Max watched as the few remaining Arisen Army units within sensor range suddenly vanished from detection all at the same time. Not just visual, but every sensor that he had stopped detecting at the same time.
"Dammit, I want that ability. I wonder where they are going? Do you think that there is a fight there? Like, are they going to another battle or just to some random spot to stage for the next battle?" Nico muttered over the radio.
"That's a very good question. If anyone knew where they went, we could take the fight to them. Did your sensors pick up anything that mine didn't? Any trace at all of where they went?" Max replied.
"I've got nothing. Nothing at all. I know that our sensors aren't perfect, but with all the other flaws that these War Walkers have, both in construction and in tactics, why would they be so good at disappearing? Is it a technique that we've never seen before?" Nico complained.
Max recalled that in her past life, Nico was the master of the disappearing act, but she might not be thinking of that right now, and Max had never been able to detect how she vanished the way that she did.
He might as well ask her and see if she remembers.
"Hey Nico, in the time before, how did you vanish the way that you did? You disappeared from a thousand battlefields without a trace and then appeared at random without any warning to cause chaos in another world. Could they be using your method?" Max asked.
Nico laughed, and Max saw the strangest scene in her memory. She simply vanished, and then there was darkness and a timeless wait, then another battlefield.
"What in the world was that?" He asked.
"That was my life between battles. I hacked the flat space technology with a timer to spit myself back out or move to a nearby device. So, I would appear wherever the bearer of the device I was hiding in happened to be, and then it would be time for war again.
I already checked, and that's not what they're doing. They are actually just vanishing somewhere." Nico explained.
That shouldn't be possible, but it did explain why she caught onto the flat space technology again so fast in this life.
"So, you're an expert in the flat space. Is it possible that there is a similar technology that puts them into some sort of alternate space that we can't properly detect?" Max asked.
That would be a pain but easier to explain than teleportation without an energy source.
"I am certain that it is possible, but the problem is that I don't know how it is possible. I've never heard of it before, and now that someone is doing it, there really isn't a good way to determine where they are going or what that place is like. For all I know, it could just be some sort of wormhole that leads back to their ships but operates in a way that we can't detect."
Max sighed. That was a lot of interesting information, but it didn't bring them any closer to knowing how the Arisen Army was doing what they did to escape the battlefield.
[Human delegation, there will be a rescue ship incoming within the next two minutes. We request that you clear the path for its arrival.] The Koleska dispatcher reported.
[Understood, traffic control. We will ensure that the dropship makes it to the city intact.] Max replied, then opened the secure channel to Nico.
[You heard the nice man. Let's go follow the path of the dropship and kill anything that might threaten its path.]
That brought her spirits back up after the annoyance of not knowing how the Arisen could disappear as they did, but the joy was short-lived. They hadn't only disappeared around Max and Nico. They were gone from the planet entirely.
So, they escorted the ship to the surface using their shields to clear the path of any possible hazards, but there wasn't anything bigger than a bird to be seen.
The ship landed outside the city, and a flood of civilians poured out of the gates toward it, creating mass confusion for a moment until Max engaged his loudspeaker.
[Civilians of the Koleska. The ramp of the ship is four persons wide. Please form a line no wider than four adults and proceed in an orderly fashion. This is your first warning.]
The frantic fleeing of the civilians came to a halt as they noticed the unfamiliar Mecha flying overhead, heavily armed and questionably friendly. That was enough to convince them to behave as well as possible, and the front of the line began to narrow to only four people wide, though they were still running toward the ramp of the evacuation vessel.
[I don't know what you said to them, but good work, Commander. None of the other evacuations are going so smoothly.] Commander Yuri congratulated Max as the civilians filed into the waiting ship.
[I just informed them of the ramp size and that improper advancement would cause unnecessary delays. The people of this planet seem quite adept at problem-solving.] Max replied.
They would need to make a proper debriefing report later, and it was better if he didn't explain too much over public communication channels.
It took four hours for the population of the city to be fully evacuated and verified clear, and by that time, Max was beginning to seriously wonder if it was even necessary to do it at all. The Arisen was gone, likely never to return. Or at least not soon to return, so they could remain on the planet for the repair and reconstruction of their essential services. Humanity had been doing it that way for millennia, and it made things more efficient in the long run since there would be local input into the process.
But it wasn't his call, and the Koleska were free to do things however they wanted. The fact that their ways seemed strange to Max was to be expected, given the extreme differences between the species. They had no more in common with humanity than the Shin did, even though their skeletal heads looked a lot like human skulls.
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