Chapter 157 Anomaly

The instant those three titanium guards were destroyed, Hao Ren sensed something was amiss.

Because the opponents hadn't reacted at all.

Hao Ren was convinced that the three titanium guards hadn't reacted at all, rather than not having enough time to react—although his attacks with Vivian and Izhaks were very sudden, they weren't fast enough to ignore distance. At least Izhaks's large fireball had a delay of less than a tenth of a second before hitting the opponents. In this time difference, even if the three guards didn't have time to dodge or counterattack, they should have at least made some kind of movement.

However, in fact, Hao Ren felt like he was hitting a fixed target. Until the attacks landed, the three titanium guards didn't react in the slightest.

Not only could Hao Ren sense this, but Vivian and Izhaks, who were experienced in battle, also noticed the abnormality immediately. Izhaks immediately crouched down and said in a low voice, "Something's not right."

Lili also drew her ice and fire claws, and while alertly turning her ears in all directions, said, "It doesn't seem like any alarms are going off."

Hao Ren was on guard for a moment. He didn't see any titanium guards rushing over, nor did he hear the alarm that should have been sounding in the base. He exchanged a glance with Vivian beside him, and the two nodded in tacit understanding.

"Be vigilant, the atmosphere here is a bit strange," Vivian said softly. "Big guy, help keep an eye on the movements behind us."

Easily solving the three guards not only didn't make everyone feel relaxed, but made the atmosphere here even more bizarre. The group perked up, putting their spirits at maximum level, and continued to walk along this lifeless steel corridor towards the depths of the fortress.

Not far after groping forward, Hao Ren suddenly saw a few figures out of the corner of his eye. Almost at the same time, Lili, who had good eyesight, also exclaimed in a low voice, "There are more titanium guards ahead!"

"Wait a moment," Hao Ren grabbed the husky girl who was about to rush up waving her weapons. "Watch."

After saying that, he took out a metal handle from his dimensional pocket and threw it forcefully at the floor in front of those titanium guards in the distance.

The metal block landed on the alloy corridor floor, making a crisp sound. In this deathly silent place, the sound was as ear-splitting and loud as if it were knocking on people's hearts. However, strangely, those few titanium guards who were gripping their weapons tightly and seemed to be fully alert didn't react to this at all, as if they had become deaf and blind.

After confirming this scene, Hao Ren erected a rigid shield and boldly walked to the side of those titanium guards.

The steel warriors, their bodies gleaming with metallic cold light, stood upright at their posts. The special electromagnetic rifles in their hands were gripped tightly in front of their chests. Their alloy-cast faces seemed to be covered with a layer of shiny shell, and at the position of their eyes on the metal shell, there was only a narrow slit emitting a white glimmer. These were the titanium guards, the most elite warriors with the greatest combat power in the Executor society. Their appearance was worthy of their fierce name.

However, they were now standing here blankly as if they had crashed, turning a blind eye to the intruders swaying in front of them.

Lili also slinked over with her tail between her legs. After confirming that the titanium guards were really not moving, she breathed a sigh of relief. She flicked her tail with a smug look on her face, and even poked one of the titanium guards' chests with her paw: "What is this? After all that, it's just a bunch of model dummies! Scared me so much my fur stood on end."

However, n-6 had a look of shock on her face: "This shouldn't be... This doesn't make sense! The titanium guards are the most vigilant warriors, how could they..."

Vivian casually pulled the husky, who became strong when encountering the weak and cowardly when encountering the strong, to the side, and stepped forward to knock on one of the titanium guards' iron heads with her finger: "Feels like... hibernation mode? Or standby? They seem to still have energy, look, their eyes and the lights on their bodies are still on."

"There's definitely energy, the Data Terminal has already detected energy readings, but there's no action signal, so they're not moving at all," Hao Ren frowned, and reached out to push the steel warrior in front of him. This tall titanium guard fell straight down, making a loud noise when it hit the alloy floor. "Perhaps we should take a look at the inside of this thing?"

Izhaks scratched his big bald head: "Maybe I should have brought Elizabeth along."

"Don't mention her, she's all about destructive disassembly. One screwdriver down and she'll pierce the motherboard," Hao Ren quickly waved his hand, and then took out a lightsaber from his dimensional pocket. He spent a lot of effort to take off the titanium guard's chest armor, revealing the complex circuit structure inside and a cube core that flickered with a faint light. "Terminal, can you read the database of this thing?"

The Data Terminal flew over upon hearing this, and connected itself to the core of the titanium guard with a scanning beam: "Should be no problem."

Vivian reminded him from the side: "As soon as possible, we don't have much time to waste on these iron lumps. If we can't crack it within three minutes, we have to continue moving forward."

"It won't take that long, you know the capabilities of this machine... Although all you guys usually do with this machine is watch movies," the Data Terminal muttered while starting the reading process. As a result, it exclaimed after only a few seconds: "Hey? It's just garbled code?"

There was no logical program in the core of the titanium guard. All the Data Terminal could read was a large amount of garbled code.

Lili immediately glanced at Hao Ren: "Could it be that it was broken by the landlord..."

"I don't think so," Hao Ren frowned, turning his head to look at n-6. "You mentioned before that the titanium guards are all directly controlled by the main brain?"

n-6 nodded: "That's right."

"Then, if the main brain's malfunction reaches a certain level, will it cause the titanium guards to appear in this state?"

n-6 didn't answer, but widened her eyes.

"Looks like I'm right," Hao Ren exhaled, looking down at the titanium guard who had completely lost his ability to move and had turned into a pile of scrap metal. "The main brain's malfunction is rapidly deteriorating. Its error code has broken through the firewall built into the server and spread to the titanium guards. If we don't take action, it will sooner or later become a source of infection and contaminate your entire Executor network."

The group left the titanium guard behind and began to accelerate towards the inside of the fortress.

"When do you think the titanium guards' abnormality appeared?" On the way, Vivian asked n-6 curiously.

"I can't judge either," n-6 felt her logic circuits were overheating. The unprecedented sense of crisis made her completely forget her previous worries about Hao Ren's group of powerful and unpredictable "aliens". "The fortress and the outer lunar base are like two worlds. The security system established by the main brain prohibits any individuals with insufficient authority from accessing the inside of the fortress—usually, only a large number of automated systems are responsible for maintaining the fortress's daily operations. The freight trains we saw before are part of these automatic systems. Only titanium guards and humans are qualified to move freely in the fortress, but they never leave this place..."

"In other words, you Executors have never been able to directly understand what happened inside the fortress, right?" Vivian frowned. "Therefore, these titanium guards may have gradually stopped moving a long time ago, but the people outside don't know at all... But according to n-4, shouldn't there also be a group called 'Maintainers' responsible for the routine maintenance of the main brain hardware? Didn't the Maintainers notice the abnormality here?"

To this, n-6 could only shake her head: "I don't know about this either. Although the Maintainers move inside and outside the fortress, they don't often appear in front of ordinary Executors, because they are also part of the fortress system."

All the way forward, Hao Ren and his group discovered more titanium guards in a shutdown state.

These special fortress guards became more and more common as they went deeper, but without exception, they had all lost their ability to move. Some titanium guards were still standing at their posts, but more were just leaning to one side or another, lying in some corner. These soldiers seemed to be patrolling the route before losing their ability to move, but the sudden system crash caused them to fall straight down and turn into a pile of waste.

All the signs indicated that the main brain's system error reached a critical point at a certain moment—this critical point arrived so quickly that all the titanium guards in the fortress stopped running almost simultaneously.

This critical point should be the moment when the main brain's faulty servers exceeded the number of normal servers.

The systems inside the fortress used to maintain various hardware facilities were automatically operated under the control of low-level AIs. This part was like the "vegetative nervous system" of this fortress, operating based on the underlying protocol. Such a structure allowed them to escape the fault group caused by the main brain's logical chaos. Therefore, the infrastructure in the fortress was still operating normally to this day, including the lights and ventilation system, but apart from these things, the entire fortress's functions were in fact close to being shut down.

The guards were shut down, and the monitoring system was also offline. In this silent fortress, there was only a main brain that had lost control, and a group of humans who had not yet shown their faces.

Hao Ren didn't know what those so-called humans living in the Palace of Finality were doing, but he knew that the main brain that had lost control was still constantly sending out instructions, even though more and more logical errors were appearing in these instructions. The Executors outside, who completely followed the command line, would not realize the changes in the fortress—or even if they realized the problem, they would be powerless to change it.

The offline security system made this trip, which should have been tense, exceptionally smooth. They almost brazenly crossed all the checkpoints and gates, and finally arrived in a hall with a large number of cables, pipes, and servers.

This hall was one of the many secondary server rooms that supported the main brain's thirteen main servers.

Vivian shook her head after seeing the situation in the server room: "Looks like... we don't need to investigate why those Maintainers didn't warn us."

Between the closely arranged pipelines, cables, and servers in the hall, there were many mechanical wrecks that had turned into coke. Those things with alloy shells, shaped like beetles, were the Maintainers that n-6 and n-4 had mentioned.

They had all been killed—killed by internal deflagration caused by strong electromagnetic pulses.

The main brain did it.