Becoming the Wasteland Overlord With My Harem System!

Chapter 312: Lacking Privileges

A few minutes later, Axel was done extorting—ahem—collecting protection money from the remaining soldiers. Combined, they had all given him roughly 500 billion Colts.

It was literally just pocket change compared to his current wealth, but this wasn’t done to get money anyway. It was to ingrain fear into them.

Fear of the unknown, and the known at the same time.

The unknown—the mysterious powerhouse that had deleted the majority of their fleet. Fenrir.

And the known—the very real danger of going bankrupt just to pay for their own lives. Like prisoners scrambling to cover their own bail, except with the added humiliation of having lost the fight that landed them there.

"Master..."

Right after they left, Fenrir flashed into existence by Axel’s side, staring at the residual energy of their teleportation fading from the air.

"Do we chase them?" She asked.

Axel just sighed, shaking his head. "No need." He said. "We need them alive for a bit longer—long enough for news to reach Trismus Weapon Solutions’ main troops."

As he said that, he withdrew the new item he had just acquired and looked it over. The necklace that Rochelle had been carrying, containing secrets serious enough to bring Trismus down to its knees if used correctly.

"For now, let’s spread the contents of this to the entire universe."

"This is...?"

Fenrir took the trinket Axel passed over and stared at it, turning it between her fingers. To her senses, it was just a necklace—nothing more, nothing obviously remarkable about it.

"A storage device." He clarified. "Inside it are secrets that could bring Trismus down if handled correctly. For now, we should use a fraction of it to greet them properly, shall we?"

Fenrir, hearing all this, visibly frowned.

"But... don’t we lack the technology to access this thing’s stored information? How will we use it?"

Her concern was valid, of course.

Although Axel had already built a teleporter, there were still no "computers" anywhere around them—no terminals, no compatible interfaces, nothing that could speak the same language as whatever system the necklace ran on. Still, that didn’t really matter, all things considered.

"We have those, right?" He grinned.

Fenrir tilted her head at first, confused. Then it clicked.

"Ah, those things! Yes, we can use them!"

After that, anticipating a second visit from the enemy in the near future, Axel went back to the girls and gathered them.

Then they all moved to an empty stretch of space a few hundred kilometers away from the Axevaria Kingdom—far enough that whatever happened next wouldn’t become someone else’s collateral damage.

"This far should be enough." Axel determined. "Fenrir, take it out now."

"Yes, Master!"

Under everyone’s watchful gaze, Fenrir stepped further into the open distance before daring to actually do it. The sheer size of what she was about to produce demanded space, and she knew it.

Everyone watching wasn’t particularly surprised when it appeared.

They had heard Axel’s plan rehashed enough times that the novelty had long since worn off. Still, hearing about it and seeing the thing materialize in front of you were two entirely different experiences.

"So this is the spaceship husband kept talking about...? It kind of looks like your airplanes!"

"My King really is wise. To think you could get this from the enemy..."

"Woah...! So big! Sir Axel, is this really a ship and not a giant building?!"

They clamored as Fenrir pulled a whole spaceship out of the inventory—casually, the way someone might produce a coat from a wardrobe, except the coat was the size of a small city block and had weapon ports along its hull.

How did it get there?

Well, it was a bit complicated in the details, but simple in principle.

During Fenrir’s "attack" earlier—the one that had carved a large, clean hole straight through the enemy’s formation—she hadn’t simply devoured everything in her path.

Instead, in a literal split second, she had moved around and collected the ships into the system’s inventory, leaving their pilots suspended mid-air with absolutely nothing beneath them.

To keep it from looking suspicious, the edges of ships beyond the planned collection range had been cleanly cut, producing the debris that rained down on the ground as convincing "remains."

The pilots who had been inside the collected ships were, of course, completely dead. Axel had no particular use for them.

He had enough population with Queen Sharika’s people added in, and no interest in managing prisoners on top of everything else. Killing them had been the fastest and cleanest of all available choices, and so that was what had happened.

From that single stunt, Axel had gained 63 ships of various sizes.

Only 18 of them were unscathed.

Though with the system’s repair function available, fixing the rest wouldn’t be a particularly difficult undertaking—time-consuming, perhaps, but not difficult.

Anyway, to handle the storage device, Axel and everyone else made their way inside one of the intact ships.

Since they had no corresponding biometric data, passcodes, pass cards, or whatever array of trinkets the various security features demanded, they had to break their way in.

Their fists were harder than the ship’s metal exterior, so this wasn’t as much of an obstacle as it sounds—just loud, and somewhat undignified.

Entering, they were greeted by metal corridors that screamed of science fiction. Everything was sleek, angular, and clearly designed by people who thought intimidation was a valid aesthetic choice in interior architecture.

Axel looked around curiously, hands in his pockets. "Now this is more like it."

Since they had no blueprint of the ship, they could only roam around and hope the layout made intuitive sense.

Though perhaps due to their forced entry, the paths were all blocked by bulkheads that had slammed shut—the security system reacting to the intrusion the only way it knew how. Every corridor they tried was a sealed door. Every sealed door had to be removed the hard way.

They had to break literally everything in their path just to keep moving forward.

About 15 minutes later, they finally reached the main control room. The main computer was on, its screens casting a pale blue glow across the room—but it was completely locked, every input field demanding credentials they didn’t have.

Axel tried his hand at it with his admittedly meager hacking skills, poking at the interface with the confidence of someone who had watched someone else do it once.

"Damn. What is this system even?"

In the end, he couldn’t even get the console to initialize properly.

Every screen he touched either demanded authentication or displayed an error he couldn’t parse. The architecture was completely foreign—not just unfamiliar, but built on principles he didn’t have the foundation to even begin guessing at.

At this rate, accessing the contents of the data storage was completely out of reach.

"We should’ve captured someone to teach us how to control this, at least..."

Eve whispered quietly, patting Axel’s back with the resigned sympathy of someone who had seen this exact situation coming and wisely said nothing.

As they say, regret always comes last.