48. He Was a Hero

He Was a Hero

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Yes. Everything arrived exactly as expected.

The instant the tower rose high enough to surpass the surrounding buildings—mostly an old theater that had not quite finished collapsing—magical lightning struck it.

Several gigajoules of electrical energy arced in dazzling brilliance, powerful enough to instantly vaporize a quarter ton of steel or melt a main battle tank into slag.

The enemy wanted to destroy Cheng Rui’s work before it was finished.

The black-haired arcane engineer sneered.

He could barely feel any temperature change in the armor plate beneath his hands.

The enemy was not going to succeed.

Not this time.

He did not even need to look up to know that the points where the huge lightning bolts had struck bore only faint scorch marks. He did not need to rely on his half-blind eyes and aching ears to finish the project.

The design was stamped firmly into his mind, and the work was performed by his magic.

So he closed his eyes and shaped the next layer of material.

More copper-glass and diamondlike laminate formed, curving inward and splitting apart, then shaping mooring structures and a ring based on pure diamondlike ball bearings for the tower’s turret section.

The outer high-conductivity layer had to be completed before the steel-glass scaffolding and internal components could be made. That complicated the turret design slightly, but for obvious reasons it was necessary.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

More gigajoules of electrical energy arrived, and the tower’s outer layer absorbed them like dry sand drinking water.

Copper was already an excellent electrical conductor—the third-best natural conductor on Earth.

The glasslike copper alloy Cheng Rui used was almost equally conductive, but it was also an excellent thermal conductor.

And it was thicker than any cable ever built.

Trying to damage it with electricity was extremely difficult.

Normally, such a tremendous current would concentrate on the surface of armor plate and cause at least some damage anyway.

That was where the diamondlike fibers came in.

Those fibers had far greater conductivity than copper, providing millions of tiny pathways for current to pass through the entire armor plate. In essence, they absorbed the electrical energy and dispersed it throughout the whole tower.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Any heat produced by the passage of immense current formed more evenly throughout the tower’s fiber network, then spread into the extremely thermally conductive glasslike copper alloy.

Vaporizing one ton of steel was one thing.

Trying to do the same to three hundred tons of armor designed specifically to minimize electrical damage and harmlessly guide the overwhelming majority of lightning strikes into the ground?

Cheng Rui giggled.

Good luck, villains.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Because all those properties of the armor?

That was before Cheng Rui’s skill enhancements.

And unlike ordinary material properties the villains could ignore whenever they felt like it—because magic—these properties were also supported by magic.

Ever since Cheng Rui’s eardrums had ruptured, ignoring the continuous bombardment had become much easier. So he continued into the deeper parts of the design.

He intended to teach the invaders why fortifications should never rely on only one design, no matter how effective it was.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Diamondlike coils thicker than Cheng Rui’s thumb moved and wound around a twelve-meter vacuum tube.

Electromagnets powerful enough to crush a tank like an aluminum can settled into a tungsten-scandium-aluminum alloy frame that could barely hold them in place.

Cheng Rui did not have the ability to build in a large margin of safety, and the device was not intended to function for more than a few minutes. Even so, every scrap of physical reinforcement his skills provided was necessary now.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The principle behind his energy weapon was fairly simple.

It would generate an electron beam, accelerating electrons to 0.** times the speed of light.

Then the beam would pass through extremely powerful electromagnets arranged every quarter centimeter, forcing the electrons to move in a sinusoidal path.

Each “wiggle” of those highly relativistic electrons would produce photons, which traveled only a little faster than the electron beam.

That, in turn, would lead to self-amplified spontaneous emission of coherent radiation along the same direction as the electron beam.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Completing the turret, repairing the minor damage caused by the constant lightning strikes, repeatedly checking his calculations, then adjusting the design required three more uses of Emergency Charge.

By then, Cheng Rui’s maximum stamina and mana had been consumed down to one-fifth of their normal level.

In the end, he felt as if he had been chewed up, spat into a frying pan, and then thrown into a fire.

But he had done it.

He had finished the entire device with magic and done it on time.

So why not add one more thing?

The craftsman and nerd wasted no time considering the potentially life-threatening consequences. He began drawing on rarer substances his abilities could extract from soil and bedrock as raw materials.

Thirty grams per ton might not sound like much, but a compacted block of soil ten yards on a side weighed nearly three thousand tons.

He had enough material.

And this final addition might not be any kind of robotic or armor component, but technically speaking, it was both an electrical system and an energy weapon.

As every tabletop gamer knew, technically correct was the best kind of correct.

At first, I thought Cheng Rui was building an extremely powerful lightning rod.

Drawing all the fire of the enemy lightning towers for as long as his creation could withstand it would have been fantastic.

I could have carried him and Chi Li away faster than anything could intercept us.

That impression lasted until the turret barrel began to take shape.

Strangely, whatever he was building seemed as if it would be a little more destructive than a lightning bolt, but I had no idea how it was supposed to work.

Unlike the lasers on his armor, for which I could find easy reference points in dozens of common electrical devices, peering through the tower’s outer shell with Force Sense gave me no clue at all.

I did recognize some individual components, such as the electromagnets.

But the way they came together made no sense.

Why did most of the device look like a phone charger looping back on itself again and again?

Where was its power supply?

Why were so many electromagnets mounted to a gigantic vacuum tube?

Whatever principle made the thing work, it was either knowledge we had never learned in high school or something so altered by Cheng Rui’s own magic that it was no longer recognizable.

But whatever its purpose, Cheng Rui believed his weapon would work.

Otherwise, he would not have made such a huge sacrifice to build it.

I could see that he had nearly destroyed himself to keep going, a strategy I knew very well and hated with the force of an exploding sun.

I had seen athletes do it. Plenty of people did it in pursuit of glory, or because others had deceived or coerced them into it.

Cheng Rui was doing it to save people.

To protect this world from monstrous invaders.

In that moment, in my eyes, he was a hero.

Which meant I could not back down either.

Because if I did?

All of his sacrifice would be for nothing.