Chapter 1459: The Complete Form of the Skycruiser
From the command center, the senior staff watched the enemy’s strength dissolve.
Those that had landed on the island’s surface found no weakness to exploit. Those still circling found no arc in the coverage to slip through. Under Eleanor’s precise fire, every second they delayed cost them — in Devilbeasts rolling out of the sky, in Mad Demons cut down on the runway stone, in the slow, grinding arithmetic of exposure. Devilbeasts had ruled the aerial battlefield for centuries, arriving from above into engagements where speed and altitude defined everything. Against the floating island, they had entered a kill box that looked like open sky from the outside and had no exit once entered.
More than half of the assault force had fallen before any human hand held a weapon.
Some had begun to retreat. Or to flee — the distinction mattered less than the fact of it.
This was the moment Plan B existed for.
The core logic was simple: highest kill count, smallest cost, and the retreating enemy was the optimal target. The Skycruiser’s particular advantage over any prior aerial platform was its ability to switch between defended stronghold and assault base without pause, without reorganization, without the vulnerable interlude that a transition normally required. The platform was the defense; the Aerial Knights were the offense. Both could operate simultaneously.
Under Tilly’s command, the command center shifted to the corresponding procedures. The shift itself had a music to it — ordered, stacked, no step waiting on the prior to finish.
“Channel pressures contained — all steam pressures nominal!”
“Hangar doors one and six opening — runway clear, stand by!”
“Ground service reports five minutes remaining.”
“First wave counterattack force in position!”
The hangar design took advantage of the island’s vertical depth. Multiple launch bays stacked along a central longitudinal axis; aircraft projected outward and downward from the lower levels, using the island’s own elevation to supplement the initial run. Heavy blast doors — thick steel, steam-driven — sealed the interior runways against bombardment and could only be opened by the same engines that pressurized the flight catapults. Each runway was roughly a third of the surface length, which was adequate for the light biplanes; and if initial velocity fell short, the island’s altitude provided the recovery altitude.
“Are you not taking the field yourself?” Roland asked.
Tilly smiled. “This is a rare opportunity. Let the newcomers have it.” She raised the radio. “Once the hangars open — move out immediately. Goal: eliminate every last one of them.”
It was not Good’s first time launching from the interior runway. His previous attempts had all been training runs.
He finally understood why Her Highness had emphasized the earmuffs.
More than fifty biplanes, sealed inside a stone hangar, all cycling their engines simultaneously — the sound was not loud in any conventional sense. It was structural. It passed through the body before the ears processed it. Two or three meters away, ground crew were screaming things he couldn’t hear. They appeared to be mouthing words into a silence that the engine noise had swallowed whole.
From the moment the order came, everything ran on hand signals and flags.
Good rolled out first into the launch position. The bubbling steam. The steel doors — thicker than a man is broad — grinding open on their mechanisms, extending the visible runway out past the island’s edge. Number 01, stenciled clean on the far door.
With Tilly not flying, the formation was his.
Door 06 is probably Manfeld.
Challenger.
He grinned inside the cockpit.
Rachel, can you see this?
I used to watch the nobles from a distance, thinking they lived in a different world. Now they’re the ones trying to keep up.
He couldn’t have said it that cleanly. But it wasn’t wrong either.
The ground crew held up the wind board. Speed, temperature, the island’s current rate of advance. The ideal sequence: hangar doors open into the wind, giving the biplanes a free lift boost on departure. In combat, that wasn’t always possible — the hangar might be facing the wrong direction, the enemy might make any pause at the correct angle a liability. The witches had drilled for suboptimal conditions. They had charts, and habits, and the kind of judgment that comes from doing a thing until it stops being a problem.
Good returned a thumbs-up.
The last door opened.
Bright light drove through the gap and expanded across the runway — from a sliver to a burning rectangle to nothing bounded at all, the full aperture of the sky. Strong wind followed, pushing clean through the hangar, dispersing the engine smell.
Grade five tailwind. The best possible departure window.
The ground crew raised a green flag and swept it down.
“Runway clear — Good is moving out!” He jammed the stick and the throttle together.
The Fury of Heaven accelerated. On either side, the ground crew lined the runway; he caught them waving as he passed, a send-off at speed. Then the light hit his face, a brief white blindness — and then the world opened.
Everything went quiet.
The noise of the hangar cut off as though a hand had covered it. The air out here was clean and cold and smelled of something growing, far below. Good pulled off the earmuffs, let the rushing air replace everything that had been pressed into his skull, and climbed.
From altitude, looking down: the tracer lines below pointed direction. Northeast. About sixty kilometers out, the Devilbeasts were still running.
He didn’t hesitate. He banked and followed.
Before the magic power projection, Roland’s hands had closed without his intending it.
This. This was what a Skycruiser was supposed to be.
Not a flying fortress enduring attack. Not a platform moving carefully toward a target. Both simultaneously — the island standing firm while the Knights launched from its body in a continuous wave, trading a defensive engagement for a pursuit. The enormous mass. The layered weapons. The aircraft unfolding from the mountain’s flanks like birds from a shaken tree.
One after another, the biplanes punched clear of the rock face and closed on the retreating Devilbeasts, the Fury of Heaven’s speed advantage opening immediately. The Aerial Knights were faster by a wide margin. The Devilbeasts had no realistic prospect of distance.
At the Impassable Mountain Range, holding down the Devilbeast assault had cost more than ten aircraft. Now, aside from a handful of unmanned gun turrets destroyed by the elite Mad Demons, the two hundred Devilbeasts of the assault wave had taken human casualties of zero.
“Now it’s our turn to give them a headache.” Edith’s voice had a particular quality — not quite satisfaction, something more pointed. The demons had used a Deity of Gods to obliterate human defenders by mass and attrition. She had found that quite troubling. Returning the favor in kind was clearly a pleasure she had been saving. “They’ll feel it all the way at the King’s City.”
“I expect they’ll retaliate with a larger force.” Iron Axe studied the projection. “Or deploy a senior lord-ranked Senior Demon.”
Roland worked through the roster quietly. Blood Conqueror — Lords-of-Hell upgrade, exceptional in ground combat, too massive for Devilbeasts to carry. Death Scar. Undeserved. Against a floating island armed in all directions, none of the obvious choices were well-suited. The demons’ assignment of Hackzord to the Western Front had been, in this sense, fortunate for humanity — Sky Lord commanded a theater that was now disrupted by his own defection.
“Whatever means they choose — we can meet them.” Roland looked at the map. The red line marked the final distance. “But they’re running short on time.”
Two hundred and fifty kilometers remained. Three days, at the Skycruiser’s current rate.
Three days until the destination, and the final battle.