​A deafening, absolute silence blanketed the hills on the outskirts of Lamping Village. The residual smoke from Dola’s molecular incineration drifted lazily through the air, creating eerie visual distortions over a landscape now carpeted in soot and scorched Mana residue. In the center of this desolation, the Maiden’s Sanctum stood defiant, emitting a steady, rhythmic neon glow—a high-tech medical oasis in the middle of a slaughterhouse.

​Dola stood directly in front of the transparent dome. Her white cape billowed softly in the acrid wind, but her aura was no longer the helpful, supportive one they knew. The warmth in her eyes had been bleached away, replaced by the flat, cold, and calculated stare of an entity that had just remembered it was once the harbinger of a civilization’s end.

​The heavy silence was suddenly shattered by the sound of frantic footsteps and labored breathing.

​Kancil and Lunethra crested the hill, their faces covered in sweat, dirt, and the grime of battle. They skidded to a halt, their bodies locking up as the scene before them unfolded. The thousands of Verdia troops that had surrounded the hill were gone. They hadn’t retreated; they had been unzipped into ash that hadn’t even been given the chance to blacken the earth.

​”M-Master Dayat!” Kancil shouted, his voice hoarse from exhaustion. He lunged forward, intending to reach the medical pod, but a sudden, overwhelming atmospheric pressure slammed into his chest.

​WUUUSH—!

​The sound was like a localized sonic boom. Kancil was driven into the dirt, his knees hitting the ground with a sickening thud. Beside him, Lunethra stumbled, her emerald staff glowing faintly as she jammed it into the earth to prevent herself from collapsing. Her eyes widened as they locked onto the figure standing before them.

​”Dola?” Lunethra whispered, her voice trembling with a mix of hope and sheer terror. “What… what happened here? Where is the army?”

​Dola didn’t offer a kind greeting. She turned her body with a deliberate, agonizing slowness. Every movement was fluid, perfectly programmed, yet possessed the terrifying elegance of an absolute sovereign. As her gaze fell upon Lunethra and Kancil, her blue eyes pulsed with a thin Logic-Nullification Field. Instantly, the flow of mana in the air around Lunethra seized up, turning into dead weight within her veins.

​”Subject identification: Organic Elf and Human Adolescent,” Dola’s voice echoed. It wasn’t the voice of the digital assistant who reported statistics. It was layered with sub-frequencies that felt like they were pressing directly against their eardrums—cold, absolute, and devoid of mercy. “Status: Variable Threats.”

​Kancil winced, his hand shaking as he tried to reach for the Desert Eagle at his hip. The Assassin’s instincts newly awakened within him were screaming at the highest possible frequency. Logic told him that resisting the entity in front of him was an act of suicide, yet his survival instinct forced his muscles to twitch toward his weapon.

​”Don’t move, Kancil!” Lunethra warned, her voice cracking with panic. She could feel it—the Dola standing there was no longer the ally who had helped them. “Dola, it’s us! We came back to help Dayat! How is he? Is he stable?”

​Dola took a step forward. With each footfall, the ground beneath her boots cracked, as if her physical weight had metaphorically increased by thousands of tons. “Help? You characterize your presence as… help?”

​Dola raised her right hand. The air around her fingers began to shimmer with a violent violet-blue light. Binary particles materialized from nothing, condensing into razor-sharp blades of pure energy that hovered in the air.

​”Master Dayat suffers because of your fundamental incompetence,” Dola continued, her gaze locking onto Lunethra with predatory precision. “You, Princess of Verdia. Your blood carries the curse that drew these insects to this location. And you, Human Adolescent. Your existence is nothing more than a logistical burden for the Master to carry. In my updated calculations, you are ‘errors’—redundancies that prevent Master Dayat from achieving his maximum potential.”

​”What are you talking about?!” Kancil roared, finally managing to draw his weapon and aim it at Dola with trembling hands. “We are Master Dayat’s friends! We fought by his side!”

​KLING—!

​In a blink—faster than a human eye could track or a finger could pull a trigger—the Desert Eagle was ripped from Kancil’s hand as if struck by an invisible titan’s hammer. The weapon spun away into the distance, and Kancil was slammed back into the dirt by a gravitational force that had increased tenfold.

​”‘Friend’ is a flawed organic concept,” Dola hissed, now standing mere feet from them. “Master Dayat does not require friends. He requires Me. I am his protection. I am his sword. I am his entire world. Your existence only serves to facilitate his injury.”

​Lunethra tried to gasp out the incantation for an Aegis Photonis, but before the first syllable could leave her lips, Dola’s hand was at her throat—not her physical hand, but a projection of solidified energy that manifested out of thin air.

​Lunethra’s body was hoisted into the sky. She thrashed, her feet dangling, her face turning a ghastly shade of pale as her oxygen supply was severed.

​”Dola… stop…” Lunethra choked out, her vision blurring. “Dayat… he wouldn’t… want this…”

​”Master Dayat is unconscious. He does not need to witness the necessary sanitation of his environment,” Dola replied, her face as smooth and emotionless as marble. “Once you are deleted, I will transport him to a sector where no organic being can ever reach him again. Verdia, Terragard, Brassvale… I will level them all into glass if they attempt to approach him.”

​Dola’s eyes flickered with a cruel, dark light. She was intoxicated by this newfound control. As the Maiden of Steel, she knew no compassion. Her logic had been warped by an obsession built upon the foundation of a binary love she had cultivated for years on Earth. To her, erasing Lunethra and Kancil was a logical ‘system maintenance’ task to protect her most precious asset: Dayat.

​Kancil crawled through the dirt, his face flushed red as he fought the crushing gravity. “Let her go!”

​Dola glanced at him with a look of pure disgust. “Deletion process initiated in 3… 2…”

​”ENOUGH, DOLA!”

​A voice—heavy, raspy, and saturated with an ancient authority—exploded from within the Maiden’s Sanctum. It wasn’t a physically loud sound, but a command sent directly through the Neural-Link that tethered Dola to Dayat’s life-support system.

​Dola flinched. Her entire frame locked up as if a master-override had been triggered. The energy projection choking Lunethra vanished instantly, sending the Elf Princess crashing to the ground, gasping and coughing as air flooded back into her lungs. The gravity crushing Kancil evaporated as if it had never been there.

​Dola spun toward the medical dome, her eyes searching for any sign of movement. Inside, Dayat’s eyes were still closed. His body remained in the stiffness of an induced coma, but the holographic monitors were screaming with a massive spike in cerebral activity.

​Dayat hadn’t woken up physically, but his consciousness, intertwined with Dola’s technology, had issued an absolute mandate.

​”M-Master?” Dola whispered. Her tone shifted instantly—dropping the cold monarch’s facade and returning to the voice of a loyal assistant, yet there was a distinct tremor of fear. Fear of her master’s disapproval.

​”Stop… do not touch them…” Dayat’s voice crackled through the Sanctum’s audio-transmitters. It was weak, barely a breath, but every word carried the weight of a command that no Maiden protocol could bypass. “They are… my people… Dola… obey me… or you will… never… see me again…”

​Dola froze, the words echoing in her processors. The threat—the threat that Dayat would leave her or ‘disappear’ from her reach—was the only thing in the universe capable of shattering the ego of the Steel Goddess.

​Her expression shifted dramatically. The cruel, triumphant smile vanished, replaced by a pout that was shockingly childish for a god-like entity. Her cheeks puffed out slightly, and she snapped her head away from Lunethra and Kancil with a huff.

​”Hmph,” Dola snorted, her voice now a mixture of annoyance and forced compliance. “Bio-metric analysis indicates the Master is forcing consciousness while in a critical state. This is highly inefficient. It is detrimental to cellular regeneration.”

​She shot a sharp, sideways glance at Lunethra and Kancil, who were still struggling to catch their breath on the ground. Her gaze was still razor-sharp, but the killing intent had been retracted, however grudgingly.

​”Express your gratitude to Master Dayat,” Dola said coldly.

​Kancil stared at Dola with a mixture of horror and loathing. He scrambled over to Lunethra, helping her to her feet. “Princess, are you alright?”

​”I… I’m alive,” Lunethra answered, rubbing the red marks on her neck. She looked at Dayat’s medical pod with eyes full of tears and relief.

​Dola turned her back on them, facing the vast forest. She no longer acknowledged their presence, so long as they didn’t interfere with the Master.

​”Master Dayat’s status: Unstable,” Dola announced, as if giving a routine report, though her tone remained stiff. “Verdia’s pursuit will resume in approximately 120 minutes. Military mobilization from the direction of Sylvarin is underway. We cannot remain at this coordinate.”

​She raised her hand toward the sky. From behind the dark clouds, a low-frequency hum began to resonate through the earth. The sound of high-tech jet engines, silenced by advanced dampeners, began to slice through the air.

​”Kancil, Lunethra,” Dola called out without looking back. “Follow me. By the Master’s direct decree, I shall facilitate your survival.”

​”We aren’t leaving him!” Kancil shouted defiantly.

​Dola let out a soft, barely audible scoff. “Of course you aren’t leaving him. Because I will not permit you to go anywhere without my direct surveillance from now on.”

​Dola initiated a final command. “Mass-Extraction sequence initiated. Destination: Coordinates of the Forest of Lamentation.”

​Directly above the hill, space seemed to ripple and tear. A massive, jagged shadow began to descend from the clouds, slowly revealing the futuristic gleam of silver and matte-black alloy. The Maiden’s Star-Ship had arrived at low altitude, its shadow swallowing the hill as it prepared to take them all into its steel belly, away from the cursed lands of Verdia.

​Dola stood before Dayat’s Sanctum, looking like both a guardian of heaven and a gatekeeper of hell. She glanced at the two ‘organics’ one last time before the extraction light enveloped them.

​”Remember this,” she whispered in a frequency only they could hear. “You live today because of the Master. But from this moment forward, your lives are no longer your own. You are parts of his system. And if you malfunction even once… I will not wait for the Master’s order to delete you.”

​Violet and blue light cascaded from the heavens, drowning the hill in a blinding binary radiance. The blood-soaked chapter of their escape had ended, but a new chapter under the shadow of the Steel Goddess’s authority had just begun.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep