Chapter 976 — Non-Directional Burst
Blade of Dawn · Page 4 of 4
Wreathed in pale cyan vapor, the magic-crystal shell shrieked through the air, tracing a long arc—and in the direction of its fall, the knight order charged across the plains on horseback, surging magic filling the ranks and lending the whole formation a strange, half-real, half-illusory air. The shrieking from the sky did not escape the ears of this force of superhumans, yet throughout the charge, not a single knight turned his head to look up.
The shell plummeted with unerring precision straight into the Iron River Knights' attacking formation, and an instant later a deafening explosion tore across the plain.
Boom, boom, boom!
A colossal cloud of explosion, borne upward by the shockwave, billowed into the sky. Across the shield canopy stretched above the knights, dense ripples suddenly surged, and in some regions the shield's surface began to take on white noise like interference static—after all, a barrier raised by human effort combined could never rival the shields of a castle fortress; even if it could withstand the power of "Skyfire" for a short while, it plainly could not last long.
And how much "Skyfire" did the Cecilians have?
Barely a dozen seconds later, the shrill whistling that came rushing down again from the high sky supplied the answer.
Explosion after explosion rang out in relentless succession; as the distance closed, the camp's smaller cannons opened fire too, and shockwaves and blast clouds great and small ran riot over the knights' combined shield in turn after turn. The barrier held up by a great host of extraordinary beings joined together finally began to show breaches and signs of critical overload—at the edges of the battle formation, knights began to fall from their horses one after another, stricken by magic backlash or blast injuries.
Yet still they charged forward in silence, as though utterly insensible to the agony visited upon their bodies.
The thermal cone began its descent, gradually synchronizing with the wedge formation of the massed knights. Watching this unfold, the camp commander understood that this first wave of impact certainly could not be stopped.
"Prepare to receive the impact—"
The next second, the camp's shield collided violently with that vast, constrained body of plasma.
A tooth-grating shriek filled the interior of the shield; dense, brilliant sparks burst from the shield generators and magic capacitors all along the walls, and great swaths of white noise appeared across the front of the camp's shield. And in the camp commander's eyes, those Typhon knights had already begun shifting their ranks before the thermal cone even arrived—even as they let that high-energy cloud mass crash against the shield of its own accord, they split into more than ten waves of echelons and began assaulting the shield nodes at every point.
On the walls, the Cecil soldiers began to fight back with ray guns, lightning generators, and every manner of individual weapon, but the camp commander knew this place could not be held.
Just as the energy barrier raised by the Typhon Knights could not match a castle's shield, this mere border camp... was, after all, no Long Wind Fortress.
The humming drone that precedes a shield's collapse reached his ears.
"How long until the Iron Throne arrives?"
"Sir, the World Serpent has already set out from Border Station Seventeen!"
"All hands—light your blades!" The commander gritted his teeth, reached down, and drew the molten-edge sword at his waist. "For our nation!"