"Hello, hello? Can anyone hear me?"
On Mars, the sole human voice echoed forlornly inside the vacant bridge of the T-class Great Spike mothership.
Over half a year ago, high above the South Pole of Blue Star, Pegament remembered those had been his exact words during his final transmission with Azure.
Back then, amid a sea of static, the person from the Rejectors had answered urgently yet firmly: "Stay alive! We will definitely come find you. Definitely..."
And after that, there was nothing more.
For more than six months, Pegament had spoken that same line once every day, but no response ever came from the other end of the communicator again.
"I'll count to three. One, two, three."
The countdown ended. No answer came over the communicator.
*Click!*
Pegament cut the call cleanly and decisively, without a shred of hesitation. Then, as he set the communicator down, he removed the battery, keeping the device and the battery separate as he carefully stowed and concealed them away.
Throughout this sequence of actions, Pegament moved gently, with a practiced ease that would have broken anyone's heart.
He was afraid the battery would run out of charge.
Even though Azure's high-grade battlefield communicators used the most advanced batteries humanity had to offer, still... 'What if I have to wait here for years? Many, many years...'
Pegament knew he had not plunged into deep space.
Back then, after the remnants of the Great Spike fleet fled Blue Star, they hadn't flown for very long before landing as a group. Furthermore, this planet where they landed had an alternation of day and night.
In fact, the day-night cycle here felt remarkably similar to Blue Star's.
"So it's not too far. Yours truly should still be in the solar system."
He had been here for over six months now. After all this observation, analysis, and scientific deduction, Pegament currently believed this godforsaken place was probably Mars.
His main basis for this deduction was that, of all the names of celestial bodies he had ever heard, besides the moon, Mars was the one he heard most.
Aside from that, whether the solar system had eight or nine planets, Pegament wasn't familiar with any of the rest.
"Nothing shameful about that. As a real man and a superhero of mankind, I, Pegament, wouldn't go around obsessing over horoscopes and astrology like those girls do.
"Of course, I know I might be dealing with Mercury retrograde recently—retrograde for over six months now...
"What the hell is Mercury retrograde anyway? Fuck, how do you cure it?
"Fine, we'll talk astrology when I get back... In any case, this shouldn't be the moon.
"Because by rights, there should be a Mitli national flag planted on the moon. Nobody can fool me on that. I saw the photo when I was a kid; I still remember... Haha!"
In this one-man conversation, Pegament finally managed to make himself laugh again.
About three months ago, on a certain day, Pegament had suddenly jolted awake from his slumber, realizing he hadn't spoken for several days (apart from that single line), much less laughed.
And so, to prevent crippling loneliness from causing mental or physical problems, he began requiring himself to do this every day.
He talked to himself, imitated comedic movie dialogue in the cockpit, and even threw in exaggerated expressions and comical gestures...
"Fuck, my sense of humor seems to be getting way too demanding lately." Before today, Peg had gone several days in a row without managing to make himself laugh. "Still, today's was a genuinely great joke."
Without despair or dejection, Pegament stood up, walked over to a bulkhead, and pressed his right eye against it.
Here was a narrow gap he had spent a long time gouging out. It wasn't large, but it allowed Pegament to catch any sound that might arise outside and keep track of the lighting changes outside.
Mars's sky was darkening.
"Time to go out scouting and hunting."
Pegament pressed an ear to the gap in the bulkhead, staying alert, and quickly swapped out the source energy block in his apparatus's metal magazine.
"Looks like I need to be even more frugal." Counting the fewer than twenty concentrated source energy blocks remaining on him, Pegament felt a small wave of depression.
In truth, the thing least in short supply here was source energy; the Great Spike ships were packed with it. However, all of it was in the form of metal blocks.
And Pegament had no refining equipment, nor did he know that Han Qingyu could actually absorb metal blocks directly and backfill source energy.
...
"Check weapons."
"All clear."
"Check apparatus..."
The familiar pre-battle preparations. The commands rang out on distant Mars.
Back on Blue Star, Pegament had never been the kind of soldier to obediently follow the apparatus operating manual for pre-battle prep. But here, he was like a recruit who had just donned the gear, rigorously carrying out every single pre-battle procedure each time.
Because here, he was all alone.
Meanwhile, the Great Spikes that had landed on this planet likely numbered in the tens of thousands, with at least two hundred Red Shoulders among them. There might even be some hiding all along, waiting to take him down.
"These damn aliens.
"...Wait, looks like I'm an alien here too."
The two factions of aliens on Mars—a whole swarm and a solitary one—had known of each other's existence from the very start. In the early stages after the ships touched down, both sides had clashed violently in several large-scale skirmishes aimed at complete annihilation.
Ultimately, the Great Spike swarm discovered that under almost any circumstance, it was impossible to kill this strange human with pink hair.
He was absurdly strong, his individual combat prowess towering above everything on Mars, unmatched by any Spike. And the moment he realized he was at risk of being fully encircled, he would run.
He ran extraordinarily fast and possessed tremendous breakthrough power, making encirclement and war-of-attrition tactics impossible to pull off.
Likewise, after those clashes, Pegament had realized his own dilemma:
First, his source energy reserves were insufficient; second, although his individual combat prowess was invincible, humans suffered from a severe lack of defensive resilience, meaning that if too many Red Shoulders massed together and trapped him, his life would still be in grave danger; third, if he slaughtered them too quickly and all the Great Spike corpses rotted away, he might very well starve to death out here.
And so, after those initial decisive battles, the two factions of aliens coexisted on this unfamiliar soil, clashing intermittently from time to time.
"Test startup."
The final vital step of pre-battle preparations: the pre-departure apparatus startup test. Pegament stepped away from the bulkhead and stood before the bridge console of this Great Spike mothership for who knew how many times.
A test startup required source energy activation. While wasteful, it was necessary, so each time Pegament would perform another task at the same time: attempting to start up this Great Spike ship.
If this thing could be flown, Pegament would have piloted one back to Blue Star long ago.
Pegament knew how to pilot a source energy airship; nearly all high-ranking Azure combat personnel knew how, differing only in skill level. However, that was strictly limited to source energy airships modified or built by humans, which did not include Great Spike vessels.
Up until the time Pegament left Blue Star, not a single human had been able to directly pilot a Great Spike craft.
As for how to modify one... "Sorry, I'm just one of humanity's top four experts; I'm not a source energy scientist."
The console of a Great Spike ship had no control sticks, nor did it have a single button.
According to Azure's scientific research department, they seemed to rely on a specific frequency of source energy fluctuations to interface with the ship's propulsion system, thereby powering and piloting it.
And humanity had never been able to find that specific fluctuation frequency.
*Hum!* The source energy apparatus fired up, blue light flickering.
"Take off... Never mind."
Unsurprisingly, Peg failed once more.
Because he was all alone here, no one could tell Pegament that this failure might actually be a blessing.
If he actually had managed to get the ship flying, there was at least a 99.9% chance that, unable to navigate the route back, he would truly have drifted alone into the depths of the universe...
"Alright, let's roll." With a touch of gloom, Pegament shut down the apparatus and, relying solely on his body's physical capabilities, departed the T-class mothership, which had long been emptied of every Great Spike.
Hunched low like an agile, silent cat, he ventured onto the Martian surface under the night.
Chapter 869