Tonight, Alice joins the hunt.

This is merely a world of memories, and she is Alice, with no intention of assuming the karmic consequences of her predecessor, Arya—those harmed by Arya who wish to harm her deserve to die. Those who helped Arya torment others deserve it.

Some people deserve to die, and some people deserve to live.

Therefore, her mind was free from any distracting thoughts—although even without all these excuses, she would not have been tempted by any distracting thoughts.

She glanced around, watching the skeletons and corpses scattered throughout the manor, trembling as if trying to move, yet restrained by an unknown force, lying prostrate on the ground. She then shook her head slightly.

"Why bother?" the witch said softly. "Since this life is nothing but a dream anyway, why not transfer the power to me? At least it will spark some different kind of brilliance."

She whispered, but her whisper was met with silence.

A wind blew through the courtyard, causing the sand stained crimson with her blood to sway slightly over the corpse. It seemed as if it were about to roll off the wreckage, or perhaps it was about to be swept away by the breeze.

So the witch stomped her foot.

"May you be eternally condemned to the underworld, for countless eons—"

The next moment, just as she was about to utter the word "resurrection," the corpses of all 136 prisoners, 22 guards, 45 male and female servants, and two nobles in the entire manor leaped up at the same instant, roaring and howling as they pounced on the witch in the circle!

"Stop," Alice said, uttering a single word.

Then the many resurrected corpses suddenly stopped, either frozen in their leaping, pouncing poses or falling to the ground. Only the four hundred and ten dead eyes or eye sockets stared at her, their murky or empty pupils seemingly burning with black fire.

“You only get up when I curse you to this extent, you really deserve a beating.” Alice glanced at them, then gave another command: “Assemble.”

The dead immediately sprang to life as quickly as when they were alive, quickly forming a neat small square array in front of the witch. The perpetrators and victims stood shoulder to shoulder, with semi-congealed blood occasionally trickling from their excessively ruptured wounds.

"Since there's no time for me to plan, I'll just snowball my momentum. The Scourge of the Undead, using war to fuel war, I haven't done this in hundreds of years," Alice muttered to herself as she stepped out of the red blood ring.

She took a step forward, and the resurrected corpses followed suit.

She took two steps forward, and the resurrected corpses followed her, taking two steps forward as well.

She took three steps forward, and an invisible, colorless halo of light surged from beneath her feet, enveloping all the corpses within it.

She pinpointed the direction the horse's hooves had gone. She raised her hand and pointed forward—a dead horse immediately came to her side with small steps, offering itself to her.

"Forward in formation, until the very end!"

She gave the order, and her army immediately moved forward in silence.

............................................................

Alice's plan is proceeding as planned... Ugh, she always likes to sabotage herself like this. I'm starting to feel a little sorry for her...

However, such a large amount of unclaimed spiritual energy is left here, and it's gradually boiling over with the war... I think it should be enough as bait. If Alice and that woman named Esdeath could be swallowed whole... even a salted fish could touch the threshold of the extraordinary.

I really hope I can fish you out soon...

"Okay, that's all for now."

Patchouli casually tossed her half-finished cup of black tea into the trash can, and a soft 'thud' sound rang out, startling all the other veterans who were staring blankly at the cross-shaped instrument or doing something else.

She got up from her chair and stopped looking at the huge machine that was constantly running.

"What happened? Don't we need to keep watching?" one of the veterans asked.

“No need, the setup is complete. Let Alice handle the rest herself,” Patchouli replied. “Before she made her move, she set up a simple scheme for herself to ensure that she would follow her pre-planned course of action while having some of her memories blocked.”

"I've been watching her closely to make sure her plan doesn't have any flaws. Now that it's successful, I don't need to interfere with the duel to affect this memory world. All that's left is to keep an eye on the newcomers. As long as they don't make any mental mistakes, the rest shouldn't be a problem."

"So you mean I'm the only one who needs to watch over things here?" Zhang Jie asked.

“Yes, that’s right. Next, I’ll team up with the others.” Patchouli nodded, and her gaze immediately shifted to the dim space window that had been there just seconds before—a moment ago, the dim light in the window had vanished in an instant, replaced by a huge planet with a dull color, seemingly covered in yellow earth and sand.

Zhang Jie shrugged; he immediately recognized the origin of the planet outside the window. It was Tango Ghost, an important planet in the Swarm system. In the original story, after the protagonists' defeat in Korenda, they arrived at Tango Ghost to carry out a rescue mission, where they discovered a brain worm.

There's no doubt that the cerebrate is a side story. And there's definitely more than one. While the location of the other cerebrates is uncertain, at least this one is guaranteed to exist.

Since these points were offered to us, there was no reason not to take them—this was a strategy that had been casually agreed upon in the previous meeting, and naturally no one would question it now.

Patchouli glanced at Zheng Zha, then at Zero and Ming Yanwei—the newcomers, Overlord, Alice, and others were absent; Chu Xuan had other important matters to attend to; and Zhang Jie needed to oversee the De Chroy. Therefore, only these three combatants remained as operational personnel. When she looked at them, they responded with a 'I'm ready' look.

Then the orbital suppression bombardment began...

Five minutes later, when the four of them stepped out of the landing module and looked around, what came into view was an endless expanse of Gobi Desert, and large swaths of fine, rubble-covered wasteland blasted into sand by the railgun bombardment—the entire surrounding area had been covered by annihilating artillery fire, and all things, living and dead, had accepted the same fate, being cleanly and decisively wiped from the world.

Zheng Zha made a hand gesture, and Lingdian immediately understood, activating the shielding device on his body and disappearing without a trace. He glanced at Patchouli, and immediately a fine silver-gray mist expanded outward from beneath her feet, reaching the edge of his vision in the blink of an eye.

“There are no living creatures within a ten-kilometer radius,” Patchouli said. She controlled the swarm of nanobots to scan the surface and several meters underground in a very short time, and could roughly determine that there was no direct threat around them.

"The satellite will be in place soon too." Ming Yanwei, fiddling with a bunch of instruments, nodded to Zheng Zha. She had just finished handling the launch of a small spy satellite—thanks to the orbital bombardment, the surrounding sky was quite clear. For at least three hours, there was no need to worry about clouds obscuring the satellite's view.

Everything is ready.

Aside from lacking a mentalist—Zhang Jie simply couldn't scan the ground from thousands of kilometers away—this team was practically flawless. And naturally, with such a powerful and near-perfect team, this relatively easy mission objective should be a piece of cake.

—Provided that it can be found.

"Have we been able to pinpoint the location of the brain worm?" Zheng Zha asked.

“Not yet, but we can ensure the target is within a hundred kilometers,” Patchouli replied. She pointed to the edge of the Gobi Desert, bombarded by previous railgun attacks, and to the faintly visible hills.

“Unfortunately, we arrived too early. Even if we push the plot forward and send the tough-guy squad to this planet to kill the bugs, we might not be able to pinpoint the exact location of the brain bug.” Patchouli shrugged. “So we had to resort to a clumsy method: during the previous orbital bombardment, we used high-resolution surveillance equipment to scan all the war zones on this planet and then selected the areas where the bugs reacted most violently.”

"And this is it?" Zheng Zha asked, instinctively summoning his Destruction Greatsword.

“This is it.” Patchouli looked at him with satisfaction. “You should remember that the brain worm in the movie was hidden inside a mountain, so I think you should know what to do now.”

"Can't I use your magic cannon?"

“Sorry, I need to focus on controlling the nanite swarm to monitor the underground right now, so I don’t have that much mental energy or magic available.” Patchouli glanced at him.

So the person resigned themselves to their fate.

Soon after, a tremendous roar, like rocks splitting open, was heard.

Section 25 Pest Control Campaign

The rock on Ghost Tango is very hard and structurally stable. Although the surface is filled with unreliable sandy areas and scree belts, making it possible for a reinforced company of flamethrower bugs to emerge from underground at any moment, this does not contradict the fact that their surface rock layers have withstood a round of orbital bombardment and remain largely intact.

Their rocks are hard, which is why their brain worms were able to hide safely inside the mountain and wait for the railgun bombardment to end. This was also because the railguns were not specifically aimed at the mountain. At the same time, this also meant that even after the patrol fleet located the area where the brain worms were hiding, these exceptionally intelligent worms were still unable to escape in the first instance.

Perhaps they deliberately didn't flee immediately.

Patchouli thought to herself as she watched Zheng Zha, enveloped in dense energy, hurtle like a cannonball fired from a train, crashing into a pale red mountain. Then, amidst a cloud of smoke, covered in dust and debris, he slid out and crashed into another mountain. Although his own mass was not large, the impact from his powerful energy and high-level genetic lock control was enough to easily tear gashes tens of meters wide in these mountains.

It was hard labor, but it suited Zheng's muscular physique perfectly.

Patchouli's activated magic furnace ensured that he could enter full combat mode without any worries within a radius of a hundred miles. And since she had such a suitable and useful chisel, Patchouli naturally didn't bother to waste her energy releasing those thankless tasks in this place outside of human civilization.

I'm making the most of what I have.

She looked at the thirteenth mountain where Zheng Zha had carved out a large hole, and soon a fourteenth mountain followed in its footsteps. The swarm of nanobots she controlled nimbly burrowed into the crack covered by high temperature and molten lava after Zheng Zha left, and then searched for the insects' hiding places along the cracks in the ground.

The insects were well hidden, but not well enough. Just a minute ago, she had discovered a small insect nest isolated by an underground collapse—this gave her a reward of fourteen bonus points (equivalent to 1,400 warrior insects) and also pointed her in the direction of her next exploration.

—The insects' big nest must be here, there's no doubt about it.

She thought to herself, and was absolutely certain of her judgment.

She had watched all three Starship Trooper movies, though the latter two were rather far-fetched and poorly made. However, the plot still offered some points of reference—in the third movie, the cerebrate captured in the first film used mind control to corrupt the Grand Marshal of the Federation in the research facility, revealing that it had deliberately allowed itself to be captured by the protagonist's subordinates from the beginning, intending to infiltrate the Federation. And now, although the crucial Zerg God's whereabouts in the third film are unknown, Patchouli believed that these cerebrates would still employ the same strategy.

First, the Reincarnators are stronger than the Federation's army, stronger than anyone else. The large-scale disturbance they caused in Kolenda was clearly intended as bait for them.

The second point is that she discovered this while searching the federal internal database...

Patchouli jerked her head, pointing to the lower part of a mountain range that Zheng Zha had bombarded two minutes earlier. A directional sound wave rang out accurately and clearly in the ears of the reincarnators simultaneously!

"Found it! It's over there, thirty-five meters underground!"

Before she finished speaking, Zheng Zha, who had just escaped from the rift in the fifteenth mountain range, took a deep breath, activated his Destruction Mode, and took several steps towards the sky, covering nearly a hundred meters in a row. He then stepped on the air condensation that was equivalent to a solid object at supersonic speed and arrived above the area she pointed to!

He raised the Greatsword of Destruction, and two streams of positive and negative energy, drawn from his brain and dantian respectively, vibrated and collided, transforming into a chaotic and violent energy flow that surged into the Greatsword of Destruction in his hand. With a downward slash, a chaotic blade of light spread for over a hundred meters!

'boom--'

The energy turbulence caused an explosion that expanded outwards, whipping up sand and gravel, tearing up the ground, and hurling all small objects within a five-kilometer radius to the outside of the veterans' field of vision. At the point where the blade struck, the thick strata of earth vanished by thirty-five meters in an instant, revealing a massive rift leading directly to the underground wormhole before the veterans' eyes!

The storm has subsided.

Zheng Zha gripped the Destruction Greatsword tightly, hovering in mid-air thanks to the constantly boiling energy around him—when he was strengthening and advancing to the level of a vampire count, a pair of demonic bat wings had materialized on his back under the blessing of the main god, and now, with abundant energy, those materialized wings had become a reality.

He flapped his enormous wings, looking down at the torn abyss below.

And countless gazes from the abyss also cast malevolent stares toward the airspace where he was located.

The next moment, the chirping of insects began!

Accompanied by a continuous trembling sound like the buzzing of flies, thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of flying insects spewed out from underground, surging towards the airspace where Zheng Zha was like a tidal wave! The sheer number of insects surpassed any insect horde in any battle on the planet Kolenda, and it was as if death itself had materialized. The black-green giant wave was like a forbidden giant hand awakened from underground, threatening to crush Zheng Zha into dust!

However, Zheng Zha simply stomped his foot lightly, and with a sudden, explosive sound, he cleared a gap of about three hundred meters. The instant he moved away from the airspace, a line of fire descending from the sky collided with the giant, black-green insectoid hand!

Iron, fire, and flesh and blood—this is the only way to pass.

Clearly, the incendiary projectiles loaded with railgun fire had a higher priority than the chitinous exoskeletons of the flying insects. The moment the fire line touched the giant hand, the latter crumbled like a tide crashing against a reef! But unlike the sea, which leaves behind only a misty spray after its collapse, the defeated insect swarm was replaced by a sky full of incinerating clouds!

Napalm bombs, 10,000 tons capacity.

The patrol fleet certainly didn't use the old-fashioned napalm bombs widely employed in trenches and bunkers during Earth's civil war. Although the Federation's military industry wasn't particularly developed due to internal factors, this basic weapon still utilized incendiary agents and aerogels far more powerful and superior than their ancestors from hundreds of years ago—they dispersed upon contact with the swarm, transforming into a crimson cloud of burning energy covering several kilometers in radius, pressing down upon them. From Zheng Zha's perspective, it looked like a red carpet spread across the earth!

"What a pity, that would have been worth nearly ten thousand reward points." Zheng Zha shook his head slightly. He watched the flying insects struggling and tumbling in the burning clouds, watching them turn into grayish-white charcoal like dry twigs being roasted by the burning clouds. And the remaining carbon disintegrated during the fall, turning into pale and slightly warm ash floating in the low sky.

The swarm was too weak, so weak that it had no chance of fighting back when it faced the Federation when it really put its strength into it.

Their claws and teeth are undeniably sharp, and their carapaces undeniably sturdy. If they were to close the distance, a single flying insect could easily take down two or three Marines who haven't donned powered armor. And if hundreds of thousands of them were to swarm forward, even Zheng Zha, who was already on the verge of becoming a superhuman, might suffer some injuries due to insufficient energy, or even be caught off guard and lose his life.

However, at this moment, they were as insignificant as ants under the orbital bombardment of the fleet that had seized control of the universe.

[I'm becoming increasingly interested in the Senzhou team, which Chu Xuan has identified as a breeding team and will likely be incorporated into the Zerg swarm. The fact that they've forced Chu Xuan to disappear all day, and that Margot Lloyd has wasted so much time playing this 'nominal' competition with that Esdeath guy, when in reality she's set countless traps and prepared countless extra targets in this hide-and-seek game…]

"...I think they must be really powerful."

[Tsk, I was practically an idiot for worrying a few days ago that the Nan Yan Zhou team was hiding their true strength. Hopefully, my intuition will be more accurate this time... Oh well, if the Sen Zhou team is also a bunch of weaklings... that's actually not so bad.]

Zheng Zha exhaled softly, regulating his surging blood and qi, watching as the crimson burning clouds reduced the tens of thousands of insect swarms to nothingness in a mere few dozen seconds. The clouds touched the ground, then gradually dissipated amidst a scorching sound, revealing the brightly lit abyss beneath…

Then step into it.

..............................

The bug eradication game is quite fun.

And there's another section if you turn the page.