. In his mind, the general layout of a massive trap was already beginning to take shape.
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