After submitting the list of military insects screened from the First Legion, while waiting for the results of the review, Leslie took Casper to the Second Legion’s station to start raiding the noble military insects there.
Most of the spots had been allocated to the First Legion; coming to the Second Legion was merely to supplement the team with some elites specialized in individual combat. There was not much time left. With military insects from two parties possessing completely different combat habits, it was highly likely that they would end up striking their own side or feel constrained, causing their overall strength to drop significantly.
In that case, there was simply no need to force them to coordinate. They would be directly split into two parts: elite vanguards and the main force, allowing precise strikes and frontal assaults to be carried out simultaneously.
In the virtual battlefield, dozens of high-end, precision mechs sped through the space environment, accurately bypassing scattered meteorites to approach the enemy camp silently.
In real combat, they often needed to take on multiple enemies at once to eliminate the opposition’s backbone and scatter the enemy army from its roots.
However, in this virtual battle, they had only one target: Casper.
Outside the arena, Lifya’s eyelid twitched as he watched mech after mech being silently dismantled.
Usually, when he commanded, this group could show some spirit of team collaboration. But now, as soon as they left his command, they immediately entered pure individual combat mode, to the point where they would not even notice if a teammate were killed.
The eldest prince shook his head silently.
Deserved.
A group of arrogant cubs needed to suffer the beatings of society like this to realize that there is always a stronger bug out there.
Suffering a few lessons now was better than losing their lives on a real battlefield later.
Lifya leaned over and whispered into his younger brother’s ear: “Good thing this is a virtual battlefield.”
Otherwise, given Casper’s method of dismantling mechs, he had no idea how much of his budget would be burned through.
The mech maintenance insects would cry and scream that it was impossible if they saw that pile of scrap metal.
This was not maintenance; it was rebuilding.
Leslie was fully focused on the silver-blue mech in the virtual screen, moving with elusive, ghostly speed.
He had selfishly imported the data of Casper’s exclusive mech into the simulation. It had been a long time since he had seen Frost Shadow appear in space.
As his thoughts drifted for a moment, Leslie thought inexplicably that Frost Shadow would be exceptionally beautiful in the space environment of the Butterfly Cloud Star System.
The glow of pink and purple nebulae would be sparsely scattered across the metal surface reflecting silver-blue light. The high-speed mech would graze past, drawing a silver arc across the surface of the constantly expanding and dissipating butterfly wings.
Tearing through the eerie nebula graveyard, it would stir up a free-flowing storm of matter.
That must be an incredibly breathtaking beauty.
His royal brother’s question beside him brought Leslie’s drifting thoughts back.
“Such extreme operations stimulate the body well. You are not holding onto the idea of helping him break through to the SS-rank, are you?”
Lifya felt his guess made a lot of sense.
The breakthrough and metamorphosis of high-rank female insects are very subtle.
It might just be a hormone surge during a fight that breaks the upper limit, leading to metamorphosis, or it might be that they cannot break through even after facing death several times.
There are plenty of female insects who remain stuck at the critical point for life.
The jump from A-rank to S-rank is a natural chasm, and the jump from S-rank to SS-rank is as difficult as breaking through a spatial barrier.
It is a gamble on luck.
For the rare high-rank female insects, especially one like Casper with such high combat talent, there would be implicit preferential treatment based on the principle of cherishing talent.
Take Casper’s previous crime of severely wounding a high-rank male insect; if it were any other bug, it would be the death penalty without negotiation. But in reality, if Leslie had not abducted the prisoner in court, Casper would not have been sentenced so harshly. Apart from the plaintiff, Gray, the judges and lawyers would have tried their best to excuse and reduce Casper’s sentence. While not completely innocent, a few decades of imprisonment to appease public anger would have sufficed.
But returning to his original position was impossible.
The public did not have amnesia, nor were they all blind.
The preferential treatment for an S-rank female insect stopped there.
But if he were SS-rank, that would be a different story.
The only surviving SS-rank female insect today was the current Empress. If Casper truly metamorphosed to the SS-rank, the strength-worshipping insect public would welcome him back to the Legion. Leaving such powerful capability unused would be a waste, would it not?
Leslie gave his royal brother a strange look and tilted his head. “No, I just simply thought that they could not threaten Casper, so I let them go together.”
Lifya choked.
His younger brother, who had been a fan of Casper since childhood, pointed at his idol who was slaughtering everyone on the virtual screen, stating the fact with a tone of natural, unsurprised certainty: “Look, Royal Brother, see? Everyone who got close was finished off by Casper.”
“And that was not even them approaching him voluntarily.”
If Casper had not broken them down one by one, this group of military insects would not have been able to even touch the edge of his mech.
How much time would it waste to deal with them one by one?
Why should this group of military insects steal his time quota? They had to go back and rest after the fight was finished early.
Lifya felt a familiar sense of heartache.
Sure enough, a reconciliation between him and Casper was impossible.
They should just fight whenever they meet.
Bearing Leslie’s puzzled gaze, Lifya silently lay down into a training pod.
“Royal Brother, what are you doing?”
Lifya ruthlessly closed the cabin door, his calm voice harboring killing intent: “It is a rare opportunity, so I am going in to fight a round, too.”
Leslie looked blankly at the tightly closed training pod. After a long while, he silently retracted his outstretched hand.
Forget it.
This was their unique way of communicating emotions among female insects.
Have a fight, and the relationship will be good.
In the virtual battlefield, as the signal sources on the display screen vanished one by one, Casper acutely sensed that something was wrong.
From the beginning, he had left a fake signal source in the camp for diversion. After hiding his channel, he had slipped out and started hunting them one by one.
Frost Shadow’s detection system was different from ordinary mechs. It did not rely on electromagnetic waves, but on the fluctuations of spatial matter. Therefore, even if the opponent activated a concealment shield, they could not escape detection.
But now, Frost Shadow could not detect the remaining three signal sources.
Wrong.
The suddenly surging sense of crisis caused Casper to change his original trajectory in an instant and dive downward.
The burning beam of light grazed the surface of the silver-blue mech, drawing an unrestrained arc in the pitch-black, barren space. After exceeding the expected distance without hitting the target, the orange-red beam broke and diffused into a cluster of sparkling particles, eroding the detection waves released by Frost Shadow.
Good news: there was no enemy on the display screen.
Bad news: he saw them through the control room glass.
Casper immediately manipulated Frost Shadow to open up the distance, his tracks elegant, graceful, and unpredictable.
Lifya.
And his mech, Phoebus.
Casper raised an eyebrow. The tacit understanding between military insects needed no words; they knew what to do at a single encounter. The ice-blue light blades flashing with electric sparks extended from the front of the mech’s arms, forcefully intercepting another orange-red high-temperature beam, cutting it in half.
At the same time, electromagnetic cannons fired from three directions, bombarding the silver-blue mech in the center in a surrounding posture.
Electric sparks crackled and exploded on the virtual screen. The silver-blue arcs and orange-red laser beams shone in the pitch-black space. It was the ultimate combat aesthetic, a manifestation of unrestrained freedom completely different from the previous one-sided, silent killing.
Truly cool.
Leslie watched the Frost Shadow dancing freely in the field unblinkingly, just like his first meeting years ago: suave, at ease, brave, and fierce.
Casper, who was not at a disadvantage even when facing four opponents, was truly cool.