“Understood.”
Hearing Bronya’s words, Gray Wind’s expression calmed down.
The room they were in gave a soft shudder before rapidly descending underground.
Bronya’s room was actually a massive elevator, connecting directly to a subterranean base located hundreds of meters below the surface.
Gray Wind’s nanobots only needed to devour any matter to continuously self-replicate.
In just a few short days, they had excavated and constructed a colossal underground complex.
Throughout the entire process, not a single drop of Honkai Energy was used—it was built purely by the count of quadrillions of nanobots.
Bronya’s reason for avoiding Honkai Energy was simple: she needed it, but she couldn’t afford to be detected by Schicksal, Anti-Entropy, or World Serpent.
Triggering a Honkai outbreak was the most efficient way to gather Honkai Energy, but it would also draw countless enemies to her doorstep.
Bronya didn’t foolishly believe she could beat Durandal and Fu Hua all on her own, especially with all those ridiculously overpowered Divine Keys lying around.
Besides, as powerful as Gray Wind was, she wasn’t literally the planet-devouring Gray Wind from Stellaris.
In short, Bronya had made up her mind: she had to stay completely under the radar while quietly hoarding Honkai Energy.
And gathering Honkai Energy didn’t necessarily require causing a full-blown Honkai eruption anyway.
After all, the end goal of the Honkai phenomenon was the destruction of humanity.
And turning humans into Void Rangers and spawning Honkai Beasts wasn’t the only way to wipe out mankind.
The big three factions might be hyper-sensitive to Honkai Energy signatures, but when it came to non-Honkai incidents?
They wouldn’t give two damns.
That was exactly Bronya’s angle of attack.
The elevator gradually slowed to a halt.
One wall of the room slid open outward, revealing an immensely vast underground fortress.
Bronya stepped slowly toward the exit.
Under the harsh floodlights, rows of war machines gleamed with a cold, metallic sheen.
Endless swarms of newly replicated nanobots poured out from specialized vents, organizing themselves on platform workstations to form all kinds of vehicle parts.
Mechanical arms of every size swept them into assembly lines, where other robotic arms pieced them together in seconds.
In just a matter of moments, a brand-new battle tank rolled off the line and parked inside the staging area.
Hundreds of tanks stood in immaculate, imposing rows across the subterranean floor—and as time went on, their numbers only grew exponentially.
It wasn’t just tanks, either.
Assault rifles, heavy artillery, armored personnel carriers, and fighter jets were being churned out in massive industrial batches.
“What better way to cause mass human casualties than a good old-fashioned war?”
Bronya smiled faintly.
“Besides, war is the only thing that won’t blow my cover with those factions.”
“Bronya-nee-chan, why not use a deadly virus?”
Gray Wind asked, her blue eyes blinking in pure curiosity.
“Or I could spread more nanobots to short-circuit human nervous systems directly.
Wouldn’t that yield a much higher body count?”
Just as Gray Wind said, Bronya was entirely capable of cooking up a terrifying virus with near-100% lethality and contagiousness.
But such a bioweapon had appeared in the past—namely, the Black Death that swept through Europe five hundred years ago.
In this world, the Black Death was actually a manifestation of the Honkai.
Otto, having served as Schicksal’s Overseer for five centuries, would instantly recognize a similar contagion.
Using nanobots directly would lead to the exact same problem.
At the end of the day, nanobots were still technological creations.
And what was the Herrscher of Reason known for?
Mastering technology.
If nanobots got exposed, it would take five seconds for someone to link them straight to Bronya, the Herrscher of Reason.
After all, neither Schicksal nor Anti-Entropy were strangers to nanotechnology—let alone World Serpent.
“Yeah, you’re not wrong,” Bronya said, giving a slight nod.
“However, we can’t underestimate humanity, nor can we just stand openly as their enemy.”
“More than a decade ago, there was a Herrscher far more powerful than me.
She possessed six Herrscher Cores and total control over space.
With her power, wiping out Earth was child’s play.
Yet she still died, killed by humans.
And afterward, her consciousness, her body, and her Herrscher Cores were all exploited by them.”
“The best way to destroy humanity is to let them destroy themselves.
If we strike personally, we’ll only unite them against us.”
Gray Wind looked a bit confused.
“So Bronya-nee-chan plans to spark a global civil war and make humans wipe themselves out?”
“Bingo.”
Bronya’s goal was to ignite the flames of war and set the whole world ablaze.
Before long, the massive arsenal in this underground fortress would flood out from Siberia and rapidly spread across every corner of the globe.
And along with these war machines came something far more insidious.
Bronya didn’t linger in the assembly area for long.
Hopping onto Project Bunny with Gray Wind, the two went drifting and speeding through the underground facility until they reached a separate wing.
Beep.
A heavy blast door slowly slid open.
Snap!
Countless overhead lights flickered to life, illuminating the entire sector before Bronya’s eyes.
Row after row of cylindrical pod tanks filled with glowing green liquid stood arrayed like a forest across the cold metal floor.
Further out, swarms of nanobots were continuously expanding the facility, building even more pods.
Despite the bright lighting, the atmosphere here felt hauntingly eerie and sinister.
“How much longer?” Bronya asked, walking into what looked like a scene straight out of a mad bio-lab.
“100,000 cloning pods will be completed in 2,415 hours, 35 minutes, and 7 seconds,” Gray Wind reported in a calm, precise tone.
“18 hours, 1 minute, and 2 seconds after completion, 100,000 clone soldiers will step out of the pods.
Full combat readiness and deployment training will be finalized in 2,512 hours, 4 minutes, and 18 seconds.”
The initial cloning pod had been created by Bronya using Honkai Energy.
After Gray Wind devoured it, her nanobots were able to replicate the pods endlessly.
This was precisely why Bronya had created the nanobots in the first place—to duplicate and mass-produce pure technological creations on an industrial scale.
Aside from having an absolute Thought Stamp of loyalty to Bronya imprinted on their minds and carrying a contingent of nanobots in their bodies, the cloned soldiers were indistinguishable from normal human beings.
The Thought Stamp machine was another creation Bronya had synthesized with Honkai Energy before having Gray Wind devour and replicate it.
Its main purpose was to guarantee absolute loyalty.
On top of the mental Thought Stamp, the nanobots embedded inside the clones served as a physical kill-switch to enforce obedience.
Furthermore, the nanobots Gray Wind scattered across the globe had already harvested the memory data of countlessly many human brains.
This meant that whenever Bronya desired, she could seamlessly replace key figures in human society with clone duplicates.
More importantly, these clones were not technically “human.” Even though their DNA was identical to humans, with human flesh, blood, and memories, and even though they could be corrupted by Honkai Energy, they still weren’t human.
Besides, Bronya had no intention of letting these clones think of themselves as human anyway.
Doing so would just mean replicating another human civilization, which was pointless.
In their programmed minds, they only saw themselves as loyal subordinates of the Herrscher of Reason, Bronya, and as agents of the Honkai.
Of course, their active memories contained none of these details.
Any memory relating to Bronya was physically and mentally wiped by the nanobots and Thought Stamps to prevent certain individuals who liked manipulating memories from uncovering the truth.
A little over ten days later, Bronya and Gray Wind returned to the subterranean base.
By now, 100,000 clone soldiers stood in neat phalanxes, clad in black-and-red uniforms adorned with gear-shaped emblems.
Holding steel rifles in hand, their eyes burned with fanatical devotion as they gazed up at Bronya on the high platform.
“Eliminate human tyranny!
The world belongs to Honkai!!!”
Bronya cried out, her voice echoing throughout the underground complex.
“Eliminate human tyranny!
The world belongs to Honkai!!!”
The clone army roared in fanatic unison.
“The war…
has begun,” Bronya whispered as the noise subsided, her gear-patterned pupils gleaming with cold brilliance.
“Time to hit fast-forward.”
Ren clicked the fast-forward button in the game interface.
Every few days, event pop-up windows flashed on screen: reporting weapons and clone troops arriving in Region X, initiating coups in foreign governments, or stealthily replacing key human figures.
Naturally, Ren kept Bronya’s operation strictly under the radar so as not to alert Schicksal, Anti-Entropy, or World Serpent.
After all, wars between human nations were everyday occurrences.
Societal conflicts were merely swept under the rug rather than gone.
Ren simply gave a gentle push, and the flames of war quietly ignited across the globe.
Before long, the game’s timeline progressed to the beginning of the main Honkai story—two years after the Honkai eruption in Nagazora.
However, unlike the original storyline, the iconic trio had been reduced to just two: Kiana and Raiden Mei.