“Wow... They’re moving faster than sound, aren’t they? Where’s the shockwave?”
“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am. None was observed.”
“Big Sis! Things are getting fun!!”
At last, Asahi had stuck her nose into it.
That alone made Akane’s emotional graph recover a little stability.
Apparently, the back-to-back observation of absurd fantasy phenomena had been stressing her. It was possible Asahi had noticed that too and deliberately spoken up.
“Asahi. Is it okay over there?”
“Yes, well, I was only observing the threat organisms.”
Even as she said that, Asahi’s avatar slid into view on the display.
“The wall is inanimate, but a threat-organism-style barrier is deploying properly on it. Fascinating.”
“<Iris> wants to confirm the deployment state in the sky and underground, and also how it reacts when infantry-class units make contact.”
Akane could use the fact that she herself was the backbone to unfold <Iris>’s thought processes across her own Brain Unit. Apparently it became difficult if too much time passed and the divergence grew too large, but since less than a year had passed since the branch split off, synchronization was still very possible.
“It is planning to seize the southern gate and its surrounding area. After enemy-unit removal has progressed to a certain extent, it intends to attempt an infiltration using doll-machine communicators.”
“I see. So it’s a test of what the barrier is reacting to. At the very least, it blocks shells, but the question is how it reacts to humans moving in and out.”
That was definitely something worth knowing.
“If it blocks absolutely everything, then it must have some kind of on-off mechanism for deployment. If it doesn’t, then it’s identifying things by some criterion.”
“Ah, exactly, Big Sis. I kind of get the feeling it’s deploying automatically, though.”
While they were discussing that, a shell struck the air above the Holy Capital.
The air above it.
“Big Sis. A barrier is also deployed overhead. Its continuity with the barrier deployed on the wall is unknown.”
An armor-piercing shell fired from the airborne Mnemosyne had been blocked by a glowing spherical barrier in the sky and blown apart. Apparently it was not going to be as simple as having free entry from above.
“Even so... for Jotun to go down that easily...”
What Eve was looking at was a Jotun that had lost four main guns. A priest-class attacker had come running in at supersonic speed and lopped off the barrels almost before anyone knew what was happening. Since it was a gigantic mechanism and also a precision machine, it had not even been able to perform emergency evasive action.
Once the enemy got in that close, there was nothing to be done.
Ordinarily, they were supposed to eliminate something like that before it ever got close enough to matter. But because it had ignored the weapons deployed on the front line and come straight in, they had not even been able to buy enough time for withdrawal.
“For the moment, concentrated laser use has been confirmed as capable of eliminating them. That alone is useful information. Let’s tag the powerful units and control the battlefield.”
“Understood. Beginning tag identification. <Iris> is currently tracking six target units.”
If those priest-class units were allowed to move freely, all the Jotuns would probably be neutralized before long. That would be annoying.
At the moment, the only thing that could counter them was concentrated laser use.
If they could snipe them from a distance at which they could not detect it, then even hypersonic shells might be effective.
“Can they be eliminated with the equipment we have now?”
“The local Tactical AI has judged that saturation attack is the only option. <Iris> agrees.”
“Overwhelming an opponent who surpasses you in quality by pouring in more attacks than can possibly be handled is the basic strategy, after all.”
The enemy had the ability to respond by looking at guns being aimed either at themselves or at their target. At the very least, they had already learned that simply trying to pick them off with laser fire would let them evade.
“We’re tracing their movements, but it really does look like they’re communicating with one another.”
“It kind of looks like swarm control to me. There’s a high chance the units are communicating with each other.”
At the analysis results from Asahi and Erika, Ringo nodded as well.
“<Scerket>-type organisms also communicate within a group. It would be more natural to assume that magic-using humans can do the same.”
As ever, the four-legged tanks and the cleric-soldiers were still fighting across the surface. It was a muddy, tangled melee in which both sides kept shaving down each other’s strength.
Even so, the four-legged tanks were steadily accumulating experience, and the balance of the situation was gradually tilting in <The Tree>’s favor. The kill rate was trending upward.
However, the sudden drop in Jotun’s combat power had thrown that balance badly off.
“If all we wanted was annihilation, it feels like the airborne fleet could settle this with bombing.”
“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am. However, that would yield no information at all. <Iris> is proceeding with the assault operation with intelligence gathering as the top priority. It has been instructed that, in the worst case, as long as information is obtained, even total destruction of the present force is acceptable.”
If all they wanted was to wipe out the enemy, then they could probably do it simply by continuing to send shells in from outside the enemy’s range. But what that would leave them with was nothing but one-sidedly plowed ruins.
“By cornering them, it may become easier to obtain information from the bots that have already infiltrated. In fact, information on that barrier had been kept secret until now. At present, bots have already reached the central area.”
“And what they found was that huge <Magic Stone>, right? Did you see it too, Asahi?”
“Yes, Big Sis! It’s fascinating. It seems almost certain that the <Magic Stone> is serving as the core of the barrier, but I have no idea how it works.”
A gigantic <Magic Stone> had been enshrined underground beneath the center of the Holy Capital. Believers were offering prayers to that stone. Bots that had infiltrated together with moving believers had observed the entire scene in detail.
For the moment, though, they could not approach it, simply because there were too many eyes on it.
“Big Sis. <Iris> has decided on ground bombardment by Mnemosyne. That is a response to Jotun’s reduction in combat power.”
“If we just leave them alone like that, it looks like they’ll get the next one too, so that sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?”
The Titan-class airborne escort ship, the eleventh ship Mnemosyne, was flying at an altitude of around 2,000 meters and had begun dropping explosive shells from the guns mounted on its underside. The purpose was to destroy ground installations and, at the same time, pin down the strong priest-class units.
They were an unmistakable threat, so Eve wanted them crushed sooner rather than later.
“So with the forces on site, concentrated laser fire is the only real countermeasure, huh? Well, as long as they’re still relying on vision to recognize the outside world, there’s no way they can dodge an attack moving at the speed of light. If one does dodge it, then that means it has some kind of future-sight skill!”
“So far, no such threat has been observed.”
Asahi said that cheerfully, and Akane answered plainly. It was a blunt reply, but those two usually talked like this, so they were probably enjoying themselves.
The ground was being plowed up by the bombardment, and huge amounts of dust were being thrown into the air. ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) Bad visibility made laser attacks difficult. At the very least, one could not expect accurate sniping from four-legged tanks covered in dust clouds.
“<Iris> has stopped using explosive shells. A misjudgment.”
“Oh?”
Since this was <Iris>’s first real battle, oversights on the ground were perfectly normal. Ringo, who could use <The Core>, was capable of predictive calculations close to perfection, but the predictive functions that <Iris> could execute with its own computational resources naturally had limits.
In that sense, this assault on the Holy Capital was also a field of instruction for <Iris>.
“It is attempting to destroy one more unit through aerial laser attack. Precision targeting control against the relevant unit has begun. ...Now.”
In the footage, a flash burst like a strobe.
The Prava Divine Kingdom’s combat-power evaluation dropped with a lurch.
A quantity of heat large enough to vaporize the dust cloud had been concentrated at a single point, and the matter located at that focal point had been turned into plasma.
The problem was that firing the laser batteries simultaneously temporarily drained the transmission capacity of the microwave power supply system. The units that fired the laser batteries had their built-in capacitors emptied, so their output dropped.
Even in the middle of the air raid, the cleric-soldiers were still energetically destroying four-legged tanks.
