Chapter 140: The Broken Heroes

Down on the forward quay, right where General Phillip’s blood had dried into dark, sticky crusts on the flagstones, the three summoned heroes stood as a pathetic shield.

They were not an army. They were not even a combat squad. They were three broken teenagers propped up by dark metal thorns grinding against their bones.

Ayanokoji stood with his weight balanced entirely on his right heel. The bone of his shattered left shin grated together inside his torn, blood-soaked trouser leg, but his posture did not waver. He held his black abyssal spear planted firmly between the cracks of the pavement, using the heavy shaft like an iron pillar to stay upright. His left eye was swollen shut beneath scorched, blackened flesh, while his right eye burned with the dull, parasitic crimson glare of the Torment Band.

Beside him, Kenji Sato leaned heavily against the rusted iron frame of a destroyed cargo crane. His right arm dangled limp, fractured in two places, dark arterial blood trickling down his knuckles. In his trembling left hand, he gripped the jagged hilt of his snapped ceremonial rapier. White holy mana flickered over the broken steel, but the light was sickly, sputtering like a dying candle in a gale.

Behind them, Miyuki knelt in a puddle of muddy brine.

She held the splintered half of her World Tree staff in both hands, driving the jagged wood into the stone. Every breath she took sounded like crushed glass sliding in her throat. Her spiritual core was already fractured, but the parasitic band around her wrist kept forcibly siphoning her life force, converting her remaining biological energy into a pale, flickering green aura.

"Spatial anomaly active at palace coordinates," Ayanokoji stated.

His voice was a flat, raspy drone, untouched by panic or despair.

"Channeling progress: twenty-two percent. Master’s extraction corridor will stabilize in one hundred and forty seconds. Threat assessment: hostile naval assets have commenced high-angle trajectory firing. Inbound kinetic mass exceeds defensive thresholds by four orders of magnitude."

Kenji did not answer. He couldn’t. His punctured lung made every gasp an agonizing wheeze, pink foam bubbling at the corner of his lips. Yet, when the automated mental trigger in his arm pulsed, his left wrist jerked upward, holding the shattered blade toward the open ocean.

Five miles away, the horizon lit up in blinding sheets of orange fire.

The automated fire-control networks aboard the cruiser USS Bunker Hill and the destroyers Carney and The Sullivans did not care about the three figures standing on the pier.

Their primary mission was the massive, three-thousand-foot pillar of azure spatial mana erupting from the palace keep behind them. The radar computers designated the high terrace as Target Alpha, while the quay was swept by general area-suppression fire.

THOOM-THOOM-THOOM-THOOM!

Dozens of five-inch naval artillery shells roared through the low clouds, accompanied by a wave of AGM-158 JASSM cruise missiles screaming straight for the royal bluff.

The cruise missiles bypassed the lower harbor entirely, their sleek gray bodies hurtling over the harbor towers toward the azure light on the mountain.

KABOOOOOOOOM!

The palace keep vanished inside an apocalyptic eruption of orange fire and shattering stone. The mountain shuddered to its roots. A blinding shockwave rolled down the slope, blowing away roofs, trees, and stone arches in a massive gray avalanche.

Within the roaring heart of that fireball, the azure pillar suddenly bent, flared violently, and snapped. A violent ripple of spatial distortion tore through the smoke, followed by a faint, fading flash of golden light that vanished westward into the distant mountains.

Goddess Viona had escaped by a hair’s breadth, abandoning her city, her throne, and her puppets to the falling sky.

Down on the quay, the secondary barrage arrived.

It was not a direct hit from a cruise missile. Had a two-thousand-pound warhead struck the pier, the three students would have been vaporized into red mist. Instead, it was the concussive splash of three seventy-pound naval fragmentation shells striking the harbor basin barely thirty yards from the edge of the pier.

KER-BLAM! KER-BLAM!

The ocean water erupted into forty-foot geysers of black mud, boiling spray, and white-hot steel shrapnel.

"Absolute... Sanctuary..." Miyuki gasped, coughing up a mouthful of dark crimson.

The pale green ward flickered to life, forming a thin, hexagonal sheet over their heads.

It lasted for less than a tenth of a second.

The supersonic concussive shockwave slammed into the green barrier like a speeding freight train.

CRACK!

The ward shattered into green sparks. The splintered wooden staff in Miyuki’s hands snapped into three pieces, the magical backlash blowing her backward.

Her head struck the stone flags with a dull, wet thud, and the green light vanished from her eyes. Her slender body went completely limp, her breathing reduced to an imperceptible, shallow flutter as her shattered spiritual core collapsed into a deep coma.

Kenji’s holy blade didn’t even make contact with the blast.

The blunt atmospheric pressure wave hit his damaged chest, crushing his remaining ribs inward. The jagged piece of his rapier flew from his fingers, spinning away into the churning bay. Kenji was lifted clean off his boots, thrown twenty feet backward, and slammed against the concrete foundation of a collapsed warehouse.

He slid down the wall, his head lolling to his shoulder, leaving a thick smear of crimson on the masonry. His pulse slowed to a faint, erratic beat, unconsciousness dragging him down into the dark.

Only Ayanokoji remained upright for one final, defiant moment.

As the wall of pressurized air and water smashed across the quay, Ayanokoji’s S-rank instincts kicked in automatically. He spun the black spear, bracing the shaft against his chest to absorb the brunt of the kinetic wave.

SNAP!

The compound fracture in his left leg finally gave out under the violent pressure. His knee twisted inward, and his right shoulder dislocated with a sickening pop as a jagged piece of flying shrapnel tore through his upper arm, slicing muscle down to the bone.

The concussive wave ripped the black spear from his bloody grasp, sending the ancient weapon clattering across the wet flagstones.

Ayanokoji collapsed hard onto his right side, his cheek pressing into the cold, bloody mud next to General Phillip’s chalk outline.

The black Torment Band around his forearm pulsed erratically.

With Viona leagues away and her divine signal severed by distance, the dark metal thorns began to spark with dying red lightning. The parasitic magic desperately tried to pump non-existent mana into his ruined nervous system, but the boy’s mortal body had hit its absolute physiological limit.

His single open eye blinked once, staring out at the burning harbor water.

Through the drifting haze of smoke, the dark shapes of American gunboats and amphibious transports were already emerging from the sea mist, their searchlights cutting through the gray gloom.

"Target... lost..." Ayanokoji whispered.

The last trace of dull red light died in his eye, leaving his pupil dark, vacant, and still.

His head slumped against the wet pavement. His breath slowed to a quiet, faint rhythm, suspended on the razor’s edge between life and death.

The three S-rank champions lay broken, silent, and unconscious upon the stones, drowning beneath the cold drizzle of the burning shore.