The First Superhuman: Rebuilding Civilization from the Moon

Chapter 248: Successful Rescue

In the blink of an eye, the rescue operation had stretched to forty grueling hours.

Thousands of automated excavators worked frantically, carving out a massive, cone-shaped crater 1.3 kilometers in diameter and a staggering 500 meters deep! They had literally moved mountains of earth to reach the trapped survivors.

To prevent secondary cave-ins, the engineering teams utilized every trick in the book. Heavy-lift dropships continuously transported the excavated rock and sand far away from the site. Meanwhile, a steady supply of rapid-setting industrial polymer cement was flown in and sprayed directly onto the exposed crater walls, reinforcing the soil and preventing structural collapse.

Since automated AI couldn’t handle the delicate nuances of such a massive, high-stakes dig, thousands of human operators stepped in to remote-control the machinery. The Ark’s Central Command was urgently expanded to accommodate a crisis response team of 5,000 personnel!

With bloodshot eyes, they pushed through forty uninterrupted hours until they finally struck deep earth, a full 500 meters down!

At that exact moment, the Super-Dog, Shadow, became noticeably agitated, barking frantically to signal that he had caught the scent! There were survivors directly below!

Immediately, the excavation pace slowed. Heavy industrial drills were swapped out for lighter, precision machinery to ensure an excavator blade didn’t accidentally cut a survivor in half. Simultaneously, the communications division boosted their radio signal output, desperately trying to punch through the remaining bedrock to contact the buried crew.

Every passing second felt like an eternity.

Up on The Ark, Security Director Austin hadn’t slept a wink. For two agonizing days, he had been trapped in a state of hyper-anxiety.

The pressure was crushing. With his restless personality, he desperately wanted to jump into a mechanized suit and dig the dirt himself. But he knew his place was at Command. However, holding everything together without Captain Jason was proving nearly impossible. The department heads and senior scientists were a chaotic mess. Without Jason as their unifying anchor, the various divisions had lost their backbone, their usual efficiency replaced by panicked bickering. It wasn’t just a lack of skill; it was a lack of mutual trust.

Furthermore, within forty-eight hours of the collapse, the Federation had officially declassified the disaster to the public. You couldn’t exactly hide a fleet of thousands of heavy dropships and engineers mobilizing en masse. Anyone with half a brain knew something catastrophic had happened. To prevent conspiracy theories from running rampant, the High Council chose transparency.

Naturally, this triggered a wave of public panic. Grieving families broke down in the streets, and thousands of ordinary citizens angrily petitioned to be sent down to the surface to help dig. The military swiftly rejected all civilian petitions, what good were untrained civilians? Did they think they could dig through a kilometer of bedrock with their bare hands?

Fortunately, the initial unrest was minor and quickly suppressed by local security forces. But Austin knew the truth: the panic hadn’t disappeared; it was just simmering beneath the surface.

If Captain Jason truly died down there, taking dozens of lives with him... that simmering panic would erupt into an unstoppable tidal wave, completely shattering the Federation’s social order! The civilization might not collapse entirely, but it would never regain the absolute cohesion it had today.

"...Jason, you stubborn bastard, you can’t just die on me for no reason," Austin muttered, rubbing his exhausted eyes. He simply refused to believe that Jason, a man with the survival instincts of a cockroach—would meet his end inspecting a subterranean construction site. Humanity’s grand interstellar journey had barely begun! How could their leader just check out early?

If he really died down there, I swear I’ll empty a Gauss rifle into his corpse, Austin thought bitterly.

Just then, his command console chirped with an incoming priority transmission from the surface. Austin practically slammed his hand onto the receiver.

"What? You found the first survivor?!"

He clutched the headset, his eyes widening. Blood rushed to his head, his face flushing crimson. "What’s his status? Is he stable? What about Captain Jason?! Do you have a visual on Jason?!"

A Marine’s static-laced voice replied over the comms, "...We’ve established satellite communication with the main pocket. Captain Jason is alive and stable! We’re breaking through the final layer of rubble now!"

"Thank God!" Austin roared, a massive, crushing weight instantly lifting off his chest. He collapsed backward into his command chair, immediately passing out into a deep, exhausted sleep.

The subterranean nightmare, which had lasted exactly 43 hours, was finally resolved thanks to the Federation’s overwhelming industrial machinery and flawless execution.

Tragically, the final death toll stood at seven. Three Marines had perished during the initial ambush from the acid-spitting swarm. The other four were victims of sheer bad luck, crushed to death by massive boulders during the secondary cave-in despite their heavy powered armor.

Fifteen personnel sustained varying degrees of injuries, primarily severe fractures to their limbs. Six others, whose helmet seals had been compromised during the collapse, inhaled the unfiltered alien atmosphere and contracted unknown subterranean pathogens; they were immediately placed in strict medical isolation.

And then... there were the missing eight. A fireteam of eight Marines had seemingly vanished into thin air. Even Shadow couldn’t pick up their scent anywhere in the rubble. Search and rescue operations in the immediate grid were still ongoing...

Captain Jason had been successfully extracted.

He was incredibly lucky. Aside from severe dehydration and starvation after two days trapped in the dark, he hadn’t sustained a single physical injury. After forcing down some high-calorie rations and resting for a few hours in the med-bay, he was already back at his desk in Central Command, reviewing the after-action reports.

There were still too many unresolved variables, and Jason was incapable of sitting idle while his people were unaccounted for.

He stared at the casualty report, his brow furrowed in a tight knot, his heart heavy with grief. Seven dead... Adding four more names to the three they had already lost was a bitter pill to swallow.

And what about the missing fireteam? How could eight fully armored Marines simply disappear? It didn’t make any tactical sense! Even if they had ventured down an adjacent tunnel, they couldn’t have gone far before the ceiling collapsed. They should have been buried right next to the main group.

In a catastrophic cave-in, "missing" was usually just a polite way of saying "dead and unrecoverable." Although the rescue teams were still scanning the sector, the statistical probability of finding them alive was dropping to zero.

Jason let out a long, heavy sigh.

"Captain! Captain!" A young communications officer suddenly burst into the office, out of breath and practically tripping over his own boots.

"At ease. What happened?" Jason didn’t reprimand him, sensing the urgency. "Take a breath and report."

"Sir... it’s the missing fireteam! All eight Marines just breached the surface in Sector F7—over 130 kilometers away! They just established a stable satellite uplink! They’re alive, Captain! They’re all alive!" The officer was so excited he practically screamed the final words.

Jason’s eyes widened in sheer disbelief, and he shot up from his chair.

How in the hell did they end up 130 kilometers away in Sector F7? Did they navigate the subterranean maze and find their own exit?

It didn’t matter right now, they were alive, and that was a miracle!

His tactical mind snapped back into focus, and he immediately fired off two rapid orders: "Dispatch the nearest rapid-response dropship to their coordinates for immediate extraction!"

"And... stand down the excavation teams at Cavern B11! Everyone has pushed past their limits. Send them to their barracks and get them some well-deserved rest!"