System Wars: Here Comes the Heroes!-Chapter 38: Technology vs Pugilism

"Firing missiles!"

"Oh shit."

Several panels across Alpha-887's newly minted mech opened for a brief moment before expelling a volley of missiles. These vicious little explosives flew through the air like a swarm of angry hornets with Gaia Mask as their target, ready to deliver a payload designed to disperse the dust that made up his body and atomize them in the process.

"Shit! Shit! Shit!"

In response to this volley of explosive death, Gaia Mask initially deformed his body of sand like a cartoon character so that all the missiles flew right through him.

"Phew!"

Under normal circumstances, he would've been worried that dodging these missiles would hurt the people that were directly behind him, but since Platiknight was running defense with his barrier, he knew he could count on them to protect them instead.

"Have at thee, vile bringers of destruction!" Platiknight declared while standing on his shield bubble and entering a fighting stance. "I'll send all of you flying back!"

Unfortunately, these weren't standard dumb missiles.

The moment Platiknight was about to throw out a punch in order to knock away one of the missiles, the damn things suddenly turned upwards and began to fly back towards Gaia Mask's direction. However, they weren't flying directly backwards.

"Huh?"

Instead, the missiles flew in an arcing path back towards Gaia's Mask direction until they reached a point that was several dozen feet above his head.

Once the missiles reached this apex, whatever propellant was driving them forward suddenly stopped, and the missiles began to fall towards Gaia Mask's direction.

Due to the height from which these missiles began to fall, Gaia Mask didn't realize he was about to get impacted until Platiknight called it out.

"My liege! Look out above you!"

"Huh?"

Confused by Platiknight's call, Gaia Mask made the mistake of looking up.

"OH SHIT!"

Gaia Mask's initial reaction to possibly becoming a live re-enactment of a war crime wasn't exactly positive or productive. He just sort of stood there like a rube before it finally clicked that he should be running for cover, making a cover, or...

[Activating, Heroic Heart.]

...try and do something incredibly stupid.

'Wait a minute...I'm made of earth right now...why should I fear some explosions? In fact...I think I can just punch them right out of the sky and then some. Yeah!'

Unsure if he was filled with confidence, courage, or something else entirely, Gaia Mask proceeded to enter a fighting stance before drawing power from the planet beneath him and restructuring his earthen body.

Visually, it appeared as if he had solidified the sand that composed his body into stone before further refining key parts of his body into crystalline pieces of armor.

Once the transformation was complete, Gaia Mask went from looking like a monster made of sand into a gem-encrusted knight statue, with strange-looking wrist-crossbows made of stone and loaded with crystalline bolts.

The weapons looked incredibly decorative in the eyes of the Salbanbo and observing Lumenlithic...up until Gaia Mask started shooting the damn things at the bombs coming down on him.

Well, it was less like shooting and more like he was punching his fists forward with such ferocity that the crystal chunks attached to his wrists were flung with equal force. However, due to their delicate nature, the crystals would shatter during their ascension and become razor-sharp pieces of shrapnel that tore through air and subsequently detonated the bombs before they had a chance to explode on the ground.

This made for an absurd, eye-catching display of skill that stunned everyone present into silence.

Then again, the sound of several dozen explosives getting obliterated by crystal flak might've been enough to render most people mute.

As the bombs exploded in air, the resulting smoke mixed with the crystal shards and made a dazzling display that made it appear as if Gaia Mask was being showered by the distilled essence of light and luxury.

"Whoa..."

"By the almighty credit score..."

Needless to say, the display did wonders in making Gaia Mask look significantly more majestic in the eyes of everyone present.

'And...that's the last of them!'

Once the last of the bombs had been destroyed, Gaia Mask turned back towards Alpha-887 and his mech in order to stare him in the eyes.

Needless to say, Alph-887 was absolutely fucking terrified at the sight of this shining stone warrior standing beneath a literal rain of explosive fallout and crystal shards.

"Neat trick. Now it's my turn,"Gaia Mask declared before stepping forward and...suddenly disappearing into the ground like a man stepping into a pool of water.

"What the f-" BOOM!

The next thing Alpha-887 knew, his mech got uppercutted by a giant stone fist.

"Let's see if those nanobots of yours can take a beating!" Gaia Mask roared as he popped out of the ground. "Otherwise, I'm going to tear you from it like a giant metal peanut!"

...Meanwhile, high above the battlefield...

"Incoming high-impact kinetic attacks."

"Prepare to take defensive measures."

"Activating force fields."

Despite the rather impressive display that Alpha-887 showcased when he activated his nanobots, he wasn't actually the one in charge of controlling them.

In reality, a team of computer engineers and the AI core of his ship were working on the main bridge to provide the nanobots the schematics and behaviors necessary to create that fancy mech that Alpha-887 was piloting.

The regional manager may have been smart when it came to turning a profit and exploiting the masses, but he was absolutely shit when it came to nanotechnology.

Aside from him though, these engineers were also in charge of running the entire ship, coordinating the soldiers, and making sure that there were no hiccups with any of the equipment.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that without these unsung heroes, the entire operation would fall apart in an instant. Which is why they were safely tucked away in the ship's bridge, far and away from any obvious sources of danger.

BANG!

"Huh?"

THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!THUD!

"Ugh..."

Evidently, these Salbanbo eggheads were so focused on trouble coming outside of the ship that they failed to consider what would happen if there was danger inside of the ship.

More specifically, they didn't consider what would happen if their idiot boss decided to cheap out on restraints for an intergalactic criminal with superspeed...and the possibility of the aforementioned criminal being freed by a vigilante armed with magic pistols.

Regardless, it took Nitropulse all of five seconds to knock out all of the engineers and bring Tin Star to the ship's bridge.

"Whoa Nelly! You work hella fast," Tin Star exclaimed once he realized what had just happened to him.

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"What can I say? I live fast, I kick ass, and I look good while doing it," Nitropulse humblebragged as he began to make his way over to a nearby control console and access the ship's controls. "Now all we have to do is...uh oh."

"I don't like the sound of that," Tin Star noted. "Why are you saying, Uh oh?"

Before answering, Nitropulse flitted between several control consoles, typing away at the keys and pulling up all sorts of computer windows. Once he had finished doing this, we quickly turned towards Tin Star with a grim look on his face.

"So it turns out this ship is actually running a Spirit-Class AI core, meaning that these engineers were the assistants while the ship itself is running the show," Nitropulse explained. "By the way, if you're wondering what a Spirit-Class AI is, it's what happens when you take a Lumenlithic's inner crystal and process it into an AI core."

"Lobotomized cyber slave, got it," Tin Star commented with zero hesitation.

"Yeah, so...if we want to do anything to this ship, we need to extract that core," Nitropulse continued, promptly ignoring Tin Star's accurate observation. "Unfortunately, I have no idea where it could be on this thing."

"Really?" Tin Star asked as he began to look around. "These Salbanbo guys don't have anything resembling a big old button that just opens a secret compartment that leads directly to the ship's AI or a big ass chamber carrying the thing?"

"If it were any other AI core, that would definitely be the case," Nitropulse answered. "The beauty about Spirit-Class AI cores is that you can place them anywhere inside of a ship, and they could work with little to no heat. Hell, I remember hearing about one that had it situated inside of the captain's bedroom, right next to the guy's pillow."

"Really?" Tin Star asked as he found what he thought was an unusual wire that seemed to lead into the deck of the bridge.

"Yeah, man. Even if we tear through this entire ship, it could take us hours until we actually find that AI core."

"Hmm. So what's this thing then?"

"What thing?"

Without explaining anything further, Tin Star simply pressed a button he found and activated a hidden mechanism that caused the ground to shift and produce an incredibly advanced-looking pedestal with a perfectly polished crystal orb being displayed in its center.

It took Nitropulse a second to process what he had just witnessed, but he had an answer he didn't expect to give.

"That's...the ship's AI core."

"Well, ain't that lucky."