Chapter 358 - 347: Relentless Bombardment
Chapter 358: Chapter 347: Relentless Bombardment
The six survivors stared blankly at the circular void, its edges as smooth as a mirror.
Outside the void, the sea of metal began to squirm again, trying to fill the gap. For a moment, they couldn’t tell if what had just happened was an illusion or reality.
"EX-2071... that’s the official investigator designation from the Association." The captain’s voice was hoarse as he forced himself to calm down.
He had seen the destructive power of a Second-level Wizard before, but never anything this clean and decisive.
"This is great! We’re saved!" The young elemental wizard’s face was alight with the ecstatic joy of survival.
Outside the edge of the void, the metal monsters stopped advancing.
It wasn’t because of fear. They lacked such emotions.
It was because the front-line units had been completely vaporized, and the rear units had lost any wreckage to absorb, leading to a brief "decision-making stall."
But this pause wouldn’t last long.
In the distance, more metal fragments were peeling away from the collapsed ruins, converging and reassembling. New entities were taking shape, even more numerous than before.
The captain saw this too, and the hope that had been ignited by that beam of light dimmed.
"It’s useless..."
He gave a bitter smile. "We’ve tried. We blow a batch to pieces, and new ones just grow back. This entire city is their material depot."
Before the words had even left his mouth, a new commotion came from the sky.
Above the Floating Island, a deep blue rift silently tore open in the void.
"WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!"
Dozens of silver-gray streaks of light shot out from the rift like lightning, letting out a piercing shriek that tore through the air.
They made impossibly sharp turns in the air, instantly fanning out to cover the vast ruins of the metal city.
And that wasn’t all.
From the spatial rift, nine humanoid silhouettes slowly emerged. They held Ship-Slicing Blades, and the "Dragon Cavalry" mounting units on their backs unfolded slightly, like war gods spreading their wings. They were the Freedom Gundams.
"Humanoid Golems... and they can fly?!" The captain’s eye twitched violently. He could feel that the Magic Power fluctuations emanating from each Mecha were no less than his own.
If the appearance of the Storm Falcons and Freedom Gundams had merely shocked the survivors, then what emerged from the rift next made their scalps tingle with dread.
Five massive aerial fortresses, like inverted black pyramids, slowly and with an overwhelming sense of pressure, passed from the Half-Plane into the Material Realm.
They hovered high in the sky, their hulls covered in a dense array of hexagonal apertures that inspired fear.
Hive motherships!
"BZZZZZZ—"
The next second, it was as if a hornet’s nest had been kicked.
Countless "Stingers," forming a black metal torrent, poured out from the open apertures of the five motherships.
They filled the sky, emitting a dense, tooth-grating buzz, before organizing themselves into formations in the air, creating a vast net.
Below, the Bloodline Wizard had forgotten to breathe. His half-transformed arm hung limply at his side as he stared blankly at the sky.
The Contract Wizard cut off his Magic Power supply, letting his vines wither. He knew full well that his pitiful defenses were useless against such a force.
The Female Wizard from the Mind School closed her eyes, her whole body trembling.
In her perception, the outline of that "vast system" became even clearer.
The system was composed of countless nodes. Every silver fighter, every black mothership, every Humanoid Golem, was a peripheral neuron in this system.
And all these neurons were connected to the same, cold, central will.
Right now, that will was doing one thing: calculating.
It was calculating the position, material density, fusion speed, and strike solution for every single metal monster below...
She tried to sense the Golems, but could only make contact with slivers of "logic" executing commands. She couldn’t find any soul to communicate with or influence.
"Is that a Tower Spirit...?" she murmured.
No one answered her.
Because the great bombardment had already begun.
On the deck of the Sky Throne, Allen stood with his hands behind his back. The holographic projection before him was covered in a dense cluster of red dots.
"Total suppression. The Stingers will operate in units of ten. The Freedom Gundams and Storm Falcons are to eliminate large amalgamations. Gabriel is on standby to finish off any target that breaks the Magic Power threshold of a First-level Wizard."
"Hive motherships, fire at will. Attempt electronic suppression, see if it has any effect."
"Also—" He paused. "Leave me some intact samples of the metal lifeforms. Use AT Fields for individual isolation and containment."
[Directives issued.]
Thousands of flying units engaged in combat simultaneously. The Stingers were the first to dive.
They were only half a meter long and weighed twelve kilograms, but when the miniature Magic-guided Light Beam Emitters under their bellies fired in unison, the effect was like a torrential downpour of light from the heavens.
On the ground, the metal monsters that had just finished reassembling didn’t even have time to react before they were blasted into fragments by the dense beams.
The fragments tried to move toward their nearby kin to merge.
But the second wave of attacks had already arrived.
They precisely bombarded every moving fragment, forcefully interrupting the "fusion" process.
Accompanied by the massive bombs dropped intermittently by the Storm Falcons, the long-silent city of metal scrap was instantly transformed into an inferno of endless cannon fire.
The six survivors watched this scene with upturned faces, their expressions changing from shock to numbness.
"Those little things... are all Flying Golems?" the Bloodline Wizard murmured. "So many of them?"
The captain didn’t speak. He had never participated in a planar war, and this was his first time witnessing the combat style of a Golem Wizard.
A dull explosion interrupted his thoughts.
In the distance, a large amalgamation that had devoured many of its kind and swelled to thirty meters in size was trying to break through the Stingers’ web of fire.
Fragments constantly peeled off its surface only to be reabsorbed, making it look like an angry mass of living metal as it charged toward the nearest hovering Hive mothership.
A Freedom Gundam saw this and flew over directly, without any wasted movements.
Its fifteen-meter Ship-Slicing Blade carved an arc of light. The "Pulverize" Rune activated at full power, and the high-frequency vibrations distorted the very air around the blade.
One slash.
The large amalgamation was cleaved in two. The cut was perfectly smooth, like a mirror, and the metal tissue at the rupture was completely deactivated by the aftershocks of the high-frequency vibrations, ceasing all movement.
The two halves of the wreckage crashed to the ground, and smaller monsters immediately swarmed forward, trying to "feast."
The Freedom Gundam’s back-mounted Dragon Cavalry system activated.
Ten mounting units detached from the frame, turning into ten streaks of light that precisely bombarded every individual entity attempting to approach the wreckage.
Simultaneously, a Storm Falcon dove down from three thousand meters, releasing the aerial bomb mounted to its belly.
"BOOM—!"
An orange fireball bloomed in the densest area of metal monsters. The shockwave, carrying temperatures of over a thousand degrees, swept across a radius of dozens of meters.
High temperatures and vibrations were the weaknesses of these metal lifeforms.
This was the conclusion Allen had drawn after the first test shot.
The physical hardness of these metal units wasn’t top-tier, but what was truly tricky was their fusion and Regeneration Ability.
High temperatures could melt and denature the metal, destroying their microscopic structure at the source.
The molten metal could no longer be absorbed and reassembled by its kin, and the fusion speed in areas damaged by the Ship-Slicing Blade was drastically reduced.
The weaknesses were obvious. Moreover, they had no reaction to Magic Power frequency suppression, clearly lacking any group communication ability.
"Jarvis, record this: the target metal’s fusion-failure temperature threshold is approximately between twenty-eight hundred and thirty-two hundred degrees. We’ll run a precise experiment on it later."
[Recorded.]
The bombardment lasted for forty minutes.
The five motherships rotated, deploying Stingers to maintain uninterrupted firepower. The Storm Falcons were responsible for precision bombing of high-value amalgamations, while the Freedom Gundams patrolled the edges of the battlefield, dealing with any stragglers that tried to break through the web of fire.
Sky Throne, bridge.
Allen calmly watched the battlefield below, simultaneously processing the real-time data stream fed to him by Jarvis.
[Sample 017 captured. Initiating containment transfer.]
[Warning: High energy reaction detected. Enemy cluster is merging. Large elite unit projected to appear in 37 seconds.]
Allen’s gaze fell upon an aggregate that was rapidly expanding in size.
"Gabriel," he said calmly.
The white colossus standing motionlessly behind him suddenly spread its eight metallic wings. The entire mecha became a streak of white light as it leaped from the Sky Throne, plummeting toward the ground.
Before the horrified eyes of the survivors, the white figure descending from the sky merged its eight wings in midair, transforming into a massive spear over sixteen meters long that shone with a holy light.
[Spear of Longinus]!
The spear’s target was the gigantic metal creation on the ground, one that had been formed from the fusion of over a hundred monsters and stood more than fifty meters tall.
Without giving the newly formed elite unit any time to react, the white holy spear, moving at a terrifying supersonic speed, pierced straight through it.
BOOM!!!
A seven-layered chain incantation detonated instantly inside the monster’s core. Rampant energy erupted from within, blowing the enormous metal creation into smithereens that scattered across the sky!
After doing all this, the white spear disassembled in the air, its parts retracting into wings as it reassembled into the form of an Eight-winged Angel. It hovered elegantly in midair, as if the thunderous strike from moments before had nothing to do with it.
The entire battlefield once again fell into an eerie silence.
All the survivors, and even the fearless metal monsters, seemed to have been stunned by this strike, which was like a form of Divine Punishment.
With Gabriel’s earth-shattering strike, the metal monsters within a several-thousand-meter radius, centered on the survivors’ location, were completely cleared out.
The ground was littered with charred, twisted, and completely inert metal wreckage.
The metal monsters farther away stopped approaching, as if the reduction in their numbers had triggered some kind of mechanism that stopped them from trying to combine into larger entities.
The six survivors stood amidst the devastated ruins, not even daring to breathe too loudly, afraid they might accidentally get blown up too.
Once the sounds of cannon fire subsided, the captain took a deep breath, forcibly suppressing the complex emotions churning within him.
He straightened his Wizard Robe and took a step toward the white colossus that was slowly descending from the sky.
The Divine Statue Gabriel landed, and on its outstretched right palm stood a person.
He was young, with a calm face and gray eyes that betrayed little emotion.
He wore a simple, dark robe with the Association’s insignia pinned to his chest, and no other adornments.
He looked like an ordinary young Wizard.
But the holy colossus beneath his feet, the Floating Island above his head, and the Steel Legion still circling and patrolling the sky all silently proclaimed his status and importance.
The captain was just about to speak and express his gratitude.
However, Allen spoke first.
"Where is your investigative analysis on these metal lifeforms?"