101. Giant Cannon Bombardment

Giant Cannon Bombardment

“It’s time,” Lia said.

During the half hour we had spent working ourselves half to death, racing an invisible deadline, the girl who had once looked like a little runt had filled out even more. She had also grown until she was almost as tall as I was.

The longer she kept both hands on my sister’s shoulders, the more that immense flood of power poured into Ye Lin’s shelter ability.

“The best moment to use your weapon is less than a minute away, so you should make very sure you’re ready.”

“How do you know?” Lily asked the girl—who now very obviously looked like a high school student—before I could.

“The secret to knowing more than other people is knowing where to look,” the taller brown-haired girl explained, her pupil-less black eyes examining all of us like miniature black holes.

I was not sure why that was the image that came to mind, but once it did, I could not unsee it. Lia’s eyes really did look like two holes in the structure of the universe, swallowing every photon that moved toward them.

“And the first step is paying attention. If you do not actively search for information, no information will find its way to you.”

“Yeah, that right there proves you’ve never set foot in high school, whatever you look like,” Lily said in disgust, and I snorted.

We could joke now. With the last spell in place, our part in this plan was finished.

The air crackled as vast amounts of electricity surged through kilometers of empowered wire, each cable thicker than my wrist.

Most of the wire was silver. Thanks to Lily’s control over metal, we had enough silver for a project this large. A substantial portion, however, was tungsten.

According to Cheng Rui, even though tungsten conducted electricity much less efficiently, its extreme heat resistance and high melting point made it better at enduring a very brief but absurdly powerful current.

Fine. He was the engineer. We listened to him.

The turret adjusted its aim at a speed that looked slow and was, in fact, very fast.

It seemed slow to the eye, but for a two-thousand-ton device, it moved with astonishing speed and precision.

It had to.

It needed to line up the shot.

As if summoned by the thought, Mort’s colossal body remained clearly visible even fifty kilometers away, standing on the horizon like a statue the size of a mountain.

Except the statue moved. And although it had partially blended into the oxygen-blue of the atmosphere, the lightning crackling from its horns made it stand out well enough.

The downpour had stopped earlier, after the military’s large-scale nuclear strike, leaving the sky as clear as we could have hoped.

Even a storm would not have been enough to stop an energy weapon of this power from functioning, but under a clear sky, at least, it could show its full strength.

“The moment the weapon fires, your sister’s shelter ability will fail,” Lia warned me, while I could feel so many electrons spinning through the turret’s coils that their motion seemed to have a physical weight.

“The reason it is so effective at making the enemy ignore its existence is that it is built on nonviolence. Preparing to launch an attack is already the limit of what it can tolerate.”

“So Mort will notice the glaringly obvious resistance stronghold behind him and try to wipe us out.” That was good to know, but one thing about the information bothered me.

I kicked at the mud-coated wreckage of the only shopping mall in Sanguang City for a few seconds before asking, “Why are you telling me this? I mean, why me in particular?”

“Your engineer friend has known all along. The young witch understood the entire mechanism after one look at your sister’s barrier. As for everyone else?” The not-quite-a-girl shrugged.

“Sometimes, concealment and confusion can be a comfort people cling to desperately in moments like these.”

“Isn’t that lying?” I could really have used a few comforting lies right now.

“To adapt a phrase from one of your storytellers: lies…