Global Lords: Building the Strongest Civilization with SSS Rank Talent-Chapter 135: Defeating the Pre-Calamity Monster, Finding the Fourth Fragment
The arachnid lunged forward and impaled a kneeling Lizard-man on a massive, rusted pincer.
Iron-Scale lunged directly at the beast’s face. He swung his scythe, hooking the curved, brutal blade directly under the arachnid’s massive mandibles.
The rotting monstrosity thrashed, lifting the Inquisitor off the ground, but Iron-Scale held his iron-grip on the weapon’s shaft, using the scythe’s blade to physically lock the snapping jaws open.
[ Hold the target. ] Red transmitted directly to the Kobold.
Red accessed the newly and recently upgraded Bastion’s macro-artillery grid on his secondary screen. He locked onto Iron-Scale’s exact coordinates and authorized a concentrated strike.
Four alchemical shells launched from the Bastion, arched across the continental sky, and slammed through the canyon’s open ceiling. The bio-gas explosions cracked the arachnid’s brittle exo-skeleton plating.
Highly corrosive gas immediately melted the puppet’s rotting joints, giving Iron-Scale the opening he needed. The Kobold violently wrenched his scythe backward, using the hooked blade to physically tear the spider’s fangs entirely out of its skull.
The feral husk collapsed into a puddle of melting sludge and broken scales.
Iron-Scale wiped the black ichor from his helmet. He climbed the hardened resin web and pulled the dark stone free. The chaotic runes covering the surface burned against his scaled claws. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖
Red leaned forward on his throne and synced the visual data through his terminal.
[ OBJECT DETECTED: ??? ]
[ SCANNING... ]
[ ERROR: DIVINE SIGNATURE UNRECOGNIZED ]
[ ERA: PRE-CALAMITY ]
Red activated his Translation Matrix and merged the new code with the previous three fragments.
[ ITEM: FRAGMENT OF THE FORGOTTEN (4/???) ]
[ TRANSLATION MATRIX: UPDATED ]
[ ...THE HUNGER... THE VOID BETWEEN STARS... HE WHO EATS THE LIGHT... ]
[ ...THE BEASTS OF THE EARTH WERE FED THE SHARDS TO CONTAIN THE PLAGUE... ]
[ ...THE LEVIATHAN SWALLOWED THE SECOND LOCK... ]
[ ...THE HYDRA GUARDED THE FIRST... ]
[ ...THE ASH-DRAKE BURIED THE THIRD DEEP WITHIN THE WOMB OF THE WORLD... ]
[ ...THE ARACHNID SPUN THE FOURTH INTO THE CANYON OF MADNESS... ]
"Four secured," Red muttered, dismissing the translation block. "Based on the continental spread, the last piece has to be in the north."
He dragged his map interface over to the primary screen and completely zoomed out to view the northern hemisphere. Because the game engine actively refused to acknowledge Pre-Calamity code, standard scans were entirely useless.
Red opened his advanced Architect tools and began stripping away the visual layers of the region, cycling rapidly through geological density, magical resonance, and subterranean cavity filters.
He scrutinized every jagged mountain range, swept his cursor across the depths of the Howling Rift, and analyzed the dense true-ice glaciers stretching toward the edge of the world. He spent hours meticulously checking the natural terrain for any hollowed-out vaults or abnormal fossilized structures that might mirror the Leviathan’s ribs or the Southern Vault.
The topographical scans returned absolutely nothing. The frozen wasteland offered no hints, no hidden game-engine markers, and no corrupted data signatures.
"This won’t work..." Red noted, tapping his metal-clad fingers against the armrest.
Since the orbital tools were blind to the glitch, manual excavation was the only viable strategy left.
Down on the physical map, the northern ridges echoed with the deafening sound of shattering ice.
Thousands of frost-barbarians labored in the absolute zero temperatures of the glacial shelf. Stripped of their weapons and titles, the massive fur-clad warriors swung heavy Star-Iron pickaxes into the permafrost in synchronized movements.
They were carving a massive trench directly through the frozen bedrock to lay the foundational stone for Red’s continental railway, doubling their brutal labor as a massive, blind excavation effort.
Gorak paced the edge of the expanding quarry. The Warlord’s breath plumed in thick clouds of white steam as he watched the barbarians struggle to break a particularly dense cluster of true-ice.
A dozen barbarians repeatedly struck the translucent blue boulder, but their pickaxes merely bounced off the hardened surface. Gorak snorted in disgust. The Troglodyte leapt down into the trench, his massive weight cracking the frozen mud upon impact. He shoved the exhausted humans aside and cracked his heavy Star-Iron gauntlets together.
Drawing his massive arm back, Gorak drove his bone-plated fist directly into the center of the boulder. The true-ice violently detonated into a shower of crystalline shrapnel, clearing the path forward in a single, devastating blow.
"You dig too slow!" Gorak roared, turning his burning crimson eyes on the shivering workforce. "The Ka-Lam-Tee demands the iron path! The Ka-Lam-Tee demands the black stone! Break the earth until your hands bleed, or I will feed you to the furnaces!"
The barbarians scrambled back to their positions, terrified by the sheer physical dominance of the monster, and resumed swinging their pickaxes with desperate intensity. Up in the Void, Red watched the trench slowly carve its way deeper into the northern ice.
The final piece of the server-wiping puzzle was buried somewhere beneath the permafrost, and Red was fully prepared to dismantle the entire region piece by piece until he dug it out.
Red stared at the blind topographical map of the northern hemisphere. Scouring the continent pixel by pixel was a massive waste of his cognitive bandwidth, and relying purely on Gorak’s brute-force excavation could take decades.
The game engine was intentionally hiding the final Pre-Calamity code. If standard System tools and manual digging couldn’t uncover the fifth fragment, Red needed to devise a completely different method to force the game engine to reveal its location.
Until he formulated that strategy, he needed to consolidate his existing pieces.
Red shifted his view away from the frozen northern ridges and pulled up the southern grid. Down in the subterranean depths of the badlands, Old-Shell stood over the shattered remains of the Pre-Calamity vault alongside the newly tamed Ash-Drake.
[ The southern objective is complete, ] Red projected his voice directly into the minds of the colossal beasts and the surviving iron-wood Treants. [ Secure the artifacts. March the vanguard back to the Bastion. ]
Old-Shell let out a deep, rumbling growl of obedience that shook the cavern walls. The massive reptile turned his heavy, emerald-infused carapace toward the surface, leading the Treants and the submissive Ash-Drake on the long trek back to the central continent.
