"That's it, he only told you this much?"
"Yeah, that's all," Tapai, hanging upside down, shrugged at Sun Jack.
"Then why didn't you tell me before?! Hiding this for so long, are you helping me or helping Guan Sanke set a trap for me? Playing the mole, huh?" Sun Jack roared in a low voice.
"Goddamn, you dumbass, do you even have a brain? I'm the Holy Grail's camera, for Christ's sake. They hear everything I say, how was I supposed to tell you?"
"Then you could've damn well hinted at it!"
"Hint? If I so much as hinted a little, before you, the idiot, could figure it out, they would've guessed it first!" Tapai retorted with crude language.
"Making such a fuss over this trivial crap, I thought it was something major. Whining every day, wearing that long face, you almost turned purple from holding back, and you didn't say a word. Anyone would think you had a crush on me!"
"Fuck off!" Sun Jack threw a punch at him.
"You fuck off! With your dumb face, who could think of anything else? For all we know, Holy Grail might've already sold out merchandise of our 'ship'!"
"This is strategy! I'm in command here! Do you get it? I intentionally wanted them to think that!! To hide my real intentions!"
As he bantered with Tapai, Sun Jack felt an inexplicable sense of security; he no longer had to face everything alone.
While Sun Jack was exchanging insults with Tapai, hanging from the ceiling, the corridor on the left exploded in an instant, thick smoke billowing towards them.
"Quit the crap! I didn't bring you here for a vacation!" Sun Jack stopped him, "Now listen carefully to my plan!"
When Tapai heard Sun Jack's entire plan, he was a little stunned, and a thumbs-up icon popped up on the screen, "Crafty old fox, coming up with such a nasty trick."
"Enough talk, we have to find some sensitive material before Holy Grail's communication is restored, and make Guan Sanke lose everything!"
Having said that, Sun Jack immediately sent out the Nanoworms from his Battle Armor to explore the perimeter, and in no time, a flat map swiftly appeared on Sun Jack's system interface.
The two of them, under Mimetic Camouflage, continued forward, following the map's guidance, while sounds of gunfire and explosions came from other areas.
"What's going on over there?" Just as Sun Jack was wondering, Tapai beside him explained.
"I did it, I planted a virus in those devices queued up with us, making them spread it as much as possible, causing some chaos. I don't know what you're up to, kid, but I know you're definitely up to no good."
"Not bad, Tapai, getting more useful by the day."
"Of course, just see how many devices I've upgraded." Tapai, still upside down, proudly patted his newly replaced prosthetic body and equipment.
"Shh!" Sun Jack suddenly stopped and quickly switched to the perspective of one of the Nanoworms, where he saw the frame of a room's door labeled 4th-level archive.
"Let's go! Found it! This way."
Just as Sun Jack and Tapi were about to head that way, the situation suddenly changed. With the piercing sound of an alarm, red lights appeared ahead and behind them.
The last image a Nanoworm transmitted before crashing was of a humming Laser Net!
The Laser Net was slicing towards them at high speed.
They were not just cutting through the location of Sun Jack and Tapai, they were slicing through the entire void!
As the dense red Laser Net on both sides drew closer, Sun Jack looked around and immediately pressed Tapai against the left wall. "Get closer!"
As the Battle Armor's Nanoworms frenziedly consumed the metal, they finally managed to gnaw out two shallow, human-shaped pits in the wall large enough for both of them, just before the Laser Net could touch them.
"We can't get out this way anymore. They're exterminating all living creatures out there. It looks like they've dealt with those problems and are now in the cleanup step."
As soon as Tapai finished speaking, swarms of Nanoworms flew through the Laser Net, making sure not a single gap was missed.
And this was just the beginning, who knew how many more steps lay ahead.
While Sun Jack racked his brains for a solution to their current predicament, Tapai, who was beside him, spoke up.
"Quick, give me the wall material your bugs are spitting out! I have a plan!" As soon as Tapai received the metal powder from the wall, without hesitation, he swallowed it down.
This was the first time Sun Jack had seen Tapai open his mouth; he had always thought that guy's mouth was just for display.
Metal tentacles with triangular heads shot out rapidly from Tapai's body, swiftly gliding along the edge of the human-shaped outline on the wall, with a blur of afterimages, as the metal powder rapidly took shape, reforming into a new metal wall.
It wasn't long before Tapai directly constructed a metal wall, burying them both into the wall.
Sun Jack, sealed inside the wall, spoke irritably, "What kind of junk are you stuffing in there?"
"A complete material 3D printer, indeed pretty useless. But who asked a certain someone to have so much money to burn, allowing me to choose freely? Besides, didn't we manage to dodge it?"
"Sure, we dodged it, but how are we going to get out now?"
Sun Jack wriggled in the cramped room, and finally came up with a makeshift solution. He had the Nanoworms start to dig around him and Tapai again, widening the space. "You keep filling it back in, don't let it collapse on us later!"
One dug while the other buried, moving through the metal walls at a snail's pace like a tunnel boring machine. It was slow, but exceptionally safe; any extermination process or detection from the outside proved ineffective against them.
Not knowing how much time had passed, just when Sun Jack felt he was about to develop claustrophobia, there was light above his head, they had finally broken through.
Sun Jack cautiously poked his head out first and found the so-called database to be very warm. Just as he was about to take Tapai down to look for the sensitive subject, he froze.
The entire archive did not contain mountains of servers, nor any control panels and display devices.
Inside the coldly lit archive room, there were only square cultivation vessels with babies curled inside a transparent liquid.
These baby-containing cultivation vessels were arranged in a ring, some hanging from the ceiling, while others were stacked on the floor.
Linking the top and bottom babies were various thick and thin data cables, twinkling with sensor lights,
They intertwined and piled up, twisting into a main trunk, combined with those square fruit-like structures containing babies, appearing like a bizarre Mechanical Tree.
"What on earth is this..." Sun Jack, under Mimetic Camouflage, cautiously led Tapai down.
"Are you sure this is the archive? Are you really sure we didn't go to the wrong place?"
As Tapai forcefully slapped a square cultivation vessel with his metal prosthetic hand, the palm-sized baby inside immediately spat out blood, rapidly shrinking and withering into the size of a black walnut-sized dead infant.