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…