Chapter 410: Scouting the Ark
"Arthur, I’m going to need you to make some things for me using that Anti-Divinity of yours."
Alvey stated as he got up to his feet. As he turned around, Arthur swiftly hurled something in his direction, prompting Alvey to instinctively catch it. When he opened his palm, he discovered it was a stone of crystallized Anti-Divinity.
"I’m guessing we’re having the same idea."
"...indeed, we are. I’d run tests and give you feedback."
Arthur grinned upon hearing Alvey’s words, and when Barron and Sylvan questioned what they were talking about, the boy gave one hell of a reply.
"We are gonna make the water go ’KABOOM!’ with Anti-Divinity."
He didn’t say anything after that, only jumping up into the air and activating his cosmic energy flight.
"Wait...where are you going?"
"To Scout the Triton’s Ark."
"This is not Duskhand, Arthur."
Alvey felt the need to remind Arthur that the Triton’s Ark was a lot different from Duskhand. For starters, there were over a Dozen Transcendents on the Mega-Floating Island Fortress.
"Don’t worry, I’d stay above clouds for the most part so there’s a low chance of me being found out.
Besides..."
Arthur flicked his fingers and created a summoning magic circle, which he used to call forth the ’Invisible Scout’ with the intention of concealing himself.
"They’d have a hard time sensing me if I’m that far off.
Even if they do find me, I can just masquerade as one of them."
The boy spoke with a shrug before the Invisible Scout’s magic power washed over him, making his figure and presence vanish completely.
"Albey, shouldn’t you be holding him back?"
"Don’t worry, Sylvan. If he gets caught, he can just act like he’s one of them.
He does possess Divinity as well, after all."
After dropping that bit of Information for the other two Demons, Alvey walked past them and contacted his subordinates to bring him some materials which he was going to use to run tests for a Special Bomb he was about to make.
◇ ◇ ◇
While Alvey was preparing to craft a weapon of mass destruction, Arthur was floating atop a sea of clouds while staring at the sun.
He was initially flying below the clouds, taking in the sight of the Ocean as he moved towards the direction Alvey had told him the Triton’s Ark was.
After a while, he decided to go higher and fly above the clouds, all while playing around with the energy of the law of fate in his palms.
"Altering Fate, huh?"
He had such a thought as he flew through the clouds and entered into the territory of some dinosaur-looking creatures of flight.
"That looks like it’d be fun to ride."
With that thought, he picked a random one as a target and landed on its back, disabling his concealment/invisibility.
Naturally, the monster noticed him and was none too pleased about having anyone on its back.
It roared in rage and tried to knock Arthur off, but all Arthur did was smack it in the back of the skull and it passed out.
As it was unconscious, Arthur forced a Master-Servant pact before jolting the creature back awake with some silver lightning.
"Now I have two mounts. A dragon, and whatever this dinosaur-looking guy is."
He released his flight and then laid on its back after instructing the monster to fly in the Triton’s Ark’s direction.
As for the Invisible Scout he summoned, that other creature just remained silent while waiting for Arthur’s orders.
"if Alvey is capable of making an Anti-Divinity bomb, we can use it to release Anti-Divinity into the ocean and negate the Divinity in the water.
Detonating such a bomb near the Ark would also cause a massive geyser—it’d be like getting hit by a small tsunami."
Thinking about it, the amount of shaking it was going to cause the entire structure, and the destruction from the ’small tsunami’ the bomb’s detonation would cause was sure to destroy a part of it.
"Come to think of it, Alvey hasn’t told me the plans for after they take over the Triton’s Ark."
Just as he said that, he noticed a cluster of presences below and ordered the Invisible Scout to cloak him and the dinosaur-bird he was on.
Turning around, Arthur descended below the clouds and saw a small speed boat dashing across the water in the direction of an Island.
"?!"
It was only after a second look at the speed boat’s destination that Arthur realised, he wasn’t looking at any Island.
"So that’s the Triton’s Ark!"
An extraordinarily massive island surrounded by ramparts, sat on the ocean, illuminated by the sunlight. The walls were outfitted with innumerable gun ports staring down at the ocean around.
Seeing this, Arthur pulled out a handheld speedometer from his subspace and wore it on his neck with a strap as he levitated into the air.
He then sent the dinosaur-bird into his summon space and coated his body in cosmic energy and time law power, before kicking off a foothold of compressed aura.
**BOOM!!
The boy shot forward at supersonic speed, blitzing straight towards the massive Island Fortress in the distance.
However, he did not attempt to land but instead began circling around it at his top speed.
It took him a bit over five minutes to complete this action and ascend above the clouds once more, calling out the dinosaur-bird and landing atop it.
"Let’s see...the range is 3400-3500?? That’s a bit too much margin for error, isn’t it?"
Arthur spoke with a sigh as he looked at the speed that the speedometer had recorded, his current top speed range.
Using his cosmic energy flight and accelerating his movements with Time law energy, Arthur could achieve a top speed of 3500, though he could not maintain it for too long.
And yet, it took him 5 minutes to circle the Triton’s Ark at this speed.
"By that calculation, this thing is even bigger than the reports said."
Arthur did the math and he estimated that the Triton’s Ark was at least 100,000 sq. km in area, though there was a margin for error as the Mega-Floating Island Fortress was not completely circular.
’It’s kind of half-kite, half-octagonal in shape?’
He didn’t have the words to describe the shape of the Triton’s Ark, given that although it had eight sides, only six were of equal length. The remaining two were much longer than the others, elongating and tapering to a pointed tip that jutted forward like the prow of a ship or the shape of a kite.
Arthur looked at the structure from above, before turning his focus to the water around it.
Surprisingly, he could not sense a thing around it. The water appeared to be perfectly normal, without a trace of divinity.
’Huh? That’s strange.
Then where did the divinity at Whitboro come from?’
Since he was flying above the clouds, Arthur had not been close enough to check the ocean on the way, but now he wanted to go back and check to see just where the trail of divinity stopped.
’First, let’s do a little investigation.’
Arthur summoned three random bird monsters and sent them into the Ark’s airspace, trying to gauge the reaction they had to airborne intruders.
The monster birds flew into the Ark, perched on some buildings and spent a few minutes there before being chased away by some nearby soldiers.
Seeing that there was no issue, he made the Dinosaur bird he was on visible while remaining invisible himself, before commanding it to descend from above the clouds and into low-altitude flight range.
He turned up his concealment ring to mask his aura and successfully entered the Triton’s Ark airspace without alerting any of their defences.
"In the end, I lost the battle against my curiosity."
Arthur spoke as he jumped off the bird and landed on the roof of a building, using gravity magic to slow his fall and muffling the sound of his feet with a bit of wind magic.
He let the dinosaur-bird fly high up and circle around the area for a few moments before disappearing into the clouds where it would wait for him to finish his ’scouting’.
The boy jumped off the roof and landed on the ground beside it, sliding into a public restroom nearby and changing out of his Demon Army uniform.
He then unsummoned the invisible scout and walked out casually, entering the street and joining the sea of people who were moving around busily.
Just like he did in Duskhand, Arthur mixed in with the inhabitants of the Ark, listening to conversations here and there whilst reading signs, and newspapers and picking up pamphlets to gather information.
Within a few minutes, Arthur could surmise that the Triton’s Ark was divided into two halves, much like Duskhand.
There was the Military Segment and the Civilian Segment.
The Military Segment was the larger one of the two, taking up around 60% of the Island’s total mass, which was frankly a lot considering the Island’s Size.
