Chapter 137: So this is Vulnerability

The naval shells did not stop because the palace had fallen.

Modern fire missions do not cease until the target grid is confirmed neutralized by overhead surveillance. Up in the stratosphere, the MQ-9 Reaper drone’s synthetic aperture radar painted the royal bluff, tracking the four surviving thermal signatures huddled among the rubble.

The automated fire-control system on the USS Bunker Hill adjusted coordinates by three mils.

THOOM! THOOM! THOOM!

The seventy-pound five-inch shells began raining down on the terrace with terrifying, mechanical rhythm.

Every four seconds, another steel cylinder plunged into the courtyard, detonating with a concussive roar that sent fountains of pulverized granite and white-hot steel splinters sweeping across the plateau.

“Help me…” Viona cried out, clawing at the dirt with her working left hand. She dragged her body an inch at a time toward the shallow alcove beneath a cracked marble fountain. “Belis! Justin! Where are you?! Protect your goddess! Come here and die for me!”

No one answered.

Lord Justin had fled into the mountains hours ago. Prime Minister Belis lay thirty feet away, his old body half-buried under a collapsed pillar, crushed to death when the colonnade had fallen during the initial missile strike.

There were no high priests left to offer sacred prayers. There were no paladins to raise silver shields. The forty thousand subjects who had chanted her name every morning were either dead beneath the smoking ruins of the lower wards or running for their lives into the western forests.

She was completely, utterly alone.

A five-inch shell detonated twenty paces from the fountain.

KER-BLAM!

The shockwave slapped Viona flat against the stone, driving the breath from her lungs in a wet gasp. A shower of sharp gravel and concrete dust pelted her back, shredding the remnants of her silk gown and biting into the bare skin of her shoulders.

“Stop… please, stop…” she sobbed into the dirt, coughing violently as sulfurous smoke filled her lungs.

Every breath felt like swallowing broken glass. Her divine lungs, accustomed to the pure, refined mana of the celestial realm, were burning from chemical fumes and pulverized masonry. The pain in her shattered right arm was so overwhelming that her vision pulsed in sickening shades of gray and black.

A shadow dragged itself into her field of view.

It was Ayanokoji.

The boy had tied a torn strip of his white tunic around his broken left thigh to act as a crude tourniquet, yet bone still visibly pressed against the torn skin of his shin. He was using the shaft of his black abyssal spear as a crutch, dragging his dead limb behind him across the cratered terrace.

His face was unrecognizable. The left side was blackened and blistered from the missile’s heat wave, his left eyelid swollen shut. Only his right eye remained open—dull, vacant, and glowing with the faint, fading red light of the Torment Band.

He stopped three paces from Viona, resting his weight on the spear.

“Master,” Ayanokoji stated.

His voice was hoarse, scratched raw by smoke, but entirely devoid of panic, fear, or pain. It sounded like a report read by an automated machine from a ruined factory.

Viona looked up at him with wild, pleading eyes, reaching out with her trembling, bloody left hand.

“Ayanokoji… use your spear…” she begged, tears carving pale tracks through the thick soot on her face. “Jump across the water! You are an S-rank! You can leap across the bay! Pierce their hulls! Kill the men on the boats! Save me!”

Ayanokoji looked down at her with his single open eye.

“Physically impossible, Master,” he replied flatly. “Distance to naval line: seven point eight kilometers. Maximum S-rank leap distance: seventy meters. Hostile surface fleet possesses overlapping Phalanx CIWS networks, SeaRAM missiles, and automated radar-guided cannons. Any airborne humanoid contact exceeding thirty knots will be engaged and neutralized within zero point four seconds of radar detection.”

“Then carry me!” she shrieked, clutching his torn trouser leg with desperate strength. “Take me away from here! Take me to the imperial sanctuary in the capital! Run into the mountains!”

Ayanokoji did not move. He tilted his head slightly toward the sky.

“Negative, Master,” he said in his cold, steady monotone. “Look above.”

Viona forced herself to turn her head, looking up through the swirling black smoke.

Circling in wide, lazy orbits barely three thousand feet above the bluff were four AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters. Their dark, predatory fuselages hovered like hornets over a crushed hive. Beneath their stubby wings, AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and podded rockets were primed on active pylons. Their chin-mounted 20mm Gatling cannons traversed smoothly, tracking every movement on the terrace with thermal optics.

Beyond the helicopters, high in the upper atmosphere, two F/A-18F Super Hornets cut white contrails across the overcast sky, maintaining an unbroken circle over the coast.

“The operational theater is under total aerial interdiction,” Ayanokoji continued, his voice relentless in its cold logic. “Every road leading out of Port Solis has been cratered by cluster munitions. Any vehicle, horse, or gathered formation larger than three individuals is designated an active target and engaged with precision ordnance. We possess zero tactical mobility.”

Viona let out a high, broken wail, pressing her forehead against Ayanokoji’s dusty boot.

“How did this happen…?” she wept, her fingers clawing at the stone. “How could this happen to a goddess?! I am eternal! I am divine! I have lived for centuries!”

“You engaged an industrialized military apparatus using feudal assumptions, Master,” Ayanokoji replied without hesitation.

Beside them, a weak groan came from the rubble.

Kenji was trying to push himself up from the crushed colonnade. His right arm hung limp, broken in two places, and blood was running freely from his mouth as he coughed against the dust. His glowing white aura was completely extinguished. The proud, arrogant champion who had boasted about slaughtering demon kings in the royal court looked like nothing more than a battered, dying teenager pulled from a train wreck.

Across the terrace, Miyuki did not move at all. Her pulse was a faint, erratic flutter beneath her pale skin, her breathing so shallow it barely stirred the dust on her lips.

Ayanokoji looked down at Viona.

“We are at a disadvantage.”