Chapter 136: Do Gods Bleed?

The four AGM-158 JASSM cruise missile descended like falling stars. Their stealth-contoured fuselages sliced through the sulfurous smoke hanging over Port Solis at high subsonic speed. Their infrared seekers had long since locked onto the thermal blooms radiating from the royal keep’s subterranean foundations. They made almost no sound until the final three seconds—just a low, hollow tear in the atmosphere that grew into a deafening scream.

“Incoming terminal impact,” Ayanokoji’s voice droned, perfectly steady despite the apocalyptic roar above. “Four heavy penetrating warheads. Point of detonation: zero point eight seconds.”

“Miyuki! Hold the ward!” Viona shrieked, scrambling backward on her hands and knees until her bruised back slammed against the fractured base of the marble sundial. “Hold it! Channel every drop! I command you!”

The black Torment Band around Miyuki’s left forearm surged with blinding, sickly crimson light. The metallic thorns, driven directly into her ulna and radius, twisted violently, forcing her depleted spiritual pathways to open by raw force.

“Absolute… Sanctuary… Ward…”

Miyuki did not shout the words. The syllables spilled from her lips as a wet, broken rasp.

Blood was no longer merely dripping from her nose; it poured freely from her ears, her nostrils, and the corners of her unblinking eyes, running down her chin and soaking the embroidered collar of her white diplomatic tunic. Her spiritual core was literally fracturing under the strain, burning through her mortal lifespan to feed the spell.

The emerald-gold dome flickered, thickening from translucent glass into a solid, humming shell of condensed mana barely ten feet wide.

Then, the first thousand-pound penetrator warhead struck.

THUUUUUUM-CRACK!

The specialized dense-metal casing of the missile did not bounce off. It slammed straight into the apex of the green barrier at eight hundred feet per second. The kinetic mass alone cracked the outer mana film, followed a microsecond later by the detonation of the blast-fragmentation core.

A flash of pure, blinding white fire swallowed the terrace.

The sound was not an explosion; it was an atmospheric displacement so intense that the air pressure inside the ward dropped instantly to a vacuum. The stone flagstones beneath their boots liquefied under the concussive pressure, blowing downward into the royal wine cellars thirty feet below.

PING-SHATTER!

Miyuki’s wooden staff, an ancient artifact carved from the sacred World Tree bough, fractured straight down the middle. Splinters of glowing ash sprayed across the girl’s face.

“Guh—!”

Miyuki pitched forward onto her stomach, vomiting a thick puddle of dark blood across the shattered flags. The emerald barrier did not simply dissipate; it collapsed inward like crushed parchment, sending a backlash of raw, unstable mana directly back through the Torment Band.

The crimson gemstone on her wrist cracked with an audible pop. Her body convulsed once, twice, and then went completely limp, her breathing turning into a faint, shallow rattle as her nervous system shut down from total mana burnout.

Before the smoke could clear, the second and third cruise missiles hit the exposed stone.

KABOOOOM! KABOOOOM!

Without the protective ward, the direct blast wave tore across the terrace with the force of an erupting volcano.

“Defensive Arc!” Kenji moved entirely on automated reflex.

The S-rank Holy Sword Master planted his boots into the crumbling granite, drawing his ceremonial rapier in a wide, desperate arc. He didn’t have time to form an offensive blade of light; he condensed his white holy mana into a flat physical buckler hovering two feet before his chest.

It was completely insufficient against two thousand pounds of specialized military-grade explosive composition detonating twelve paces away.

The shockwave hit Kenji’s holy buckler and pulverized it instantly.

SNAP!

The rapier snapped into three pieces, the jagged steel shards spinning back and embedding themselves deep into Kenji’s own shoulder and neck. The overpressure wave slammed into the boy’s chest with the blunt weight of a falling boulder.

Kenji’s breastplate caved inward, cracking four of his ribs and puncturing his right lung. The force hurled him thirty feet backward through the air like a ragdoll. He crashed violently into the stone wall of the royal keep, his head snapping back against the masonry with a wet, heavy crack before he slid into the rubble, motionless, a trail of dark crimson smearing the dusty stone behind him.

Beside the crater, Ayanokoji stood his ground for a fraction of a second longer.

His S-rank perception calculated the blast vectors, his body shifting into a low stance to ride the kinetic wave. He drove the butt of his black abyssal spear into the ground, angling the heavy dark steel shaft to deflect the supersonic shrapnel cloud.

CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!

Dozens of razor-sharp tungsten fragments pinged off the shaft, glowing white-hot. But even an S-rank spear master could not defy the laws of physics.

A jagged piece of the missile casing, eight inches long and traveling at Mach 4, bypassed his guard. It struck his left leg directly below the knee.

CRACK!

The black steel armor was sheared through, and Ayanokoji’s left shin snapped clean in half.

The boy didn’t scream. His brain, suppressed by the Torment Band, processed the catastrophic physical trauma without a shred of emotion. He simply adjusted his balance, throwing his entire weight onto his right heel to keep his upper body upright.

Then the secondary shockwave caught him. The heat burned the left side of his face, stripping away the skin and singeing his hair to ash, before throwing him sprawling into the dirt beside Miyuki’s unconscious form.

And in the center of the terrace, exposed to the sky, lay Goddess Viona.

The fourth missile had not struck the terrace itself; it had punched straight through the outer courtyard wall forty feet away, collapsing the grand colonnade in an avalanche of burning masonry.

Yet, the raw thermal wave and concussive overpressure spared no one.

For three hundred years, Viona had never known physical pain. She was a higher being, a celestial authority whose skin had never been pricked by an iron needle, whose divine flesh had never felt the sting of a scrape, whose eyes had never witnessed her own blood spilled upon the dirt. Her worshippers prostrated themselves before her perfection; rival kings knelt at her feet.

That divine perfection ceased to exist in a single millisecond.

The heat wave washed over her, scorching her long golden hair into brittle, blackened curls. The concussive blast caught her slender body and tossed her across the jagged stone like a discarded doll.

CRUNCH!

Her right shoulder struck a fallen granite lintel. The divine bone, brittle from the total depletion of her internal mana reserves, shattered on impact.

“AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!”

The scream that tore from Viona’s throat was not divine. It was not majestic. It was the raw, high-pitched, agonizing shriek of a terrified animal being crushed in a bear trap.

She hit the ground hard, rolling three times through dirt, broken glass, and burning sulfur ash before coming to a stop on her stomach.

A sharp, searing agony flared in her right shoulder, shooting white-hot lightning through her entire nervous system. When she tried to move her arm, the limb hung limp and useless, the joint displaced and swelling rapidly beneath her skin.

Worse, something warm and sticky was pouring down her face.

Trembling, her left hand reached up to touch her cheek. Her fingers came away covered in thick, radiant, golden-crimson celestial blood. A jagged piece of missile shrapnel had grazed the side of her temple, carving a deep, ugly gouge from her brow to her jawline, ruining the flawless porcelain skin she had guarded for centuries.

Viona stared at her bloody fingers, her eyes wide, bulging with horror and disbelief.

“My… my face…” she whimpered, her voice cracking into a broken, ragged sob. “My… my blood… I’m bleeding… I’m bleeding…!”

She looked around the terrace through a haze of tears and gray dust.

The grand palace was gone.

The keep behind her was a burning hollow shell, its roof collapsed inward, sending towering plumes of black smoke into the gray sky. The magnificent gardens were craters of scorched earth.

Her champions were broken.

Miyuki lay unmoving, drowned in her own blood. Kenji was buried beneath falling masonry, his chest barely rising. Ayanokoji was dragging his ruined, broken leg across the rubble with cold, mechanical persistence, his spear still clutched in one blistered hand.

And far out on the horizon, the gray warships of the United States continued their unhurried, rhythmic thunder.

THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.

Another salvo was already screaming through the clouds.