Raid (2)
Ruins stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see.
Buildings had collapsed and were still burning, and the ground around them was lined wall to wall with corpses.
"Kieeeeeeek!"
The spider creatures began shrieking the moment they laid eyes on me. At the sound of their cries, more spiders started pouring down from the surrounding buildings.
"So it's a war of numbers, huh... Summon. Every combat unit in the Machine Legion."
Vroooooooom—
In an instant, the area was packed wall to wall with Machine Legion combat units.
"Sweep them away. Every last spider."
At my command, the Raptors surged forward. The auto-aiming cannons mounted on their backs opened fire in a steady roar.
At the same time, the flamethrowers built into their mouths set the spiders ablaze as they sprinted straight through them.
Kraaak.
They bit down and crushed, and tens of thousands of Raptors began charging at once.
The low-tier combat Golems hurried forward as well, smashing the creatures' heads open one after another.
"All top-tier units, prepare Breath."
Vrooooooom.
Ultra-high-heat Breath began smoldering in their jaws. They hung high in the sky, and even with the blast still held inside their mouths, I could feel the heat down on the ground.
Out ahead, countless tides of spiders came swarming toward us.
"Fire."
Whooooooooooooooosh—!
The moment a hundred Dragons unleashed their Breath simultaneously, the spider creatures pouring down from the horizon were simply melted off the face of the blood-red earth.
The ground itself had turned molten, and even the spiders hiding inside the buildings still standing were wiped out in one stroke. A span of well over a hundred meters vanished in the blink of an eye.
Kraaak. Ratatatatatatata—!
Anything still lurking nearby got cleaned up on the spot. The spiders obliterated in that instant never showed themselves again.
"So where's the Spider Queen?"
The moment the words left my mouth, a mountain in the distance suddenly began to move.
To be precise, the entire mountain collapsed in on itself, and from within the rubble a colossal spider rose to its feet. From that spider's body, tens of thousands of spiders came bursting out.
Compared to the ones we'd dealt with earlier—which must have been mere hatchlings—these were several times larger. Worse, the things started flying around on threads shot from their rears, swinging through the air like the hero of some foreign blockbuster.
"They're doing backflips now? Have you ever seen such insane spiders. All units, prepare Breath. Heavy Weapons Units, buy us time up front."
A few flicks of webbing, and the creatures were suddenly right in front of us.
But we had a full two thousand Heavy Weapons Units waiting on this side, drawn up in neat ranks of ten. The front rank bristled with tank-type Heavy Weapons Units hoarding massive tower shields, and behind them stood their comrades armed with miniguns and RPGs. Flanking them, low-tier Golems stood ready with ammunition and warheads.
"All Heavy Weapons Units, fire!"
Booooooooom—!
Countless bullets and warheads began tearing through the air.
Amid that maelstrom of battle, the presumed Spider Queen came lumbering slowly toward us, spitting out spiders without pause. It was as if her body had a door built into it—she was black through and through, so I couldn't see a thing, yet the spiders just kept pouring out from somewhere. Honestly, it was easier to believe her body was an egg-laying factory.
Either way, as the colossal thing—an apartment-building-thirty-stories-tall monstrosity of roughly a hundred and twenty meters—drew closer, the ground began to shudder.
"Snipers, open fire too! Take them all down!"
The airborne spiders weaving through the sky were shot out of the air one after another. With tens of thousands of spiders charging in all at once, the Machine Legion slowly began to give ground.
"Fire—!"
Whoooooooooooosh—!
A hundred Dragons' Breath roared out at once, and the abdomen of the creature spewing out spiders simply... vanished.
"...It's not over?"
"Kieeeeeeek!"
The raid target was supposed to be the Spider Queen. And if the Spider Queen was dead yet the raid wasn't over...
"I don't think that one was the Spider Queen! But if something like that wasn't the queen, then..."
At Pitasha's words, the mountains around us suddenly began to move.
"Son of a... you're telling me those aren't mountains?"
Every tree and hill standing on the bloodstained earth had gone jet black. The spiders' bodies were pitch black too, so in reality it was impossible to tell mountain from monster at a glance.
I'd thought one of them would be more than enough—and now every single one of them was stirring at once. A single mountain spider birthed tens of thousands of spiders, and now six of those mountain spiders were on the move.
My snipers took aim at the spiders gushing out of their bodies like vomit.
"Fire."
Ratata-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tang—!
The hundreds of snipers I'd already deployed shot the spiders out of the sky as they launched themselves upward. Each one carried up to four sniper rifles and could fire once per second per gun. A torrent of bullets swatted the spiders down, and every downed spider was finished off by the Raptors surging across the ground.
Even so, the spiders pressing in from land and air alike numbered far more than a handful.
"How long until Breath is ready?"
"About ten seconds!"
At Pitasha's report, I took command immediately.
"Raptors! Pull all of them into a single direction—funnel everything into one point!"
Directing the Raptors, I baited and herded the spiders so the Breath could wipe out as many as possible at once. The spiders advanced in a fan-shaped spread toward the six mountain spiders, and I lured them until they lined up in one long, straight row.
"Ready!"
"Fire!"
Whooooooooooosh.
Another volley of Breath. Twenty Dragons had been assigned to each mountain spider, so the creatures took twenty blasts head-on and were erased on the spot. The spiders clinging to their bodies went with them, and whatever spiders remained were cleaned up without a trace.
"So where the hell is the Queen? Damn it all."
Which meant we might have to keep fighting from here on out.
"Prepare Breath. Those eight mountains back there—I'm flattening every one of them."
"Thirty seconds to fire!"
"Heavy Weapons Units, clear out the ground spiders, fast! Snipers too! Forget the ones that are close—take out the ones trying to run first!"
With every spider in the vicinity dealt with, the freshly loaded Breath was ready to go.
"Fire."
Whoooooooooooosh—
"Kieeeeeeek!"
Of the eight mountains ahead, a full four of them turned out to be spiders. After that, we simply flattened every mountain in the area.
Dozens of mechanical Dragons hovering in the sky, blasting the surrounding peaks with Breath over and over—it was quite a sight.
"That's it for now. We need to rest before we can fire again."
"Hmm. We've already flattened every mountain in sight, so it should be fine."
I'd temporarily summoned some combat engineers to throw together an ordinary house, and after sleeping like the dead in its bed—earplugs that blocked out every last sound and an eyemask that shut out all the light—I woke up.
"Master! Look at this!"
When I got up the next morning and stepped outside the prefab, scratching my belly, Pitasha was beaming at me. In her hands she held a mana stone.
So that's what they meant by getting mana stones from a raid.
"Looks like it! The ones hit by Breath—their corpses vanish, but the mana stones don't!"
"Just how tough is this stuff?"
Thinking that, I stepped outside to find mana stones piled endlessly across the ground, since I hadn't summoned any transport units yet. The subspace pouches were already stuffed completely full.
In the end, I summoned the transport units and loaded the mountains of mana stones straight onto their backs. Naturally, it was the Machine Legion doing all the hauling.
To the poor overworked units, I said, "We've already swept everything within about ten kilometers of here, right? Bring back all the mana stones. Don't miss a single one."
Snap snap.
The low-tier units saluted crisply and marched off. For the record, the bottom-tier units mostly died during the battle and were useless anyway, so I don't bother summoning them.
"Getting close to a hundred thousand now. What should I unlock when I hit a hundred-thousand-strong army..."
My Machine Legion stood at roughly twenty thousand, with the hundred-thousand mark still to come.
"I should increase the number of Gatherers. It's all too slow."
Things were fine as they were, but our territory had grown, and it seemed worth expanding the Gatherer zones too. With that thought, I messed around with Pitasha while we waited for the mana stones to be fully collected.
Mana stones packed to the brim in the cargo holds of no fewer than several hundred transport units.
"Check whether you guys can carry these over there. Dismiss summon."
"Summon."
When I brought the transport units back out, thankfully nothing was left clinging to their backs—the mana stones had transferred cleanly.
Which meant, in other words, that we could farm mana stones infinitely from here on out.
"Let's farm some mana stones before we go after the actual Spider Queen."
"Sounds great! Think of everything we can do with this many mana stones!"
With the mana stones fully recovered, the place we headed for was, naturally, mountain country—specifically, an area where the ground for miles around had all turned blood red.
"Why aren't the little ones hatching here? Back where we were, the ground turned red and they came bursting out."
"Perhaps the concentration is different or something along those lines?"
"Hmm... that does make sense. Let's not go too deep into it."
"Yes sir!"
We put the most useless units—the bottom tier—out front and advanced slowly. Then, the moment a mountain came into view?
"Are we in range here?"
"Yes!"
"Blow it away."
Whooooooooooosh!
We wiped out the mountain, dealt with the mountain spider hiding inside it, and the units trailing behind scooped up the mana stones without missing a step. Just from this, we'd already racked up a good several hundred tons of mana stones.
How much could I get on Earth for that? Not that it mattered—there was nothing left for me to do on Earth anyway, so it didn't really stir my blood. I'd even gotten an invitation to some program or other, but I had zero desire to show up.
I was riding a transport unit specially modified with a seat for me, rolling slowly forward, when it finally appeared.
"One look and you can tell—that's the Queen."
It had a full eight eyes, and every one of them was a different garish color. Its body was pitch black, but every single one of its legs was rainbow-colored.
"Prepare Breath."
"Kieeeeeeek—!"
The moment it laid eyes on us, it began shrieking—and at that cry, a hill we'd completely ignored, too small to bother with, started to move.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me. An ambush?"
Things buried in the earth began rising one after another.
"You have got to be kidding me..."
Mountain spiders. Easil a few hundred of them.