Crisis Invasion (7): The Niberia Archduke Who'd Raze the City to Possess Seira
Again and again… Just thinking about Seira made the sympathetic nerves flare up as if an electric current were about to burst straight out of them, surging hot and violent. The Archduke recalled the incident from his second meeting with her. The moment he saw her, desire had roared through him so fiercely he had nearly taken her by force right then and there. Fortunately, the urge to protect her had proven stronger. He had barely managed to order his knights to drag him outside, then commanded them to fetch a white-haired wig. After that, he had kidnapped a maiden from a nearby village. Unfortunately for her, one lovely young virgin had caught the Archduke’s eye.
Recalling that moment, he decided he would satisfy his lust with another woman before meeting Seira. Until their formal wedding, he wanted to keep her safe.
“Bring me my beloved steed Durandal at once! Before I lay eyes on Seira, I’ll stop by my concubines and relieve this urge first. Otherwise I won’t be able to hold back when I see her. Damn it! It feels like I’m about to explode, probably because I cut short what I was doing to come out here. Ah… Seira! For you, I would—”
But the expressions on his generals’ faces had darkened, completely unlike before. One knight, turning away from the blast zone, saw the Archduke preparing to descend and spoke with great caution.
“Y-Your Highness the Archduke… look over there.”
The Archduke turned his head slowly, a dark premonition crawling down his spine. He prayed desperately that the feeling was wrong. It wasn’t. To think the dragon had survived that barrage…
He had no choice but to seize command authority once more. Then the man who had never once performed ancestral rites began to pray to his forebears.
“A-Ancestors… please, watch over the Korazhan Archduchy and keep it safe!”
Soon the Archduke resolved that, even if it meant astronomical damage, he would destroy that monstrous creature which clearly operated on an entirely different level from ordinary dragons.
“Fire every magic cannon in the city at that dragon simultaneously!”
“What?!”
“B-But Your Highness…! The cooldown period hasn’t—”
“Ignore the cooldown! Kill that dragon no matter what it takes!!”
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A short while earlier, Dragonai had been staring at the eighteen blinding spotlights hurtling toward him at Mach 1, utterly dumbfounded.
“When the hell did these bastards start working with the black dragon?”
And now this insane Archduke cannon was locking onto him again?
“Damn it all…! Are they seriously planning to blow the entire city to hell?!”
He felt there was no escape. Even if he pushed his barriers to double or triple maximum output, he wouldn’t be able to block even two or three shots. Using short-range blink magic to dodge was equally impossible. His body stretched well over three hundred meters; far too massive for an Elemental Dragon. The mana cost would be enormous, and there simply wasn’t enough time for the required calculations.
Blink magic isn’t simply a spell that lets you teleport a short distance in the blink of an eye.
Despite its simple appearance, the spell demanded extremely precise calculations and complex conditions. On the surface it looked like instant movement faster than the eye could follow, but in truth it involved folding a sliver of space to create a shortcut, all within an absurdly brief window of 0.001 or even 0.0001 seconds.
If the calculations went wrong, the caster would slam into various materials at speeds of thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers per hour, matching the planet’s orbital and rotational velocity. A planet this size orbited at roughly 160,000 kilometers per hour and rotated at about 3,700. Since the blink occurred inside the same planetary system, every living thing and object moved at the same speed as the caster. Rotational and orbital velocity could therefore be mostly ignored thanks to inertia. Without that inertia, the coordinates would be beyond even a supercomputer.
The only factors the caster truly needed to calculate were the time and distance involved in folding the spatial plane. Suppose he could fold ten centimeters of space in 0.01 seconds? On open plains that would be no great problem. Colliding with a clump of grass ten centimeters away after 0.01 seconds would only amount to a 36 km/h impact.
But if the folded distance increased tenfold to one meter, or if an error shortened the folding time tenfold to 0.001 seconds? Even a few blades of grass could slice skin at over 360 km/h. Inexperienced calculators usually made errors of ten times or more. Human mages with low mana or beginners sometimes suffered errors of a hundred or even a thousand times. At those speeds, brushing a single blade of grass could mean a 3,600 km/h graze or a 360,000 km/h collision. Kinetic energy increases exponentially with each tenfold rise in velocity. A one-gram object at 360 km/h carries 5 joules; at 3,600 km/h it carries 500; at 36,000 km/h it carries 50,000. For someone clumsy with mana calculations, a hundredfold error could turn a single blade of grass into a weapon capable of severing or shattering a human leg.
Of course the grass itself would be obliterated, but still…
That was why blink magic required considerable calculation time to maintain maximum precision and control. In open sky it might be manageable, but in the middle of a city even a dragon would need several seconds. Those incoming lights, however, would arrive in the blink of an eye while he was still calculating.
“There really isn’t enough time… Damn those filthy humans!! Can’t they even recognize their own guardian deity?”
Besides blink, other short-term escape options included reversing gravity or simply flying upward. But reversing gravity would launch him skyward at only 200 km/h. The magic cannons had been aimed with lethal precision at a dragon flying near Mach speed. Something five times slower had no hope of escape.
There seemed to be no way out. A magic cannon of such horrifying power that blocking it was impossible and dodging it was even more impossible.
Yes. At some point humans, in their quest to exterminate monsters, had created abominations that far surpassed the very monsters they feared.
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There’s a limit to swallowing them with fireballs…
The citizens who had been cheering for me were now caught in the blast zone alongside me, weeping and shaking with terror.
“Fine! If it’s a dragon-slaying cannon too powerful for fireballs to devour…”
Damn it. In this crisis, I saw only one possible choice. I would call for reinforcements.
“Dragon Tooth Soldiers, summon!”
Three hundred salvation soldiers that would appear the instant the one-second call was completed—I summoned every last one of them. The elite troops Dragonai had painstakingly created over two hundred years by pulling out his own teeth! His precious Dragon Tooth Soldiers, forged from his own irreplaceable fangs! Those cherished children!
To think they would be wasted so meaninglessly… They had been created over two centuries of grinding hatred, all for revenge against Tamorpati…
But simply summoning the Dragon Tooth Soldiers wouldn’t change anything against that monstrous magic cannon. I gathered them all around me in an instant and, with a grave expression, began chanting the activation phrase.
Elemental Dragons could cast high-tier magic through silent invocation alone. For one of us to actually chant meant the spell was so advanced it was only passed down among the highest ranks of dragons—ancient magic said to have been lost during the legendary or mythic eras.
Hwaaaaaaaa—!
From my colossal body, yellow light mingled with pure white poured across the ground. Countless ancient runes etched themselves across my scales as magical formulas. It was an ancient spell known as Spirit Wave.
It linked my body with the Dragon Tooth Soldiers so that we would share over ninety-five percent of all incoming damage. Now, in addition to my own vitality, I possessed the combined endurance of three hundred Dragon Tooth Soldiers.
Only then did I meet the oncoming flashes of the magic cannons—blinding beams of light like the dawn itself—with my entire being.
“Wait, at this rate civilian casualties will be catastrophic…”
This time the impact wouldn’t be confined to the immediate area. With that much mana it could erase a third of the city—no, perhaps even half. It was exactly like burning down one’s entire house just to kill a single invading dragon.
That can’t be allowed…!
In the original story, the battle between two dragons and the Archduke’s greed had reduced the city to ruins. The entire kingdom had then trembled at the return of “Dragonai” and joined the subjugation.
I will survive…! Together with this half-baked body of mine!!
I would even shield the shockwaves threatening to leak beyond the blast radius with a barrier!
A roar that tore apart everything in the air erupted. The world before my eyes turned pure white.
KWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANG—!!