dmims Chapter 130 The Dwarves Enter the Kree Empire
Chapter 130 The Dwarves Enter the Kree Empire
The sky over Hala Star remained calm for a few days.
The Supreme Intelligence spent the last few days doing one thing: changing the Holy Lord's command authority from "suggestion" to "execution".
Previously, issuing an order required approval from the parliament, signature from the general, and stamp from the governor of the colony, a process that took an average of seventy-two standard days.
Now there are only two nodes: the Lord says, it does, greatly improving efficiency.
A rainbow-colored beam of light cleaved down from the void and pierced straight into the plaza in front of the Supreme Hall. The beam lasted for more than ten seconds, and after it dissipated, there were more than three hundred people in the plaza.
The leader was a short, stocky middle-aged man with shoulders nearly twice the width of an average person. The muscles on his arms were like coiled steel cables, and he had a braided red beard hanging from his chin. He was less than 1.6 meters tall.
Dwarves.
Standing beside them were dozens of tall, slender Asgardians with blond hair and blue eyes, their armor adorned with runes.
Reg stood at the edge of the square, his pupils contracting.
He knew the dwarves.
Their relationship with the dwarves was not friendly. When their space exploration team reached the edge of the Nine Realms and encountered the dwarves, they tried to subjugate them, but the dwarves refused.
The Kree fleet razed one-third of Nidaville's forges.
The dwarves still refused.
Another third of it was leveled.
The previous leader of the dwarves, who was also the father of this red-bearded man, said something when only one-third of the furnace remained: "You can destroy the furnace, but you can't build it."
The war ended with the Kree Empire's strategic retreat. Two-thirds of the Dwarven forges were destroyed. In order to avoid genocide, the Dwarven agreed to the Kree Empire's terms and paid tribute of equipment to the Kree Empire.
Later, the Nine Realms were unified.
At the time, the Kree Empire didn't care. In their eyes, the Nine Realms were just backward regions on the edge of the universe. What difference would it make if they unified them? They even sent a harassing fleet to probe, but the entire fleet sank to the bottom of the sea without even sending back a signal.
That initial test led to everything that followed.
The red-bearded dwarf surveyed the plaza, his gaze sweeping over the neatly stacked wreckage of power armor and the Kree soldiers standing in their linings, before letting out a snort.
"Kree junk."
The sound wasn't loud, but every Kree soldier in the square heard it, yet no one dared to speak back.
Redbeard's gaze swept across the plaza and landed on the High Hall. His expression changed. The Holy Lord had truly conquered the Kree Empire. This foreign king of Asgard had indeed helped the dwarves out of their predicament, even if the Holy Lord's help wasn't purely altruistic but had other motives.
The short, stocky blacksmith knelt on one knee, pounding his chest with his right fist in a booming voice: "King Aitley of Nidaville's Forge, I have come by royal command!"
More than two hundred dwarves behind him knelt down at the same time, their fists pounding their chests in unison.
"I have come by the King's command!"
The dozens of Asgardian warriors also knelt down.
Reg stood to the side, his Adam's apple bobbing. The dwarves, the dwarves whom the Kree Empire could bombard with its fleet without yielding, called that man King.
Wanda walked up to Atreus: "The master said he remembers about the furnace. The Kree Empire destroyed it before, and now they will make them pay for it all."
Aitley was taken aback: "Compensation?"
"Supreme Wisdom." Wanda turned her head.
The blue sphere above the hall flashed, and a holographic projection unfolded, displaying a list of 470 rare minerals, their names, quantities, and origins, all from the Kree Empire's colony mines.
The total amount was ten times the loss suffered by the dwarves that year.
Aitley stared at the list for a long time, his red beard trembling slightly, his voice tight but steady: "Thank the King for me."
Wanda didn't respond, but turned to the Asgardian warriors: "The coordinates of the Rainbow Bridge are fixed. Subsequent personnel and supplies will be transported in batches. The base has been marked. The Supreme Intelligence is in contact."
An Asgardian warrior looked up: "What brings you to the Kree Empire?"
Wanda glanced at him: "The master said four words: Go out and see."
The Asgardians fell silent. Although the Nine Realms possessed magic and divine power, their system had been closed off for far too long.
They knew the universe was vast, but had never been part of a true interstellar civilization network, and now they had been thrown into an empire with 4,700 colony planets.
The meaning is clear: their king wants them to open their eyes to the world.
For the next seven days, the Rainbow Bridge flashed once every six hours. Asgardian rune scholars entered the Kree Energy Research Institute and discovered that cosmic ray drive technology and runic energy conduction were highly complementary.
The dwarven blacksmiths took over Hala's largest military factory. Aetry stood in front of the Kree neutron star alloy smelting furnace for two hours before saying, "Connect this thing to the Uru Forge, and I can forge things I never dared to dream of before."
Kree's chief scientist, Jayne Fran, stood by watching a 1.3-meter-tall dwarf dismantle and rebuild his prized possession, his expression indescribable.
And the Holy Lord never questioned any of this.
On the eleventh day, a new message marked "highest priority" appeared in the core log of the Supreme Intelligence. In order to engrave this message into the bottom of the system, it remained silent for 0.7 seconds, which, given its processing speed, was equivalent to a human being remaining silent for an entire day.
"Holy Lord".
"explain."
"When integrating the deep space exploration database, we discovered a set of information that had been sealed by the former management team for 800 years and was encrypted at the highest level."
"What information?"
"A coordinate and an image." The voice of the Supreme Intelligence fluctuated extremely faintly: "The coordinate points to Titan."
The Supreme Intelligence retrieved the images, which were blurry and had unstable signals; they were taken by a deep space probe at its extreme distance.
A desolate planet, its surface littered with ruins, with the wreckage of a colossal ship, far larger than the Kree flagship, floating in its orbit.
But the reason the former management sealed and preserved this footage was not because of the ruins or the wreckage.
It was the figure standing in the middle of the ruins.
Too far away and too blurry to make out the face, only a huge silhouette standing alone in the desolate wasteland, looking up at the sky.
"Eight hundred years ago, a probe passed by Titan and took this image. The probe was then destroyed on its return journey. The management determined that the target's threat level exceeded the Empire's response limit and chose to seal it off. Titan and three surrounding star systems were designated as a permanent no-entry zone, and no one has touched it for eight hundred years."
"And now?"
"There are no signs of life on the surface of Titan, but within a radius of thirty light-years, regular spatial fluctuations have been observed for nearly three hundred years, with the frequency and amplitude increasing year by year."
Something is moving.
"Yes, and it's accelerating."
The hall fell silent once more.
After a long while, the Holy Lord's voice rang out, his tone as indifferent as if he were talking about something trivial: "An old acquaintance."
The Supreme Intelligence did not understand the meaning of these four words, but it stored the sentence verbatim on "the ceiling".
There are already seventeen files in the folder.