Don’t raise unruly people in extreme cold weather

Chapter 875

This ridiculous war finally came to an end, ending as hastily as a farce.

The so-called "last counterattack force" of the desert tribes was simply vulnerable in the face of the iron torrent of the imperial army.

The Sand Knights' charge, and the power bestowed by the ancient gods, which they were so proud of, were like fragile sand castles encountering huge waves under the chainswords of the Steam Knights and the roar of heavy artillery. They couldn't even organize a decent resistance and were completely crushed into dust by the artillery fire, without even a chance to struggle.

Their last hope, the goddess Sekhmet, who was placed with high hopes, was just a slightly tricky prey under the butcher knife of the godslayer armor.

Although she displayed power far beyond the comprehension of mortals, her fate was already determined in the face of Perfectoct's carefully designed god-killing weapon.

How ironic!
The chieftains of these desert tribes must still remember that the strongest fighting force the empire brought out during the last rebellion was just a few "God's Grace Knights" - those autonomous knights created by Perfectoct in the early days, who could barely reach the legendary level of combat effectiveness only when they were in an over-limit state.

Although the evil god army they summoned was ultimately defeated, they at least made the imperial army pay a certain price. At least they shed blood and lost a lot of elite soldiers.

This time, they did their homework.

Those chiefs turned over every brick and stone of the ancient temple, deciphered every obscure inscription, and even sacrificed the lives of the entire tribe, using blood and souls as sacrifices, just to exchange for enough power.

When they finally summoned the real gods, they must have been fantasizing about being able to avenge their previous humiliation and make the imperial army tremble in fear under the might of the gods and kneel down to beg for mercy, right?
Unfortunately, reality always likes to play such cruel jokes.

When the god that the desert tribe had summoned with all their might finally arrived, he was like a lousy street magician, clumsily performing a so-called "miracle" in front of the steel body of the Empire's godslayer armor.

Her roaring sandstorm, her scorching sun, her wrath of divine punishment - all seemed so ridiculous in front of the God-killing Armor.

Sekhmet's divine power is truly amazing. If it were in ancient times, her power would be enough to overturn the outcome of a war or even destroy a country.

Even if it were a few years ago, even the empire would have found it difficult to stop the power of a god. Perhaps it could only choose to avoid its edge, or pay a heavy price to barely compete.

But with Perfectoct developing the godslayer armor, gods?
He was no longer the invincible being in her eyes.

Perhaps, in Perfecto's eyes, the gods have never been invincible.

The most ironic thing is that until the last moment of their lives, the turbid eyes of those tribal elders still flashed with incomprehensible confusion.

Their wrinkled faces were distorted and their cracked lips were trembling, but they were still unable to utter the question that had troubled them until death.

They could not figure it out until their death: Why was it that the same summoning ritual, the same ancient spell, the evil god army summoned last time was able to fight back and forth with the Empire's Divine Knights, and even caused the Empire to pay a heavy price, but this time it couldn't even fight back?

Why did they sacrifice more lives and chant more complete spells, only to suffer more complete failure in return?

The answer is actually obvious, yet cruel and laughable - while these tribesmen were still searching for the broken spells to summon the gods in the ancient temple by the flickering firelight, Perfect had already dissected three lesser gods in the brightly lit laboratory.

While they knelt in the temple and prayed to the gods for strength in hoarse voices, the engineers of the empire had already iterated the weapon system of the God-killing Armor to the seventh generation, and every detail had been optimized thousands of times.

This is a showdown that spans time, with one side paying homage to the past and the other side forging the future.

When the chainsaw sword of the God-killing Armor chopped off the god's head with a sharp roar, the tribal warriors were still kneeling and praying to the headless body of the god, as if this could bring their god back to life.

Their bloodshot eyes were filled with despair and piety, but they could never understand what was happening before their eyes.

This absurd scene has no other value except to provide some after-dinner jokes for Perfect.

It's as ridiculous as a child trying to fight a cannon with a stick, but it also has a kind of pitiful naivety.

She suddenly found it ridiculous: these ignorant primitive people would probably never know that the supreme gods in their eyes were just precious alchemical materials and research samples waiting to be disassembled in the eyes of Perfect.

I wonder if they would be so angry that they would crawl out from the pile of corpses if they knew the truth?
But it doesn’t matter. This farce at least proves one truth: in this world where the strong prey on the weak, technology is the only “god” worthy of belief.

The laws written by the Empire with steel and steam are far more real and reliable than those illusory oracles.

As for those so-called gods? They are just raw materials waiting to be slaughtered!
Just like ore waiting to be smelted and data waiting to be analyzed, these so-called gods will eventually be broken down into their most basic components in the empire's laboratories.
-
"Regent, we have recovered the divine core left behind by the gods summoned by the desert tribe." An alchemist respectfully presented the report to Perfectoct, his voice filled with excitement.

This war with the desert tribe was really unremarkable. The only thing that could be considered a gain, apart from the large amount of valuable test data collected by the God-killing Armor in actual combat, was probably the divine core left behind after Sekhmet was killed.

The way this desert god appeared was completely different from all the gods that Perfecto had encountered before.

It did not come to the world in the traditional form of flesh and blood, and it is even difficult to use common sense to define whether it has a complete form.

When fighting with the God-killing Armor, the body it displayed was just a temporary condensation of the yellow sand in the sky. After being killed, it immediately disintegrated into ordinary sand. This phenomenon is enough to show that it does not have a real physical form.

However, according to Perfectocte's research and understanding of gods, real gods obviously should not exist in this form.

Before this, all the gods she had seen, whether they came in person or were summoned, were real entities with flesh and blood.

That is to say, the ancestral spirits believed by the indigenous people of the North have no specific form, but only live in totem poles, but the ancestral spirits cannot be called gods.

This abnormal phenomenon aroused Perfect's great interest.

She couldn't help but start to wonder what kind of special form of existence this was, and whether Sekhmet had really been completely destroyed.

What concerned her even more was that if she could successfully analyze the method by which the desert tribes summoned this special god, she might be able to develop some new tactics of great strategic value.

By then, the imperial army might also be able to master this powerful ability to summon gods. After simply asking the alchemist a few key questions about the process of recovering the divine core, Perfect handed over the tedious task of sorting out the combat data of the God Killing Armor to them.

He couldn't wait to turn around and go into his own laboratory to conduct in-depth research on the mysterious core that had just been recovered.

Sekhmet's divine core lay quietly on the laboratory table, glowing with a dull stone luster under the cold alchemical light.

At first glance, this is just a very simple stone statue, and the rough texture on the surface shows that it has gone through the baptism of a long time.

The statue is carefully carved into the image of Sekhmet - the desert goddess with a lion's head and a human body, sitting majestically, with her muscular hands holding weapons and folded across her chest.

On her head she wore a crown that symbolized the sun. Every radiating line was clearly visible, and the gem inlaid in the center of the crown had long lost its luster.

The base of the statue is engraved with ancient hieroglyphs, which are faintly visible under the light, as if telling the legend of a lost civilization.

To devout believers, this statue is indeed simple yet majestic, with every detail exuding a sacred atmosphere.

Those mottled marks are not the result of years of wear and tear, but the proof of miracles; those rough textures are not flaws in craftsmanship, but the embodiment of divinity.

But in Perfecto's eyes, it was just a stone statue that looked like it had good research value.

Her gloved fingers gently stroked the patterns on the surface of the statue, and what came to her mind was not a reverence for the gods, but a series of equations and experimental plans to be solved.

In her opinion, the value of this statue lies not in the deity it represents, but in the energy structure and material composition it contains, and how it constructs such a huge body.

The cold white light of the laboratory cast sharp shadows on the surface of the statue, and clear contours were formed at the junction of light and dark, just like the gaze of Perfecto as he examined it, precise, rational and cold.

She was wearing a single-sided alchemical eyepiece, and her eyes behind the lens were slightly narrowed, flashing with the unique concentration when analyzing data.

To her, this was just a research sample waiting to be disassembled, just like those numbered and sealed alchemical materials in the laboratory. She had no reverence for the gods at all.

Her fingers tapped lightly on the surface of the statue, making a dull sound, as if mocking the ignorant believers who were worshiping the stone statue.

After she conducted a brief study of the stone statue, she concluded that it was just a totem made of stone and did not even have any artistic value worthy of praise.

She scraped off a small amount of stone powder with an alchemical knife and tested the composition in an analyzer. The result showed the most common sandstone base.

Yes, this stone carving - the divine core of Sekhmet, is just something similar to the totem poles worshipped by the indigenous people of the North.

They all carry the beliefs and aspirations of specific groups and are the concrete products of primitive religious worship.

Perfect even noticed that the seemingly mysterious patterns on the base were actually similar to the decorative patterns on totem poles in the North.

However, unlike the totem pole, this stone statue does not house any gods, only a sufficient power of faith and a faint trace of divinity.

When Perfect tested it, the instrument only detected weak energy fluctuations, far from the strength of a complete divine core.

This is slightly different from the totem pole. The ancestral spirits in the totem pole have self-awareness, and the divinity they embody is more abundant than that of this stone statue.

Perfect recalled several Northern totem poles he had dissected before; those specimens at least gave noticeable responses to detection, and even occasionally showed resistance.

This thing looks like a variation of a totem pole. Although on the surface its shape of a lion head and a human body looks completely different from those abstract totem symbols in the North, there is no difference in their core. They are all products of primitive beliefs.

Perfect snorted, casually placed the statue on the lab table, and turned to prepare more sophisticated testing equipment.
-
After several days of research, Perfect finally came to a definite conclusion.

This stone statue of Sekhmet was activated with some ancient ritual techniques and special methods to contain its divinity and power of faith, which is why it can burst out with combat power comparable to that of a god on the battlefield.

Through testing with sophisticated alchemical instruments, she discovered that the faint divinity inside the stone statue, after being activated, produced a chain reaction like a lit fuse.

This divinity instinctively drove the enormous power of faith stored in the stone statue, and constructed the complete form of the god Sekhmet out of thin air.

The process of materializing this energy was so exquisite that the projection of the god summoned by the stone statue was able to engage in fierce combat with the Empire's two latest-model god-killing armors, even knocking the two expensive war machines into a state of mid-breakage.

"What a trouble." Perfecto frowned as he checked the armor's damage report.

Although these damages are not irreparable, there is no doubt that the technicians responsible for the repair must have wanted to curse when they saw the scarred armor.

In particular, the complete destruction of the left arm's transmission system and the signs of energy overload on the chest armor required the replacement of a large number of precision parts.

And this stone statue fell into complete silence after Sekhmet's body was defeated by the godslayer armor.

Now it is like an ordinary stone, lying quietly on the laboratory table.

It can be seen that both the core divinity and the huge power of faith gathered in the stone statue were consumed too much in that battle.

The entire statue lost its vitality, and the patterns on its surface became dull and lifeless, like an ordinary stone that had been drained of all its value.

However, this also gave Perfectot an inspiration. Perhaps based on the characteristics of this statue, he could study how to summon the gods and summon a divine incarnation of the gods.

(End of this chapter)