Saiyan stowaways on the Ark

They then instantly entered the building, and in the severely damaged interior, they stepped on the broken walls, avoided the icicles outside, and moved upwards.

But when they entered the building and prepared to continue their advance...

In a space that is much smaller than the outside world, there are floating Originium ice crystals.

"We've been waiting for you to take this path."

Countless ice crystals exploded at the same time, and the frigid air created a huge temperature difference, tearing the building apart and engulfing the guards.

The towering ruins began to shake and collapse, falling towards the ice platform where Froststar and the others were.

The single platform then tilted downwards and extended to the ground, allowing people on it to slide down quickly and leave the collapsed center before being buried by the rubble.

"in case..."

Looking at the devastated ruins, Froststar raised her hand again, a look of pain on her face. She frowned, and a snow-white crystal gradually grew from her palm.

Aim forward and throw.

In an instant, an even thicker layer of ice enveloped the ruins that buried the inner guards, as if to isolate that area from the world.

Afterwards, Froststar let out a long breath, a breath so cold that it couldn't even condense into white mist.

"Phew... let's hurry back to that old stubborn guy's place... cough cough!!!"

Frostnova was giving orders to the Shield Guards, but she started coughing uncontrollably halfway through her sentence due to a severe physical discomfort.

The bitter cold.

The long-lost chill.

Frostnova knew this feeling all too well.

These are her symptoms during an attack of Oripathy.

Are you alright...?

Just as the shield guards were about to help Frostnova up, having rescued them from the danger of the inner guards, she suddenly raised her hand and unleashed a gust of wind that instantly blew the heavily armored shield guards away.

As they left their original spot, a crack suddenly appeared in the ground—then it shattered, and from it jumped out an inner guard whose body was only slightly covered in frost.

They couldn't even hold them for a minute?

"What terrifying skill! The Shield Guards pose virtually no threat to us, meaning you're essentially fighting us one-on-one..."

While fighting off the sudden onset of her illness, Froststar also noticed that there were only three guards in front of her.

"Killed an inside defender - suffering casualties in a multi-on-one situation, no one but the pure-blooded Wendigo has ever done that."

The inner guards did not continue their attack; two of them went to the shield guards whose formation had been disrupted by Frostnova.

The remaining person continued to ask:

"This is the last time. If you choose to surrender, we can erase your identity and let you continue to serve Ursus. These soldiers—the generals' old subordinates—will also be spared their lives."

“We know you are now serving Rhodes Island, which means that since you left Ursus, you have 'betrayed' both Ursus and Reunion. Even if it happened again, I don’t think you would refuse anything, would you?”

This is more like humiliation than persuasion to surrender.

"As for the survivors who remained... we already knew where you gathered your survivors and have sent people to do what we were supposed to do, so you don't need to worry about anything."

The guards watched as Frostnova led Rhodes Island's rescue team to an underground passage.

Then Frostnova brought out a group of Shield Guards, but the other members were not seen. They must have stayed behind to take care of the others who were unable to move.

In other words, that must be a survivor concentration area on this mobile platform, and it just so happens that there are remnants of the Patriots there.

Frostnova and Shieldbearer are still worth recruiting, but the rest are not.

Those who are of no value—or rather, those who are of no value to Ursus—will be treated by the guards according to the original policy.

That is to prevent any of them from revealing scandals involving people in Ursus who are colluding with the Reunion Movement, or even betraying the city and intending to start a war, and to "erasure" them—regardless of whether those people knew about it or not.

To the internal security guards, doing something like this simply for insurance purposes is perfectly reasonable.

As for Talulah, she was in the center of the explosion where even the inner guards who stayed in the core city to monitor the situation were turned to ashes. Was there any need to search for her?

The guards seemed to be smiling as they spoke.

Froststar refused; that meant death, but it would rid Ursus of a scourge.

Frostnova accepted, and that was a contribution, adding a small part of strength to the mighty Ursus.

Frostnova smiled.

However, she used an ugly expression to mock the guards' stupidity.

"You mean, some of the inner guards went to where the rest of the people were?"

Frostnova realized that her inner guards still didn't understand who she had met among the survivors.

[Main Text] Chernobog, Amidst the Ruins: Chapter Thirteen - The General is Old, He Must Fight Ten

Perhaps it was an intuition, which was not really a "reason," that led Frostnova to choose this mobile platform, which was not much different from other scattered neighborhoods, to carry out the rescue work when she first led the team.

And the results of this exploration did indeed make Frostnova realize that her intuition was not unfounded.

The traces of activity remaining on the ruins allowed her to easily determine that it belonged to a group of people rather than Originium creatures, and that they appeared after the ruins were created.

In other words, there are indeed people here. This level of evidence is nothing new to Froststar, who used to live on the frozen ground of Ursus and spent his days tracking or avoiding the Ursus patrols.

Most of the accompanying team members were aware of her identity, but they had been instructed at the pre-departure meeting not to reveal it to the outside world.

So they found an underground space where a large number of survivors were gathered without much difficulty.

To her surprise, all the survivors here were infected people from Chernobog—they originally used the underground as their activity area.

After explaining their purpose, the group of infected aid workers, who called themselves "Azazel," chose to trust the Rhodes Island rescue team that came to provide assistance, despite lacking supplies, and led them into a deeper area.

To Frostnova's surprise, just before she arrived at the personnel gathering area and was about to meet their leader, "General Hrag," whom she had heard of during the Reunion Movement, she saw another familiar figure.

"...Yelena?"

"Old stubborn man!?"

Neither of them were dressed in their usual attire, or rather, neither of them had any impression of each other's appearances.

Frostnova, whose face was covered, was immediately called out by a hoarse voice mixed with doubt.

At the same moment, Frostnova called out the nickname of the tall, robed figure in a surprised tone.

Frostnova, dressed in Rhodes Island uniform, met Patriot, who had removed his armor, at Azazel's underground base.

This encounter did not cause much of a stir. The two sides simply put aside their long-held concerns that they had never revealed to outsiders, and then skillfully exchanged information about their current situations and the circumstances of the survivors.

Froststar also noticed that her father had changed a lot compared to before.

As for the patriot, he spoke to Hrag in a halting yet boastful tone:

“General! This is my daughter, Yelena. I told you I would bring her to meet you. Come, call her Grandpa.”

"Shouldn't you call me uncle?"

However, Frostnova, who was trying to send a communication to the Doctor, discovered that the signal was being interfered with.

That's why he left the Rhodes Island operators to continue taking care of the people there, while he took the surviving Shield Guards to check the situation in the surrounding area.

—Of course, these things were unknown to the inner guards who thought they had given Froststar to the "General".

Or perhaps we don't know yet.

Why are you laughing?

The inner guard looked at Froststar, who was at her wit's end due to the sudden onset of Oripathy, and asked.

"Have the guards you sent sent back to you yet?"

Frostnova countered with a question that momentarily stunned the other party.

The signal jamming was Ursus's doing, but Ursus's military communication equipment could still function smoothly in this environment, although the old-fashioned communication equipment could only transmit limited information.

The Shield Guards also brought communications personnel, so when she noticed the anomaly, she immediately sent a message to Tomat using a transmitter. The reason was simple: of the few communication numbers she had recently come into contact with, Tomat's was the earliest and the one that left the deepest impression on her.

After all, the convenience of new communicators, which allow you to directly enter contacts without having to memorize each number, becomes an obstacle when using old-fashioned communicators.

Moreover, the opponent was an internal guard, so it would be safest to notify him first. Unfortunately, after she dialed the first number, the internal guard stopped her and had no time to inform the doctor.

"No, what are you thinking..."

The guards stopped acting because of Froststar's words, and were also puzzled as to why, as she had said, the guard they had sent out had not responded for a long time.

"Perhaps to you it was just a trivial cleanup mission, but if the mission is completed, there must be a reward. That's common sense for soldiers, right?" Frostnova slowly stood up, looking in the direction she had come from, and continued unhurriedly, "Normally, that mission should have been completed quickly, or even if there were any unusual circumstances, you would have been notified. So the only possibility is..."

"What exactly are you trying to say!?"

The guard suddenly raised his voice, causing even the surrounding gravel to tremble and fly up with a chilling aura.

"Perhaps they encountered a situation where they didn't even have time to send a message?"

There's nothing to worry about with Tomat, whether we run into him or not.

Other teams did not start exploring the outer areas as early as they did; they mostly gathered with the main rescue convoys from Lungmen and Rhodes Island, and it was unlikely that the inner guards would directly take action.

The only situation that remains unclear is Azazel's side.

If Froststar had been somewhat worried before, then what the inner guard said completely dispelled those worries.

"I mean--"

Froststar turned around in front of the guards.

In that instant, everyone felt an unusual sense of oppression, different from the cold aura during the previous fierce battle, which came from the direction Froststar was facing, like a tidal wave.

It was as if a vast army was arriving, their presence unseen yet the thunderous sound of their iron hooves could be heard, determined to crush anything in their way.

“That old stubborn man—no, I should say my ‘father’—is coming.”

The guards saw an object, seemingly shrouded in thick black fog and blood-red light, rushing towards them like lightning.

It smashed through the ruins of buildings, flattened twisted steel, and scattered flying ashes, each step carrying a deafening force as it approached them.

"Yelena!!!!!!!!!"

The ominous figure roared angrily from a hundred meters away, calling out Frostnova's real name.

They felt the ground beneath them shake from the roar, and the ice covering the buildings cracked and crumbled.