Chapter 78: Seeing it in Its Glorious Might

The morning mist slowly cleared as the sun rose over the eastern sea.

By zero-six-fifty, nearly all the surviving crew members from both ships were standing on the upper decks. Nobody had slept that night. The wounded were sitting against wooden crates, and the uninjured soldiers stood huddled together in complete silence. All of their weapons—swords, iron daggers, and fire harpoons—had been taken down to the lower cargo hold and locked away, just like Captain Daniel had ordered.

The sea was completely flat and calm. The only movement was the gentle rising and falling of the small swells beneath the broken wooden hulls.

"Lookout," Daniel said, his voice dry and hoarse. He pressed a hand against his injured ribs, looking up toward the masts. "Do you see anything out there yet?"

A sailor sat on the high rigging of the undamaged sister ship, holding a brass spyglass with shaking hands. For a whole minute, he didn’t say a word. Then his arms dropped down to his lap. His mouth opened wide, his eyes completely frozen in place.

"C-Captain..." the sailor shouted down, his voice cracking from panic. "To the west... over the water... there are floating islands! Massive iron monsters are coming!"

Daniel quickly pushed through the crowd of nervous sailors and grabbed the wooden railing at the bow. Miyuki and Ayanokoji walked up right next to him, looking out into the western horizon where the morning sun cut through the haze.

Far out in the distance, the line of the sea broke.

First, tall gray towers and strange angular poles appeared above the horizon. Then, the massive bodies of the ships pushed through the low mist.

They were not made of timber. They had no white cloth sails, no carved wooden figureheads, and no gold crests of Goddess Viona anywhere on them.

They were enormous, sharp-angled slabs of gray metal, cutting through the water at high speed and throwing out wide trails of white foam behind them.

On the sides of the group, two destroyers moved forward like guard dogs. Their sharp bows cut cleanly through the waves, and automatic gun turrets sat quiet and level on their front decks. Behind them cruised a large cruiser, covered in flat radar plates and vertical missile hatches.

Then, right in the center of the formation, the main ship appeared.

Every single imperial sailor on the deck stopped breathing.

"By the Goddess..." Captain Daniel whispered. His knees gave out, and he had to slam both hands onto the wooden railing to keep from falling flat on his face. His eyes went wide with pure horror. "What in Her holy name is that...?"

It was the USS Gerald R. Ford.

The nuclear-powered supercarrier did not look like a boat at all. It looked like an entire floating fortress made out of gray steel. Its sheer size broke every rule of shipbuilding the imperial soldiers had ever known. It was more than three hundred meters long, towering twenty stories high from the waterline up to the command tower. Its massive hull pushed aside over a hundred thousand tons of seawater without slowing down at all.

The flat upper deck stretched out like an entire open airfield laid down directly over the ocean. Parked along the wide edges were rows of gray F-35C stealth fighters, Super Hornet strike planes, and twin-engine radar aircraft with big round dishes on top.

There was no sound of men pulling oars. There were no wind mages casting spells into sails. There was only a low, constant mechanical hum coming from its deep nuclear engines, sending subtle vibrations through the water that rattled the wooden planks of the corvettes even from miles away.

Imperial sailors dropped to their knees all across the deck. Some started crying, frantically making holy signs across their chests and praying out loud to Goddess Viona. Others just stood there frozen stiff, completely overwhelmed by how small and fragile they were compared to the steel monster in front of them. Next to that giant carrier, their two wooden corvettes looked like tiny wooden sticks that could be crushed and run over without the giant ship even noticing.

"It’s like a floating mountain..." Miyuki said quietly, her voice trembling. She held her cracked wooden staff tightly with both hands, her eyes wide as she looked up.

She had seen videos and pictures of American aircraft carriers back on television in Japan. Everyone had seen them in the news or online. But standing right next to a real three-hundred-meter steel carrier in the middle of a magical fantasy ocean was totally different. It felt completely unreal. It felt suffocating.

"Even back on Earth, seeing one in person is terrifying," she stammered, staring up at the gray steel walls drawing closer. "To think someone actually brought one of these into this world..."

Next to her, Ayanokoji stood completely still.

His eyes, which were usually dull and bored, opened slightly wider than usual. He carefully looked over the tall command island on the Ford, the advanced radar plates built directly into the gray walls, and the small rotating automated guns mounted along the edges of the flight deck.

That’s a Ford-class, Ayanokoji thought to himself, quickly analyzing what was in front of him. It’s the newest, most advanced carrier they have. That means it uses electromagnetic launch tracks, nuclear reactors that run for decades without refueling, and an integrated digital combat network connecting every escort ship around it.

Reading about modern military specs on paper was one thing. Seeing the full industrial might of the modern world sitting directly in front of a fantasy empire that still used bows, swords, and wooden boats was almost ridiculous.

"H-Hero Ayanokoji..." Daniel stammered, reaching out with a trembling hand to grab Ayanokoji’s sleeve. All of his earlier pride and arrogance were completely gone. "Can our world’s magic actually damage that thing? Could the heroes or top mages destroy it?"

Ayanokoji looked at the trembling captain, then shifted his gaze back to the massive wall of steel and the armed boarding craft racing across the water.

"Against that kind of military power? Standard magic won’t do much," Ayanokoji replied flatly. He watched the black speedboats close the final gap, his fingers resting loosely at his side. "Though whether the heroes can match an entire carrier strike group... that’s something I’d find very interesting to find out."