Chapter 442

Molly could hardly believe what she was witnessing. Judy was brazenly using Shermaine as leverage to manipulate Joshua. ‘What the hell is this woman even saying?’ she thought, seething. ‘Unbelievable! Has she no shame at all?’

Her hand tightened instinctively around her gun. She was already imagining the bullet tearing through Judy’s skull.

“You were never meant to be part of this world,” Judy said coolly.

Roy and the others exchanged uneasy glances, their expressions shifting from confusion to alarm.

Now they were forced to consider a wild possibility: that Judy might actually be an alien.

How else could she make an entire plane vanish without a trace over Mount Hordeum?

Joshua’s voice broke the silence. “I want to see Sheary first.” His gaze was unreadable, dark as a storm. “No deal until then.”

The dimensional rift that housed Shermaine could only be opened three times. After that, it would seal itself shut forever. No one would be able to access it from the outside.

In time, that space would begin to collapse quietly and irreversibly, until nothing remained.

Worse, Judy wasn’t even sure whether the robot had finished the job.

Those machines had never failed before. Everyone sent into that space had died. Not one had returned.

Judy’s tone hardened. “And why should I trust you? You think if I bring Shermaine back here, I’ll be allowed to walk away? I wasn’t born yesterday. I’m not giving her up, but I might let you speak to her.”

For now, negotiation was her only move. Judy shot a glance at Harry.

He nodded and got to work. The device in his hands, about the size of a tablet, was already running, his fingers tapping across its surface. But no matter what he did, he couldn’t connect to the robot’s signal.

Fortunately, there was more than one unit in that dimension. He rerouted control to two other machines and dispatched them to scout Shermaine’s location.

Still, the silence from the first robot gnawed at him. He wondered, ‘No connection? Don’t tell me… it failed? Could Shermaine have actually taken it down?’

In the four-dimensional space, one of the standby units was activated at last.

Neil had already dismantled the first robot’s limbs and armor, but the internal structure was far too complex for him to handle.

That was when Shermaine stepped in.

She removed the chip embedded deep within its processor core.

Her computer, brought along from their helicopter, was compatible with the alien tech.

She slotted the chip into a port, and to her relief, the system recognized it without rejection. It responded immediately.

That confirmed the technology was essentially the same, just running on a more advanced system and a different language.

Shermaine began decoding the chip’s contents. Within moments, she found the identity of the robot’s creator: Harry Kramer, Major in the Knights of Xyperia, age 29. His photo was attached to the file.

One glance, and she knew.

So he was the one they’d been chasing all this time, the invisible force that kept circling their lives like a shadow.

And Judy wasn’t just after Shermaine. She had her sights set on Joshua as well.

Shermaine let out a quiet snort and began rewriting the robot’s system.

It didn’t go smoothly at first. The core required a password for administrative access. But for her, that was child’s play.

Her fingers danced across the keyboard. In less than a minute, she bypassed the lock, erased all of Harry’s security data from the chip, and replaced it with her own credentials. Now, when the robot rebooted, it would recognize her as its one and only master.

Not far away, Neil was rummaging through his pack, stomach growling, just about to eat something when a metallic groan cut through the silence. Two more robots appeared in the ruined doorway.

High above the dimensional space, the sky began to crack. A sliver of space split open, barely wide enough for something round and glowing blue to squeeze through.

“Ow, seriously? This is way too tight!” Dave grumbled, wedged halfway in.

With his Energon reserves running low, he had barely managed to tear open a narrow passage.

To make things worse, he’d put on weight recently, plumper and rounder than ever.

Panting and straining, Dave forced his body through inch by inch. The moment he caught Shermaine’s signal, he summoned every ounce of strength and shoved himself free, then plummeted from the sky like a giant, glowing gumball.

He didn’t even bother to slow his descent. He couldn’t die from a fall anyway.

But he was starving.

All he could think about was finding Shermaine, and hopefully, something delicious to eat when he did.