Primordial Expanse: I have the Strongest Talent! - Chapter 432

Chapter 432: Below the surface
A few days had passed since Alex’s first strike against the Red Demons on Gorath. The once desolate desert was now littered with patches of obsidian glass, each one marking the grave of another underground city destroyed.

Each molten crater was a symbol of the devastation he had wrought upon his enemies—cities erased, entire populations incinerated beneath the destruction caused by his Phoenix fire.

In the span of those days, Alex had hunted without rest, moving from one bunker to the next with cold precision. His anger had not waned, and his attacks had only grown more methodical, more calculated.

The Red Demons had learned quickly that there was no defence against him. They had tried to fortify their bunkers, attempted desperate ambushes, but none of it mattered.

Alex would arrive, the ground would split, and the molten sand would do the rest.

As it turned out his initial assumptions that Gorath would be a difficult planet to rid of the Red Demons was wrong.

He had lost count of how many cities he had destroyed. Dozens, perhaps even more. The scanners aboard King had helped him locate each one, pinpointing the hidden networks of tunnels and subterranean cities with chilling accuracy.

Every Red Demon stronghold he found met the same fiery fate. Gorath had been transformed into a planet-sized tomb, its lifeblood turned to molten glass, its cities consumed by the earth itself.

In the moments of respite between destruction, Alex would return to King, not to rest, but to check on Mira.

She had been slowly recovering, her strength returning with each passing day.

By the third day, Mira was moving about the ship on her own, her movements still careful but determined. The colour had returned to her cheeks, and her eyes no longer held the glassy look of someone lost to pain.

On the fifth day, Alex stood on the bridge of King once again, watching the scanners for the next target. The list of Red Demon cities on Gorath had dwindled, with only a handful remaining.

He had been thorough in his campaign, reducing each one to molten glass, leaving nothing behind. Soon, there would be no trace of them on this planet.

As Alex stood on the bridge of King, his eyes scanned the digital readouts.

The last few Red Demon bunker cities blinked like faint embers on the edge of a dying fire.

There were only a handful of targets remaining, scattered across the planet in an attempt to slow Alex’s destructive path down even by just a little bit.

‘Soon it’ll all be over, and onto the next one…’

He leaned against the console, drifting in his thoughts for a moment.

The rage that had driven him these past few days was still there, and hadn’t dulled one bit.

Even with Mira recovering, he couldn’t shake that feeling of destruction he wanted to rain down on them, nor did he want to shake it off either.

Then, something shifted.

Alex’s brow furrowed as his hand instinctively tightened around the console.

He could feel something…

Not with his eyes, not with the scanners, but with his spatial perception.

His awareness extended outward, probing deeper into the planet’s surface than any ship’s sensor could reach.

And there, nearly a hundred kilometres below the planet’s surface, something stirred.

It wasn’t like the other Red Demon bunkers he had encountered. Those had all been relatively shallow—no more than a kilometre deep, some barely beneath the surface, hidden among the dunes.

But this… whatever this was, it was far deeper, almost unnaturally so. The presence he sensed was faint, but unmistakable—a cluster of Red Demon signatures, densely packed together, concealed so far underground that even King’s scanners had failed to detect them.

His grip on the console tightened further.

‘What is this?’

His instincts told him something was wrong.

He thought he was close to wiping them out on this planet, but if what he was sensing was true, he had severely underestimated the scope of the Red Demon’s presence on Gorath.

Mira entered the bridge a moment later, walking with a steadiness that came with her speedy recovery.

“What’s wrong?”

She asked.

“I’m picking something up…”

Alex said, staring at the empty holographic display before him.

“There’s a massive concentration of Red Demons deep underground. Much deeper than anything we’ve encountered so far. Nearly a hundred kilometres below the surface…”

He didn’t know what to think about this.

Mira frowned, shifting her gaze to the empty scanners on the console.

There was nothing there, though she knew that if Alex had sensed it with his spatial perception, then it was real.

His own senses were never wrong, and much more reliable than technology.

“Why would they be so deep? Every other bunker has been right beneath the surface. What are they hiding?”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out.”

Alex replied in confusion.

But then it hit him.

A feeling of nostalgia, a distant memory.

Of his own times back on the asteroid colony, in the mines.

He and all the other miners had to travel dozens of kilometres into the cores of the asteroids to mine out the best pieces of ore.

What if this was what the Red Demons were doing on Gorath?

What if all those surface bunkers were just a ploy to try and divert Alex’s attention from the real prize down below?

It was already well known that the Red Demons weren’t afraid to throw away so many of their own lives in heaps to achieve their goals.

Like their sieges on each star system for example, they just keep sending more and more Red Demon cannon fodder to their deaths in order to achieve their goal of conquering the planet.

What was the difference between that and offering up a few millions to keep their mining operations down below the surface a secret?

And just the fact that they might do this made Alex question what was so valuable down there.

Was it really worth throwing away all those lives?