The one who caught the small girl was, naturally, Yue Yang.
He had been watching in silence throughout.
Now, he decided it was time to step forward.
Not because he wanted to be a hero — he simply couldn’t stomach watching these people any longer.
Exploitation and oppression existed in every world. Anywhere a class structure existed, it was inevitable. If it had only been exploitation and oppression, Yue Yang would have been reluctant to intervene so quickly. After all, this was his territory — but acting prematurely risked disrupting the plans he’d carefully developed around Zhonghua, Ji Wuri, and the others. But watching the stationed gatekeepers and General Leihou treating human lives as worthless, indulging in this kind of gratuitous killing for sport — that made him genuinely nauseated.
This wasn’t just bullying. This was psychopathic behavior.
Human Valley’s original purpose was to make the beings within it use “wisdom” to solve problems the way “humans” did.
And these people were specifically looking for loopholes to use violence instead.
Nothing Yue Yang despised more in his life than the sort of vile creatures who dug for loopholes like blind moles underground.
In a place where everyone was supposed to solve problems with intelligence, you use violence? Would it kill you to engage your brain? Someone this incapable of thinking had no business coming to Human Valley at all — should have stayed wherever they came from.
“So there really was someone wanting to play the hero — haha, how delightful. Since when do self-proclaimed heroes come off an assembly line?” General Leihou paused for a moment, then broke into a loud laugh. Behind him, several hundred soldiers — approaching a thousand — were arrayed as escort, each with a battle construct at their command. Officers of higher rank were even mounted within enormous humanoid battle constructs. General Leihou himself was the same, seated atop a colossal lion-form puppet construct fully twenty meters from head to tail.
Every construct in the surrounding area, measured against that lion-form construct, was a mouse standing next to a lion.
In terms of size, grade, quality, and power — the gaps were vast.
Whatever technique Yue Yang had used just now to catch the small girl remained unclear to General Leihou, but the question vanished from his mind almost immediately.
He had never been the sort of person who enjoyed using his brain. Given the option to use his hands instead of his head, he chose hands every time. That habit had been his before he ever entered Human Valley — even here, he’d always preferred settling things with his fists over whatever people called “wisdom.” Not that Leihou was stupid, exactly — he had a certain cunning intelligence, even a degree of shrewdness.
His preference for violence was simply a deeply ingrained habit, a stubbornly held principle of conduct.
In Human Valley, Leihou had decided: relying on fists rather than brains could still build him something worth having.
And it had worked, so far.
“A sword-carrying mercenary — psh. Here I was wondering who it was, having the nerve to stick their nose in my affairs. Turns out it’s a little sprout who hasn’t even finished growing.” General Leihou looked Yue Yang up and down — unremarkable in every respect — and spat on the ground with contempt before looking away, dismissing this small fry entirely.
“Captain — no, no, Captain—”
The young mercenary, still held back by several companions, saw the captain pinned to the ground with the spear driven clean through him, and was so terrified he nearly collapsed, weeping as though the world had ended. After his father and his brother, another strong figure from his life was about to be taken from him.
Even though they’d nearly come to blows just moments ago.
In his heart, the young mercenary had always thought of the captain as an older brother.
And now looking at that bloody spear driven through chest and abdomen, sticking out the other side, with the body pinned to the earth at an angle — how could the young mercenary be anything but shattered?
If he hadn’t been so impulsive, none of this would have happened.
The thought that he’d killed the captain with his own recklessness made his body simply give out beneath him. His hand stretched toward where the captain lay — a helpless reaching out, as though hoping against hope for a miracle to come and bring the captain back from the edge of death.
Several companions, grief and fury mixed together, pressed the young mercenary down. Their hearts were equally broken, equally full of hate — but what could they do? Power and force were entirely in the enemy’s hands. The enemy was a bottomless abyss, and no number of lives thrown in would fill it. And what could a group of barely a dozen mercenaries do against General Leihou’s hundreds of elite personal guards?
Their only option now was to leave as quickly as possible.
Every additional second here meant an additional measure of danger.
“Captain, Captain—” Dragged forcibly away by companions holding his legs, the young mercenary made sounds that tore the air apart. His hands scratched and clawed at the ground, fighting to stay, to remain even if there was nothing left to do — he couldn’t bear to leave his respected captain to die alone here, his body torn apart by the constructs.
“A fine display of brotherhood — but not enough to impress me.” General Leihou raised a hand. “Give this more substance. I think this performance can get a great deal more entertaining.”
RUMBLE!
The construct beasts that had been converging on Yue Yang, those that had been surrounding the captain, even the ones that had been tearing at the barely-alive husband and wife — dozens approaching a hundred of them pivoted simultaneously and swept after the retreating mercenaries. Meanwhile, on either side of General Leihou, more constructs and humanoid battle machines tightened their ring around the large but exhausted group of slave mine workers.
Yue Yang?
A sword-carrying mercenary this weak — even the ordinary gatekeepers wouldn’t spare him a second glance, let alone General Leihou.
A mercenary without a battle construct — did that even qualify as combat capacity?
Ignore and move on.
This dismissal was much like how a certain nation’s city management enforcers, when they saw a street vendor without a weapon, would do whatever they liked without a second thought. Of course, if they happened to run into one of those hammer-and-stick specialist vendor-warriors, that would be a different headache entirely — but the odds of that were so small they barely registered in any general sweep. There might be one person in all of that great nation capable of frightening small-time authorities into backing down, but only barely one.
The husband and wife collapsed in their blood had no strength left even to reach toward their daughter.
As for the slave mine workers — any who dared move were immediately suppressed by guards manipulating constructs, mechanical arms fitted with spike-lances, bayonets, and whips keeping this large but helpless mass of people pinned in place.
“We can’t resist — or they’ll officially charge us with attacking noble domain property.” An older, more experienced mercenary, seeing the constructs spreading out to encircle them, shouted loudly to hold his companions back. His idea was for the mercenaries to do what the slave mine workers were doing — press together into a tight cluster, use their numbers to absorb the attacks. Those on the outer edges might be hurt, but the people protected at the center had a chance of survival.
“The moment you set foot inside the mine district, you were already guilty!” Against the backdrop of General Leihou’s uninhibited laughter, dozens of constructs surged in simultaneously, scattering the compact clusters the mercenaries were desperately forming — splitting them apart, isolating them, surrounding each one in turn.
Within seconds, the mercenaries had broken apart entirely.
By the time they wanted to fight back.
It was too late.
And their animal battle constructs were simply no match for General Leihou’s forces.
Every one of those animal constructs was torn apart by the vastly more numerous, stronger, and larger constructs — nothing survived. The mercenaries cried out in anguish as chunks of their own flesh were ripped away piece by piece.
The only reason they were still alive was that General Leihou wanted to prolong their suffering.
“Stand down!”
A shout came from behind Yue Yang.
The captain — transfixed by the spear through his chest — had moved. He seemed suddenly as though touched by a divine presence, golden light radiating from his entire body. The agonized and twisted face was no longer the expression of someone dying — it was a face blazing with battle intent.
He swung one hand like a blade and cleanly snapped the shaft of the spear behind him.
Then reached forward.
In full view of everyone present.
And pulled the blood-soaked spear out of his own chest by main force, blood jetting from both the entry and exit wounds like twin streams — and he seemed not to notice at all.
“Haha, of course there was something held in reserve — nobody dies that conveniently. Had to be something spectacular still to come. Look at that — quite impressive. To save his comrades, he’s using some kind of combustion-sacrifice enhancement technique. As a captain, that sense of duty is expected — just have to wonder whether generations of inherited captaincy left him anything actually useful, like a large-scale battle construct or a decent mech suit.” General Leihou watched with relish, one large hand stroking the bristling beard on his chin.
“ROAR!” The captain stretched his bloodied hands toward his own throat, his face blazing gold as he let out a thundering shout: “Ancestors above — your descendants are at the brink of life and death. For survival, forgive this unworthy descendant for calling upon the Golden Ape Battle Armor.”
BOOM BOOM BOOM—
The captain crushed the Heaven Crystal core he’d been carefully keeping at his throat.
A ten-meter tall primate-form humanoid battle construct appeared before everyone present with an earth-shaking impact.
It blazed with golden light that was difficult to look at directly, and the previously near-death captain seemed to ignite with the full force of vitality — instantly reinvigorated a hundredfold. A single leap carried him precisely into the cracked-open chest cavity of the Golden Ape construct, sliding into its piloting chamber.
Man and machine as one!
The Golden Ape construct’s arms shot overhead, its mechanical maw releasing a soul-shaking roar that rolled like thunder.
A single hammering strike to the ground launched every construct attacking the mercenaries into the air simultaneously.
The captain piloted the Golden Ape into a leap.
Light and swift as a swallow taking flight.
Both arms swept outward in a cross-pattern spin — every construct they touched was reduced to fragments. The few that escaped the initial sweep, still being piloted back toward their masters, were run down by the Golden Ape before they’d gone half the distance and stomped into mechanical scrap.
“Yes! YES!”
The slave mine workers watching went wild, screaming their encouragement.
The mercenaries lying in their own blood stared up at this towering Golden Ape construct with barely believing eyes. If the captain had something like this all along, why hadn’t he used it before? Was the captain really the one inside, piloting it? And where had this Golden Ape construct come from? Carrying those questions, and the relief of having survived something unsurvivable, the mercenaries ignored their wounds and scrambled upright, gathering together.
They were strong now. With a Golden Ape construct like this, could they possibly fail to take on General Leihou?
If he’d brought it out earlier, those despicable gatekeepers would already be paste!
Unlike the excited mercenaries below, the captain inside the Golden Ape construct let out a great shout: “I’m covering the rear — everyone run! I can’t hold this for long!”
“Of course you can’t hold it for long. Haha — you have nowhere near the strength or the right to pilot something like that. Grievously wounded, yet forcing yourself to command a high-grade construct so far above your level — that’s essentially asking to die. Showing off like that, I’m sure your vision is going black in waves right now!” General Leihou dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “Send some people in. Keep playing with him. Don’t let him die easily — toy with him like a cat with a mouse, and keep it going until the very end. That’s the entertaining part.”
“Run!” The captain bellowed.
“Nowhere to run.” Before the mercenaries could react, several seven-to-eight-meter humanoid constructs came sprinting toward them — elite personal guards of General Leihou. Their constructs might not match the Golden Ape in raw power, but in terms of piloting skill and man-machine synchronization, the captain was nowhere near them even on his best day.
General Leihou had been looking forward to enjoying the spectacle — but the corner of his eye happened to catch the sword-carrying small mercenary moving.
A flash of wariness.
He snapped his gaze over immediately.
And found this young man had laid out a blanket on the ground, arranged some food and fruit on it, and was seated comfortably, eating and watching the fight in the center as though he’d come here for a picnic and the battle was merely the entertainment. Even stranger was what had happened to the small dirty bundle of a slave girl — in the brief time since he’d caught her, she looked completely transformed. Her hair and face had been washed spotlessly clean somehow, and her body had been dressed in some kind of special, fine clothing. There was nothing left of the little blackened bundle — this was simply a sweetly sleeping little princess.
General Leihou blinked involuntarily. He suspected he was seeing things.
There was no way. This simply was not possible.
Even if she’d been bathed and dressed, the girl had been gaunt to the bone from starvation — how could her complexion be this rosy and smooth? She didn’t look remotely like a starving slave child. She looked like a well-nourished, even slightly overfed member of the imperial family. The sleeping girl’s small round face had visible baby fat.
How was this possible?
The fierce construct battle in the center had completely lost its appeal for General Leihou.
His entire attention was consumed by the inexplicable miracle playing out in front of him. What power could possibly transform a filthy, near-death slave girl — too starved and exhausted to even cry, barely clinging to her last breath — into this rosy-cheeked, smooth-skinned, vitality-full, slightly chubby-cheeked adorable little round-faced princess?
He blinked again.
And General Leihou discovered his eyes were playing even stranger tricks.
The husband and wife who’d been collapsed in their own blood had somehow made their way to the edge of the blanket.
And the couple who’d very nearly been torn apart by construct beasts — the horrific, gaping, muscle-shredding wounds covering their bodies — were visibly healing at speed.
Was this… a divine miracle?
(End of Chapter)