[Nexus reporting: Satellite Colony 1 reinforced, all units ready for combat.]

Pioneer scans and analyzes the report sent by Nexus while quickly moving toward the newly built Outpost 14 by using the highway. The core did not turn around to return and support the colony defense, instead, it cut off one-third of its processing power to take control of one of the prototype Beta type Drone in the main colony. Pioneer decided that the Beta drone would be tested by Pioneer personally while it was away, the core was confident that Nexus could take care of the defense by itself.

[System_rebooting.../]

[Reactors: Online]

[Sensors: Online]

[Weapon_systems: Online]

[Defensive_systems: Online]

[Mobility_system: Online]

[All_systems_nominal]

[Welcome_Pioneer_1]

[/New_objective: Reinforce Satellite Colony 1]

As the experimental drone finishes its rebooting process, Nexus immediately orders the General Purpose Drones nearby to remove the current modules and replace them with more experimental type modules. The new drone's torso is fairly armored from all side, but its legs, arms and shoulder modules are somewhat lacking behind in term of durability. Equipped with a pair of experimental Thermal Beam Emitters for its arms, reversed joint bipedal legs for movement and a single Tactical Medium Ordnance Module for its shoulder mount. The drone looks like a scale down and hand me down version of current Pioneer's hull rather than a combat drone.

Pioneer quickly runs a few scans to get more information about the new body it is controlling as it orders the drone to gather other prototype Beta type drones and get to the Satellite Colony 1 as fast as possible. And just as expected, Nexus really gave Pioneer the latest equipment to test them just like the last time with its current Pioneer 1 hull. Pioneer also notices the static electric field around the drone, it seems like Energetic Heart has been carried over to the drone by having Pioneer taking direct control.

[Nexus reporting: Confirmed, streaming real time statistic data from Beta 0 now]

The core notes down the important features of the Beta drones and saves it in the Colony's data storage server before it hops to the humanoid body in the shelter. So far nothing new has happened since the unexpected waste problem which occurred 72 minutes ago, most of the adventurers have fallen asleep after having a long day of fighting and being watched by Pioneer's drones. Currently, Erika is the only one still awake as she tries exchanging words with the humanoid Pioneer awkwardly, sometimes they manage to understand each other, sometimes Erika just places a palm on her face and sighs before shouting randomly for no apparent reason that Pioneer could understand.

[Pioneer 0 leveled up]

[Pioneer 0 is now level 31]

[Pioneer 0 received 1 unallocated point]

The core has leveled up again thanks to Quadro 1000's efforts in fighting the bugs on the other tunnel, the core also begins to wonder what it needs to do to change its displayed name in the informant log panel. Maybe Erika knows a thing or two about this, Pioneer will try to ask her when the language problem is dealt with in the future.

[Nexus reporting: Suitable colony construction site found]

Pioneer hops back to its primary body as it slows down and gets off the highway after arriving at Outpost 14, which is the current frontier of the bug-free tunnel. Pioneer slowly looks around to inspect the area and download information from the local Data server, it seems like there have a few ore veins here along with some big Hirudocrystallus nodes to harvest on the wall and the ceiling, not an ideal location to do harvesting so Pioneer and Nexus will look into this as soon as possible to deal with it.

"!?"

Pioneer hears something crumbled as it looks around for a moment and raises one of its feet up to see what it just stepped on.

[/Scanning_object]

Pioneer quickly digs up the crumbled piece of metal in the ground to get a closer and better look at the object, a human's fist sized slab of old, damaged bronze plate is the result of Pioneer's analysis. The metal is clearly not made by Pioneer, and it looks a bit too old and different to the thing the adventurers are using. Pioneer is not sure who or what made this thing, maybe Erika and others know a thing or two about this.

As Pioneer orders a nearby Alpha type General Purpose Drone to carry the object of unknown origin back to Googleplex, it gives the body an order to finish the inspection and move on to the new colony site Nexus just mentioned of before it hops back to the experimental Beta type Drone which just arrived in the Satellite Colony 1 a few milliseconds ago.

So far, there are no issues with the reversed joint type Beta Drone, the legs although not as good as the normal bipedal and quadrupedal on off-road terrain, it is certainly can 'skip' much farther and faster than normal bipedal legs while being very stable and quite reliable with much less energy and processing power consumption when competing against the quadrupedal system. The twin dual-power reactors are also a new wonder that Pioneer wants to have to upgrade its current hull as well, instead of converting just magical energy alone, the new reactor converts magical energy and electromagnetic energy, which is the green light emitted by the Viricrystallus cores, into electrical power at the same time, in rough estimation the core power output is about 20% higher than a normal magical energy only reactor.

In the case of Pioneer's Beta Drone though, Nexus equipped the drone with an experimental twin tri-power reactors instead, now adding in the exotic and hard to convert gravitational energy into the mix, Pioneer's reactors output is estimated to be 42% higher than the classic magical energy reactors on average. The only reason why Nexus did not mass produced this yet is because of the insane material cost needed to produce a small reactor to fit in a drone.

Pioneer wonders if there will have any other way to get more power production method that can be applied to tight spaces of a drone's mini reactors as it stops in front of the wall and checks its weapons as well as the combat readied drones behind it. Pioneer has no intention of standing around and waiting for the bugs to come to them anymore, the core has made a decision to come out and bring the fight to them before they could come any closer to the Satellite Colony, this is also a good chance to put the Beta drones and experimental technologies on combat condition trial and find out what the other part of the overly large magical signal picked up by the sensor is.

[Pioneer 0 leveled up]

[Pioneer 0 is now level 32]

[Pioneer 0 received 1 unallocated point]

Pioneer looks the Beta drone's gun-arms for a second before ordering the Mobile Nanite Construction Drone to deconstruct the wall for the Beta drone battle group, 5 standard prototype drones with 5 different configurations led by a single experimental type drone. Enough for wiping out most, if not all types of threat that Pioneer and the colony have encountered so far.

Just as soon as the deconstruction of the wall is about to finish, Pioneer quickly orders the Beta drones to advance and carry out their threat removing orders as it hops back and forth between the 3 bodies at 3 different locations. This gonna take a while for Pioneer to optimize the process and get used to it.

[/New_objective: Neutralize all threats]

[/New_objective: Construct a new frontier outpost to protect Satellite Colony 1]