Chapter 137 : A Beautiful Jasmine Flower
Chapter 137: A Beautiful Jasmine Flower
【Enemy attack!!! Enemy attack!!!】
A cry rose from the ranks of soldiers behind them; the men around immediately grew restless and frantically looked about. The general, who had been watching the enemy vanguard withdraw, was startled in his heart, then flushed with anger and cursed:
“Damn it — who’s shouting? Didn’t you see they already pulled back! Where’s the enemy attack?”
【In the sky! General! In the sky!】
The general looked up and indeed saw a cluster of black specks. He slapped his forehead — he still had not quite adapted to the Seris Federation’s method of attacking from the sky. “Godsdamn it! Take cover!!!”
A small portion of the soldiers risked their lives on the ramparts to continue observing the Seris Federation army’s movements, preventing any surprise counterstroke; most of the men hid in various houses and sturdy fortifications.
Although the Federation’s Iron Eagle strikes were not very accurate, there were always a few unlucky ones who were hit — and anyone within dozens of meters around them rose to the sky with them.
But after being struck often enough, they realized that if one hid inside a room one could usually survive unless hit at very close range.
【Are you ready? Chavez, we were about to reach the target airspace.】
Over the roaring of the cabin, the pilot’s question came through the radio headset.
Chavez, who was in the bomb bay, laughed and said, “Of course! When this is done, come to my place tonight — I’ll buy you a drink and we’ll have a proper time!”
【I didn’t think you still had quotas left?】
“Damn, this kid always drinks my drink, and he somehow saves his own — I’m coming tonight too! Bring me along!”
“Me too!”
Charles’s smile vanished as he said helplessly, “By the Empress! I don’t have that many left. At most one cup per person.”
“Heh heh, that’ll do — I’m not picky.”
【All right! We were about to descend altitude — boys, get ready, and good luck to us!】
“Bombing ready, brothers. I was going to make them noisy as a festival.”
【Bombing squad, listen. Pilots begin lowering altitude.】
【Received.】
The warplane began to further lower its altitude to five hundred meters so the bombardier could aim more easily — but this was an extremely dangerous height.
Because it was dangerous, the Federation Air Force had previously forbidden doing so, and that had prevented the Church Army from seizing this rare opportunity.
“Aim locked on you!”
Charles pressed the switch. The wing clips holding the 100-gallon solidified-gasoline bombs on both sides of the bomber’s wings retracted; as the bomb bodies fell they pulled the safety fuses tied to the wings.
Under the force of the torn fuses the bombs began to tumble in the air. The alkali inside the fuses mixed with the gelatinous filling inside the bomb bodies, and the tumbling bombs finally slammed into the ground.
The collision caused the alkali to self-ignite, instantly detonating the nitrocellulose hidden on the bomb bay’s inner wall into high-pressure gas while igniting the solidified gasoline. The internal pressure surged, bursting the bomb bay and raising a dazzling firework of many meters into the air.
With the blast’s momentum the firework sprayed out to a radius of a hundred meters, then, like flowing molten lava, it ate into every crack and began to spread everywhere without leaving a gap.
The soldier hiding in a room suddenly felt his arm-pauldron grow hot. “Ah?! What is this?! Help me slap it off!”
He began to beat at his arm desperately; his companions did the same, grabbing various household things to smack at it. The temperature of thousands of degrees almost instantly melted the protective runes on the surface, coming into direct contact with the metal and melting it into droplets of molten iron that dripped onto his arm.
Bone-eating pain ran from his arm into his smacking palm; his comrades emitted all sorts of harsh, miserable screams.
“My hand!!!”
“Why won’t it go out! Help!! Save me!!”
“Creak”
The wooden house burned through; a large amount of red, flaming liquid poured down from above and doused them head to toe, and the whole room became an ocean of fire.
“Kill me!! Kill me!!!”
The dense, inhuman shrieks of agony made the soldiers hiding below stare at one another in horror. Before they could react there came the sounds of violent collapse and splintering — the fire-engulfed soldiers above crashed down onto them.
Some, in panic, saw the faces of those soldiers and a bone-chilling cold rose from their hearts; their legs went weak and trembled.
Their features had long since been dissolved; the flesh of their cheeks had been burned away, and through the smoke they grinned with purple-black, terrifying maws like hellish demons and howled frantically:
【Goddess! The Goddess has come for me!】
Many soldiers hit by the splashed fluids soon met the same fate, flinging themselves about and careening wildly or rolling frantically on the ground.
The general, standing atop the city wall beneath his magic shield, looked up at the countless bombs falling from the sky. They did not boom like the shells he had seen before; their sound was not very loud.
But what puzzled him was that the men hit this time screamed in unusually bitter, even horrifying voices.
One even smashed into his shield; by luck it only exploded into multitudinous viscous fluids that sprayed outward, covering many of his guards’ heads and faces.
Just as doubt began to form in his mind, sparks leapt suddenly from the seemingly harmless fluids — like a chain reaction, in the blink of an eye the area around him became an endless sea of flames.
His guards, too, began to emit inhuman, shrill screams as they clawed feverishly at their faces and bodies, tearing off chunks of burning flesh.
“Di-di-di-di…”
In under two seconds the power core behind him gave a sharp shriek signaling it was about to run out of energy. Before he could react the shield began to fracture, and the flowing, blood-red liquid outside the shield doused his over-seven-meter Mechanical Body.
The steel frame that could once take a shell and walk away melted into molten iron at a hair-raising speed and flowed rapidly inward.
With the rune array destroyed the entire machine lost control. He battered at the cockpit door desperately to get out, but the cramped space left him nothing to brace against.
He finally forced the lock with a divine art, only to find in despair that large patches of that fluid clung to his body and continued to burn. Smacking did nothing; wiping merely caused the fire to spread to other places.
As the squad climbed and returned, the Paria Royal Capital below had already become a sea of flames — the towering infernos and the wails made every watcher feel as though they had come to the legendary hell.
The choking black smoke rose like resentment. Many observant gunners in the cabins looked through high-power telescopes and saw black-purple humanoid shapes wandering the streets with flames, and many skeletal figures knelt in the inferno; several turned away and vomited violently.
“I—I want to go home and see my mother. I can’t take it!”
“Me too! My gods, what kind of weapon is this?!”
They would never forget this blasphemous, utterly horrific scene — not in this life, nor likely the next.