I Only Wanted A Class In The Apocalypse-Chapter 1943: Digging For the Truth Using Two Different Teams!

Hye recalled the incredibly complicated process of his own entry into this solar system—the layers of security, the orbital locks, and the constant monitoring.

There had to be a high-level traitor in the upper circle of the Hescos. Only someone with immense authority could facilitate the entry of an alien Torank vessel every month and keep its presence a total secret from the rest of the empire.

He reached the primary storage facility and crashed the heavy reinforced door open. He stepped inside and was immediately shocked by the scene that welcomed him.

"Damn! I thought this facility only stored the ore on the surface, not that it dug so deep into the ground like this…"

Hye stood at the edge of a precipice. The storage area inside the building was a perfect cylinder, extending for tens of metres below the ground level. The engineers who built the city ensured they utilised the subterranean space to shield the special ores from surface hazards and temperature fluctuations.

"That means there is a massive amount of this ore here, and likely at every other major building in the city," Hye realised. The scale of the theft was breathtaking.

He summoned an army of his warriors using tokens and signalled for several of his big battleships to descend and land in the warehouse district. "Don't leave a single rock behind! Take everything and load it into the ships!"

From the information harvested by his warriors, the Torank transport ship was scheduled to arrive in exactly two days to collect the month's haul. Yet, Hye was certain it wouldn't show its face this time.

The traitors in the Elder Council must have already sent a frantic warning to the Toranks, halting all shipping operations until the dust settled and the threat—Hye himself—was dealt with.

"If they sent a ship here now, they'd risk exposing every other hidden city on the planet," Hye mused to himself. He knew this grand loot belonged to him alone. He left the heavy lifting and the transfer of the ores to his tireless warriors, while he took the opportunity to explore the city further.

From a distance, the city had looked as if it were simply built against the mountain to utilise its shadow for defence. Yet, as Hye walked the inner perimeters, he was surprised to find that the inhabitants had hollowed out vast sections of the mountain rocks. They had constructed a grand, multi-tiered metropolis entirely within the mountain's core.

The part he had seen from the surface—the warehouses and the walls—represented less than ten percent of the city's actual size.

"This explains why my technique ended up adding hundreds of thousands of people," he shook his head in amusement. The city was a masterpiece of clandestine engineering. It was far too perfect to be left abandoned.

Hye paced the metallic corridors of the hollowed-out mountain, his boots echoing against the seamless, dark alloy floors. He still wasn't entirely aware of the specific technology being used to overcome the deadly, crushing nature of this world.

It was a marvel of engineering, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to walk inside the city as if they were strolling through a temperate capital of a normal world.

"Perhaps it's something like a starship's internal life-support and inertial dampeners, coupled with localised planetary shields and defensive measures, but scaled up to a gargantuan, city-wide level," he thought to himself. He considered that this place would have been a fascinating case study for Old Gan.

The old researcher would have probably wept with joy at the sight of such sophisticated atmospheric stabilisation technology. "I should definitely bring him with me next time," Hye decided. A gut feeling told him that despite the current chaos, this wouldn't be his last visit to the Hescos' homeland.

As he had moved the entire population into his fleet for a more controlled interrogation, the city now looked as vacant and eerie as a ghost ruin. At first, the silence had piqued his curiosity, but as he wandered through the empty plazas and abandoned high-rises, the novelty wore off, and he grew bored with the stillness.

"I'll take this city as the central base for my operations in this world," Hye decided. With a wave of his hand, he summoned a fresh legion of warriors from his tokens. "Dig into every corner, search for any clues, and find the heart of this city's secrets."

He didn't bring them out for a simple sightseeing tour. He wanted them to perform a deep sweep of the entire mountain. He ordered them to search the homes of his captives, dismantle suspicious machinery, and look behind every rock and building.

If there were hidden data slates, physical ledgers, or secret communication relays, he wanted them all gathered in a special flagship he dedicated for this purpose.

By the time he had assigned enough warriors to the search duty to ensure no stone was left unturned, he finally returned to the familiar sanctuary of his small ship.

"I need to go through the mountain of messages piling up," he sighed, cracking his neck. He knew that the longer he delayed, the more the workload would compound until it became an insurmountable wall of reports.

He sat in his command chair and began the gruelling process of filtering through thousands of reports sent by his various reports.

He had two primary streams of information now: the interrogation group, who were documenting the verbal testimonies of the hundreds of thousands of captives, and the search group, who were uploading scans of physical evidence.

His job was to be the filter—to find the genuine gems amidst the tons of useless, repetitive information.

For several hours, the results were underwhelming. He found a few interesting claims now and then—rumours of shadow leaders or whispers of strange visitors from the stars—but these were mostly isolated tales from seemingly low-level labourers.

Without secondary confirmation or backing, they were just noise. He stored these possibilities aside for now and continued his deep dive.