Chapter 320: The New Eleventh B Squadron [Part 1]
Once Moon activated the black box and the external equipment began running, a whirlpool started to take form in front of the space fortress. The edges of the whirlpool were lit up slightly like a nebula, but the center of the whirlpool was dark black.
The whirlpool grew bigger to bigger. In the end, the space fortress looked as tiny as an ant before it.
The reason they chose to activate the black box in this space was because there was no nearby planet, meaning that the chances of someone or something detecting the anomaly was minimal. The whirlpool was a lot bigger than the wormhole Genya encountered probably because his activation was accidental, and this wasn’t.
After the wormhole was fully formed, everyone sat down on their seats, turned on their shields and activated their safety equipment. This was to prevent incapacitation from happening just in case of an accident occurred before, during or after the travel. Back when Cillin was forcibly transported to this part of the galaxy, it had taken him a long time to recover from his dizziness. Not even Wheeze was immune to the effects.
“Okay, we’re taking off!”
Moon gave the order and started piloting the space fortress toward the wormhole.
The space fortress had been built on Xi Kai’s electronic planet, and the construction had been overseen by Chip himself. Therefore, every building block and every connection was extremely precise. The space fortress was complex enough that it would take ten normal humans to helm it properly, but Moon was neither human nor normal. He alone was enough to control the space fortress.
This also meant that Moon was in control of the entire space fortress right now. The decision was reached only after Xi Kai had a discussion with Chip.
Before Xi Kai left, Chip had said to him, “Whatever may happen in the future, the five of us will never betray the Xi Family.”
His promise was the main reason Xi Kai decided to give Moon full control of the space fortress. He might not trust Moon, but he definitely trusted Chip.
The space fortress was huge, but the amount of passengers it carried could be counted in two hands. They were Cillin, Wheeze, Shi Tang, Sha Rou, Shusag, Tesoro and Xi Kai. Everyone else who weren’t robots had been transferred out of the space fortress a long time ago. The robots wouldn’t do anything unless ordered by Xi Kai.
The space fortress slowly moved toward the center of the wormhole. The closer they got, the quicker Shusag and everyone else’s heart beat.
Shusag had been dozing off when Cillin went to look for him. After telling him his whole plan, Shusag’s first reaction had been that he was still in a dream. How else was he supposed to react after being woken up from his sleep and told: “Come, I’ll take you to another galaxy and live the life you desire.”
For Shusag, a man who had gone through too many things and dreamed to escape the shackles of nobility since forever, Cillin’s offer was like God answering his followers’ prayers via shining a holy light from the statue they prayed to. After slapping himself a couple of times, circling around the entire house once and confirming that Cillin wasn’t fucking with him twice, Shusag immediately called a studying Tesoro to get his back home pronto. The world of hunters Cillin had described to Shusag enticed the former soldier deeply, and Cillin decided that he could use a couple of extra hands when he got back, which Shusag and Tesoro fit very well. It was a mutually beneficial agreement.
Tesoro’s teachers and classmates weren’t surprised when the young man rose from his seat. It was hardly the first time he had left without warning. They had no idea that Tesoro was never coming back.
Shi Tang and Sha Rou also greatly looked forward to their new life. They might not know how the galaxy on the other side of the wormhole looked like, but it couldn’t possibly be worse than the life they were currently leading.
At the galaxy of GAL, Sigma was tinkering with some equipment at the D-rank planet Cillin and Wheeze had vanished from. In fact, he was the only being still left on the planet. When he was at the underground base, he at least had the Lovages to play with. Now, after Cillin and Wheeze were gone, he was well and truly alone.
Sigma was hoping to repair the equipment, but he quickly discovered that it was impossible to do within a short time. Literally every piece of equipment was disrupted in some form, so he spent all his time repairing them one by one.
To say that his fragile heart was annihilated by the epic failure a few years ago would be an understatement. At the time, almost all of the energy in the underground passage was depleted, and all the programs were in tatters. The reason almost all of the underground equipment were paralyzed was because of the “machine language” frequency radiation Wheeze generated before it was sucked into the wormhole. Long story short, it was all Wheeze’s fault. Of course, most people didn’t know that yet.
Today, Sigma was repairing the equipment in silence as usual. He put on some cheerful music so that he wouldn’t feel too lonely. After all, he was the only one left on the planet.
Suddenly, a familiar signal intruded his sensors and caused the music to come to a halt. After confirming that the signal wasn’t an illusion, he let out a yelp and ran out of the underground passage while flailing its arms.
Once outside, Sigma stared at the wormhole of time and space taking form on the sky, the signal growing stronger with its formation. He knew who the signal belonged to. He would never forget even if it had been almost a millennium.
“Moon…” The blue strip on Sigma’s faceplate flashed rapidly. It looked like the quickening heartbeat of anticipation.
When the gigantic wormhole of space and time grew to a certain extent, a space fortress emerged from the center. It vanished slowly after the space fortress crossed over completely and approached the planet.
“Wheeze!” Sigma exclaimed in pleasant surprise as he picked up Wheeze’s signal as well. Today had turned out to be a happier day than he could possibly imagine.
“Sigma, I’m here to get you!” Moon shouted excitedly.
“Moon!”
Sigma activated his propeller and took to the sky. An entrance opened on the space fortress to admit him.
The two brothers who met after nearly a thousand years of separation circled each other and flailed their arms non-stop.
Xi Kai himself felt like crying after witnessing the robot who flew into the space fortress. This was Sigma, the Sigma that his ancestors only got to see in video form. He had finally witnessed Sigma with his own eyes.
No one attempted to disturb the reunion of the two brothers. After scanning the surroundings temporarily, Wheeze said to Cillin, “I don’t sense Czedow or anyone else on the planet. However, there is an active observer close by watching everything on this planet. Luckily for us, its functions were disrupted when the wormhole took form.”
Cillin had suspected that there would be an observer nearby. That was why he had told Wheeze to disrupt the signals the second they emerged from the wormhole. Since there was no one on the planet except Sigma, Cillin told Moon to fly to another location where no one was spying on them. This was also a good time to check all the news he had missed for the past two to three years while he was stranded in another galaxy.
Unlike the empire information in GAL was looser and more scattered, so it wasn’t exactly easy to catch up on everything. Still, Cillin was able to make a rough outline of things.
Cillin knew that chaos was coming before he was sent to another galaxy, but it turned out he had underestimated exactly how big it was. Nearly the entire GAL space was affected by it, and right now things were complicated to say the least. The original galactic alliance had been cut into several pieces, and the reshuffle of power that involved governments, armies, great families and other major forces were still ongoing to this day.
Even the GAL army wasn’t the old GAL army anymore. They had separated into different factions and called themselves the ruler of a corner of the galaxy. Most smaller forces found it difficult to survive in an unprecedented chaos like this, so they were either subsumed into bigger factions or had merged together to form new, stronger entities.
I didn’t matter to Cillin what the politicians and militants were playing at though. All Cillin cared about was the Sixth B Squadron.
Sigma was in a poor mood after it was done recounting stories with Moon. He had learned that the two and half of them—Chip at his current condition couldn’t be considered a whole Origin robot—were all that was left of the five of them. At the side, Xi Kai was panicking a little. He might not be the fuckers who conducted the experiments back then, but he was the patriarch of the Xi Family right now. His ancestors’ responsibility was his responsibility as well.
However, he relaxed when he learned that Sigma was no different from the robot he thought he was when studying the videos, and nowhere as craft as Moon was. In Sigma’s opinion, Xi Kai was his master’s descendant, so he would treat him well. It was that simple.
“Sigma, where’s Czedow?” Cillin asked.
Xi Kai and the others were using Cillin’s custom-made translators, so they could understand the foreign language he was using right now.
Sigma grew even gloomier when he heard the question.
“Czedow is no longer with the Sixth B Squadron. In fact, he left Vanguard right after the Sixth Squad changed hands.”
“The Sixth B Squadron had changed hands?!”