The moment the three Titanium Guards were destroyed, Hao Ren felt something was amiss.
His opponents did not react at all.
Hao Ren firmly believed that the three Titanium Guards did not react at all, not because they could not react in time. Although his, Vivian, and Y 'zaks' attacks were very sudden, they were not fast enough to ignore the distance. Y 'zaks' fireball was delayed by less than a tenth of a second before it hit the opponents. Even if the three Titanium Guards had no time to dodge or fight back, they should have at least moved a little.
However, Hao Ren felt that he had hit a stationary target. The three Titanium Guards did not react at all until the attack hit them.
Hao Ren was not the only one who felt it. Vivian and Y 'zaks, who had rich combat experience, also noticed the anomaly. Y' zaks immediately leaned down and whispered, "Something's wrong."
Lily also drew out her Frostfire Claws. She turned her ears in all directions and said, "There seems to be no alarm."
Hao Ren was on high alert for a moment. He did not see any Titanium Guards coming, nor did he hear the alarm in the base. He exchanged a look with Vivian, and the two nodded tacitly.
"Stay alert. The atmosphere here is a bit weird," Vivian whispered. "Big guy, help us keep an eye on the back."
Although they had easily taken care of the three guards, it did not make them feel relaxed. Instead, it made the atmosphere even more strange. The group of people braced themselves and continued to walk along the lifeless steel corridor into the depths of the fortress.
Not long after, Hao Ren suddenly saw a few figures from the corner of his eye. Almost at the same time, Lily, who had good eyesight, also exclaimed in a low voice, "There are Titanium Guards in front!"
"Wait a minute." Hao Ren held the husky maiden who was about to rush forward with her weapon. "Watch."
After that, he took out a metal handle from his Dimensional Pocket and threw it at the floor in front of the Titanium Guards in the distance.
The metal pieces fell to the floor of the alloy corridor and made a crisp sound. In this dead silence, the sound was as loud as a knock on the heart. But strangely, the Titanium Guards, who were holding their weapons and seemed to be on high alert, did not respond to the noise as if they had turned deaf and blind.
After confirming this, Hao Ren put up his Steel Membrane Shield and walked up to the Titanium Guards.
The Steel Warriors stood upright on the sentry post, their special electromagnetic rifles clenched in front of their chests. Their alloy faces seemed to be covered with a shiny shell, and there was only a narrow slit where their eyes should be. These were the Titanium Guards, the most powerful elite warriors of the Executor society. Their appearance lived up to their name.
But now, they stood there as if their computers had crashed, turning a blind eye to the intruders in front of them.
Lily also came over with her tail between her legs. After confirming that the Titanium Guards were really not moving, she breathed a sigh of relief and swung her tail proudly. She even poked one of the Titanium Guards in the chest with her claws. "What the hell? It turns out they are just a bunch of models! Scared the hell out of me. "
But N-6 was shocked. "It shouldn't be like this. It's illogical! The Titanium Guards are the most vigilant warriors. How could they — "
Vivian pushed the husky aside. She bent her finger and knocked on the head of one of the Titanium Guards. "It feels like they are in hibernation mode? Or are they on standby mode? They seem to still have energy. Look at their eyes and the lights on their bodies. "
"There must be energy. The MDT has detected the energy reading. It's just that there's no signal, so it's motionless." Hao Ren frowned and pushed the Steel Warrior in front of him. The tall Titanium Guard fell straight down and hit the alloy floor with a loud thud. "Maybe we should take a look inside this thing?"
Y 'zaks scratched his big bald head. "Maybe I should have brought Y' lisabet with me."
"Don't mention her. She's destructive dismantling. Her screwdriver punctured the motherboard." Hao Ren quickly waved his hand and then took out a beam dagger from his dimensional pocket. It took him a while to remove the armor on the chest of the Titanium Guard, revealing a complex circuit structure and a shimmering cube core. "MDT, can you read the database of this thing?"
The MDT flew over and used a scanning beam to connect itself with the core of the Titanium Guard. "It should be okay."
Vivian reminded, "Hurry up. We don't have too much time to waste on these iron lumps. If we can't crack it in three minutes, we have to move on."
"It won't take that long. You guys know how good I am … Although you guys usually use me to play movies," the MDT muttered as it began the reading process. A few seconds later, it exclaimed, "Huh? There's only garbled code? "
There was no logical program in the core of the Titanium Guard. All the MDT could read was a lot of garbled code.
Lily immediately glanced at Hao Ren. "Could it have been destroyed by Mr. Landlord?"
"I don't think so." Hao Ren frowned and turned to look at N-6. "You mentioned before that the Titanium Guards are directly controlled by the Cortex Prime?"
N-6 nodded. "That's right."
"If the failure of the Cortex Prime reaches a certain level, will it cause the Titanium Guards to behave like this?"
N-6 did not answer, but her eyes widened.
"Looks like it's right." Hao Ren exhaled and looked down at the Titanium Guard, which had completely lost its ability to move and turned into a pile of scrap metal. "The failure of the Cortex Prime is rapidly worsening. Its error code has broken through the server's built-in firewall and spread to the Titanium Guard. If you don't take action, sooner or later, it will become a source of infection and contaminate your entire Executor Network. "
They left the Titanium Guard behind and began to speed toward the fortress.
"When do you think the abnormality of the Titanium Guard appeared?" Vivian asked N-6 curiously on the way.
"I'm not sure." N-6 felt that her logic circuit was heating up. The unprecedented sense of crisis made her completely forget her previous worries about Hao Ren's group of powerful and unpredictable aliens. "The fortress and the lunar base outside are like two different worlds. The security system established by the Cortex Prime prohibits any individual with insufficient authority to access the fortress. Usually, only a large number of automated systems are responsible for maintaining the daily operation of the fortress. The freight trains we saw before are part of these automated systems. Only the Titanium Guards and humans are eligible to move freely in the fortress, but they never leave this place. "
"In other words, Executors like you have never been able to directly know what's happening inside the fortress, right?" Vivian frowned. "So these Titanium Guards may have gradually stopped moving a long time ago, but the people outside have no idea. But according to N-4, shouldn't there be a group of people called 'maintainers' responsible for the routine maintenance of the Cortex Prime hardware? Didn't the maintainers notice the abnormality here? "
N-6 could only shake her head. "I don't know about this part of the situation. Although the maintainers are active inside and outside the fortress, they don't often appear in front of ordinary Executors because they are also part of the fortress system."
Along the way, Hao Ren and his team found more Titanium Guards in a state of shutdown.
The deeper they went, the more common these special fortress guards became. But without exception, all of them had lost their mobility. Some of the Titanium Guards were still standing at their sentry posts, but most of them had fallen to the ground. These soldiers seemed to be patrolling the route before they lost their mobility, but the sudden system crash caused them to fall straight down and become a pile of debris on the ground.
There were signs that the system error of the Cortex Prime reached a critical point at a certain moment. This critical point came so fast that all the Titanium Guards in the fortress stopped operating almost at the same time.
This critical point should be the moment when the faulty server of the Cortex Prime exceeded the normal server.
The system used to maintain various hardware facilities in the fortress ran automatically under the control of low-level AI. This part of the system operated based on the underlying protocol like the "autonomic nerves" of the fortress. This structure happened to allow them to escape the failure cluster caused by the logic disorder of the Cortex Prime. So today, the infrastructure in the fortress was still operating normally, including the lighting and ventilation system. But other than these things, the entire fortress was actually close to a shutdown.
The guards had stopped working, and the monitoring system had gone offline. There was only one out-of-control Cortex Prime in this silent fortress and a group of humans who had not shown up until now.
Hao Ren did not know what the so-called humans living in the Inevitable Palace were doing, but he knew that the out-of-control Cortex Prime was still issuing one command after another. Even if there were more and more logical errors in these commands, the Executors outside would not realize the changes in the fortress. Or even if they realized the problem, they would not be able to do anything about it.
The disconnection of the security system made this journey, which was supposed to be stressful, exceptionally smooth. They almost casually passed through all the checkpoints and gates, and finally arrived at a hall with a lot of cables, pipes, and servers.
This hall was one of the large number of secondary server rooms supporting the 13 main servers of the Cortex Prime.
Vivian shook her head after seeing the situation in the server room. "It seems that we don't have to figure out why the maintainers did not warn the outside."
Between the tightly arranged pipes, cables, and servers in the hall, there were a lot of charred mechanical wreckage. Those things with alloy shells and shaped like beetles were the maintainers that N-6 and N-4 had mentioned.
They were all killed — died of internal deflagration caused by a strong electromagnetic pulse.
It was the Cortex Prime.
You've already exceeded your reading limit for today. If you want to read more, please log in.
Login
Select text and click 'Report' to let us know about any bad translation.
