Chapter 138: Destruction of Port Solis

The sky above Port Solis had ceased to be sky. It was a boiling roof of black chemical smoke, sulfur, and falling fire.

Five miles offshore, the United States Carrier Strike Group did not slow its tempo by a single fraction. On the decks of the cruisers and destroyers, the automated reload sequences ran like clockwork. The Mark 45 five-inch naval guns fired with a steady, deafening rhythm, pumping high-explosive fragmentation shells into every remaining garrison strongpoint, watchtower, and stone barricade across the city.

Inside the ruins of the lower harbor, the remnants of the imperial army were not putting up a fight. They were being wiped out.

Two thousand imperial heavy infantry—men who had sworn blood oaths to defend the empire, clad in layered steel plate and carrying enchanted pikes—had attempted to regroup inside the vaulted stone courtyard of the Grand Armory. Their commander, a decorated imperial general who had spent thirty years conquering frontier tribes, stood upon a shattered stone cistern, his broadsword raised high.

"Form the turtle!" the general bellowed, his voice hoarse from inhaling plaster dust. "Interlock shields! Channel your earth wards! The heretics have no foot soldiers! If we hold the stone walls, their ammunition will dry up!"

It was a strategy built on centuries of medieval siege warfare. In this world, catapults ran out of stones, and battle mages ran out of mana after an hour of hard casting. The imperial officers truly believed that no army could sustain such violence forever.

They were wrong.

High in the sky, an MQ-9 Reaper drone loitering at twenty-five thousand feet painted the center of the armory courtyard with a steady infrared laser beam. The coordinates were beamed directly via Link 16 datalink to a flight of two F/A-18F Super Hornets orbiting ten miles out to sea.

"Strike package incoming, target designated: hostile troop concentration in grid Charlie-Three," the flight lead reported over the radio. "Pickles away."

Four GBU-31 Joint Direct Attack Munitions—two-thousand-pound satellite-guided bombs—dropped smoothly from the wing pylons.

They fell through the smoke like heavy black anvils, their steering fins adjusting in micro-fractions to ride the laser line down to the ground.

WHIIIIIIISTLE—

The sound tore through the air a second before impact.

"Look up!" a paladin screamed, pointing his gauntleted hand at the clouds.

KABOOOOOOOOM!

The four heavy bombs struck the courtyard in a synchronized box pattern.

Eight thousand pounds of high-grade military explosive detonated simultaneously inside the enclosed stone space. The overpressure wave had nowhere to expand cleanly; it hit the thirty-foot-thick perimeter walls and bounced back inward with catastrophic force.

The two thousand armored legionnaires did not even have time to scream. The sheer atmospheric shockwave liquefied their internal organs inside their steel breastplates. The stone cistern, the armory towers, and the weapons racks were blown into a horizontal blizzard of shrapnel that shredded anything left standing.

When the towering column of gray smoke drifted away, the Grand Armory was simply gone. There was only a thirty-foot-deep crater filled with smoldering gravel, twisted iron scraps, and scorched mud.

Across the entire perimeter of Port Solis, the same story repeated itself in every sector.

A cohort of four hundred elite archers took up positions on the high stone aqueduct, hoping to fire enchanted frost arrows at the low-flying helicopters.

Before a single bowstring was drawn, an AH-1Z Viper attack helicopter hovered two miles away, well outside the range of their magical bows. The gunner flipped the thermal sight switch, centered the crosshairs on the arched stone pillars supporting the aqueduct, and squeezed the trigger.

FZZZZZZT—BOOM! FZZZZZZT—BOOM!

Two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles slammed directly into the central pillars.

The ancient masonry exploded into gravel. The massive stone aqueduct groaned, fractured, and collapsed in a thunderous avalanche of falling rock, dragging all four hundred archers down into the dry canal bed to be crushed under thousands of tons of stone.

Down by the western gate, three hundred mounted imperial cavalry—riding barded warhorses bred for breaking infantry lines—attempted to sally out toward the coastline.

From thirty miles away in the open ocean, the destroyer Carney fired a ripple volley of four Tomahawk cruise missiles carrying submunition dispenser warheads. The missiles opened over the open valley, releasing hundreds of small combined-effects bomblets that carpeted the entire road in a blinding sequence of popping explosions.

In ten seconds, the proud cavalry charge was transformed into a screaming slaughter pen of shredded flesh, dying horses, and twisted metal.

The imperial army did not retreat because there was nowhere to retreat to. The mountain passes were blocked by cratered roads, the coastal bridges were sunken piles of stone, and the sky above was owned entirely by unseen predators that killed without ever showing their faces.

Every single formation that gathered in numbers larger than a squad was wiped out by guided ordnance within three minutes of forming up.

The military power of the Holy Solarian Empire in Port Solis had ceased to exist.

Up on the high palace terrace, Goddess Viona pushed herself off the ground with her trembling left hand, coughing violently as another thick cloud of gray concrete dust rolled over the stones.

Her right shoulder was completely ruined, the shattered joint throbbing with white-hot agony that made her stomach heave. Golden celestial blood dripped steadily from the deep, jagged shrapnel gouge on her face, soaking the tattered remnants of her once-glorious white and gold silk gown.

She looked out over the edge of the terrace.

The entire city of Port Solis was an unbroken sea of fire and black smoke. The grand avenues, the majestic temples, the ancient stone palaces—everything had been pulverized into unrecognizable rubble. Thousands of bodies lay scattered through the streets, completely unburied.

And five miles out on the sparkling blue water, the gray fleet of the United States sat completely undisturbed.

Not a single American soldier had died taking the city. Not a single boot had touched the shore since General Phillip’s brutal murder. John Smith had kept his promise: he was not fighting a battle; he was executing a methodical, industrial extermination from beyond the horizon.

"It’s over..." Belis’s crushed body lay ten feet away, but his dying words from hours before seemed to ring in Viona’s ringing ears. The numbers do not lie... we have lost this war.

Viona’s breath came in ragged, terrified gasps.

For three hundred years, she had believed she was an eternal being, an absolute sovereign who stood far above the petty lives of mortals. But feeling the sharp, agonizing burn in her broken bones, feeling the warm, sticky blood pooling on her collar, she knew the terrifying truth:

If another missile hit this terrace, she was going to die.

An immortal goddess could be blown apart by high-explosive iron just like any mortal beggar.

"No..." Viona whimpered, her teeth chattering with cold, frantic dread. "I cannot die here... I am divine... I am the ruler of this world... I will not die for these peasants...!"

She looked down at her left hand.

Deep inside her celestial core, past the battered and exhausted mana circuits, lay an ancient, forbidden divine relic: the Aegis Hearth Stone. It was a tiny, glowing tear of pure spatial mana that allowed a deity to perform a single, desperate emergency displacement back to the core sanctum in the imperial capital, hundreds of leagues to the west.

Activating it required three full minutes of uninterrupted channeling.

Three minutes where she would be completely defenseless, unable to dodge, unable to cast a defensive barrier, and radiating a massive spike of spatial mana that would light up every foreign radar screen like a beacon in the night.

If she channeled it alone, a single artillery shell would blow her to pieces before the portal could open.

She needed shields. She needed bait.

A cruel, desperate madness flared in Viona’s bloodshot golden eyes as she slowly turned her gaze toward the rubble behind her.