The Archbishop ran across the ground, at times kicking off the air itself as he fled. The high-output masers pursued him, their firing angles shifting by tiny increments. Wherever the beams struck, the ground instantly lost its moisture, dried out, cracked, then glowed red and melted. Molecules transformed into plasma diffused through the air around it, giving off their own peculiar light.
“The range is making precision targeting difficult. The target is small and fast. There are micro-vibrations in the air as well, so this may be the limit.”
Asahi’s bust projection, sticking up out of the console, tilted its head with its arms folded. The maser cannons were under precision control, but since they were equipped with only simple vibration-damping systems, it seemed difficult to target a human-sized opponent.
Originally, that had been why the beam diameter and energy output had been set the way they were.
Against a normal living creature, even a glancing hit should have charred it black.
“Iris has requested the coil cannons. The Eurytos group has selected staggered coil-cannon fire.”
At the same moment Akane gave her report, metal shells accelerated to 6,000 m/s were launched from a total of 7 coil cannons. Their heat-resistant coatings vaporized away as the shells tore across the roughly 10 km gap in under 2 seconds.
The hypersonic warheads slammed down with slight time offsets, cutting off the Archbishop’s escape route. The shells blasted away the earth where they struck, scattering shockwaves in every direction. Chunks of soil turned into shrapnel and exploded outward, and the cleric-soldiers caught in it were helpless as their lives were torn away.
And yet, even after taking that attack, the target Archbishop still could not be eliminated.
“Waaah. Target escaped the attack zone~. What is this, invincible mode~?”
“Maser pursuit fire is ongoing, but barrel temperatures are nearing their limits. Emergency shutdown will begin soon.”
“We need to stop the other Archbishops too~.”
At the east gate, the Archbishop was swinging around a two-handed sword nearly as long as a man was tall, spreading catastrophic damage everywhere. He closed on the Jotun deployed on the eastern side and swept low at its feet. A barrage of laser fire rushed in right afterward, forcing him to retreat, but that single strike had nearly destroyed the Jotun’s lower running gear. Roughly half of the wheels mounted on its underside had been sliced apart and rendered unusable.
To stop that Archbishop, every kind of shell imaginable was being fired without pause.
And at the north gate, the many barriers that had been deployed were severely obstructing the movements of the four-legged tanks. Once their movement slowed, they became nothing more than targets. Unable to support the other machines either, the four-legged tanks were being destroyed one after another by multiple cleric-soldiers and Bishops.
“All Titan-class airborne escort ships and the Gigantia-class airborne carriers have entered turning orbit. Dorsal weapons can now be used as well.”
“Oh, finally... The Titans are a little light on ventral weapons, after all...”
Those dorsal weapons had been unusable because the ships’ own hulls had been creating blind spots. The Titans mounted about 1.5 times as many gun emplacements on their backs as on their bellies, and even the Gigantias carried dorsal batteries amounting to about 70% of their ventral armament.
By taking a turning orbit with their hulls tilted diagonally, most of those gun emplacements could now be brought to bear on ground targets.
“Flight path stable. Commencing attack.”
And so, onto a battlefield that was already chaotic, a further storm of shells was added.
But the battlefield was spread across all 4 directions to begin with.
“So then... can we manage it over here?”
“Enemy units at the south gate have been eliminated. Advancing.”
The unit at the south gate had succeeded in wiping out the rough bulk of the enemy forces.
Its Jotun had lost its main guns, but all other functions remained intact. The four-legged tanks also still had a fair number of units remaining.
The Jotun rocked its enormous body forward and began to advance. The trenches that had been built meant nothing to it. Its gigantic wheels crushed everything in their path.
The enemy cleric-soldiers somehow kept resisting around the gate, but they could not stop every four-legged tank surging forward. A few machines broke through that resistance line and reached the city gate sealed shut by its giant doors.
But apparently the enemy was not going to let them pass that easily.
The moment the four-legged tanks approached, an iron portcullis came crashing down with a rattling roar.
Falling under its own weight, the lower edge of the iron grate stabbed into the ground and fixed itself in place.
That said, under normal circumstances, a grate of about this level could have been destroyed easily enough.
But the very moment shells were fired into it, a defensive membrane reacted and blocked every single round.
“It seems shells are judged to be attacks. I wanted to confirm how it would respond if something merely tried to pass through, but that iron grate is troublesome. Destroying it looks difficult.”
While that was happening, the cleric-soldiers still resisting at the south gate were completely eliminated. The area around the south gate was now fully occupied by <Paraiso>.
“The Bishops and Archbishops are pinned down on the other battlefields too. Looks like we’re safe here for a while. Which means?”
“Entry will be attempted by crossing over the wall. Jotun is launching wall-climbing equipment.”
From the Jotun that had approached the wall, a large number of hooked wire ropes for infiltration support were fired out. They flew up to the top of the wall and caught neatly in the stonework there.
“They didn’t get deflected.”
“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am. It appears to selectively block offensive objects.”
There, a new property of the magic-fantasy barrier was revealed. Obvious attacks intended to inflict damage, such as bombardment, were blocked—but things like infiltration ropes apparently were not treated the same way.
“How is it choosing what to block, I wonder?! It’s hard to imagine that the core <Magic Stone> itself has any capacity for thought!”
Asahi sounded delighted as she said it, but really, the barrier’s selective nature had been an anticipated phenomenon from the beginning. If it blocked absolutely everything, then air, water, and food could not pass through it either. And if the conscious will of living beings were making the choice, then it would be unnatural for it to react to attacks outside their awareness.
There was a possibility that some kind of selection mechanism existed externally.
That said, the analysis could not be pushed any further here.
Perhaps they had never anticipated a wall-scaling assault, because the cleric-soldiers at the points where the grapnels struck ran over in a panic. The local cleric-soldiers also reached out to remove the hooks, but steel cable was not something that could be cut so easily.
The four-legged tanks immediately latched onto the ropes, connected their winches, and began hauling themselves upward as they climbed the wall.
Unfortunately, bombardment fired from outside was still blocked by the barrier.
The gathered cleric-soldiers brought their swords down in an attempt to sever the cables. Fortunately, the steel used for the cables proved to be the stronger material, and the swords snapped in half from the middle with a single strike. But at present, each cable had a four-legged tank weighing dozens of tons hanging from it.
Once the surface was damaged, the cable began tearing apart from that point with a harsh ripping sound.
Then it snapped completely.
The recoiling cable lashed through the surrounding cleric-soldiers, mowing them down, and the four-legged tank that had lost its support could do nothing but slide helplessly down the wall.
“It appears the cable strength was somewhat insufficient.”
“For improvised equipment, it looks like it’s working well enough, so it’s fine.”
Ringo probably would have preferred a much greater margin in maximum strength. But on a battlefield, there was no time to be leisurely about that.
Some of the four-legged tanks made it all the way to the top of the wall and began rampaging. The gathered cleric-soldiers attacked them, but the footing atop the wall was narrow. A single railgun shot sent dozens of cleric-soldiers flying through the air.
Then that became the foothold, and more four-legged tanks climbed up onto the wall one after another.
“They’re deploying barriers individually...”
The cleric-soldiers thrust both hands forward and deployed barriers. Deflecting the railgun rounds, they advanced.
But apparently those barriers were not strong enough to stop very many hypersonic shells fired in succession. They managed to block a few rounds, then collapsed as if fainting.
That was probably the symptom Asahi had mentioned before—magical power exhaustion.
The cleric-soldiers behind them immediately moved in to cover and closed the distance further, but by # Nоvеlight # then, the four-legged tanks had already broken through into the interior side of the wall.
“...This is awful. I know it’s awful, but... this really looks like monsters swarming a hole.”
And the magnified footage of the scene, no matter how generously one tried to view it, looked exactly like a pitiful fortress city being overrun by a horde of monsters.
