Chapter1

"Your credit code has been wiped to zero. You are worse than a cyber-dog now."

I fought bloody battles in the Abyss for the Federation for three years, only for my wife to be framed by my adjutant, her left arm shattered, and kicked into a wasteland scavenger town like a dead dog.

Three years later, I returned from the bloodbath. What awaited me was not a medal of honor, but the megacorp's indiscriminate bombing order aimed at my wife.

High up in Cloud City, the megacorp executives raised their wine glasses and sneered: "Burn it all to ashes, along with that crippled woman!"

They seemed to have forgotten that I am the Grand Marshal of the Federation, and an absolute war maniac.

Since the law means nothing, I will use the purest firepower to drag their massive fleet and the entire megacorp straight down to hell!

——

The No. 37 decompression airlock of the space station let out a piercing screech of hydraulic friction.

The heavy alloy door slowly rose. There was no Federation fleet guard of honor, nor any spotlights. The corridor was filled with a rancid stench of cheap machine oil mixed with disinfectant.

In the darkness, a rusty military tactical boot stepped heavily onto the metal grating.

Grand Marshal Layton Vance stepped out of the transition pod. He carried a pitch-black waterproof tactical backpack. The dark silver exoskeleton armor, once the symbol of the Deep Space Fleet's supreme commander, had long been corroded into a mottled dark brown by three years of acid rain and alien biological fluids in the Abyss Mining Zone. Three years of physical isolation with zero communication made him look less like a triumphant general and more like a beast that had just crawled out of hell's meat grinder.

"Bzz—"

The exhaust fan overhead suddenly stopped spinning.

Immediately after, alloy blast doors crashed down at both ends of the corridor, and an azure high-voltage power grid instantly sealed off all escape routes. The ventilation ducts began spewing pale green nerve gas, churning under the dim red alarm lights.

Layton didn't look up. His gray-blue eyes were as calm as stagnant water.

Thirty meters ahead in the shadows, twelve scarlet mechanical cyber-eyes lit up.

They were twelve cyborgs, all over two meters tall. They wore no uniforms; the numbers on their chests indicated they were death row inmates from a maximum-security prison, now uniformly implanted with Berserker Serum pumps and military-grade hydraulic mechanical arms.

"Two high-purity silicon mines." The lead cyborg spoke in a breathy, synthesized mechanical voice. His right arm was a rapidly spinning heavy chainsaw. "Mr. Victor offered a price we couldn't refuse. Layton, your myth ends here—open fire!"

Twelve heavy machine guns loaded with high-explosive armor-piercing rounds instantly spat out half-meter-long tongues of fire. In such a narrow, confined corridor, the crossfire was enough to shred a heavy main battle tank into scrap iron in an instant.

But a tenth of a second before the first bullet tore through the air, a faint blue halo rippled at the edge of Layton's retinas.

Federation classified special cybernetic implant—Neural Overclocking System, activated.

In Layton's perception, the surrounding time seemed to be instantly dragged into thick glue. The trajectories of the bullets breaking the sound barrier turned into clearly visible slow-motion air currents in his eyes.

He didn't draw his gun. During his three years in the Abyss Mining Zone, he had learned that in the absolute close quarters of CQB, the impact of steel is deadlier than bullets.

Layton's body abruptly crouched low, shooting forward close to the ground like a fired cannonball. He forcefully shattered the flow of poison gas. His broken shoulder armor brushed against three armor-piercing rounds, erupting in a dazzling string of sparks, as he crashed right into the center of the enemy formation.

Crack!

Layton's left hand precisely clamped onto the hydraulic joint of the chainsaw cyborg, his dark brown armor unleashing a terrifying physical torque. Accompanied by the harsh sound of metal snapping, he not only tore off the expensive mechanical chainsaw arm but also used the immense momentum to swing the hundred-kilogram severed steel limb like a sledgehammer at the enemies beside him.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Muffled explosions echoed through the corridor. The titanium skulls of three cyborgs burst like rotten watermelons under the frantic smashing of the chainsaw arm. A thick mixture of synthetic blood and machine oil splattered across the walls.

"He's not human! Fall back!" the remaining cyborgs roared in terror, the courage brought by the Berserker Serum instantly collapsing under this absolute, violent crushing.

Layton was like an emotionless killing machine. With a side kick, he snapped the knee joint of the target on his right, smoothly snatched the shotgun from their hands, and pressed it one-handed against the man's chin.

Boom—half his head disappeared.

Blood dripped down Layton's cold face, traversing an old scar. Seven seconds. In just seven seconds, the once-dense crossfire was completely extinguished. The floor was covered in twitching severed limbs and short-circuiting electrical sparks.

Layton tossed aside the empty shotgun and strode over to the chainsaw leader, whose legs had been smashed and was now desperately crawling backward. A military boot stomped mercilessly onto the leader's modified chest armor, caving in his sternum and the mechanical pump with a horrifying depression.

"No... wait! We just took the money..." the leader spat bloody froth, his mechanical eyes blinking frantically.

Layton didn't say another word. He drew the tactical combat knife with a nano high-frequency oscillating blade from his outer thigh, flicked his wrist, and precisely, brutally sliced open the armor on the back of the leader's neck.

"Ahhhhh—!"

Amidst the miserable screams, Layton thrust his left hand in, violently ripped out a bloody neural hub chip, and plugged it directly into the data parsing port on his wrist.

A miniature holographic projection instantly unfolded before Layton, green data cascading down like a waterfall.

[Employer Authorization Code: Apex Megacorp CEO Victor]

[Assassination Bounty: Layton Vance (Dead or Alive), Payout: Two near-Earth silicon mines.]

[Supplemental Purge Protocol: Target's family disposal record.]

Seeing the word "family," Layton's breathing, which had been as steady as stagnant water, experienced a microscopic pause.

Data decryption completed. A compressed surveillance feed popped up. The timestamp showed two years ago.

In the video, acid rain was falling. In the separation zone of Cloud City's lower district, Ilya—the aristocratic girl who was once afraid of hurting her fingers even while playing the piano—was being cornered in a dead-end alley by four thugs in megacorp uniforms.

Her expensive trench coat was already covered in mud. She curled up tightly, leaning against a dumpster, clutching a box of "high-purity anti-radiation medicine"—considered a lifeline in the wasteland—tightly to her chest.

"Your credit code has been wiped to zero by Mr. Victor, madam. In this city, you are worse than a cyber-dog now." The thug sneered, raising a high-voltage kinetic baton.

"That's mine, that's the safe access he left for me!" Ilya didn't cry, though her voice trembled. She fiercely protected the medicine in her arms. It was her only trump card for survival before fleeing to the wasteland, and even the only hope for the new life gestating in her womb.

"Bang!"

The kinetic baton smashed down viciously.

A scalp-numbing sound of bone cracking came from the video. To protect the medicine, Ilya had taken the blow head-on with her left arm. Her forearm bent at a twisted, broken angle, with stark white bone splinters piercing through the skin.

Yet she didn't even scream. She only let out a muffled groan, biting her lip until it bled, burying her face in the filthy mud. She let them strip her of the last meager pieces of valuable jewelry, and then, like kicking a dead dog, they kicked her down the garbage disposal chute leading to the Wasteland Scavenger Town.

Immediately after, the screen switched to an exile order bearing the megacorp's highest seal, and a candid photo taken recently in the wasteland:

In the photo, Ilya's hair was cut into a messy bob, her face smeared with gray-black machine oil. Her broken left arm had been crudely amputated and replaced with the cheapest, rusted mechanical prosthetic, with exposed wires and gears. She was carrying a rivet gun on one shoulder, standing in the blowing sand, staring warily at the camera.

"Victor..."

From Layton's hoarse throat, a name was squeezed out, as if from the freezing depths of the abyss.

He had thought that fighting desperately in the Black Zone for the Federation, cut off from all communication, was to protect Cloud City and to protect her. But the adjutant he personally promoted had not only used forged deepfake data to strip him of everything, but had also brutally crushed the only soft spot in his life into this state.

[Red Maximum Priority Warning!]

The holographic projection on his retina suddenly popped up an intercepted real-time order:

[Sender: Cloud City, Victor's Office]

[Target Location: Wasteland D-9 Scavenger Town]

[Order Content: Execute physical erasure immediately. Heavy Combined Battalion is in position. At 12:00 tonight, raze it to the ground, leaving no survivors, along with that crippled woman and all refugees. Time remaining until execution: 04 hours 12 minutes.]

The red light of the countdown flickered wildly in Layton's pupils.

Layton slowly pulled the data cable from his wrist. He looked down at the chainsaw leader still clinging to life beneath his foot.

"The silicon mines Victor gave you, you'll have to spend them in hell."

Bang!

The alloy military boot suddenly applied force, and the leader's head burst like a tomato crushed by a hydraulic press.

Layton stepped over the corpses littering the floor and walked to the blast doors where the poison gas was dissipating. He unzipped the massive waterproof tactical bag. There were no personal items inside.

Only two large-caliber kinetic Vulcan cannons and thirty kilograms of high-explosive C4 plastic explosives.

Layton locked the heavy ammunition belt into the receiver with a heavy clack.

No more procedures. No more reporting to command. No more appeals.

Since Cloud City loved using numbers and machines to butcher the innocent, he would use the purest firepower and corpses to teach these suit-wearing megacorps what true fear from the abyss feels like.