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 are the mind-killer. They are a corrosion of creative thought, leading to utter destruction. No matter how useful they seem, they are one of the greatest sources of evil in the universe.”

Her bottomless, light-devouring gaze stared straight at me for three seconds, then at our distant enemy crowned in lightning for four.

“The entire philosophy of Mavis is a lie. Look at what it has brought about.”

“Violence is power?” I glared at the ruins of my hometown. “That doesn’t look like a lie right now.”

“Do not pretend to be stupid on purpose. Up to this point, naked force has solved more problems than any other tool humanity has ever used.”

Then the overly serious little runt who had grown into an impossibly serious young woman overnight smiled at me.

It was a sincere, brilliant smile, like the touch of sunlight after a cold night.

“The lie is believing it is the only answer. Communication and cooperation can serve those skilled enough to wield them just as well.”

I was just trying to come up with a clever retort when the turret fired, and the world seemed to tremble.

Lasers were loud.

Even a laser meant for cleaning skin sounded like a tiny firecracker, its beam flash-heating the air along its path.

And that was just a device no stronger than a flashlight. When the strongest energy weapon we had managed to build with everyone’s combined power fired, the ground shook, bones vibrated, and the eardrums of everyone with weaker physical enhancement ruptured.

An ordinary person standing beside that massive weapon when it fired would have been killed by the shockwave alone.

The beam was brighter than lightning.

It was more dazzling than the noon sun beneath a clear midsummer sky.

It was so bright that half of us were blinded even with our eyes closed.

Under that black, dense dome of magically formed thunderclouds—a storm system that had plunged the entire city into near darkness—

A fifty-kilometer stretch of Sanguang City received more light in an instant than it ever had before.

Then the beam ceased, leaving behind a steaming turret, a thousand tons of metal rapidly cooling under magical refrigeration as it fought to contain its own heat.

Fifty kilometers away, the weapon’s distant target—the back of Mort’s neck—was struck.

Much of the beam’s energy had been absorbed by the atmosphere between us. The shockwave and the light had to come from somewhere, and air was neither perfectly transparent nor a vacuum.

In fact, the more intense the beam became, and the more energetic each particle was, the more opaque the air became in certain ways.

Cheng Rui’s design, however, had accounted for that. The photons from the absurdly powerful laser portion of the beam physically blasted atmospheric gas out of the weapon’s path.

That created a highly conductive near-vacuum channel, allowing the stronger electron beam to pass through with far less obstruction.

Those electrons slammed into the neck of Mort’s gigantic body, releasing energy equivalent to a small nuclear weapon across an area of only a few square yards.

The explosion made cruise missiles and artillery shells look like little firecrackers.

With my enhanced senses, I clearly saw more than a hundred cubic yards of steel-hard black flesh vaporize in an instant, the force of it powerful enough to further wreck the surrounding landscape.

The mountain-sized enemy stopped moving.

Aside from nuclear weapons, no other attack had accomplished that.

Only two seconds later, the turret fired again, and another impossibly bright beam stabbed through the sky.

Two more seconds passed. As Mort’s enormous body slowly turned to look at us, a third shot struck the side of his neck.