83. A Twelve-Person Assault Team

A Twelve-Person Assault Team

“The tower is going to shoot at us with—”

CRACK-BOOM! CRACK-BOOM! CRACK-BOOM! CRACK-BOOM!

A colossal bolt of lightning tore through the sky with such violence that it staggered the weaker members of the group.

Its blinding light made the cloud-covered heavens brighter than the noon sun, and the shockwave of its passage blew away the rain within three hundred meters of the bolt itself.

It was spectacular and terrifying, with enough power to vaporize anyone in the group, including me.

And then, every few seconds, it happened again and again… without hitting anything nearby.

“What are they aiming at?” Chi Li amplified her voice with magic so we could hear her through the ringing left between thunderclaps. “Is the target even inside the city?”

“It is shooting down missiles,” Lia said in her usual level tone, somehow making herself heard over the thunder without raising her voice. “Fifty or sixty kilometers away. Sometimes above the clouds, sometimes below them.”

Cheng Rui’s eyes went wide. He glanced around carefully, far less discreetly than he probably thought, then started making exaggerated gestures to get my and Chi Li’s attention.

We both found his stupidity amusing.

That lasted until he spelled one word for us:

NUKES.

…Well, I could not exactly blame the people in charge for using nuclear weapons.

Not in this mess, as I had heard Zhao Mancheng mutter a few hours earlier.

It only meant we had to bring the tower down ourselves after the government ran out of missiles, but before they tried something equally destructive.

So, what did one bring to a wizard-tower party?

“I think we should skip the entrance and break into the upper levels directly,” I suggested when my Force Sense hit a wall and could not probe any farther. “Bypass whatever defenses and traps the bad guys set near the door and go straight for the important parts.”

After several hours of preparation, one last meal, and as much rest as possible, our twelve-person group crept close to the huge metal structure in the city center under whatever cover we could find.

The few monsters we saw, we avoided whenever possible, so the enemy commander would remain unaware of us for as long as we could manage.

Then Zhao Linshou, Chi Li, Zhao Mancheng, Zhou Xiaorui, Chen Jin, Josh, every survivor who had killed at least one fire demon and could reach us in time, and I encountered our first problem.

The tower had no windows, no other doors, and only one gate. It had no keyhole and no other visible way to open it from the outside.

“We may have to do that,” Chi Li agreed after casting several spells at the gate. “I cannot find any way to open it. To every detection spell I know, it looks like absolute nothingness.”

“Try it,” Zhao Mancheng said, his black eyes scanning everything in front of him and finding nothing. “No traps, no hidden switches or panels, no mechanisms at ground level, at least.”

Nobody else had any ideas beyond blowing everything up, but considering the sheer mass of the black structure, we would make no meaningful progress without nuclear weapons.

The Mavis monstrosity was as wide as a football field at its base, though its pyramid shape narrowed as it rose.

Even so, it was still far larger than any similar human structure and built from a solid black metal no one could identify.

Symbols the size of cars had been carved into its matte-black surface, each glowing with ominous, sickly crimson light, and every one of them was harder to understand than the last.

The higher I flew, the smaller those symbols became, so that every row on each face always held seventeen. As they glowed, they also swallowed the surrounding light, growing brighter and darker at the same time.

When I tried to read them, my eyes slid away on their own while stinging, because their shapes made no sense and their angles refused to agree with themselves.

When I reached two thirds of the tower’s height, the constant crackling of…