Chapter 75: Glazing

Captain Daniel pushed himself up against the shattered timbers of the wheelhouse, his face pale from blood loss and sheer disbelief. He shoved the apprentice cleric aside, ignoring the stabbing pain in his cracked ribs, and limped toward the bow where Ayanokoji and Miyuki stood.

His hand gripped the hilt of his broadsword so tightly his knuckles turned white. Around them, the surviving imperial sailors and exhausted wind mages were still staring into the night sky, their eyes hollow with shock. The sound of that deafening roar still rang in their ears, and the bitter, chemical stench of burnt jet fuel hung heavy in the damp ocean air.

"Hero Ayanokoji!" Daniel demanded, his voice hoarse and strained. "What in the heavens was that winged demon?! What did you just say about an aircraft... and this ’United States’?"

The captain looked between the two otherworldly heroes, his brow furrowed in desperate confusion. "You spoke as if you recognized it. Speak plainly! Is this some secret, forbidden construct engineered by the Wallachians? Did they strike a pact with abyssal spirits to create a flying iron monster that moves faster than lightning?!"

Ayanokoji didn’t turn around immediately. He kept his hands resting casually on the cool wood of the snapped railing, his eyes tracking the empty moonlit clouds where the twin trails of vapor were slowly fading away.

"It has nothing to do with Wallachia," Ayanokoji answered flatly, turning his head just enough to meet the captain’s frantic glare. "And it isn’t an iron demon or a spirit construct. That machine is called an F-35 Lightning II. It’s an aerial combat vehicle from the world Miyuki and I were summoned from."

Daniel froze, blinking as if he had just been struck across the face. "From... your world? A machine that flies without mana or wings that flap? That’s absurd! Your world is devoid of magic! The sacred scriptures of Her Divinity clearly state that the realm of the summoned heroes is an unblessed land of frail, magicless mortals!"

"That’s exactly why," Miyuki spoke up, stepping forward as she held her cracked wooden staff. Her gentle face had turned completely serious, a lingering tremble in her voice. "Because our world has no magic, our civilization spent centuries developing science, engineering, and industry to defend itself. And the nation that built that aircraft—the United States of America—is the undisputed supreme power of our entire planet."

Daniel stared at her, then let out a sharp, incredulous scoff. He wiped a smear of blood from his forehead with the back of his gauntlet, a grim, mocking sneer curling his lip.

"A superpower? A nation of magicless peasants who rely on iron toys?" Daniel scoffed loudly, shaking his head. "Little healer, you clearly do not understand the true might of our Holy Solarian Empire. We possess grand paladins who can cleave castles in twain with a single sword strike. We have mages who can call down meteors to incinerate entire armies, and above all, we have the direct divine protection of Goddess Viona! Do you truly believe a godless realm of mortals could ever stand against the divine will of the Goddess? If these ’Americans’ dare cross into our seas, our imperial battle galleons and holy inquisitors will crush them underfoot!"

Ayanokoji let out a faint, dry breath through his nose. His dull, brown eyes drifted over the bruised captain, over the shattered deck covered in blue monster gore, and toward the jagged stump of the mast.

"You’re completely delusional," Ayanokoji stated coldly.

Daniel stiffened, his face flushing with sudden anger. "Insolent boy! S-Class hero or not, you dare insult the majesty of the Holy Empire—"

"I don’t deal in insults. I deal in objective facts," Ayanokoji cut him off, his voice completely flat, carrying a chilling, razor-sharp clarity that silenced the entire deck. "Look around you, Captain. An S-rank Kraken almost dragged your ship and your men to the bottom of the ocean five minutes ago. Your tier-four wind mages are passed out from mana exhaustion, your holy barrier cracked under a single blow, and even my spear barely scratched its muscle. Yet whoever was down in the water killed that beast in under two minutes with a single strike."

He pointed a finger toward the empty expanse of the western ocean.

"And then that aircraft appeared. It was flying at Mach 1.5. In modern units, that is roughly five hundred meters per second. No wyvern, no high-tier griffin, and not even the fastest wind spell in your empire can match that speed. When it banked over this deck, it deliberately exposed its internal weapons bay to show us two air-to-air missiles. It was a calculated display of force. That single pilot could have released those warheads from twenty miles away, before you even heard the roar of its engine, and blown this wooden hull into kindling without breaking a sweat."

Miyuki nodded quietly beside him, her hands clenched tightly. "He’s right, Captain Daniel. The United States possesses thousands of those aircraft, along with fleets of steel warships powered by endless artificial energy, and weapons that can wipe entire cities off the map in the blink of an eye. If they wanted to erase this ship, we would already be dead."

Daniel took a half-step back, his mouth opening and closing, his arrogant bluster entirely stripped away by the cold logic of the two teenagers. The surrounding sailors looked terrified, glancing at the dark sea as if unseen monsters were aiming guns at their chests right now.

"Then... if what you say is true..." Daniel stammered, his bravado finally crumbling into cold dread. "Why haven’t they killed us? Why did they kill the kraken?"

"It was a warning," Ayanokoji said plainly, leaning against the bulwark. "And a demonstration. They wanted us to know that our movements are completely compromised, that our magic is irrelevant against their technology, and that they control this entire ocean."

Yet beneath his calm exterior, a rare knot of genuine calculation tightened in Ayanokoji’s mind.

The appearance of the F-35 didn’t just upend the empire’s military assumptions—it disrupted his own baseline logic. Modern military hardware didn’t just fall through a wormhole by accident. An F-35C required a catapult to launch, a nuclear aircraft carrier to land, jet fuel refineries, radar networks, satellite links, and hundreds of trained personnel just to keep it in the air.

How did an entire carrier strike group get transported to this world? Ayanokoji wondered, his half-lidded gaze turning back toward the west. Was an entire nation summoned?

He doesn’t know.

"Whatever the case," Ayanokoji murmured, turning toward the cabin stairs. "The western continent isn’t an uncharted wilderness. We are sailing into hostile territory. We should be prepared for whatever comes next from this moment forward."