When Selina's crystal dragon wings swept over the top of the ruins, metal debris flew into the air like a group of startled blood bats. She kicked open the wreckage of the Church's transport ship half-embedded in the Xingyuan rock layer, and crushed the mechanical priest's skull that had long been dried in the cockpit with her boot heels. "Is this the worst place?" Asphalt-like mucus dripped from the gaps in the dragon wings, corroding the rock layer under her feet, "Even the excretion pipes of the fucking culture chamber are cleaner than here."
Twenty-three dragonborns huddled in the cracks of the Broken Star Abyss, half of them with broken wings. The youngest one huddled in a corner, his mechanically modified dragon tail twitching nervously—with each twitch, fluorescent blue bone marrow fluid would spurt out of the broken hydraulic pipe, drawing a distorted church seal on the rock wall.
"Temporary leader?" Selina grabbed a handful of rusty gears and smashed them against the rock wall, sparks splashing on the scales of an old dragonborn. "I'm here to tear down the church's lair, not to be a nanny for the disabled asylum!"
The old dragonborn's mechanical prosthetic eye flashed a stream of data. He trembled and raised his right arm, which was grafted with the remains of the Holy Light Cannon. Half of the spine of a Vatican Knight was stuck in the barrel: "Three hundred years ago... our tribe's gathering place... was just below this rock layer..." The barrel suddenly overloaded, spewing out encrypted bands wrapped in blood foam, projecting a holographic star map on the rock wall.
(Selina's pupils shrink slightly - Misha's cloud-like consciousness fragments are floating in the corner of the star map, repeating a certain coordinate at 0.3 second intervals)
"Fuck!" The crystal dragon wings suddenly spread out, knocking over three young dragonborns who tried to get close. Selina bit the old dragonborn's gun barrel with her fangs, and mucus seeped into the weapon system through the gaps between her teeth. "Three hundred years ago, this broken place didn't even have the code for the church to wipe its ass!" Her tongue touched the marks on the inner wall of the gun barrel - those were ancient words written in dragon blood, which resonated with the patent code on the inside of her wings.
The young mechanical dragonborn suddenly screamed and crashed into the rock wall. His tail vertebrae exploded, and what spurted out was no longer bone marrow fluid but the encrypted data stream of the Church. Those fluorescent blue dots condensed into 299 miniature clones of Ryan in the air, each holding a broken Lyria embryo.
"Warning... Detected the secondary instructions of the Mother Protocol..." Irene's remaining chip leaked the star code from Selina's collar, "It is recommended to... destroy..."
Selina's dragon claws pinched the throat of the young dragonborn, and the crystal wing tips pierced into the burst hole of his tail vertebrae: "Boy, is that the tracker of the Church or the ashes of your ancestors installed in your spine?" Mucus poured down the wing tips, but what spurted out of the wound was a distress signal composed of fragments of Misha's consciousness - those light spots spelled out "SOS 29°34'N 103°46'E" in the air, which were the coordinates when the Judge's mask last appeared.
The old dragonborn's gun barrel suddenly overheated and melted. He stared at Serena with his only remaining natural left eye, and his pupil reflected a creeping shadow in the depths of the abyss: "Leader... your wings are bleeding..."
Selina reached back to touch the base of the dragon's wing. The place where the mechanical joint should be was now oozing fluorescent blue mucus - exactly the same source as the data stream ejected from the young dragon's tail vertebrae. Her tongue swept across the fangs and tasted the unique metallic smell of the encrypted band: "Listen to me! First, I'm not your fucking leader; second..."
The sound of an explosion interrupted the declaration. Above the cracks in the rock formation, three Vatican reconnaissance ships carrying the Dragon King's skull were lowering holy light ropes. Wherever the light ropes passed, the Xingyuan rock formation collapsed like melted wax, revealing the densely packed dragon corpses underneath - each corpse was embedded with a "III" type mark, and the Vatican's standard weapons grew out of the wounds.
"Third!" Selina's dragon wings, wrapped in quantum storms, crashed into the reconnaissance ship, and the crystal scales peeled off in the holy light. "If anyone dares to mention the shitty things that happened three hundred years ago, I will make his spine into a toilet brush for the Church!"
The corner where the young dragonborn was curled up suddenly lit up with abnormal energy fluctuations. Micro-mechanical tentacles crawled out of his broken tail vertebrae and quietly penetrated into the cracks in the rock strata. The coordinates of the star map composed of the fragments of Misha's consciousness appeared at the tip of the tentacles.
(Erin's chip vibrates violently in Serena's collar, and the star code spells out "Warning: The symbiosis rate of the mother agreement has reached 61%")
When Selina tore the energy core of the last reconnaissance ship, thousands of encrypted bands emerged in the mucus rain. Those fluorescent blue light spots automatically gathered into a blood-red throne, and the armrests were a fusion of the Dragon King's skull and the Judge's mask. Fresh blood words were engraved on the bottom of the throne: "Leader is the sacrifice."
"Nonsense..." Selina's crystal dragon wings were quantizing, and the edges were scattered into star dust. "Everyone, gather at the hell coordinates of 103 degrees east longitude! Now! Immediately!"
What she didn't see was that her dripping mucus automatically drew the Holy Seal of the Church on the rock. The mechanical tentacles in the young dragon's tail vertebrae had drilled 300 meters underground. What was buried there was not the remains of the ancient dragon, but a semi-activated holy light cannon matrix - the energy readings were completely synchronized with Misha's distress signal.
The old dragonborn wrapped his trembling companion with his broken wing membrane, and his mechanical eye flickered for the last time: "Three hundred years ago... we also thought we could overthrow Him..."
The wind from the abyss swept through the ruins with the stench of electronic corpses. An unrecorded frequency was growing in the encrypted band, like the cry of a baby, or the first heartbeat of a Lyria embryo before awakening.