Chapter 105: Decimation of the Seventh Carrier Fleet

The descending golden radiance from the upper stratosphere did not bring warmth to the Eastern Strait. It brought the dry, suffocating heat of an alchemical crucible.

Fifty supersonic interceptors fanned out into a broad wedge formation three miles above the floating iron bastion. Their swept titanium wings shivered in the turbulent air, twin afterburners painting streaks of bright sapphire across the purple storm clouds. Below them, across the open horizon, the heavy silhouettes of twenty-four Allied warships steamed forward at full flank speed, their automated deck guns already rotating toward the newly raised continental barrier.

On the central parapet of the Iron Wall, Commodore Sterling stood behind a rusted rangefinder, his spectral greatcoat snapping violently in the gale.

"Lead flight wing has crossed the territorial boundary, Sovereign," Sterling announced, his hollow voice carrying over the groan of four dozen welded ship hulls. "Altitude twelve thousand feet. They are carrying Mark-Nine holy plasma canisters engineered by the Vatican armory. If those warheads detonate against the barrier joints, the concussive heat will boil the bay to bedrock."

Renan did not move from the forward edge of the rampart.

His dark hair whipped across his brow, his hands still resting deep in the pockets of his coat. High above, the figure of Sir Arthur Pendelton hung suspended in the sky like a second sun, the eight-foot star-metal broadsword held point-downward, radiating waves of silver pressure that pushed back the rain clouds for miles.

"Let them fire," Renan said softly.

The sky tore open with fifty simultaneous sonic cracks.

The Allied fighter wing pitched their noses downward in a steep sixty-degree dive. From beneath their reinforced pylons, a hundred heavy plasma canisters dropped into the air currents, their solid-fuel boosters kicking on with blinding orange trails. The warheads shrieked as they accelerated past Mach 5, converging on the three-mile iron barricade like a falling curtain of holy fire.

"Artillery divisions," Commodore Sterling’s command echoed through the rusted bulkheads of forty-two sunken warships. "Depress forward kinetic batteries forty degrees. Load corrupted abyssal shells. Fire on my mark."

Across the floating fortress, four hundred shadow sailors slammed heavy breech blocks shut.

The ancient naval guns—massive twin-barrel turrets that had rested in the mud of the Nero Trench for thirty years—groaned as hydraulic gears packed with necrotic mana forced the rusted barrels skyward. Instead of standard black powder or compressed gas, the chambers burned with volatile, dark violet energy drawn directly from Renan’s reserve pool.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Eighty heavy naval cannons detonated in a single, rolling salvo that shook the water beneath the barrier forty feet deep.

Eighty shells of solid obsidian stone, wrapped in dense wreaths of black dragon-fire and corrupted gravitational mana, tore upward through the descending storm. The projectile velocity transcended modern artillery parameters, ripping through the sound barrier with shrieks that sounded like iron tearing against iron.

The collision in the middle air turned noon into midnight.

The hundred falling holy plasma canisters did not strike the iron wall. They collided head-on with the ascending wall of abyssal ordnance half a mile above the water.

Blinding white holy fire slammed into roaring black necrotic flame. The atmospheric shockwave was so violent that the ocean surface beneath the explosion caved inward thirty feet, exposing the jagged reefs of the shallows for two seconds before the displaced water surged outward in a roaring tidal wall.

Dozens of supersonic fighter jets, caught in the supersonic backdraft of their own detonated payload, tumbled out of control.

Their delicate titanium control surfaces buckled under the kinetic turbulence. Eleven aircraft disintegrated in mid-air, their fuel tanks igniting in brilliant red blossoms. Another twenty jets spun wildly into the sea, skipping across the black waves like flat stones before plunging into the depths where thousands of waiting shadow chimeras dragged the cockpits down into the dark.

Only nineteen interceptors managed to pull their noses up, screaming into emergency vertical climbs to escape the slaughter.

"Break formation! Break formation!" the panicked voice of the Allied flight commander crackled through the fleet-wide emergency frequencies. "Their coastal guns aren’t kinetic! They are firing compressed domain shells! Half the squadron is gone in the first pass!"

High above the burning air, Sir Arthur Pendelton’s expression darkened into cold, aristocratic fury.

The First Knight of the Silver Round did not wait for the surviving aircraft to re-form. He gripped the hilt of his star-metal broadsword with both hands, his white silk cape billowing as his entire body ignited with an SSS-Rank holy mana core that turned the clouds around him into molten gold.

"Useless cowards," Arthur’s voice boomed from the heavens, resonant and unyielding as a bronze bell. "Step aside and witness how a true champion of the Crown purges the darkness!"

Arthur kicked off the empty air.

A golden sonic boom exploded in the stratosphere, blasting the clouds apart in a five-mile ring.

The World-Class Hunter descended from twelve thousand feet in less than two seconds, his star-metal broadsword held high above his shoulder, trailing a hundred-foot blade of concentrated holy light capable of splitting an ocean liner in two.

He was not aiming for the cannons. He was not aiming for the four hundred shadow sailors.

Arthur Pendelton descended directly toward Renan’s skull, bringing the full weight of the British Empire’s greatest relic down in an execution strike meant to cleave the Sovereign and his iron wall into fine gray sand.

Renan looked up at the falling golden blade.

He finally pulled his right hand from his coat pocket.

He did not draw a weapon. He did not call on Shadow General Ignis to intercept the blow. He simply stepped forward with his left boot, planting his heel firmly onto the rusted steel decking of the central citadel, and raised his bare right arm into the open sky.

The star-metal broadsword struck.

CLANG!

The sound was not that of metal hitting flesh; it was the deafening, catastrophic ring of two tectonic plates colliding at hypersonic speed.

The three-mile floating iron wall shivered to its deepest submerged anchors, the shockwave blasting forty thousand tons of ocean water away from the hulls in a ring of white vapor. The rusted steel plates beneath Renan’s boots buckled downward six inches, but his knees did not bend a fraction of an inch.

Sir Arthur Pendelton’s eyes widened until the veins in his whites pulsed with raw disbelief.

His eight-foot relic broadsword, carrying eighty tons of descending kinetic momentum and the concentrated holy fire of the Silver Round, had been stopped dead three inches above Renan’s hair.

Caught firmly in the palm of Renan’s bare, unarmored right hand.

Not a drop of blood leaked from Renan’s fingers. The SSS-Rank holy fire burned against his pale skin, but the passive cellular density of his Sovereign Body absorbed the searing heat like dry sand drinking water, converting the radiant mana into thin trails of harmless white steam that curled off his knuckles.

Renan looked into the knight’s wide, horrified eyes through the veil of fading sparks.

"Your holy light is bright, Arthur," Renan said softly, his voice cold, flat, and carrying the terrible weight of an absolute predator.

Renan slowly closed his fingers around the glowing edge of the legendary star-metal blade.

"Now let me show you what lives in the dark."