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Chapter 1395: Close Proximity Interception

No ranging shots. No coordinate adjustments. Just fire as fast as the cannons could manage, until there was nothing left to fire.

Every technique the crews had built through months of daily training came out of them now, without ceremony. The charges had been packaged in reduced quantities — a deliberate decision that cut launch speed — but the elite gunners sustained four shots per minute across all three cannons regardless. The small offset in timing between them created a rhythm of near-continuous sound, rolling and echoing through the mountain corridors like the midsummer thunder of a storm that had nowhere to go.

“They’ve opened fire, coo!” Maggie could not help herself; she hugged Lightning’s head.

“Yes.” Lightning was already thinking past the moment, already worried. They had seen the decoy position destroyed. They had fired anyway. That kind of decision did not come from not understanding the risk — it came from having weighed it and accepted it. She owed them thoroughness in return. She held her position and watched.

Despite three cannons against a floating fortress the size of a city, the effect was not negligible. The shells scattered across the Demon City, and the result was visible: demons scattering in panic throughout. Whatever the garrison figures for the mobile fortress, the Inferior Demon population was large and apparently not prepared for incoming fire from the ground.

Lightning also caught movement among the Red Mist — human figures.

It confirmed what the General Staff had theorized: the demons were leveraging the humans they controlled as a resource. There was no regret in Lightning’s chest when she saw them. Graycastle had spent more than half a year broadcasting announcements and running evacuations out of Everwinter. The ones who had remained behind were, predominantly, nobility and their dependents — the fraction that had opposed Roland, that had preferred fighting their own kind to resisting the demons, that had sold the future of their race for a continued grip on a few acres of self-interest. Edith had said it plainly: they only had eyes for what was directly in front of them.

The Deity of Gods kept advancing. As the range closed, the impact points crept toward the city’s center, but the concentration of Red Mist there made the results impossible to observe directly. Lightning considered calling for Sylvie — the Eye of Magic, aboard the Seagull — but decided against it. If Sylvie opened her ability now, any Eye Demons concealed in the city would see back through her, and the Seagull’s position would be given away. The assault force’s fire was still ongoing. She waited.

They won’t let this stand. The certainty in her was not dramatic; it was just the shape of the situation. A few Longsong Cannons hitting their fortress — the demons would respond. The real question was how.

Then the Deity of Gods rotated. Slowly, deliberately, the island turned on its axis.

Another erected stone pillar swiveled into line — aimed at the true artillery formation.

Lightning’s stomach dropped. There it was. The Aerial Knights were committed to the engagement overhead; they could not intercept a projectile. The assault force had no capacity to evade a strike of that scale. She had been waiting for the other shoe, and here it was.

“Maggie — the investigation stays with you.” She gritted her teeth.

“Coo?”

No time to explain. Lightning reached up, grabbed the pigeon perched on her head, and hurled her upward into the air. Then she dove.

She hit the speed of sound somewhere in the middle of the descent.

The enormous stone pillar was already in the air, trailing its crown of crackling magic power as it climbed.

Lightning swept through the formation at ground level, screaming.

“Everyone — take cover! The enemy has our position and the stone pillar is already incoming! Find shelter — now! Go!”

“That’s Miss Lightning — ” Cat’s Claw had the whistle at his lips in the same breath. “All units — evacuate positions immediately! This is an order — evacuate now!”

The gunners turned and ran.

At that exact moment, the pillar’s shadow crossed the center of the formation.

Cat’s Claw looked up once and ran for the nearest sentry point. He almost made it. The blue pillar struck dead center into the Longsong Cannons — the impact was total. The peak shuddered through its roots. The cannons that took the direct hit became scattered components in an instant, and the tremendous force did not simply level the ground: it collapsed the trench and drove down into the underground bunkers.

Cat’s Claw clawed his way out of a snow pile, coughing. The tremor had traveled up through his feet and into his organs; for one suspended moment he had genuinely believed everything inside him had shifted out of alignment. His hands shook. His legs shook. He ran a quick mental inventory. Nothing seemed broken.

“Casualties and status — pass the word.” He grabbed the nearest soldier. “Now.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Jop — where are — ” The answer came before the question finished: the sharp, distinct crack of a machine gun opened up somewhere on the mountainside.

Enemies on the peak. Already.

He had not even processed the thought when Lightning’s voice dropped from overhead.

“Warning — there are demons hidden in that pillar! The pillar itself is the attack!”

Cat’s Claw already had his rifle unslung and the safety off. He moved toward the designated retreat point at a run.

The first to react, as always in a situation like this, were the veterans. The soldiers who had lived through actual combat — who had the reflexes that only came from having been genuinely afraid at close range before — were already forming a crossfire, three or four machine gun teams covering the narrow corridor between the mountain road and the center of the formation before he arrived.

The enemies were something he had never faced before.

Miniature Spider Demons. Less than half the height of a man. Their heads and forelimbs were sheathed in Blackstone armor — thick enough to absorb several rounds while the creature beneath kept moving. They could shoot stone needles the way ordinary Spider Demons did, but the process of doing so required them to open the armored panels over their skulls, and that moment of exposure was the seam.

Cat’s Claw and the flintlock teams folded into the defensive line and added rifles to the machine guns. The mountain road was the only viable path of retreat. All moving soldiers were funneling toward it naturally — those capable of running, those looking for wounded comrades, those waiting for the picture to clarify. Whatever happened next, this ground had to be held.

“Watch your barrels — off the triggers between shots!”

“Ammo — I need ammo over here!”

“Anti-Demon Grenades primed — fire in the hole!”

The air was all noise: shouts, gunfire, the wet crack of stone needles against rock. Across the field, Spider Demons had stopped moving — a dozen, two dozen, stopped in the instant they tried to push against the line. The Blackstone plating turned the first few bullets, but not ten, and not fifty, and the elites behind these guns were not rationing. Where one cannon of fire was insufficient, they built the density until it was.

A crucial pattern emerged within the first exchanges: the miniature Spider Demons’ heaviest protection ran across the head and forelimbs. The instant they tried to move fast enough to break through the firing line, they reared slightly — and the interior exposed. Anti-Demon Grenades worked best at that moment. Suppress them into slow advance with the machine guns; cook a grenade and throw it at the half-second gap. The cycle was brutal and workable.

But the Spider Demons’ worst vulnerability was their backs.

A girl with short golden hair dropped out of the sky and flew through the formation like a ghost — ten centimeters off the ground, dual pistols firing. She swept the spider bodies from behind, where the armor simply wasn’t, and her bullets went through the thin epidermis and into the backbones and skulls with the efficiency of a surgical instrument. Every pass drew cheers from the defensive line.

They all knew that silhouette. They had seen it at Northernmost Port, over the Gap of the Sky Wolf, above their heads for the whole of this long war.

Miss Lightning. Their Lightning.

Every time she completed a pass and pulled back into the air, the roar behind her was involuntary — the kind of sound a crowd makes when the thing it feared might happen doesn’t.

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