100. The Power of Everyone Together

The Power of Everyone Together

The turret, larger than a battleship, was complete.

It was an enormous machine built for one purpose: to concentrate enough power to harm Mort’s demonic form.

It was not as powerful as the nuclear strike the military had attempted earlier, not even with days of design time and the best materials magic could provide.

But if everything went right, perhaps it did not need to be that powerful.

Cheng Rui had returned to his wheelchair. A red-haired witch fussed over him at his side.

Pale, trembling, and exhausted, the magical engineer ran one final check over his ion cannon.

Four hundred tons of superconducting coils produced nearly petawatt-level electricity through a trick performed by his ability.

There was also a slightly smaller free-electron laser and an electron-beam array. The former was meant to open a path through the air, while the latter would fire electrons accelerated to near light speed through that path.

Another five hundred tons of machinery were devoted to aiming and rotating the turret. With the aid of his robotics, those mechanisms operated far faster and far more precisely than they normally could—though they might not have a chance to make use of those advantages.

Two thousand tons of magically reinforced armor could withstand a small nuclear weapon in case something broke through their other defenses.

By the standards of modern technology, it was an utter monstrosity, one capable of drilling through a small mountain.

But by itself, it was still nowhere near enough for what they needed.

“Chi Li, stop fussing. I’ll be fine,” he reassured the red-haired girl, whose expression was equal parts irritation and worry.

“We really need you to put everything you have into that heat-resistance spell right now.”

“But what about the other defenses?” she demanded, bossy as ever, glaring at him with her best how-dare-you-say-I’m-fussing look. “What if something gets through?”

“We’ll handle it.” He gave her his most confident, most reassuring smile.

Hopefully, he was too exhausted for his real emotions to show.

“We’ve lured him where we want him. He’s far enough away that he won’t reach us immediately, but still within our firing range.”

More precisely, within one third of the range allowed by the curvature of the Earth—but he did not dare risk delaying any longer.

Every step the giant took made him a little larger, and therefore more powerful.

“You had better mean that, you bastard,” she snapped. “If you die, I’ll find a way to resurrect you, and then I’ll beat that stupid face of yours in.”

Then humanity’s first true witch turned and strode toward the gun as though the several-thousand-ton turret was something she intended to trample underfoot.

Fortunately, anything technical that Chi Li knew how to handle was something Cheng Rui could deal with easily without touching it.

And he was not the telepathic one.

“You know she is never going to forget that.”

“But if we survive, she may forgive me.”

Speak of the devil, Cheng Rui thought, then looked up at the basketball player he had once had a crush on.

He had to look very, very far up.

Of everyone here, Ye Rin had changed the most.

It said something that, even with the fate of the world at stake, his first thought was still about her appearance. Only after he mentally dragged that idiotic part of himself back on course did he think about her abilities.

“Did the experiment succeed? Can you enhance the gun’s power the way we discussed?”

Then again, when you were looking at someone who made even the best cosplay seem like an amateur imitation…

“I don’t like calling our best defensive measure an experiment… but yes, it worked.” Her lips pressed into a pale line, and her blue eyes narrowed.

She stared at the fruit of their labor as a red magical glow spread from Chi Li and completely covered the gun.

“Are you sure this will work?”

“I’ve done the calculations,” Cheng Rui assured her. “For a two-kilometer-tall person with steel-like toughness—”

“That is a very conservative assumption, in my opinion,” Ye Rin interrupted.

“His breaking length is four kilometers, and he is already half that tall, yet he can still walk normally on his legs.

“Either he is wasting a huge amount of energy keeping his own body from collapsing under its weight, or his baseline toughness is far stronger than that.”

“So what? This is our only option.”

If there was one thing Cheng Rui knew about Ye Rin, it was that she always tried for the perfect outcome and always did her absolute best.

But perfect was the enemy of good enough, and no one had come up with a better idea.

“Taking the risk is better than doing nothing. However tall or massive Mort is in this form, he is still one person. I am willing to believe he is not so powerful that all of us together cannot do anything to him.”

“Fine.”

The tired worry on the blonde girl’s face slowly became a tentative smile.

“I’ll do everything I can to make it work.”

“We all will,” he agreed.

“Now remember, before you increase conductivity to raise the peak power, you must strengthen the toughness and apply cooling to the turret, otherwise—”

“Yes, yes, I’m not a complete idiot!”

She waved him off, then ran to cast her own magic.

Technology took the world as it was and harnessed existing forces to accomplish things human beings could never achieve with their natural abilities alone.

If the forces he had to harness extended beyond mere physics, well, if they were lucky, physicists all over the world would survive to study it and complain about it.

If they were even luckier, Cheng Rui might live long enough to hear them complain.

××××

Old Zhao Linshou panted against the barrel of the enormous cannon. A substance somewhere between golden light and honey dripped from his hands and seeped into the seamless metal as if the barrel were a sponge.

Through Force Perception, I sensed a subtle, almost imperceptible change passing through the massive turret as a whole. It slowly intensified as the old hunter’s face grew redder and his breathing became rougher and more uneven.

It was nothing like Chi Li’s obvious magic, which formed a red curtain across the metal’s surface and changed the metal’s relationship with heat in a way that made absolutely no physical sense.

Nor was it like my enhancement, which altered fundamental interactions in a very physical and comprehensible way.

The old man’s enhancement was invisible and elusive, but if I looked closely, I could still find signs of it.

The metal seemed to gain a strange sense of depth, somewhat like two mirrors facing each other, except that this added depth was real.

I could detect it in the infinitesimal delay when photons interacted with the metal. I could feel it in the way the turret’s weight seemed to flicker, for fractions of a second, between normal weight and many times that amount.

I could also feel it in how none of that produced the effects on the real world that it should have. I could even smell it in the way the greased ball bearings in the rotation mechanisms seemed more… pungent than normal.

There was the faintest shadow of a second turret overlapping reality, then another, and another after that, as if extending into infinity while the cannon unfolded in a way my newly acquired senses could see but my brain could not understand.

Given the absurd power of the old man’s shotgun, everyone hoped this enhancement would help, even though none of us—except perhaps Cheng Rui—could have said exactly how it worked.

The no-longer-scrawny nerd really had designed this thing with all of our abilities in mind.

At least, that was what he claimed.