Read Novel Full Chapter 458: Mock War Begins [II]
Chapter 458: Mock War Begins [II]
First day of the Mock War.
No more than seven hours had passed, and everything had gone to hell already.
Loud explosions were shaking the sky, and bright lances of light were raining down from the heavens in front of him.
That told Michael everything he needed to know about how the orderly and calculated start of this conflict was going to go.
They had carried on with their plan.
They had launched a complete offensive onto the three bridges and taken Thalia’s forces, who were expecting a much smaller reconnaissance skirmish, utterly by surprise.
Michael and the men he had personally chosen for his platoon had been camping in the shadow of the dense trees on the eastern edge of the Great Divide.
It was a long wait until the clock finally hit 12:00 PM.
Then, as if on cue, a transport airplane buzzed by from above and dropped a large supply crate right onto the center of the bridge in front of them.
His responsibility was Bridge C — the easternmost causeway.
The plan was supposed to be simple.
Wait for the drop, cut off Thalia’s scouts, secure the crate, and pull back before the Ivory forces could even rally a response.
Oh, and, of course. Burn all the bridges down while retreating.
Samael had explicitly told them not to play the hero.
But Samael wasn’t here, and the sky was currently tearing itself to pieces.
The massive supply crate had barely touched the concrete of the causeway when the opposite treeline erupted.
It wasn’t even a standard reconnaissance squad that attacked them. Thalia hadn’t sent scouts.
No, apparently she had the same idea as her brother.
She had deemed scouting unnecessary, choosing instead to send an entire vanguard of armored soldiers to seize the resources by brute force.
Fortunately, she was not as crazy as her brother.
Thalia seemed to have kept the bulk of her heavy-hitters behind to guard the six Officer Sectors and the Ivory Castle.
But what she had sent to the eastern causeway was a moving mountain. A living wall of steel.
Leading the opposing forces was a towering youth, around sixteen feet tall. Yes, sixteen! Probably some guy with the ability to alter his physical size and density.
Clad in thick, overlapping plate armor, he looked like an iron golem that had broken out of a factory.
Every single step he took sent a heavy THUD through the concrete of the bridge, visibly shaking the steel cables supporting it.
Behind him marched a wall of shield-bearers, locked together like a Roman phalanx. They were all moving in perfect sync, functioning like a singular military machine.
Far, far behind them, positioned comfortably at the other end of this kilometre-long causeway, stood a row of Cadets with their hands raised. They were casting spells from a safe distance.
But even as troublesome as it all looked, this was actually a very basic Hunter army strategy: Sentries in the front, and Casters in the back.
They didn’t seem to have any Brawlers in their midst.
That meant those poor shield-bearers themselves would eventually have to do the fighting once they closed the distance.
There was this age-old stigma that Sentries didn’t know how to do anything but take a beating. They were no fighters, especially at close range.
Of course, that wasn’t at all true.
Many times had Michael witnessed Sentries demolishing skilled Brawlers. Many times had he seen them use their shields and barriers to grind opponents into paste.
Still, he wasn’t too worried. With his strength, the rank-and-file weren’t going to be a problem.
…Except for that big guy over there.
That giant of a man was a giant pain in the ass.
The plates of his armor were ridiculously thick, and his mountainous body was large enough to harmlessly brush off most conventional attacks.
No matter what Michael and his platoon threw at him, the bastard just kept walking. Soon, he would reach the crate.
A dozen spells struck his chest.
Fire exploded against his armor and ice crawled over his limbs before shattering. Electricity danced across his plated body and blades of wind died against his titanic form.
The giant still didn’t have the decency to slow down.
“Fine then,” Michael mumbled to himself, dashing forward to weave through another salvo of incoming fireballs and dodge a blinding beam of energy by just a hair’s breadth. He then shouted at his men over his shoulder, “Hold the line, give cover, and focus fire on those Casters!”
Not waiting around for a response, he swiftly called upon his innate ability to even the playing field.
Thanks to his X-ray Vision Card, it took him almost no time at all to locate the giant’s Origin Card hovering somewhere behind his enormous right thigh.
But when Michael tried copying it, nothing happened.
Nothing at all.
“…What the—?!” he hissed, single eye straining through the skeletal lattice of the giant’s massive frame as he deflected a lethal arrow with the heavy swing of his sword.
Is something blocking my power? Michael made a frantic guess. His boots skidded against the scorched concrete as he pivoted to avoid a sharp spike of earth bursting from the bridge floor. No, that can’t be— wait! Where’s the Card for his armor?
There was none.
The fucking Goliath had only drawn a single Card from his Arsenal. And there was no chance in hell that armor was anything but magical. An Acquire Card must have been keeping it manifested.
Unless… it was the same one Michael had just tried to copy. His Origin Card couldn’t replicate Acquire Cards, which would explain why his power just failed to work.
But that raised another question: if the giant hadn’t even deployed his own Origin Card yet, how was he so fucking big?
The answer was obvious enough to make Michael roll his eyes.
Someone in that row of Casters at the back wasn’t a Caster at all.
A Supporter.
One of them was most probably a Supporter with an innate ability to enhance their allies’ size.
Michael scoffed under his breath. What a cheap little ruse — and he had almost fallen for it, ready to funnel his energy into a colossal waste of time. No pun intended.
The giant was a distraction.
He was meant to draw the brunt of their firepower while the real threat orchestrated the battlefield from the rear.
If Michael hadn’t realized this, he would have given his everything fighting that juggernaut, totally ignoring the backline.
Why? Because the time it would take to cross the bridge, reach those Cadets, and dispatch them would be more than enough for the sixteen-foot titan to reach the crate and eradicate his platoon.
But now that he knew eliminating the unknown Supporter hidden among their Casters would immediately neutralize the colossus, the trick lost its luster.
“Change of plans!” Michael bellowed, his voice somehow cutting through the deafening roar of an incinerating firestorm brewing overhead. “Ignore the big guy! Keep his shield-bearers occupied, but do not commit to a full engage! Let them get to the crate, it won’t matter soon! I’m going for the backline!”
“What?!” one of the Cadets nearest to him shouted, ducking behind a hastily conjured earthen rampart as a volley of turbulent wind spears rained down. “That’s a half-kilometer of open bridge! You’ll be turned to ash before you reach the halfway mark!”
“Then I guess I’ll just have to be fast,” Michael muttered.
What happened next was something the Ivory forces would later swear was a hallucination.
Michael Godswill bent his knees like a track athlete and willed an absurd amount of Essence into his legs.
But instead of just enhancing his muscles… he let the energy flow out of his body and seep into the hard floor, reinforcing the very ground beneath him.
No [B-rank] could project Essence outside their flesh to imbue external objects.
Whatever supernatural feats they performed were strictly restricted to manipulating Essence within the boundaries of their own bodies.
That was a rule of nature.
Unfortunately for his enemies, Michael’s unique Circulation Technique allowed him to ignore that rule.
He was able to toughen the concrete under his feet, and, because of that, none of the immense kinetic force he unleashed was absorbed or wasted by a crumbling floor.
The ground didn’t give way, no spiderweb cracks or flying debris.
Every ounce of that explosive pressure he exerted was pushed right back into his body, propelling him forward like a bullet fired from a rifle.
Only a shockwave of compressed air rippled outward, kicking up a blinding cloud of dust and stray gravel before Michael… vanished.
The Ivory Casters half a kilometer away hurriedly moved to take aim, but the boy they were targeting was standing right in front of them the very next second.
A fully realised B-ranker could travel very, very fast. But even then, they needed to accelerate!
Yet, the kind of acceleration Michael displayed was simply unreal. And that was what cost Thalia’s faction their first loss.
•••
It took a whole minute to put them all down. Some Casters possessed rather pesky abilities.
One guy even had a spatial displacement ability that nearly threw Michael right over the edge of the bridge and into the roaring maw of the violent river below.
But nearly wasn’t enough.
Bashing their heads with his sword’s pommel, cutting their spells with the blade, and eliminating them one by one, Michael systematically dismantled their backline.
He didn’t even realize when he had taken down the Supporter — or who it even was — but the proof of his success was instant.
Far down the causeway, the sixteen-foot Goliath had reached the crate. With a monstrously large hand, he was about to easily hoist it up when his towering frame began rapidly deflating like a punctured balloon.
Deprived of their living battering ram, the shield-bearers were then easily crushed by Michael’s men. It was a sweeping victory.
By the end of it, Michael made his platoon secure the supply crate— which was the size of several shipping containers stacked together.
On their retreat, he didn’t forget the most important part. A couple of his own Casters demolished the structural pillars supporting the causeway.
Twenty minutes in and dozens of detonations later, metric tons of reinforced steel and concrete — along with a swarm of enemy Cadets — were plunging into the churning waters of the Great Divide.
Those Cadets would be fine, rescued by the field Instructors. The eastern bridge, however, was permanently severed now.
And while he could only see miles upon miles of dense rainforest and an endlessly stretching river from his current position, thick pillars of rising smoke in the distance told him the other bridges hadn’t fared much better.