Chapter 115: Attacking in All Places

High above the clouds, thirty thousand feet over the mainland of the Holy Solarian Empire, the air was freezing and silent.

Below that silver carpet of mist lay an empire that had ruled for three centuries. Rolling green provinces, terraced farmland, busy trade roads, and massive stone cities stretched across the continent. To the common folk and local lords of the interior provinces, the war had felt like a distant rumor. The ocean was hundreds of miles away. Goddess Viona was in her heavens, and the imperial army was invincible.

Then the sky began to tear open.

Dozens of gray combat aircraft from Carrier Strike Group cut through the upper atmosphere at near-sonic speeds. F/A-18F Super Hornets, F-35C Lightning IIs, and high-altitude B-52H Stratofortress bombers flying staging patterns from the western island base moved in coordinated flight paths.

Their mission was not to drop indiscriminate iron. Modern doctrine dictated the total dismantling of the empire’s warmaking infrastructure.

On digital cockpit displays and navigation systems, every major city outside the capital’s golden bubble was segmented into high-priority target grids: command keeps, regional dragon pens, royal armories, enchanted grain depots, and stone bridges linking the provinces together.

"All Strike packages, this is Strike Control," the airborne command controller broadcasted over the encrypted link. "Perimeter boundaries verified. All targets confirmed unshielded. Cleared hot across all designated sectors."

"Copy, Strike Control. Package Alpha rolling in."

Seventy miles south of the capital, the great trade hub of Valora sat peacefully beside a wide river.

Valora was the iron heart of the empire’s weapon production. Its sprawling stone foundries ran day and night, smelting enchanted ore into swords, spears, and catapult fittings. Thousands of merchants, blacksmiths, and guild apprentices packed the cobbled avenues. At the city center stood the Grand Citadel of the Southern Guard, where four thousand heavy imperial infantry were quartered, waiting for marching orders to the coast.

High in the morning sky, a faint, rhythmic thunder began to roll across the hills.

The city watchmen climbed the stone battlements, shading their eyes. "Is it an autumn thunderstorm? There are no dark clouds."

Suddenly, high above the clouds, tiny silver specks appeared.

Before anyone could ring an alarm bell, long, sleek shapes detached from the silver birds. JDAM satellite-guided bombs and AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapons glided silently through the air on pop-out wings, angling straight down toward the city’s industrial quarter.

CRACK-BOOM!

The northern foundry exploded in a blinding flash of orange fire and black smoke.

A two-thousand-pound penetrating warhead punched clean through three stories of reinforced granite and detonated directly inside the central furnace. The pressure blew the roof off the building, scattering tons of molten steel and stone blocks across the riverbanks.

Seconds later, the Grand Citadel took direct hits.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Four precision-guided bombs slammed directly through the barracks roofs and the central powder stores. The fortress walls, which had stood against siege engines for two hundred years, crumpled like dry biscuits. Massive shockwaves rolled down the wide streets, blowing out wooden shop doors, shattering stained glass, and sending tremors through the earth that knocked people off their feet.

The watchtowers fell into the moat in broken heaps. The iron-smelting district was turned into a burning sea of soot, twisted metal, and shattered stone in less than two minutes.

Not a single common house was targeted, but the city’s capacity to forge weapons or muster troops was erased instantly.

Soldiers staggered out of the burning gatehouse, covered in gray ash, weeping and screaming into the smoke.

"Where is the holy light?!" a centurion cried, holding his crushed arm. "Where is the Goddess?! Why isn’t the Aegis protecting us?!"

There was no answer. Only the fading roar of jet engines climbing back into the clouds.

A hundred miles to the east, the fortified mountain city of Morvath met the same fate.

Morvath sat high on a rocky plateau, guarding the primary dragon-breeding grounds of the imperial military. Hundreds of green and red wyverns were kept in cliffside caves, tended by beast-tamers and heavy aerial knights. It was considered an impregnable natural fortress, accessible only by a single winding mountain path.

The attack came so fast the wyverns never even left their nests.

Two F-15E Strike Eagles, operating with high-precision laser-guided ordnance, swept over the ridge line. They dropped thermobaric penetrator munitions directly into the mouths of the nesting caverns.

KER-THUMP!

A low, bone-shaking rumble echoed through the mountains.

The heat and overpressure inside the caves consumed all the oxygen in a split second, collapsing the cliffside hollows into massive avalanches of falling rock. Boulders the size of houses tumbled down the mountain slopes, burying the dragon pens and the imperial flight gear beneath thousands of tons of dirt.

The great beast-legion that Viona intended to use as her ultimate reserve was wiped off the military map before a single saddle could be buckled.

Meanwhile, in the central plains, bridges and rail-less supply roads were cleanly severed.

Precision cruise missiles struck the ancient stone arches crossing the great Silver River. The massive bridge spans dropped into the churning water with resounding crashes, cutting off the imperial army’s ability to transport heavy wagons, food wagons, and siege engines between provinces.

One by one, the red dots on the American tactical command screens winked out, turning into confirmed damage assessments.

The attacks were relentless, cold, and utterly one-sided.

Back at Port Solis, Goddess Viona stood on the edge of the stone terrace.

Her hands gripped the white marble balustrade so hard her knuckles were bone-white. The golden light of the Aegis hummed softly above her head, shielding her from the clear sky.

Inside the bubble, everything was calm.

Outside the bubble, the world was burning.

Every few minutes, another messenger using high-tier emergency teleportation scrolls collapsed onto the terrace, drenched in sweat and coughing from smoke.

"Report from Valora!" a palace courier wept, holding out a scorched parchment. "The southern iron foundries are destroyed! The barracks are gone! Three thousand guardsmen buried beneath the citadel rubble!"

"Report from Morvath!" another messenger gasped, bleeding from a cut on his head. "The wyvern pens... the whole mountain ridge collapsed! The dragon legion is no more!"

"Report from the Silver River! All three grand bridges have fallen! The supply caravans from the eastern granaries cannot cross! The provincial legions are cut off from each other!"

Belis dropped down onto both knees, clutching his face with his trembling, wrinkled hands. "It’s all of them... every major garrison city outside the capital is being struck. They aren’t even marching an army... they’re just erasing our cities from the sky."

Lord Justin leaned his forehead against the cold stone, weeping openly. "Fifty leagues... a hundred leagues... distance means nothing to them. They can reach any corner of our land whenever they wish."

Viona didn’t speak.

Her chest heaved with shallow, furious breaths. Her starry golden eyes darted across the distant horizon, where faint, dark smudges of smoke were rising from beyond the green hills in every direction.

Her barrier covered Port Solis. It covered the capital.

And that was it.

She had sixty thousand elite soldiers sitting inside this glowing dome, armed with enchanted spears and holy armor. But outside this cage, her empire was being chopped to pieces, limb by limb. Her foundries were ash, her beasts were dead, and her roads were broken.

If she kept her army inside the dome, the empire would starve. If she marched them outside the dome, the iron birds would butcher them before they walked five miles.

Viona turned her head slowly, looking at Ayanokoji.

The boy stood in the shadows of the pavilion, his left arm held tightly by the black Torment Band, his eyes completely flat and lifeless.

"They aren’t trying to breach the capital," Viona whispered, her voice cracking with suppressed terror. "They never intended to attack the Aegis."

Ayanokoji did not hesitate. His lips moved, speaking in that hollow, mechanical drone that made her blood run cold.

"A fortified position with no mobility and no supply lines is not a defense, Master," Ayanokoji said plainly. "It is a prison. They are simply waiting for you to realize that you are already surrounded."