Chapter 58 Can You Turn Into a Motorcycle?

Su Yi asked in a soft voice.

He knew very well that inquiring about someone else's superpower was a rude gesture. In the wasteland, it was practically equivalent to revealing one's hand and a major taboo.

However, since the two of them were now living together under the same roof and in such close quarters, some things had to be figured out. This was for the sake of both his own safety and Lorixi's.

Su Yi needed a detailed understanding of Lorixi's capabilities—perhaps even understanding her better than the girl understood herself.

Only in this way could he properly arrange plans and assign tasks.

Otherwise, operating with insufficient intelligence, he might assign Lorixi a task far beyond her capacity. Since the girl treated her orders as matters of life and death, her exceptionally stubborn nature would compel her to accomplish her mission at all costs.

Such a command error was something he absolutely could not afford to make.

After these few days of getting along, Lorixi followed his arrangements implicitly and almost never talked back. Su Yi felt the timing was finally ripe, which gave him the courage to ask.

Just as he anticipated, the girl did not display any defensive or resistant emotions.

Lorixi merely lowered her head, shook it, and whispered, "No, I don't have one."

"Then how old are you? Anyone between sixteen and their early twenties has a chance to awaken."

Although Su Yi had instructed Lorixi to claim she was in the sixth grade whenever they were outside, that was merely a reasonable age chosen to match her height and baby face.

It was just a fabricated age.

"Age... Lorixi doesn't know either.... For a very long time before, I was in the laboratory receiving modifications from Granny, so I don't know how much time has passed."

Lorixi's voice grew softer and softer. Being unable to answer even a single question from her commanding officer made her feel utterly incompetent.

Indeed, she possessed no superpowers.

Back in the laboratory, Granny Yifei had stated this to her quite clearly.

"It was a long time ago. She was manufactured just like any ordinary soldier, receiving training and studying administrative regulations."

"Until one day, Granny told her: 'I need a child without superpowers for a special experiment.'"

Thus, she had been chosen.

Given Granny's cautious personality, she must have tested and measured everything repeatedly, leaving no room for error.

"No superpowers, huh..."

Su Yi lowered his head and fell into slight contemplation. He had been thinking about teaching Lorixi how to channel energy, but it seemed that was out of the question.

While swordsmanship was important, relying solely on swordsmanship was entirely unviable. If the gap in raw power was too vast, no amount of skill could compensate for it; it would merely be an empty show.

It seemed Lorixi's goal of learning swordsmanship would have to go unfulfilled.

"Commander, Granny said I am a special experimental soldier. She incorporated many new designs into me, including numerous hidden functions and reportedly four distinct combat modes."

Noticing his hesitation, Lorixi feared she was being looked down upon. Eagerly standing on her tiptoes and raising her hand, she spoke up to prove her usefulness.

"Oh? Hidden functions? Interesting. Something like invisibility?"

Su Yi felt a pleasant surprise. On second thought, if it was Yifei's handiwork, hidden functions were to be expected; she was precisely the type of person who loved to install surprises that even the user knew nothing about.

Faced with this question, however, Lorixi awkwardly scratched her cheek.

"There are plenty of functions, and Lorixi has used them before. But because they are still in the testing phase, Granny locked away many of them to ensure operational stability, making them difficult to access. Many options in my chip show up as 'Access Denied,' and they are very hard to retrieve."

Lorixi only remembered that after being chosen by Granny, though she remained outwardly an ordinary soldier—receiving only minimal resource supplies and surviving on nuclear waste and No. 37 machine oil—Granny had subjected her to numerous special experimental modifications.

Following each modification, she was granted authorization to use a tiny fraction of those functions before being dispatched on missions.

Once a mission was completed, Granny would back up and analyze the data from her chip, then subject her chassis to rigorous adjustments. That process was always extremely long and very painful.

It was the most agonizing period for Lorixi.

She simply hadn't expected that an intelligence failure during this mission would accidentally send her drifting to the Blue Star, preventing her from returning to report to Granny.

"Commander, if Lorixi can unlock those restrictions, I can definitely help with a great deal more..."

Hearing this, Su Yi paused. Going by this explanation, Lorixi did not seem to be a standard suicide soldier after all, but rather a meticulously engineered creation by Yifei. In that case, the self-detonation function was likely just a final resort.

Most importantly, Su Yi knew all too well how troublesome Yifei's creations could be.

As a "Sequence Two" of the wasteland, one of his duties was to help Yifei test new experimental products. Every time, she would come up with some bizarre new trick, showing zero regard for the scale of destruction.

After every test, Su Yi always felt as though she had been trying to kill him.

Yet when he finished the tests, battered and covered in soot, he would receive nothing from Yifei but a disgruntled sigh of complaint:

"Damn it, even that couldn't finish you off. Next time I'll definitely build a stronger one."

Every time Su Yi heard that, he was left utterly speechless....

However, he had been away from the wasteland for over two hundred years.

Surely Lorixi wasn't manufactured with the sole objective of assassinating him, right?

"What are the four combat modes?"

Su Yi asked with curiosity. Having tiers of combat modes sounded incredibly imposing and fit Yifei's design philosophy perfectly—that woman's experimental products always grew stronger the longer they fought.

"Well... Lorixi has only ever unlocked the Second Tier: Slaughter Mode."

In Lorixi's memories, the combat mode testing had only ever reached the second tier. That had been during a legion operation and also her very first time participating in actual combat.

Because her chip data had been wiped by Granny afterward, she couldn't remember clearly, only that she seemed to have destroyed many mechs and killed many people that day. Later, for reasons unknown, Granny had sealed it away and never let her use it again.

Otherwise, when she fought the Commander, she wouldn't have resorted to direct self-detonation right away.

"Whether you have combat modes or not doesn't really matter." Su Yi only wanted to gauge Lorixi's strength and did not have excessive demands. While combat power was always welcome, he wasn't that desperate for it.

With his Heart Flame reignited, Su Yi's self-confidence had risen by several levels, though he still cared a great deal about whether certain utility functions were present.

"Tell me, can you transform?"

"Transform?" Lorixi didn't understand why the Commander would ask such a question.

She certainly could change her appearance to look like someone else, and the invisibility function was actually a specialized optical simulation. But that was purely visual; it couldn't alter her actual physical mass, rendering it practically useless.

"No, no, no. I mean can you turn into something like a wasteland motorcycle? I haven't ridden one in ages, and I really miss it."

Su Yi recalled the days of racing across the barren lands.

Protected by his Heart Flame, he was one of the very few individuals who could move about freely without needing safety gear or tightly sealed transport vehicles.

The wasteland motorcycle had been custom-built for him by Yifei, capable of reaching top speeds of 500 kilometers per hour and possessing flight capabilities. The sensation of speeding wildly through the landscape had been exhilarating.

Although he had never seen anyone capable of transformation, nearly three hundred years had passed since he left the wasteland, and technological advancements could have taken any form.

Coupled with the fact that Yifei was a genius by nature, he still held high expectations for such a feature.

Seeing Su Yi's look of eager anticipation regarding a wasteland motorcycle, Lorixi panicked slightly. She scratched her cheek and buried her head in her messy, silvery-long hair:

"Lorixi cannot do that..."