Chapter 1325 — Medical Relief
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 5
The battle group of the Mortal Dawn orbital fortress entered the field, commencing a swift and saturated purge of the aberration legion besieging Red Jade City. Tons upon tons of orbital shells poured down from those immense anti-gravity bastions like a rain of meteors, conjuring upon the northern defense line of Red Jade City a great tidal wave woven of explosions and shockwaves. Those towering, powerfully built "behemoths"—as fearsome as siege engines—became fragile as paper before fortress guns of such caliber, and the common aberrations clustered around them were in an instant reduced to fragments filling the sky.
Yet those defiant, death-courting monsters did not scatter and collapse after a single bombardment as the noble armies once had, nor were they lacking in means of air defense—vast numbers of peculiar creatures swiftly reacted within the black tide.
First came the "behemoths" that had survived the first barrage. These long-range units, armed with ray cannons, swiftly anchored themselves to the earth with bone spurs, their parallel charging structures on their backs aimed at the sky. Amid the humming whine of beam charging, hundreds upon hundreds of dark crimson beams leapt from the ground toward those enormous, unmistakable floating platforms.
Close behind came a breed of monster never seen on the northern battlefield: creatures with great heads swollen like water bladders, their malformed, mutated brains pulsing and writhing within those half-translucent skulls. These monsters clearly possessed the power of levitation and far greater spellcasting; buoyed aloft by some anti-gravity sorcery, they swung their overgrown, many-jointed arms to summon flame and lightning, and flew toward the Mortal Dawn, which appeared clumsy in its movements and incapable of evasion.
What they faced was the "swarm" carried by the Mortal Dawn.
With a series of clicks as mechanical locks disengaged, the suspension mounts along both flanks of the orbital fortress opened one after another, and great numbers of dragoon fighters, long since readied, detached from the mother ship. These nimble anti-gravity craft shrieked through the air like wailing banshees, in an instant filling the sky between the floating platforms, while small ray cannons and arcane missile launchers wove a precise web of fire, and foul, scorched flesh rained down from the heavens.
But the swarm "carried" by the Mortal Dawn was in truth far more than dragoon fighters alone—as more and more aberrations poured onto this battlefield, a section of hatchway amidships on the Mortal Dawn suddenly began to open slowly. Amid a gale that rushed into the combat pod, one massive figure after another leapt from the open hatch and spread enormous wings beneath the blood-hued light of the dusk sky.
These were the first contingent of the great dragon expedition from Tarond, and dragonborn mercenaries from the Holy Dragon Duchy—some had crossed the boundless sea, others the endless mountains; under the sacred covenant of alliance, these warriors from distant lands had boarded an anti-gravity aerial fortress built by the human empire and come to this battlefield on the western front of the continent.
Beneath a sky deepening into night, blazing firelight and magical radiance made the whole world bright as day once more. Morak stared in astonishment at a sight beyond anything he had imagined, and only after a long while did he murmur, gazing at the dragons and fighters soaring in the distant sky: "It seems I really have grown old... is this what modern war looks like?"
"...No, it's just that the Cecil style has always been a little different from everyone else's..." Camilla muttered under her breath, then turned at once to the holographic projection that had just surfaced from the mage-net terminal. "Princess Frostflower, thank you so much for your support..."