The annihilation of the force pursuing Daniel's caravan was the last even remotely interesting even during their journey.
Save for the soldiers who took part in the battle and those who were on the main bridge during the deployment of the drone clouds, no one even knew that such a battle took place.
And since it was the case for the troops that accompanied Daniel's caravan, it was all the more true to those who sent the pursuing parties after them.
Maybe it was the sudden end of contact with all of their troops coupled with the absolute lack of any signs of nuclear discharge that could potentially explain it. Maybe the forces hostile towards Daniel exhausted the limit of how many troops they could pull from the frontlines and put towards hunting him down.
Or maybe they were keeping all of their spare troops back, refusing to risk losing even a single soldier more before the massive, last-ditch offensive would strike the guard post set by Daniel's forces?
"No one knows shit," Daniel cursed under his nose as he read through the report from one of his units for the fifth time in a row.
It was written in the typical military jargon that the conglomerate has adopted for its forces. And while surely there were some massive upsides to using a language both concise and precise when it came to reports, when there was absolutely nothing of importance to call in…
The reports would turn lengthy for no reason whatsoever. After all, a supreme commander of the expeditionary forces could devise a plan to defend a small area amidst the endless emptiness of the sun-scorched sand dunes without the information about the density of the scorpions per square kilometer spotted both by the vanguard and the patrolling drones!
"Doesn't that mean there is nothing of interest happening?" Alice asked, accompanying Daniel, as usual, even all the way out in the nothingness of the desert.
This time, however, she didn't hold herself back at all, dressed in the exact same suit that she came to this world in.
After all, contrary to the properly established headquarters, the secondary bridge on the mobile central unit of the force didn't have the luxury of extensive ventilation working around the clock.
"If only that was the case," Daniel muttered in response while rolling his eyes. Then, being the man of duty he was, he finished the report in his hands before leaving it on the desk and moving over to the next piece of paper.
This time it was the engineering report detailing the progress of the main mission of the entire expedition.
It's been three weeks since they reached the deployment zone. It took an entire week to unpack and set up the excavator and then another week to fix all the issues that prevented it from working in the extreme conditions of the desert.
The third week went by without any major events, allowing the engineering group to pick up the pace and squeeze a bit more power out of their equipment.
"We are still two to three days away," Daniel spoke out loud when he finally reached the most interesting part of the report.
Two or three more days before the massive wheel armed with teeth on its circumference would dig out enough sand to uncover the layer of the solid sandstone that hid the entrance to one of the last few unexplored warehouse chambers left by Daniel's former civilization for the situation that the world was in right now.
And according to Daniel's personal calculations supported by the mind-boggling calculating horsepower of the semi-quantum computers, there was about seventy percent change that this time, after all those years of extreme effort and costs, they would reach the place Daniel was looking for ever since the situation in the world started to going downhill.
"Oh come on," Alice complained, raising up from the one piece of equipment she requested the spare engineers to construct for her in their free time. It looked fancy with all the modern technology used to create it… but in essence, it was nothing more but a simple bathtub connected to the hover's water filtration system and with an added cooling device that kept the water inside at a comfortably chilly temperature. "Just forget about those reports and come here!" the girl requested, stretching her hands out of her tub towards Daniel.
"I only have a few of them left," Daniel replied, paying little to no mind to the girl's invitation. 'I'm too old to fall for those tricks, you know?' he thought, rolling his eyes over the one quality of his personal secretary and unofficial partner that he never managed to fix.
No matter what, Alice never learned to accept that as one of the oldest beings alive on the entire planet, Daniel no longer had the same sex drive as all the other guys of the same biological age as his body.
"You are not going to humor me at all, are you?" Alice protested, pulling her hands back and sinking down into the tub.
Yet, refusing to just give up, she quickly moved her hands to a small, waterproof console hanging just high enough above the tub to remain relatively safe from any of the potential splashes.
A few strokes of her gentle fingers later, the waters of the tub turned completely transparent, revealing all the details of the beauty of her naked body to Daniel's eyes… assuming he would bother to actually raise them above the papers in his hands.
"It's not going to work," Daniel muttered with a small smile, more amused by the girl's playful attempts at distracting him than he was by her eagerness to get busy with him.
"There is no loss in trying, though," Alice grumbled, reaching out with her hand to the console to change the settings on the tub's wall back to their default mode.
Her attempt at luring Daniel out failed, so rather than foolhardily pressing the attack, she opted not to distract her boss any further.
Yet, after tapping at the console just a few times, Alice's hand suddenly froze.
She then pulled herself up, half-sitting in her tub as she now used both of her hands to quickly type in a few commands into the console.
"Hey, Daniel," Alice called out without even looking her boss' way.
"What's up?" Daniel asked, too busy putting the report back on the table and picking the next one to look at the girl, fully expecting her call to be nothing more but some more shenanigans.
"Was Patric supposed to come to visit the site anytime soon?" Alice asked, seemingly out of nowhere.
Still, the question was simply too out of place for Daniel to keep ignoring the girl.
'If that's how she wants to force my attention on her…' Daniel thought, raising his eyes to the girl. Yet, the second he saw her serious expression, the man realized the girl was playing around no more.
"No, he was not," Daniel replied, actually standing up and approaching the girl's tub.
Upon arriving at the elaborate piece of extremely expensive equipment put together to create the most sophisticated bathtub in the world, Daniel couldn't help himself but look down, through the water, at the alluring curves of Alice's body.
His sex drive might've dried up considerably due to his mental age… but his body was still forever stuck at its prime, making it impossible for him to ever fully get rid of it.
Still, rather than just dropping the topic and sneaking over the tub's wall to play some with the girl, Daniel raised his eyes to the screen of the girl's console.
Reading Daniel's intentions, Alice reached out and turned it around a bit, making it easier for her boss to read the message.
And just like her question from earlier implied, there was indeed a new visit scheduled to the site of the only person whose age came anywhere close to Daniel's real age.
The only other person in the entire conglomerate and thus the world that traced its direct descendance to the civilization lost in time so thoroughly, nearly all of its archeological record ended up erased from the face of the planet.
"What does he think he is doing, coming here?" Daniel muttered, staring at the new position in the calendar as if he saw the ghost. "Did he forget that we are not supposed to ever appear anywhere near each other?"
The source of this c𝐨ntent is fre𝒆w(e)bn(o)vel