Chapter 164: It’s Unfair

Leon had taken only two steps toward the edge of the tree line when the hair on his arms stood on end. It wasn’t the prickle of a spellcaster’s mana buildup. It was a drop in atmospheric pressure, a sudden, high-altitude whistle so faint it sounded like wind cutting through dry grass.

He spun on his heel, his one amber eye narrowing as he glared upward.

"Viona!" Leon barked. "Look up!"

Viona lifted her chin, squinting past the dense canopy of the ironwood branches. "What is it? Did you see another bird?"

"Nothing!" Leon growled, his hand snapping to the leather-wrapped hilt on his back. "There’s no engine noise! No wings! But something is falling!"

Viona’s eyes flared gold. She pushed her senses through the cloud ceiling, extending her mana network into the upper atmosphere.

Two seconds later, her face turned pale.

Four heavy, blunt shapes had already broken through the clouds. They weren’t glowing. They carried no elemental signature. They were falling fast—silent, heavy, guided by cold steel fins that adjusted with tiny, mechanical clicks.

"They dropped more iron!" Viona shrieked, panic cracking her divine facade. "From beyond the clouds! How can they see us?!"

"Stop screaming and raise the shield!" Leon roared.

Viona threw both arms toward the sky. Her recovering mana core screamed in protest, but she ignored the agony. She pulled every shred of ambient spiritual energy she had left, weaving gold and crystalline blue light into a thick, hexagonal dome over their heads.

The barrier solidified forty feet above them, glowing like molten glass. It was three times denser than the field she had used to protect the inner palace gates.

Above them, the four two-thousand-pound GBU-31 JDAMs screamed downward, gravity and initial forward velocity driving them past the speed of sound.

CRACK!

The first bomb struck the center of the golden dome.

The kinetic energy alone was terrifying. A ton of hardened steel falling at terminal velocity hit the magical surface with the force of a collapsing watchtower. The barrier groaned, radial fractures blooming outward like shattered ice.

Before the light could even repair itself, the bomb’s fuze triggered.

BOOOOOOM!

A blinding, earth-shaking blast tore the air apart. The shockwave hit the barrier like an iron sledgehammer. The gold light bent inward, shimmering violently under thousands of pounds of high explosive.

"Hold it!" Leon yelled, planting his boots into the gravel.

"I can’t—!" Viona choked, blood spraying from her lips as the concussion battered her internal organs through the magical link.

Then the second bomb hit the exact same structural weak point.

BOOM!

The second warhead detonated less than half a second later. The sheer physical violence of the explosion completely overwhelmed the magic. The hexagonal plates shattered into a million sparkling shards of useless light. The ceiling blew open, exposing the clearing to the sky.

Falling right through the fiery smoke came the third bomb, its heavy steel nose plunging straight toward Viona.

"Get down!" Leon roared.

He didn’t run. For three hundred years, Leon had survived by facing monsters head-on. His legendary broadsword slipped from its scabbard with a sharp hiss of tempered steel.

Skill: Mountain Cleaver.

Leon channelled raw, dense ki into the blackened blade. The jagged iron blade lit up with a furious crimson edge. He sprang forward off the churning mud, launching his broad frame ten feet into the air. With a battle cry ripped from the depths of his chest, he swung his greatsword in a savage, rising diagonal slash meant to cleave the falling iron tube in half before it reached the ground.

Steel struck steel.

CLANG-CRASH!

The sword’s reinforced edge bite into the hardened steel casing of the JDAM—but Leon had drastically underestimated what forty thousand pounds of kinetic force combined with military-grade Tritonal explosive actually meant.

It wasn’t a monster’s claw. It wasn’t an enchanted arrow. It was a two-thousand-pound blunt instrument dropping at near-Mach speed.

The downward momentum stopped for a microsecond—and then the warhead detonated right against the flat of his blade.

KABOOOOM!

The explosion ripped the sword completely from Leon’s grip, snapping the ancient crossguard in two.

The blast wave didn’t just push him; it smashed into his chest like a battering ram made of solid lead. The heavy, pitted iron breastplate he had worn for three centuries crumpled inward like cheap tin, cracking his ribs and collapsing his right lung in an instant.

"GAAAH!"

Leon was hurled backward through the air like a ragdoll.

He skipped across the churning mud of the riverbank, smashed clean through a three-foot-thick ironwood trunk, and crashed into the rocky base of the canyon wall sixty feet away. He hit the stone with a sickening thud, sliding down into the dirt, coughing up thick, dark blood.

His broadsword tumbled through the air, broken and smoking, landing blade-first into the mud ten paces away.

Leon lay in the dirt, his vision swimming, his ears ringing with a deafening, high-pitched whine. His single amber eye was wide with genuine, paralyzing horror.

What... what was that force?

He had cleaved through wyvern skulls. He had parried blows from demon generals. But that falling chunk of dead metal had shattered his ki, crushed his armor, and broken his ribs without a single speck of magical energy behind it. It had felt like trying to stop an entire falling mountain with a butter knife.

Twenty feet away, the fourth bomb slammed directly into the riverbed.

BOOM!

A towering geyser of black water, mud, and river stones blasted two hundred feet into the air. The concussion swept over the clearing, flattening every tree within fifty yards and throwing Viona onto her stomach in the muck.

The shockwave rolled away down the canyon, leaving behind only crackling fires, billowing black smoke, and the smell of sulfur and burnt mud.

Viona clawed her way out of the dirt, gasping for breath. Her white dress was ruined, soaked in swamp water and black ash. Her mouth was filled with blood from her ruptured mana circuits.

"Leon!" she wheezed, her voice shaking violently. "Leon!"

She scrambled over the broken branches, dragging her dislocated shoulder until she reached the base of the rock wall.

Leon was slumped against the cliff face, clutching his caved-in breastplate with one trembling hand. Dark red blood bubbled past his lips every time he wheezed. His eye was glazed, staring at his broken fingers.

"They didn’t even... come down..." Leon rasped, his voice barely a whisper through the blood in his throat. "Where... where did it come from?"

Viona spun around, staring frantically up into the gray sky.

There was nothing.

No dragons. No flying chariots. No iron birds with propellers. The clouds were completely empty, gray and indifferent.

Far above them, five miles up in the stratosphere, the three F-35s were already banking smoothly toward the west. Their stealth fuselages absorbed every bounce of radar, their muffled jet exhaust hidden behind the cold mountain winds.

"Show yourself!" Viona screamed at the empty sky, tears of pure terror and rage cutting through the mud on her face. "Show yourself, you cowards! Where are you?!"

The only answer she received was the cold, hollow rumble of thunder rolling off the peaks, followed by the faint, distant hiss of jet turbines high above the clouds—a sound that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.

Leon leaned his head back against the cold stone, breathing in short, agonizing hitches.

For the first time in three hundred years, the scarred mercenary looked truly terrified.

"They aren’t fighting us, Viona," Leon whispered, watching the empty sky with his single, shaking eye. "They’re just hunting."