Chương 257

The howling wind of the open sky gave way to a wave of heat as soon as Orion and Pauline dropped through the glowing breach, landing heavily on a grated iron catwalk. Inside the zeppelin lay a claustrophobic maze of hissing steam pipes, grinding gears, and vast glass vats bubbling with alchemical fluids, filling the air with a thousand smells. The roar of the wind was gone, replaced by the deafening thrum of the alchemical engines that kept the fortress aloft.

They had landed on an upper maintenance gantry overlooking what he thought was the primary dispersion bay. It was certainly large enough, with a cavernous space visible in the distance where hundreds of combat machines had been stationed just a short while ago. Fortunately, Orion couldn't spot any more. It seemed they truly had all been deployed to fight. Unfortunately, that didn't mean they were alone. Below them, frozen in the act of adjusting a pressure valve, stood six figures.

They wore rubberized aprons over reinforced brass armor, their faces obscured by respirator masks with thick lenses. Orion pushed a thread of mana into his glasses, slicing through the ambient Silence leaking from the vats to read their statuses.

Satemis Yuyuy — Iron State Alchemical Engineer Class: [Mechanized Chemist] [B-rank] Level: 118 Mind: 540 Attunement: 280 Body: 410 (+180) Traits: Toxic Resilience [B-rank]; Circuit Mana Manipulation [B-rank]; Haywire [B-rank]; Silence Adaptation [C-rank] Machu Kiseu — Iron State Alchemical Engineer Class: [Mechanized Chemist] [B-rank] Level: 116 Mind: 499 Attunement: 267 Body: 390 (+180) Traits: Toxic Resilience [B-rank]; Circuit Mana Manipulation [B-rank]; Haywire [B-rank]; Silence Adaptation [C-rank] That was all he managed to get before the moment of surprise shattered.

The engineer nearest the valve reached for a pneumatic launcher slung across his back, while two others raised brass nozzles connected to pressurized tanks at their waists.

"Try to separate them," Orion said, jerking to the side as a stream of corrosive acid shot toward them. We can't waste time fighting these guys. The longer we're up here, the more people will die as their magic falters, and the higher the chance someone else will notice us. Darkness poured over the catwalk railing in a deluge, warping the air around it and absorbing the acid with little difficulty.

An engineer fired a volley of steel rivets from his pneumatic gun, but Pauline's shadow surged upward, forming a dense wall. The rivets struck the darkness and stopped dead, flattened by the magic's sheer density. With a flick of her wrist, she sent her construct lashing forward like a spiked whip. It wrapped around the nozzle, crushing the thick metal with a crunch, and the pressurized tank ruptured, spraying the man with his own corrosive payload.

His screams were muffled by his heavy respirator as he collapsed onto the floor, but there was no mistaking the moment they stopped forever. Orion descended the grated stairs, analyzing the variables. The ambient Silence in the room was thick, suppressing the reach and stability of his standard spells, but he couldn't just crush the enemies from afar either, as the Silence plating on their armor would devour the force before it could build up enough to harm them.

He needed to either bypass the armor or build up enough power to punch through it. I don't think they'll be kind enough to give me the time I need to cast a proper [Gravity Shear], and the Field here is annoyingly slow to respond. But I do have another method I could try. Two engineers charged him, drawing serrated trench-blades that sparked with lightning.

Orion summoned the faint ambient light filtering through the overhead exhaust vents, weaving a network of reflective points, using the polished brass of the surrounding vats as a focusing array. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Once it was complete and the enemies were three-quarters of the way to him, he gathered the scattered light and amplified it with [Maximize Magic].

The beams bounced from one surface to another, multiplying in intensity with each reflection, much as he had done in the Spider cave. In the blink of an eye, the dim dispersion bay was cut by a grid of searing lasers. Orion ducked under a sweeping blade strike, anchoring his boots to the shaking floor with a minor gravity well. He stepped smoothly into the center of his light array and adjusted the final angle of refraction by creating a reflective mirror just ahead of him.

Three beams of superheated light shot directly into the respirators' glass lenses. For all their thickness, they could not withstand the extreme thermal shock, having clearly been made with alchemical fumes in mind, and shattered inward. The Silence provided enough interference that the beams managed only that much, and little beyond, burning flesh, but not enough to kill. Yet that was enough.

Blinded and exposed to the toxic fumes from their own weapons, the two charging alchemists dropped their weapons, clawing desperately at their ruined masks. Pauline finished the remaining three. She blinked through the dim corners of the room, wielding daggers of darkness, finding the unprotected joints behind their knees and beneath their reinforced collars.

She ghosted around the engineers, never staying in place long enough for them to aim, her shadows pinning their limbs to the grating just before she delivered the killing blows. She then repeated the same to the two Orion had dealt with, barely blinking at the spurts of blood. I kind of expected something else. Maybe green blood? Or perhaps lubrication grease? The Pretorian certainly didn't bleed normally.

But I suppose not everyone would be willing to put their brain in a vat and hook it to a contraption that inflicts infinite pain and suffering. That's no way to run a nation, and for all its ugly practices, the Iron State seems the kind to take efficiency seriously. The skirmish ended as abruptly as it had begun. For a time, the only sounds left were the hiss of ruptured pipes and the relentless pounding of the engines, until a melodic chime rang out in Orion's mind. System Notification!

You have participated in the defeat of [Iron State Alchemical Engineer - Elite] x6 Tactical application of Cascading Refraction acknowledged. +285, 000 Exp Level Up! The notification was a bit shorter than what he'd grown used to, but with so much Silence filling the air, it was hard to establish the proper connection to the System. Still, the surge of energy cleared the fatigue from the fight. He rushed down the remaining stairs, stepping over the fallen crew to reach what he hoped was the command console.

It was a complex array of mechanical levers, pressure gauges, and runic dials, but fortunately, Arcane Overlay had enough historical data from all the enemy machines he had encountered to translate the inputs, highlighting the primary exhaust valves that were actively pumping the Silence fog into the sky. Without hesitation, he gripped the central lever and wrenched it down.

The deep vibrations running through the floorboards stuttered, and the hissing from the external vents slowly died as the dispersion manifolds sealed shut.

"That worked. The fog has stopped coming out and should begin to thin soon," Pauline announced, glancing up at the melted hole in the ceiling. The green tint of the incoming light was already lightening, and the powerful winds would disperse it.

"The Archmage will have a clear shot soon."

"If he shoots this ship down now, it will crash directly into the Shattered Basin," Orion pointed out, his fingers flying across the secondary dials.

"The sheer volume of raw Silence in these vats would blanket more than the canyon floor. The losses among our forces would be severe, and the damage to the forest incalculable."

"Then what do we do?" Pauline asked, seemingly stumped.

"We can't fly it out of here; the other airships will shoot us down as soon as they realize we've taken control."

"We don't have to," Orion said as a cold smile twisted his lips. It took him some time, but eventually he bypassed the ship's safety regulators and hacked into the automated targeting arrays that controlled the zeppelin's broadside alchemical mortars. He could have disabled them and run away, but there was no way he would waste such an opportunity. So he fed them the exact coordinates of the other airships hovering over the basin.

"The firing sequence locked in properly," Orion muttered, confirming the inputs.

"But we need to make sure this one doesn't get shot out of the sky the moment we start firing." Solving that problem would require something more… daring than the enemy would expect. Grabbing a wrench dropped by one of the engineers, Orion jammed it directly into the steering column's exposed gear assembly, locking the zeppelin's rudders in a hard starboard turn. Next, he found the fuel regulators.

The airship ran on some sort of alchemically treated liquid fire, which sounded suspiciously like jet fuel but didn't seem to be of organic origin. Orion cracked the valves wide open, stripping away the cooling limiters and flooding the propulsion engines with all the power they could bear and more.

"What did you just do?" Pauline asked, bracing herself against the console as the deck beneath their feet lurched violently forward. The already noisy interior grew even more chaotic as the consequences of his actions became apparent, and Orion knew that even if his planned charge failed, the airship would be unsalvageable.

"I turned the ship into a missile," Orion yelled over the suddenly screaming engines.

"It's on a collision course with the second-largest zeppelin, and it's about to empty its entire payload into the others." The entire airship shuddered as the cannons fired. A deafening barrage of alchemical artillery erupted from the ship's exterior, tearing through the sky to strike the unsuspecting fleet around them.

Considering that none of it had been used beyond what was necessary to cover the deployment of the machine army, and given the sheer amount of warding magics that would have made such a thing a waste, there was plenty to go around. Hopefully, it'd be enough to destroy them all, but Orion would be happy with just a couple. That should give their powerhouses a chance to land their own hits. As soon as they deal with the Enders, anyway.

They seemed plenty annoying to deal with, even if not as skilled as our tier fours. Still, the constant release of ordnance was another reminder that their time in the sky had to end soon.

"We need to leave!" he shouted. The engines whined, their pitch climbing toward catastrophic failure as the zeppelin accelerated wildly. They scrambled back up the stairs, racing against the rising heat from the overcharged engines. Pauline sent a thick shadow upward, anchoring it to the lip of the melted breach in the hull, then hauled them both through the opening. They emerged back into the howling wind, but the sky was almost clear.

The toxic fog had mostly dissipated, revealing the pure blue above and the chaotic battle raging far below. To their left, three zeppelins were engulfed in alchemical fire, crippled by the automated broadside Orion had unleashed. Dead ahead, the zeppelin he'd aimed for was growing larger as their commandeered ship barreled directly toward it. Shields were flickering into existence before it, but that kind of flimsy attempt would not be enough to halt them.

After all, the zeppelins' best defenses were the clouds of Silence they could deploy at a moment's notice and the sheer number of machines they could carry within their hulls. Anything else could be handled by their hulls, since defensive magic would not work well within such a concentration of Silence.

"Jump!" Orion roared, grabbing Pauline's hand. Without hesitation, they threw themselves off the hull, leaping into the empty air, just a handful of seconds before the two flying fortresses collided in a blinding explosion that shattered them both. A moment later, the shockwave hit them, and they were hurled into the sky.