Lei Ting withdrew his gaze, his brow furrowed.
Just now, he had felt a sudden, intense sensation: someone was watching him. They were exposed. It was likely an Esper with a peculiar ability—not of a high energy level, but with an effective technique, suspected to be of the Heteromorphic type. This person was probably one of the "trump cards" kept by this pirate group.
He shared this information with his teammates and immediately adjusted the list of pending plans.
[Plan A: Cancelled.]
[Plan B: Initiated.]
The former was their original plan: prioritize destroying the control and escape systems of the escort ships surrounding the flagship, paralyzing the fleet to block the flagship's movement, and then slowly dealing with the remaining issues.
As for the latter—their current plan...
With a sharp *whoosh*, several teammates streaked toward the flagship. Lei Ting did the same, but unlike the others who, led by Number Two and Number Three, dived straight into the flagship, he surged toward the very center of the formation.
Since these were pirates within the Federation, their ships followed the standard Orion humanoid layout—upright and oriented. These vessels were fundamentally different from certain alien designs; there would be no internal shifts in the direction of gravity. Thus, boarding maneuvers were perfectly viable for his teammates.
As for himself...
Lei Ting did not take a deep breath; he didn't want to further deplete the oxygen reserves in his armor’s life-support system. His eyes flashed with golden light as he composed himself with clinical precision. His pre-heated auxiliary eyes deployed, glowing with a red light that stained his vision a terrifying crimson.
Then, he raised both hands.
...
*BOOM!!*
The flagship shuddered violently.
The four super-soldiers, who had scattered to neutralize different sector systems, showed no signs of alarm. With a gun in one hand and a specialized cold weapon in the other, they moved with composure, running along walls with an air of indifference toward death. They granted "peace" to everyone they encountered with lethal efficiency, cutting through the ship's internal structure like bolts of lightning.
Among them, Number Five was the fastest. Her ability was exceptionally strange; every time she moved, she vanished into a flash of purple light, reappearing a moment later across varying distances in another burst of violet. The short, slender blades in her hands spun rapidly. With a sharp *shink*, she severed the power supply chains inside the main server room.
Golden radiance, like drifting feathers or sea foam, wove through the corridors, illuminating the violet eyes beneath her visor.
*BOOM!!!*
Nearby, an escort ship was violently pulled into a collision with the flagship. Under the intense impact, the viewports shattered instantly, but no vacuum vortex formed—the outer alloy structure of the escort ship had perfectly sealed the breach.
The drifting golden light illuminated the cloud of flying debris. Number Four walked alone through a corridor, the play of light and shadow on his armor making it seem as though he were bathing in warm sunlight.
His steps were ghost-like, drifting weightlessly around a corner and into the flagship’s power chamber.
Like the power chamber of any contemporary Human Union starship, it was packed with various mechanical structures. Collectively, they resembled a massive, boxy heart, continuously pumping out vast amounts of energy to power the entire vessel.
Number Four’s gaze was flat. With a single sweep of his eyes, he accurately identified the "heart's" critical point. He pointed a finger, and a sphere of white light ignited at his fingertip. Suddenly, a thin, sharp beam of white light erupted, piercing through his target without resistance before dissipating into the air.
The "heart" shuddered and trembled for a moment. Number Four turned to leave.
Behind him, the "heart" let out a chaotic sound of collapsing metal. Most of its internal mechanical structures crumbled in an instant, and sparks flew as the final safety measures were triggered. Following the connected conduits, it fractured into countless components of varying shapes and a small core reactor.
The core reactor remained undamaged; it had merely been shut down temporarily.
Number Four stepped out of the power chamber, his mechanical stride maintaining a perfectly consistent length as he headed toward his next objective.
Amidst that golden radiance—neither gentle nor violent—he had not deployed his auxiliary eyes, yet a chaotic, flickering red light glowed beneath his visor.
*RUMBLE!!!*
Simultaneously, the navigation and fire-control systems of every escort ship failed. Then, within a terrifyingly short span of time, they were kneaded into a single mass around the flagship by Lei Ting.
On the exterior of this tidy yet chaotic "clump," the metal structures quietly softened and spread, wrapping everything inside. It transformed into a massive, clean, and bright metal cube, floating silently in space.
The mission was complete.
To him, this couldn't even be considered a battle. He still hadn't found an opponent of equal caliber—as usual.
For someone who wasn't a battle maniac by nature but still craved high-intensity combat, this was somewhat frustrating. However, he felt no true dissatisfaction. What was there to be unhappy about? During his internship, he had executed many pirate suppression missions, and even then, he had never encountered an opponent who could give him a headache.
Lei Ting sighed.
To be honest, the only reason he had included his teammates in the plan was probably just to give them a sense of participation...
The metal structure rippled open to form a door. The tall, sturdy Mecha Esper flew inside and landed in the flagship's main control room. He swept his gaze left and right, then paused, slightly stunned.
Wait, this... he hadn't gone out of his way to knock out the pirates operating the controls here, had he?
He was momentarily bewildered, but he remained calm and steady. He released his mental strength for a scan, only to discover with surprise that people were definitely missing.
Yes, people were gone. He couldn't find the Esper who had probed him... nor could he find the pirate captain who should theoretically be here.
Wait...
Lei Ting vaulted upward, crashing through a side door of the control room with a *BOOM!*
This door led to a small, independent escape pod launch point. It was clear the high-ranking members of this pirate group were quite afraid of death—but now, the escape pod was still there, even crushed and deformed by the escort ships he had pulled in. Yet, the people who should have been inside were gone.
Lei Ting’s brow furrowed slightly. Without a word, he began to search every inch of the surrounding space with his mental strength. Finally, he found the source of the problem a short distance away.
There was a lingering trace of spatial fluctuation.
It was a spatial fluctuation akin to a warp jump.
He didn't approach to inspect it. Instead, he observed the area from a distance, and then a golden light flashed in his eyes.
*BOOM!!!!*
Golden radiance erupted as an explosion manifested its power at the site of the spatial fluctuation.
It was a simple projection of superpowered force—the most basic application of energy—but in Lei Ting's hands, it perfectly triggered a brief disaster.
Under Lei Ting’s startled gaze, a shuttle-shaped spatial rift was torn open. The air in the room turned into a storm, as everything from mechanical structures to decorative fabrics was sucked into the vacuum by the howling winds. The other side of the rift led to open space; the blue glow left by a warp engine had not yet faded, though it was slowly dissipating into the darkness.
In the next second, the opening of the rift seemed to trigger a self-repair mechanism in space-time. It slammed shut in an instant, cleanly severing a piece of non-metallic structure that hadn't managed to pass through in time. The cross-section was as smooth as a mirror.
Lei Ting’s brow remained tightly knit. After a moment of contemplation, he raised a hand to catch the non-metallic substance, bringing it back with a piece of metal.
It was a high-strength aerospace synthetic resin used by the Orion Human Union in earlier years. It appeared to be a piece of reinforcement from the wall of the escape pod launch point. Although this material was now an "outdated version," its strength was still respectable.
...Well, the reason it had fallen off was that Lei Ting had smashed it.
*Tsk.*
Lei Ting took one last look at where the spatial rift had vanished before returning to the main control room. Under the dim emergency lights powered by the ship's backup reserves, he opened the flagship's main computer.
An ordinary, small-scale pirate group... should not possess the power to tear open a spatial rift.
If that was a superpowered effect, it would be classified as high-risk. If it wasn't a superpower but a scientific achievement...
...No. Opening a small spatial rift large enough for a person to pass through while stabilizing the surrounding space was simply not something current galactic science and technology could achieve.
This kind of effortless power could only be a superpowered effect... and it certainly didn't belong to the pirate captain or his subordinates. Otherwise, this pirate group wouldn't need to scrape by in the Federation, an environment with fierce competition and a narrow scope of operation.
Lei Ting’s expression turned solemn. He directly utilized a set of optical computer plug-ins—ones labeled as military-grade, though he had never seen anything like them during his time in the First Legion. He swiftly bypassed the flagship's authorization system and accessed its database.
He suspected... no, he was certain from the very beginning that this mission had been meticulously arranged. Regardless of which side the orchestrators came from, if they wanted him to find something in the system, he would find it.
Even if those people certainly hadn't expected him to resolve the mission in such a blunt and overwhelming manner.
Lei Ting skimmed through the database list and found that most entries were harvest records and updated lists of interstellar dangerous persons... such records had been repeated for over a decade, with many of those dangerous individuals eventually marked as "deceased."
He then opened the pirate captain’s personal database, only to find that its style differed from the public one only by the inclusion of a few scattered emails filled with crude language.
Until a year ago, when it began receiving messages from an ID named "Fire"...
Lei Ting quickly opened them, only to find they were either meaningless small talk or random nonsense. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
But the books he had read over the years weren't for nothing. He quickly retrieved a barely applicable decryption program from his memory. After some effort, he finally saw a small amount of hidden...
...Gibberish.
Lei Ting: "..."
Lei Ting: "?"
Great. He had decrypted a whole lot of nothing. Without a codebook, no one could understand this.
His lips twitched as he closed the useless terminal and stood up to stretch.
Regardless, he realized that the captain of this pirate group was definitely an agent sent by some faction. He just didn't understand why this person would bring a pirate group here to wait for death... well, the man himself had already fled. So, did the captain travel all this way just to dump his crew here to die?
He wondered what dark tides were churning behind the scenes.
Lei Ting shook his head.
In today’s interstellar society, the vast majority of pirate groups in the Milky Way gathered in lawless zones or star sectors divided among dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of small nations and planetary civilizations.
Within the Federation, the wealthy and powerful had their own security teams. More importantly, civilians traveling long distances mostly used official transport—something 99% of pirate groups wouldn't dare touch.
Furthermore, given the heavy patrol presence of the Federation's various legions, large pirate groups had mostly been expelled or annihilated. Medium and small groups either survived in the cracks by only targeting corporate transport ships that avoided official routes, or...
...Or they were simply a front, a "glove" worn by certain powers to do their dirty work.
In short, if the current Federation was a sieve, then the pirate world within Federation space was an even greater sieve. You could cast a net and fail to catch a single "authentic" high-seas marauder.
The ones Lei Ting had killed in previous missions were almost all tentacles reaching in from large pirate groups outside the Federation.
Now, in this mission that reeked of the arrogance of the Federation's upper echelons from start to finish, Lei Ting stood inside the giant metal cube he had just forged and saw it once again... a tentacle from afar.
If he weren't powerful enough to crush all of this, he would have surely begun to harbor ill will toward the owner of that tentacle after struggling so hard to get here.
If the pirate captain hadn't mysteriously vanished, he would have certainly fought the man to the death... and unless the opponent was an S-rank Esper from the outside world in disguise, they would have absolutely died by his hand. He was quite self-aware of that fact.
Lei Ting rubbed his chin thoughtfully, his gauntlet clinking softly against his jaw armor.
Someone wanted to use this incident to push him into a state of personal vendetta and hostility with another faction.
But this matter... it had been completely derailed by his habit of not proactively reporting the growth of his own combat power, and by the pirate captain’s immediate flight.
***
| Chinese | English | Notes/Explanation |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 异化系 | Heteromorphic type | A category of Esper abilities involving physical or structural transformation. |
| 猎户人联 | Orion Human Union | The formal name for the Federation/human faction. |
| 辅眼 | Auxiliary eyes | Sub-sensors or secondary targeting optics on Lei Ting's armor. |
| 跳帮 | Boarding | The act of forcibly entering an enemy ship during space combat. |
| 火 | Fire | The ID of the mysterious contact in the pirate captain's database. |
| 第一军团 | First Legion | A military unit within the Federation. |
| 空间裂缝 | Spatial rift | A tear in the fabric of space-time. |
