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Chapter 1464: Daybreak

Above King City, on the Deity of Gods.

Mask — with his many heads — did not require long rest. By staggering sleep across his various brains, he could sustain long periods of clarity. So the moment the Eye Demon guards registered something wrong, the alert reached him.

“The enemy is here.” The King’s consciousness arrived alongside it, without a tremor of agitation. “From the dark of the night.”

Those humans are using darkness to slip past the Devilbeasts. That much is plain. But what can their iron birds accomplish? Do they imagine we’ve made no preparations?

“I’m still waking those Bogle idiots up — it’ll take a moment!” Undeserved’s reaction was predictably sluggish; but given he possessed only one head, his alertness was admirable enough.

“A moment’s delay doesn’t matter.” Nassaupelle produced a miniature core. “I’ve told you before — I’ve fully studied the iron birds’ combat tactics. Your Majesty, leave these irritants to me.”

Under his magic power, the Blackstone wall enclosing King City’s dome extruded several crystalline branches. These had begun as first-generation Symbiotic Demons, but after his modifications they no longer fired needles — they housed a different, miniaturized variant. A special-purpose tool.

After multiple clashes, he had identified the iron birds’ central flaw. Though faster than Bogle Beasts, they could not change direction with anything close to the same agility. The faster they flew, the more pronounced the limitation became. Their flight trajectories described arcs, and in a dive they could not roll through a barrel. This meant that at specific intervals, they were always going to pass through specific points in the air.

The solution followed naturally: if you calculated the needle fragmentation ahead of time and replaced the static projectile with a Symbiotic Demon capable of autonomous judgment, the hit probability rose steeply. These needle-shapes would detonate near the iron birds and scatter — temporarily airborne parasites that landed on the outer shell and began tearing.

Mask was confident this system would leave an impression on the night attackers.

What actually happened surprised him.

The iron birds did not exploit the gap before the Devilbeasts took to the air. Instead they turned south in a body, as if deliberately avoiding King City.

What is this?

Are the humans retreating?

“Heh. Fleeing. It seems your toys won’t get to be used.” Undeserved’s scorn was smooth and unhurried. “In the end, it still falls to me to chase these humans down.”

No. This isn’t right.

Nassaupelle frowned. Whatever contempt he held for them in theory, the reality of the clashes had established one fact: these magicless creatures did not lack courage. They had risked a night sortie. They would not turn and run at the critical moment without reason.

There was one light source the Eye Demons could currently see. That implied the majority of the humans’ forces had not yet “seen” the Deity of Gods — the dark limited both sides equally. If the visible iron birds were not the main assault force —

The idea arrived fully formed. He diverted the Eye Demon guards away from magic detection and directed their visual faculties outward, scanning the empty sky surrounding the Deity of Gods with the combined sight of thousands of eyes.

“What are you doing?” Undeserved protested irritably.

Mask didn’t explain. All his brains fed back through the Eye Demon guards in parallel. And after a time, he found it — an inconspicuous black object moving toward the Deity of Gods through the dark blue. Small body. Near-invisible against the pre-dawn sky. But once seen, unmistakable.

A cylinder.

The shape stirred a memory. The explosive objects the Fury of Heaven planes dropped when they dove. But would the humans go to such lengths for something as simple as that?

He ordered the Blackstone barriers raised regardless.

Then the light happened.

An incandescence that occupied the sky completely — less than a blink in duration. All Eye Demon connections severed simultaneously. What remained was searing white and a pain that reached into the core of every brain he possessed.

He could not suppress the growl that came out of him.

And that was not the end.

The Deity of Gods lurched. The city’s interior rang and shook beneath a buzz that seemed to come from the walls themselves. The dome screamed — a high, structural note — and the ground began to crumble. Nassaupelle felt the floor drop beneath his feet. His body seemed, for a moment, weightless.

Tilly did not see the instant the bomb went off.

She had prepared dark shades. But tracking an object dropped from seven thousand meters with the naked eye was close to impossible, and the shades turned an already difficult sky into pure black. After a few attempts, she abandoned them.

So it was only when the world lit up that she registered what was happening.

She was facing away from the Deity of Gods at that moment. The light hit the plane’s wings and turned them into hammered silver — rivets standing out with impossible clarity, the aircraft’s protruding edges casting long, sharp shadows where a moment before there had been nothing. Only daybreak had ever done this before — pushed back the dark and outlined all things in the night sky. Only dawn.

She breathed in and turned to look.

A massive fireball had appeared several hundred meters above the Deity of Gods. Even at that height, it was descending, still illuminating the floating fortress below. Billowing green smoke rose from the Blackstone walls as though something had swept them with an enormous hand — not air, she understood, but light at a concentration that could press and ignite. The fireball began to warp. Ripples spread outward from it in every direction with a speed that made the eye doubt itself.

They struck the Deity of Gods like a palm striking a table covered in dust. Vast amounts of debris lifted from every surface. The ripples spread to the rest of the floating fortress, then down to the ground. Where they hit earth, the smoke leaped up in a way that left no doubt about what these waves were made of. They were not ethereal. They were physical. They pressed.

They continued outward, still expanding, surging toward the fleet.

“Prepare for shockwave!” Tilly snatched up the receiver and shouted.

“Boom—!”

The sound hit. The silence of the night collapsed entirely. The planes bucked and shook, plummeting as if control had been cut from under them, and for several seconds pilots fought just to hold altitude.

The detonation rang like a gong calling a new world into being. A sliver of morning light tore through the mountain ridgeline and fell across the land.

The fireball had become a yellowish-brown column of smoke. Its base was buried in the Deity of Gods; its top climbed to the clouds and merged with them.

Tilly ordered a second turn.

When the fleet swung east, she saw the Deity of Gods through the rising smoke. From a distance it appeared, almost, unscathed. Compared to the trees below — many of them tilted or flattened — the fortress still hung in the air with an appearance of stability.

But the explosion had not been without consequence. Through the smoke, clearly visible even at this distance, a jagged hole had been punched through the apex of the Blackstone pyramid.

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