Weapons of the Third Era (2)
“Woohoo! Direct hit! Hey, Chief! You seeing what that gate looks like now?”
The dwarves, cradled aloft in the arms of the birdfolk as they peered through telescopes from the sky, erupted in cheers.
“Yeah. You can only make it out through a telescope, but it’s definitely visible. Stuffing the shell full of powder to maximize the blast paid off beautifully.”
“I’ll be damned… We built the thing ourselves, but what kind of monster is this? We felt how brutal its power was during the trial run, sure, but still…”
“What’s the state of the gate?”
The birdfolk, whose eyesight was exceptionally keen, answered in their place.
“Not even dust left, Lord Isaac. The walls are completely gone—just rubble now. Ah… and they’re still collapsing.”
“Check the troops’ condition and gather the gear. It’ll take those people a while to figure out what we can do. In the meantime, have the maintenance team give the machine a once-over.”
The moment the order left his mouth, everyone headed back down the hill to perform maintenance and board the train.
Everyone except one. Lumina alone remained rooted in place, staring through a telescope at the Southern Gate, her mouth hanging open in shock, unable to take a single step.
“That rattled you pretty hard, Lumina. You already knew from the trial run that this thing was no ordinary weapon, didn’t you?”
“Hah—but this is… Even so, I never imagined it would be this much. The southern and northern gates and their walls were supposed to be impregnable fortresses, solid as iron… How does something like that vanish in a single shot…?”
“Didn’t I tell you? This is the weapon that will open the Third Era. This is the Third Era. Remember that well. Otherwise, you’re going to keep being surprised.”
The garrison less than a kilometer from the Southern Gate.
“What was that just now? Did I imagine it?”
The knights and mages waiting at the garrison suddenly witnessed a massive flash of light blooming in the direction of the gate.
Immediately afterward, the ground beneath their feet heaved. In an instant, every soldier staggered hard.
“An—an earthquake!”
Panic seized the troops at the sudden quake. They scrambled out into the open ground or ducked under tables.
But it came only once. After that brief, violent jolt, the shaking stopped completely.
Bewildered by the flash and the one-off tremor, they could only stare at one another’s faces.
A few seconds later—
Crash! Pop! Shatter!
Every pane of glass in every building across the garrison exploded outward without exception.
At the same time, a wind of unimaginable force tore through the gaps between barracks and facilities, knocking soldiers off their feet and sending them rolling across the ground.
KRAAAAAAAAAANG!!!!!
And almost simultaneously, a roar more tremendous than any thunderbolt slammed into the entire garrison. Caught in the successive onslaught of these unidentifiable phenomena, the troops screamed and fell into panic.
“Aaaagh!”
“Wh-what is this?! What’s happening?!”
“Aah! The—the glass…! Argh!”
“Aaaagh! My—my ears…! My ears…! Uwaaaaagh!”
“Agh… My head… it’s going to split open…!”
Every window in the garrison bursting at once, a frenzied gale howling through, and a roar loud enough to paralyze hearing—all of it crashing down together—drove the soldiers into shrieking from every direction.
The vast majority clutched their heads against a ringing so intense it drowned out thought. Some bled from their ears.
Where the sudden storm had scoured the ground, glass shards from the shattered barracks windows lay thick, and those who had tumbled across them writhed, their bodies sliced open by the fragments.
Even the lucky ones who escaped having glass driven into their flesh or their eardrums completely ruptured still had no defense against the tinnitus that seemed to rattle their brains; they could only clutch their skulls and groan in agony.
Then, a moment later, they saw something colossal rising from the direction the storm had come from, and pointed.
“L-look over there!”
A small city roughly ten kilometers from the Southern Gate.
A few seconds after the quake had hit the garrison, the ground beneath the entire civilian city shook as well.
“Huh? What? An earthquake?”
Startled citizens rose from their seats—but again, the tremor was extremely brief, a single sharp jolt that passed as quickly as it came.
When several seconds went by with nothing further happening, the relieved townsfolk prepared to return to whatever they had been doing.
Then, after a few dozen seconds, the glass windows throughout the city began to rattle violently—despite there being no vibration in the ground at all.
“Wh-what is this? What’s going on? Is this a real earthquake?”
“There’s no shaking, though…? What on earth…?”
As the baffled, frightened citizens murmured among themselves—
KRAAAAAAAAAANG!!!!!
An earth-shattering roar slammed into the city. People screamed in terror.
“Aaaagh!”
“Wh-what is that sound?! What’s happening?!”
“Thunder…? No—the weather’s completely clear. Not a drop of rain…”
“Whatever it is, get inside a building!”
“Wait! Everyone, look over there! Up—up in the sky! What… what is that…?”
The residence of Archduke Harth of the South, some forty kilometers from the Southern Gate.
The door to the study where Harth sat leisurely reading a newspaper over coffee burst open, and his closest aide, Leon, came rushing in.
“Y-Your Grace!”
“What’s so urgent you can’t even knock?”
“Outside the window—please look!”
At Leon’s words, pointing toward the full-length glass behind him, Harth turned his head with casual indifference.
Then he saw something immense, and shot to his feet.
“…What… is that?”
What filled his vision was an enormously vast pillar of black smoke.
In all his life he had never seen smoke of such size, yet the form was unmistakably smoke—still climbing, still swelling even now.
“That’s… the direction of the gate leading to the West, isn’t it? So is that the mark of a battle?”
“Aura couldn’t produce something like that, and has there ever been a spell that belches smoke on that scale? No—why would anyone even deploy magic of that magnitude against a handful of western savages…?”
The smoke rising high into the sky began to spread sideways at altitude, taking on the shape of a colossal mushroom.
Neither Harth nor Leon could say why, but a growing unease tightened in both their chests.
They had been watching the fully formed mushroom cloud for about a minute when—
KUUUUUNG!
A thunderous boom like a bolt from a clear sky shook the city. Both men flinched hard, their bodies instinctively shrinking in on themselves.
The dry-sky thunderclap passed in an instant, but the sudden sound had crushed something in them. Instinct told them something was terribly wrong. They exchanged a glance.
“Contact the Southern Gate at once! Tell them to report what’s happened!”
“Y-yes, Your Grace!”
Leon frantically attempted contact through a communication crystal, but there was no answer from the other side.
After several more attempts yielded not the slightest response, Leon finally reported in a trembling voice.
“I… can’t reach the gate garrison…”
Harth clenched his fist as he stared at the mushroom-shaped smoke.
Simon, commander of the Southern Gate garrison, was a full Sword Master, and the forces under him were composed of exceptionally strong knights and mages.
The West’s troops, by contrast, were nothing but a rabble of savages.
They might have numbers, but in quality the West was simply no match for the South.
A real battle shouldn’t even have been possible. The possibility of defeat had been something he could dismiss out of hand—and yet…
That mushroom cloud, and the enormous roar from moments ago, kept stoking the unease in Harth’s heart.
Simon, commander of the Southern Gate garrison, had survived the explosion.
The instant that monstrous shell began its descent, Simon had drawn out every last scrap of his mana to protect his body. Thanks to that, he was still alive—despite having been so close to the blast.
The problem was that “alive” was all he was. Whether he could even still be called living was an open question.
Blood poured from every orifice of his face and body. The capillaries in his eyes had all burst; the whites were gone, replaced by a solid, searing red.
His internal organs were ruined. He kept coughing up blood. He stood on two legs, but he could not move so much as a toe or a finger—frozen in place like a stone sentinel.
The roar of the explosion had already stripped him of his hearing. Only a high, piercing tinnitus remained, ringing endlessly through his skull.
Unable to hear any sound beyond that internal whine, Simon managed to turn his blurring vision and survey his surroundings.
Nothing remained.
The gate, closest to the explosion, had been reduced to powder and vanished without a trace. The vast walls the South had so proudly called a fortress that “would not permit even a single savage to pass” had been utterly pulverized into nothing more than heaps of stone.
There were not even corpses nearby.
Moments before that monstrous shell fell, countless knights and mages had stood before him, behind him, and at his sides. Now their bodies had melted away so completely that not a single corpse remained.
Perfect, absolute destruction—so thorough that even a shred of hope for other survivors was impossible.
He wanted to confirm what, exactly, had fallen—but he could not move a single finger from where he stood.
It felt as if his body had already died and only his mind had yet to leave it. The slightest twitch of a fingertip, he was certain, would cause what remained of him to crumble into dust.
Some ten seconds later, he felt something invisible and immensely powerful brush past his body.
He could no longer hear any sound at all, yet Simon instinctively knew that the thing which had just passed through him—setting his ruined flesh trembling—was the report of that cannon they had fired so long ago.
Neither dead nor alive, Simon simply stood there, no longer certain whether a second or a year had passed.
A broken, blood-choked sound escaped him—something that might once have been words.
His ears no longer worked, but with what vision he still possessed he could make out what lay ahead.
A black train, incomparably larger than any ordinary locomotive, came to a halt in front of him. Countless figures disembarked and came striding forward.
His vision was steadily drowning in red, so Simon could barely make out the face of the man at the front of the column.
……Isaac…
It was Isaac—the chief administrator who governed the western savages.
That the man who had created this hellscape was Isaac was beyond any doubt.
Isaac was saying something, but with his hearing already gone, Simon could not catch a single word.
Something’s wrong… I have to… report…
That was as far as Simon’s thoughts went.
One of the strongest assets of the Second Era—a Sword Master—sank to his knees before the black train of the Third Era, and did not rise again.