“How’s it going?” Ner asked as he finished clearing the floor of Inzektors.

“It’ll take quite a while to get one of these moving properly. Fortunately, all I have to do is replace the deteriorated parts. Skipping the tests, I’m going to need another 30 minutes.” Luon replied as he worked away.

“As if we have 30 minutes to spare. It seems that they’re already starting to come in.”

Luon let out a sigh from Ner’s remark. They both knew that a tough fight was going to come. Even if the stairwell shattered apart, making it difficult for a person to come up, it wasn’t a problem for the Inzektors who can climb up from the sides.

If it weren’t for the wind and building instability deterring the Inzektors from climbing outside of the tower they would have already been attacked.

“They’re starting to come in,” Ner said in once more with a sullen expression.

“You don’t have to say it twice. It’s obvious what we need to do. We’ll have to delay them for a bit longer. Fortunately, I had some spare robots on me. They have already queued up the remaining procedures, so I don’t have to be here to supervise.”

“Then let’s go.” Ner nodded as he turned around.

“Wait a second.” Luon pulled out a belt from his intraspatial bag and motioned it towards Ner.

Ner looked at it in disdained as he said, “What’s up with that?”

“You said something about how they were able to identify and report to the Hivelord right? This is a transforming belt which allows you to equip a full suit of armor by chanting [Transform]. Would it be okay if you wore a full suit of body armor?”

“I guess it might work… wait if you had that then why couldn’t you have given me that earlier?”

“It’s more difficult to fight using things that you aren’t used to. Is it not?” Luon questioned Ner. The latter shook his head as he replied, “I can already use so many weapons, how would a little piece of armor even hinder me? Just give it here.”

Ner activated the belt right away, the disheveled and ragged clothes he wore earlier was no more as he dons a luxurious black armor. Its protective properties were much lower than Luon’s own, as it was one of the first prototypes, but it did its job as one couldn’t see the blue skin that evidently pointed out that he was a Tacar.

The two were fully equipped, they separated themselves to guard the entry points to the room while Ner guarded the elevator shaft Luon oversaw the stairway.

“Here they come,” Luon muttered to himself as he checked the time. There was about 25 more minutes before the completion of the ship, but he could already see the Inzektors crazily ascending the stairway.

Luon infused his mana into his sword and swung against the wall nearby. The blow chunked a large portion of the wall off, crushing the Inzektors below. If damaging the wall was enough to stop the Inzektors advance then Luon wouldn’t have to worry about anything at all. However, from what he could see all it did was agitate them even further as new ones climbed over the fallen one’s carcasses.

‘It’s quite effective, but I’ll need to reserve the tactic and use it wisely,’ Luon thought as found that attacking the wall was like using a bomb to clear the map on a 2D shooter game. He could only do it for a limited amount of times, considering the stability of the building into the equation.

Soon enough when the first Inzektor was close enough to reach him, it sprung towards him. Luon quickly adorned his sword and gave it a quick stab. It’s body sunk into the blade, only a few centimeters away from even touching Luon.

Its blood splattered a green liquid at Luon’s face, unfazed by the sight Luon dragged the corpse in one direction before swinging down towards the swarm of Inzektors. The corpse knocked several others along with it, and the fall dealt the final blow. One kill had the potential to grow exponentially. Luon let out a small smile as he found the scene to be interesting.

His expression dimmed a moment later due to the sheer number of Inzektors that continued to come up, he continuously fought them off until it came, a level 80 Inzektor soon appeared before Luon.

Among the Inzektors ascending the stairway were a few that stood out amongst the rest. Luon knew that there were about 10 of them that had entered the building, and since he was guarding the stairway, which was much larger than the elevator shaft, he predicted that more than half of them would come for him.

Inzektors had many similar traits to their insect predecessors. Although they have grown massively due to evolution, and their abilities differ slightly, their original appearance had rarely changed. The first high-level Inzektor to appear before Luon was akin to an ant with a dark carapace, similar to the Clamaris Luon encountered years ago.

The situation was much different from before. Luon nimbly dodged the charge and hacked his blade into its leg, amputating it as if he was slicing through butter. This was thanks to his high-level sword as well as his mana technique. If he had to face the Clamaris once more, Luon felt confident that they would nearly be equal in strength.

Despite having one of its limbs torn the Inzektor didn’t stop its rampage. It rushed at Luon once more. It was a repeat of the same actions, simplistic in nature, but the result turned out different.

While Luon was too busy dealing with the Inzektor, two more of the same type of Inzektor appeared causing Luon to dodge with no time to retaliate. Despite his attempts, he was still hit, after he had broken out of the encirclement, another high-level Inzektor appeared but attacked him from afar. It had used magic.

A flame wrapped itself around Luon as if it were a snake constricting its target. Fortunately for Luon his armor helped mitigate the damage. He could feel the temperature rising as the durability of his armor dropped due to the scorching heat slowly reaching the armor’s melting point.

Luon didn’t douse the flame immediately using either of the polar elements, ice, or water. Instead, he slowly converted the mana fueling the flame as his own. The shura body technique that Thanatos helped foster worked wonders and Luon felt more energetic than before.

Luon rushed towards the Inzektor who shot magic at him while the other ones were wary of the flame. Inzektors who used magic were rare amongst their kind, especially when it was at such a high level.

The Inzektor panicked at the sudden turn of events as it tried to run away. As it was hanging off of the wall in stairwell it’s the only path of retreat was down. But before it could descend, Luon leaped off of the platform and onto a normal Inzektor that was climbing up, appearing before the Inzektor eyes.

Using the Inzektor underneath him as a propellant he jumped and twirled giving the Inzektor a roundhouse kick outside of the tower. Luon didn’t know whether or not it would die from the attack, but it was most likely so since Inzektors that could use magic were often weak to physical impact.

Luon returned back up onto the platform and appeared before the other 3 high-level Inzektors. The pesky mage may be gone, but the situation hardly changed at all. In fact, it had gotten even worse.

While Luon was at the stairway, he had noticed a few more high-level Inzektors approaching their battle.

Luon let out a sigh, he knew that there was no time to spare, they needed to leave as soon as possible. Luon charged his mana into his sword, the Inzektors before him backed away from the sudden pressure that Luon emitted. What they didn’t expect was that Luon used the attack and smashed the floor, collapsing the remaining parts in the upper stairwell and crushing all of the Inzektors that were there.

The attack may not have helped kill the high-level ones, but it was enough to hold them back for a minute.

Luon pressed a few buttons on his BMPU as he ran towards the elevator shaft. He yelled, “Quickly Ner, let’s go!”

Ner didn’t respond using any words. Instead, he did the same action that Luon did and shattered the elevator shaft and the areas around it.

The two ran towards the ship that silently hummed an old tune to indicate that it was functional. Luon quickly sat on the pilot's seat and pressed a series of buttons. The digital display panel had several red segments, but Luon tapped at it causing the graphic to turn yellow.

Soon the ship lifted itself off, and the trailing Inzektors could only regretfully watch as they escaped. Ner was looking forward to entering space for the first time in a while, but he soon found that Luon had no intentions of leaving the planet yet.

Once they reached a certain elevation did they stop ascending. The spaceship drifted and flew as it were an airplane. Ner couldn’t help but ask, “What’s wrong?”

“The repairs aren’t completely done, we aren’t outfitted to go to space yet.”

“What’s left to do the ships already flying?” Ner asked as he looked around at the cabin.

Luon pointed at the panel that had a yellow alert as he said, “The only portion remaining is to ensure that our oxygen levels don’t escape the ship. For now, the robots are still working on the repairs as we speak. I don’t know about Tacar’s, but I still need to breathe.”

“You’re repairing the ship as we’re moving in the air? Aren’t you just wasting our energy? What if we run out of fuel when we’re halfway in space?”

“In the first place, we don’t know if we have enough fuel to get us anywhere. It’s not like there is a fuel depot or energy resource was laying around so that we can just plug it in and use. I had to retrofit the engine, so it took in energy from any kind of source after it goes through a converter. Worst-case scenario we’ll have to fuel it with mana ourselves once I run out of power sources that I have left in my bag.”

“Land us somewhere then, while you're doing your repairs. At least that way we’ll save some energy for the trip.”

“And deal with Inzektors or whatever else is on this planet? There’s no point we’re almost done now. As for how far we’ll get into space we’ll have to see.”

“Fine then, I’ll just go conserve my mana now in case we need some fuel later on. I’ll be using one of the spare rooms in the back then. Call me when you need me” Ner left dissatisfied at how underprepared they were.

“Make sure you clean it up first! I didn’t make cleaning a priority, so it’s probably a dirty pig pen back there!” Luon yelled, whether or not Ner heard it, he couldn’t care less.

Several minutes after their chat did the repairs finish, Luon looked at the display with displeasure as he operated the ship into space. Breaking into space was easy as the ship was designed to do so, after exiting the exosphere did some problems occur.

There were three big problems. First off was the direction of where to go. Luon didn’t have access to the Alliance’s map as of this time, and calculating the route by utilizing the stars was not in his specialty. He only knew which way not to go, and that’s the way the Inzektors came from and went to.

Luon asked Ner if he knew the direction, the latter pointed in one direction, and the reasoning behind it was that it was the complete opposite direction of where Inzektors would go to. Another problem they faced was fuel, as predicted they soon ran out of it. Luon had taken the energy core from the robots and injected it into the ship, but that had only lasted for a few days before they ran out.

After Ner poured his mana into the ship, he asked, “We should be fine for a few days. Giving energy like this is difficult, so what’s there to eat?”

His remarked shocked Luon as he suddenly remembered that they hadn’t stored a lot of food with them. Ner noticed the reaction as a thought entered his mind, he couldn’t help but mutter, “Don’t tell me...”

“We might have to starve a bit… hopefully, we’ll find someone soon?”

Ner looked at Luon astonished, and for the first time in a long time, he angrily cursed.