Chapter 113: Saber-Rattling

Three months had passed since the morning Port Solis was struck from beneath the waves.

During those ninety days, the western coast had been turned into an armed fortress. Over fifty thousand imperial legionnaires, mountain vanguard units, and holy paladins were dug into the rocky hills overlooking the sea. Hundreds of heavy ballistas and enchanted trebuchets lined the cliffs. Giant anti-magic wards and earthen trench networks, laid out under the cold, precise calculations of the mind-controlled Ayanokoji, stretched across the coastal plains.

Twenty summoned heroes, their left arms clamped in dark metal bands, stood along the garrison towers every day like silent, unblinking statues.

For three months, the sea had been quiet. No more torpedoes had entered the harbor channel, and no more gray flying machines had skimmed the clouds. Goddess Viona had convinced herself that John Smith had expended all his weapons during that initial raid. She believed his small island nation lacked the industrial capacity to replace such complex iron artifacts.

Then, at dawn on the ninety-first day, the horn sounded.

It was not a normal watchman’s blast. It was a prolonged, frantic wail from the highest lighthouse at Port Solis, echoing across the cliffs in a desperate rhythm that sent chills down the spines of the legionnaires.

Inside the royal pavilion erected on the central promontory, Goddess Viona sat on an ivory chair, sipping spiced tea from a gold-rimmed cup. Beside her stood Prime Minister Belis, clutching an imperial ledger, while Ayanokoji, Kenji, and Miyuki stood behind them in stiff, perfect silence.

"What is that racket?" Viona asked, setting her teacup down with a light clink. "Has a merchant caravel drifted off course?"

The silk curtain of the pavilion was ripped aside. Lord Justin stumbled inside, his face completely pale, his gauntleted hands trembling violently.

"Your Divinity!" Justin gasped, barely remembering to bow as his knees shook. "The ocean... look at the ocean!"

Viona frowned in annoyance. "Stand up straight, Justin. You are a commander of the Empire, not a frightened street beggar. What is out there?"

"The heretics..." Justin stammered, pointing a shaking finger out toward the open water. "They are here. All of them."

Viona rose from her seat, her silk robes rustling as she walked out onto the stone balcony of the promontory. Belis and the three controlled heroes followed close behind.

The morning fog over the Eastern Ocean was slowly burning away under the rising sun.

At first, Viona saw only the usual rolling waves and gray sea mist. But as the wind cleared the haze, dark shapes appeared along the horizon.

They were not dots. They were mountains.

Viona’s breath caught in her throat. Her golden eyes widened, the teacup’s sweetness turning to ash in her mouth.

Five miles off the coast, sitting squarely in international waters beyond the range of any known catapult or spell, floated the United States Navy Carrier Strike Group.

Leading the formation in the center was the USS Gerald R. Ford.

Viona had never seen anything like it. In her mind, a flagship was a three-decked wooden galleon with tall masts, canvas sails, and carved golden figureheads. What sat before her was a colossal, floating fortress of solid, dull gray steel. It was over a thousand feet long, stretching across the water like an artificial island. It had no sails, no oars, and no masts. Its vast, flat flight deck was lined with dozens of sharp-winged fighter jets, parked in neat, menacing rows under the morning light.

The sheer scale of the ship defied her understanding of nature. How could thousands of tons of dense iron float on top of the water without sinking to the seabed?

To the left and right of the massive carrier rode two Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers and four Arleigh Burke-class Aegis destroyers. Their sharp, angular hulls cut cleanly through the ocean swells, bristling with flat-faced radar panels, revolving gun turrets, and dozens of flush-mounted vertical missile hatches. Behind them, heavy supply ships and replenishment oilers formed an endless wall of gray metal against the blue sky.

The fleet did not hide behind the horizon. They were parked in plain sight, broadsides facing the imperial fortress in a deliberate, terrifying display of raw naval power.

"By the heavens..." Belis whispered, his knees buckling under his red robes. He dropped his ledger, the parchment fluttering across the stones. "Those... those are ships? How can iron float like that?! How many men does it take to move a mountain of steel?!"

The soldiers along the imperial trenches stopped digging. Paladins lowered their halberds, staring out at the ocean in stunned silence. The entire cliffside garrison of fifty thousand men went completely quiet, paralyzed by the sheer physical mass of the fleet sitting on their doorstep.

Viona gripped the stone railing.

For the first time since she descended to this realm, a cold, heavy knot tightened in her chest.

She had mocked John Smith as an E-rank discard who relied on petty tricks. She had told herself that his island base was a backwater settlement playing with salvaged iron toys. But looking at the Carrier Strike Group, the truth slammed into her with crushing force.

This was not a band of castaways. This was an industrial leviathan.

The gray ships sat low in the water, stable and unbothered by the heavy ocean currents. Thick, clean wakes trailed behind their sterns as invisible nuclear reactors churned thousands of horsepower beneath the waves. There was no magic radiating from them. No glowing runes. No divine blessings. It was pure, unadulterated human engineering, built solely to wage war on a global scale.

Suddenly, a loud, mechanical screech tore across the bay.

From the flight deck of the giant carrier, a thin cloud of white steam blasted into the air.

An F/A-18F Super Hornet was hurled off the bow by the electromagnetic catapult, accelerating from zero to one hundred sixty miles per hour in two seconds flat. The jet dipped slightly over the ocean waves, its twin afterburners igniting with two roaring cones of blue-orange fire, before pulling up into a steep, effortless climb toward the clouds.

A second later, another jet was launched. Then a third.

The three fighter jets climbed to five thousand feet, banked sharply toward the coast, and flew straight along the edge of the territorial boundary line.

They did not fire. They did not drop bombs.

They simply screamed past above at five hundred miles per hour, barely a half-mile outside the golden dome of the Aegis. The deafening roar of their jet engines shook the stone promontory like an earthquake, rattling the tiles of the royal pavilion and making the soldiers cover their ears in agony. The pressure wave knocked down several imperial banners, sending the holy crests rolling through the dirt.

The jets circled in a lazy, mocking pattern right in front of the garrison, showing off the racks of air-to-ground missiles and guided bombs slung beneath their wings, before banking back toward the open sea.

"So this is...America."