Chapter 322: Little Ivan (Patreon)

Elsewhere on the Eastern Front.

Qual stood against an army of more than four hundred thousand with a force of six thousand at most, and he meant to hold the line head-on.

"Lord Qual, the six rounds of Killing Magic attacks are finished."

"Good. Everyone, you can throw away the magic weapons in your hands now. Next comes the melee."

The soldier who had reported gulped nervously as he watched the dark mass of the army surge toward them in the distance.

Six rounds of magical bombardment had only cost the enemy's vanguard a small part of its strength. At most, one or two tens of thousands of fearless soldiers had fallen.

The remaining four hundred thousand covered a full six square kilometers, as much ground as more than eight hundred football fields, stretching beyond the edge of sight.

If even one of those formations charged, his own side would be swallowed in an instant.

"It's time."

Qual snapped his fingers.

A group of Demon Race members in white lab coats wheeled up a four-wheeled wooden cart covered with white canvas and stopped beside him.

They were all apprentices who had followed Qual to study magic.

"Let's test the fruit of my decades of research."

As he spoke, Qual yanked the canvas away.

On the cart sat an oddly shaped magic weapon, perfectly still.

It was a small cylindrical launcher forged from special ore, about a full meter long and half a meter across, hollow through the middle like an oversized pencil cup.

Qual reached out with one big hand and, with some effort, hoisted the launcher onto his shoulder.

His followers rushed to stand behind him. They held out their palms, and Mana poured from them.

Qual slapped the launcher once. Intricate magic circles began to bloom across its cylindrical body, and branching lines like tree limbs spread from the base toward the muzzle.

The launcher drank in the Mana the apprentices released.

Under Qual's control of the circles and the Mana, a white shell of Mana began to condense out of nothing inside the empty barrel!

It was an improved version of the magic cannons on the city walls.

An ordinary magic cannon activated its magic circle with pre-stored Mana and fired either a beam of Mana with the same effect as Killing Magic, or a small explosive shell with a blast radius of a meter or so.

The launcher in Qual's hands was different.

He had borrowed the regeneration from Jane's magic and the compression from Nanoda's Severance Magic, then added his own experience to control the flow of Mana into the vessel. The magic circles regenerated and compressed the Mana countless times until it formed a shell of boundless power.

It demanded exacting control of Mana from the operator, along with precise command of the order in which the circles opened and the timing of each cycle.

A single mistake, and the shell would explode on its own side instead of the enemy.

What's more, the more Mana consumed and the more times it was compressed, the stronger the shell became, and the more dangerous it was to handle.

Qual aimed the muzzle at the sky. He had calculated a perfect arc.

Then he slapped the launcher a second time.

The shell inside, now fully gestated, burst from the muzzle like a racehorse out of its gate at the sound of the starting signal, and shot toward the heavens.

The pure white shell, woven from countless strands of Mana, rose like a second sun. Even after leaving the vessel, the Mana inside it kept multiplying and compressing, multiplying and compressing, over and over.

"What's that?"

A soldier of the Alliance army, marching below, saw something flash in the sky and instinctively lifted his head.

A white oval was falling!

"Mages, Defensive Magic!"

A minor commander had spotted the attack from above too. He assumed it was some spell hurled from Gaderia's side. A puny spell like that would crush a few unlucky fools at most.

Barrier after barrier of Defensive Magic spread out and rose, wrapping most of the army.

But what happened next took everyone by surprise.

The shell plunged at tremendous speed. The instant it touched the barriers, they tore like thin sheets of paper!

The blinding white light left the soldiers unable to open their eyes, and a violent ringing filled their ears.

With a piercing shriek of air, the shell never slowed. It landed dead center in the formation—

"BOOM!"

The Mana, compressed countless times, broke free of its restraints and became an explosion that crushed everything.

The blast swept across a full square kilometer in an instant. Everything solid dissolved and vanished beneath the white light. There was no mushroom cloud, only a vast white sphere heaving up in the middle of the four hundred thousand.

The ground trembled faintly. Horses screamed and bolted out of control.

Before anyone knew what was happening, they were swept into the catastrophe.

"Uh... ahhhhhhh!"

A cliff had appeared at his feet out of nowhere, and several broken clods of earth tumbled into the dark abyss! After the earlier roar, the silence was terrifying.

The soldier came to his senses and collapsed on his backside.

He couldn't believe his eyes. He rubbed them in disbelief.

The soldiers who had been marching beside him had been caught in the white light and simply vanished from the world!

Before him lay a bottomless pit a full square kilometer wide, as if it had appeared from nowhere. He had been lucky enough to stand at the very edge of the destruction, and it had saved his life.

The army stopped marching.

Everyone was thrown into terror and confusion.

What in the world had just happened?

In a single instant, more than a hundred thousand of the four hundred thousand had been wiped out!

Many soldiers near the blast site shook uncontrollably.

The morale of the entire Alliance army hit rock bottom.

On Gaderia's side,

"Excellent, excellent. This is the most successful one yet."

Qual looked at the muzzle, still trailing white smoke. His fang-filled mouth stretched nearly to his ears and his narrowed eyes curved into two arcs. He was smiling, but with a face that terrifying, he looked like a devil crawling out of hell.

Behind him, the Demon Race members who had fed Mana into the launcher were on their knees, nearly half of them. They looked drained, unable to move.

The several Mana ore crystals that had been set into the barrel had lost all their luster and were crumbling into dust.

"The preparation just takes too long. And the amount of Mana ore the King brought back was only enough for this one shot."

There was a limit to what a single Demon Race member could do with magic alone.

But he had succeeded.

A weapon more terrifying than Killing Magic, the ultimate arm.

A butcher's blade that could annihilate over a hundred thousand people in an instant.

And it was in Qual's hands now.

"Whooooaaah!"

Even Gaderia's battle-hardened veterans were deeply shaken by the sight.

This epoch-making weapon had awed everyone on the battlefield!