Chapter 268
Chapter 268. Latent Heat (5)
He clenched his fist, trying to suppress the anxiety surging from within. Surely the fist he had been clenching since earlier had turned white from lack of circulation.
Standing in the center of the rooftop atop the massive steel wall encircling the Outsourcing District, Enoch stared up at the sky without expression.
The fierce wind whipped his hair.
The wind speed had been steadily increasing.
A tin barrel used for a campfire was swept away by a howling gust with a metallic clang, tumbling off the edge of the wall's rooftop and plummeting into the darkness below, scattering crimson sparks as it vanished from sight with the wind.
A single fireball fell from the pitch-black darkness below the steel wall, chasing away the surrounding gloom.
The falling orange glow faintly illuminated a tiny fraction of the wall — nearly fifty meters tall — before growing distant toward the far-off ground.
"Ugh. Why hasn't the battery arrived?"
Beside him, April muttered anxiously, catching her wind-scattered hair with one hand.
Not content with the bipod mounted on her barrel, she had mounted her sniper rifle on an enormous tripod designed specifically for snipers, aiming forward. Seated, she peered through her scope with an anxious expression.
"At this rate, there's no visibility outside at all. Ugh, if I'd known this would happen, I should've splurged on a night-vision scope at the aftermarket last time!"
The anxiety was clearly not limited to their squad.
Several freelancers deployed on a nearby stretch of rooftop were in the same state. One man was outright scratching his head while pounding a wall beside the rooftop water supply with his fist.
"Damn it. Why? Why isn't the battery here?!"
Beside him, a SIEG Industry employee suppressed his frayed nerves by clutching the ID badge around his neck as his shout echoed through the darkness.
The towering modern fortress of the Empire, with red aviation guide lights placed and illuminated at intervals.
Looking out at the steel wall encircling the Outsourcing District, Enoch was suddenly seized by a strange sense of deja vu.
He was certain he'd seen this composition before — looking down at a city surrounded by fortress walls—
"Ah."
Enoch's eyes flew wide.
Over the massive, real wall before his eyes, the image of the past Rhodes fortress suddenly overlapped.
The gray fortress city, once bathed in the brilliant water-light of the lake, and the jet-black metal wall of reality flickered over each other like visual noise.
Ah, so that's what this is.
An inward sigh escaped him. Having the Rhodes illusion shimmer this blatantly in reality was proof that his erosion threat had not ended.
It seemed fighting this operation while bearing that risk was still unavoidable.
"Will it be okay?"
Sirocco asked, her voice slightly uneasy. Enoch slowly lowered his gaze to the base of the wall and nodded.
"Yeah. Probably."
The wind surging up the Outsourcing District's wall with a sound like a flute made both Enoch's and Sirocco's clothes snap violently.
Enoch pulled the terminal from inside his jacket and checked — then grimaced. 10 PM. Only one hour remained until Anarchilon's estimated time of arrival.
He narrowed his eyes against the stinging wind and turned around, gazing into the distant darkness where the city he had to protect lay.
Currently, the 19th Outsourcing District still had no electricity, so there were no lights.
The thick clouds flowing by at the speed of the wind obscured the night sky, making neither moonlight nor starlight something he could count on.
Beside him, Nano, who had just deployed her drone into the sky, adjusted the visor pushed up on her head and assessed.
"Since our eyes have adapted to the dark, it's not completely pitch-black where you can't see a thing-mda. But the effective visual range is basically zero-mda."
"Right. That's the problem."
Enoch said that and turned to look ahead.
In this situation, the only ones who could move freely were Enoch, who could use Sense of Mana, and the handful of freelancers capable of detection-type magic.
Thermal equipment or tactical gear with night-vision capability would improve things, but even such expensive equipment was rare among the freelancers.
The same went for SIEG Industry's support.
Having prioritized far more urgent ammunition, consumables, and equipment over night-combat gear in their resupply, they had ended up entirely reliant on the searchlights for nocturnal operations.
But there was one more major constraint.
Enoch glanced at the AP Bomb sealed in a hard case on the table.
The game-changing bomb at the heart of this operation was here. But the one squad member who could actually detonate it still hadn't arrived.
"Direct Lineage! When's the Dragoon comin'-mka?"
Nano asked with a curious tilt of her head, but Enoch simply shook his head.
"I don't know. I'm not sure what Alicia is thinking."
"What do you mean by that-mka?"
"Exactly what I said."
The memory of when he and Alicia had parted flickered through his mind, and Enoch quietly lowered his head.
The wind brushing past his ears conjured the events of just hours ago, in the light of day, with Alicia.
"—Alicia, where are you going?"
"Direct Lineage."
When Enoch, having retrieved the documents from the campfire, called out to the retreating Alicia, she paused for a moment. She lowered her head slightly.
Then, with an air of resolve, she raised her head and turned to face him.
"I'm returning to my unit. Right now."
"I'd like to ask what you plan to do once you're back."
Instead of answering, Alicia swept her wind-scattered hair aside and glanced in a particular direction.
Following her gaze, he saw a familiar-looking Dragoon woman approaching from beyond the entrance of the freelancers' temporary rally point.
The color-bearer of the Dragoons' honor guard. Aslin.
The distinctive uniform — short skirt revealing her thighs, shoulders bared with snow-white skin — fluttered in the wind.
Alicia watched the honor guard color-bearer, who had apparently come to retrieve her in person, for a moment. Then she began walking forward and spoke.
"There's one thing I want to say to you, Lord Enoch."
"......"
When Enoch hesitated to follow, Alicia quietly looked back at him.
"Thank you for accepting me when I said I wanted to save people. That's exactly why I want to carve open the path for you, Direct Lineage."
"Alicia."
"So, I'll do the very best I can until the end. I promise."
Recalling the resolute final image of Alicia as she walked away, Enoch was pulled back to reality by the fierce howl of wind brushing past his ears.
The absence wasn't limited to Alicia.
Among the squad, Elena, Amelia, and Lily — who were not frontline combat Mages — could not be deployed to the front lines of this dangerous full-scale defense operation.
The women who had fallen back to the rear were being guarded by Elena's escort forces, along with a Dragoon platoon that had been on standby in the Outsourcing District and had voluntarily taken on the mission of protecting the VIP Amelia. That, at least, was reassuring.
With that level of protection, they should be safe from harm.
And then, from far away — beyond a dozen kilometers of darkness — he faintly heard it. The roar of Experimental Magical Beasts, countless legs crushing the earth as they charged forward with the fury of a raging wave.
They couldn't be seen, but they were coming.
His fingernails dug into his clenched fists.
According to the plan devised with Elena, they were supposed to first locate Anarchilon using the searchlights' powerful beams installed on the wall's rooftop, then launch a full-scale charge together.
But without the batteries, the searchlights were naturally useless.
That meant the operation would collapse at the very first step — locating Anarchilon.
The freelancer Interims were already deployed, lying in ambush from the lower levels of the buildings onward.
It was too late to issue a withdrawal order. And flares had been completely expended in the previous battle with no resupply.
Should they just charge blindly and try to thin the enemy numbers? But that would be a fight with no chance of winning.
"......"
Suddenly, a distant memory — the image of Rhodes — flickered through his mind.
—Did the Sword Saint of the Waves feel the same way?
Standing here atop the wall, looking down at the Outsourcing District, the image of a young girl long ago gazing down at the city she had to protect from atop her fortress overlapped.
Enoch raised his head and forcibly shook off the intersection of a nonexistent past and the reality before his eyes.
Just then, the thrum of a transport aircraft's rotors sounded in the distance, and a SIEG Industry employee pressed his hand to his communicator and shouted.
"Ah! The battery! The battery has arrived!!"
At those words, the expressions of the surrounding freelancers brightened. Cheers and exclamations like "Really?!" and "Good, we're not too late!" tangled over the comms channel.
"Phew! Thank goodness-mda!!"
Beside him, Nano smiled with relief. April, too, lowered her lashes behind her scope and breathed a sigh of relief as if saved.
Enoch also let out a quiet inward sigh of relief.
Thankfully, it seemed they hadn't been too late.
Then his communicator beeped, and the voice of this operation's tactical advisor, Elena, came through.
[Lord Enoch, the battery is en route to your position.]
"Have it offloaded at the pre-designated classified coordinates."
[Understood. I'll contact them to redirect to the fixed coordinates as planned. Please move to position.]
"Understood. Moving now."
Enoch nodded calmly. His heart was pounding. The timing was razor-thin, but the battery had arrived. All that remained was offloading it from the transport and connecting it to the searchlights.
Once that was done, minimum battle preparations would be complete.
"Sirocco, let's move."
"What, we're going ourselves?"
Sirocco looked up at him from the side and asked. Enoch nodded.
"Yeah. We're short-handed. The forces deployed around the helicopter are all on perimeter watch."
"Is that so?"
Sirocco scanned the freelancers stationed across the wall-like rooftop stretching into the distance, then gave a short nod.
"Hmph, right. Because of what happened last time — you're worried about flying ones showing up?"
"Exactly. In this darkness, even Magical Beasts shouldn't be able to see the transport, and even if they could, they wouldn't know what it's carrying. But there's still risk of attack."
In case any beast spotted the transport and launched an unexpected assault, the offloading point had been pre-designated at a single spot on the rooftop, with every precaution in place.
If Flying-Type Magical Beasts approached, the standby freelancers would be the first to intercept — the most heavily guarded spot on the open rooftop.
With these preparations, there should be no problems.
The battery was the most critical supply in this operation. The plan was to offload it onto the wall rooftop as quickly as possible, then have the standby support personnel transport and connect it to the installed searchlights.
Without further delay, he moved toward the direction the transport was approaching from.
The designated offloading point was right beside Enoch — just a few meters away.
THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD—!
Soon, a transport aircraft with the distinctive form of a tilt-rotor emerged faintly through the darkness.
Its forward-facing propellers angled ninety degrees and brought the aircraft to a hover above Enoch's head, then the massive metal hull began descending toward his position.
The rotors mounted above both wings roared with a thunderous THUMP-THUMP, blasting wind that tore at his hair.
Then the rear cargo bay of the transport opened in midair, revealing the object everyone had been waiting for.
The cargo suspended beneath the transport slid down on a large case into the darkness, approaching the designated rooftop position.
From beside him, the freelancers' shouts rang out.
"Yes, the battery!"
"At least now we can see what we're fighting!"
Just as every freelancer was staring up at the massive battery case descending like a lifeline through the darkness—
That was when April, eyes pressed to her scope aimed outside the wall, screamed.
"NO! Everybody get DOWN!!"
Before anyone could even register what had happened in the wake of the cry that burst across the comms—
Enoch, too, instinctively sensed the danger and grabbed Nano by the waist, pulling her down as he dropped to one knee.
And the next moment, a massive spear of light tore through the darkness and punched through the air several meters above Enoch's head.
WHOOOOOOM—!
Tracing the trajectory of the superheated lance that had drawn a straight line through the air like a precision sniper shot, Enoch's eyes flew wide before he could stop himself.
In the darkness, the spear of light pierced the battery case. The next instant, the case — skewered by the superheated beam — swelled bright orange, and——
With a flash of white that painted the darkness, it erupted in a massive fireball and exploded entirely.