Chapter 117: We Have to Act Now!

The destruction did not stop at the granaries.

By midday, the American strike package expanded into Phase Three: Total Logistics Collapse.

Inside the combat center of the USS Gerald R. Ford, digital target profiles switched from food processing centers to the foundational lifelines of the entire imperial civilization. The orders from Eagle Actual were unequivocal: reduce the empire’s internal transport and resource infrastructure to prehistoric levels.

High above the clouds, the steady rumble of heavy aviation shook the atmosphere.

Forty miles north of the burning grain basins lay the Grand Quarry of Karst, the empire’s primary source of enchanted basalt and masonry stone used for repairing fortresses and carving divine warding runestones. Over six thousand bonded laborers and imperial stonemasons operated the tiered canyon.

Four B-52H Stratofortress bombers, flying high out of the western island base, appeared on high-altitude radar corridors. Their cavernous bomb bays opened wide.

Screeech—

Dozens of CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapons and five-hundred-pound general-purpose bomb strings plummeted through the thin air.

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!

The northern quarry was obliterated.

The cascading strings of high explosives detonated across the stepped limestone cliffs. The explosions triggered catastrophic, miles-long rockslides that brought hundreds of thousands of tons of mountain stone crashing down into the open pits. The great steam-powered winches, the enchanted lifting cranes, and the stone-cutting mills were flattened and buried under forty feet of jagged rubble. The carved highway leading out of the quarry was snapped into floating shelves of cracked shale, entirely impassable to carts or supply beasts.

Almost simultaneously, seventy miles to the northeast, the primary imperial salt flats of the White Marsh were reduced to boiling mud.

Salt was the only chemical preservative known to the pre-modern empire to keep meat, fish, and dairy usable for winter campaigns. Two flights of F/A-18F Super Hornets swept over the vast white pans, dropping strings of Mark 82 unguided bombs fitted with delay fuses.

The earth ruptured. The shallow subterranean saltwater beds erupted upward, mixing with thousands of gallons of burning aviation fuel and pulverizing the dried crystal mounds into ash-covered brine. The drying kilns, the salt warehouses, and the packing houses collapsed in roaring walls of fire. The empire’s ability to preserve food for the upcoming winter was eradicated in twenty minutes.

Next came the lumber arteries.

The ancient Blackpine Sawmills, nestled along the foaming rapids of the northern rivers, provided the straight cedar and treated pine required for building catapult frames, palisade stakes, and arrow shafts. Strike fighters released cluster munitions across the log flumes and drying sheds. The stacked, dried timber caught fire like dry paper. Within an hour, a towering wall of orange flame tore down the entire riverbank, consuming millions of board-feet of cured military timber and sending a choking blanket of white pine ash drifting into the sky.

Every single road hub, crossroad inn, and draft-beast breeding pasture outside the Aegis was systematically dismantled.

The great imperial horse-breeding paddocks at Greenfield were scattered. The low-level sonic booms from passing supersonic jets panicked hundreds of high-grade warhorses, sending them breaking through their splintered wooden fences and stampeding wild into the wilderness, completely lost to the imperial cavalry divisions.

The sky above the continent was no longer blue.

A thick, dark veil of mixed black smoke, grain dust, pine ash, and pulverized limestone choked the sun. The afternoon daylight turned a sickly, apocalyptic amber, casting long, bruised shadows across the rolling terrain.

Inside the imperial pavilion at Port Solis, the air was suffocating.

Spatial teleportation runes on the arrival dais flared almost continuously, spitting out broken, soot-covered couriers every few minutes. The marble floor, once spotless and grand, was slick with sweat, dirt, and dried blood.

"The Great Quarry is gone!" an overseer shrieked, his voice raw from screaming. "The canyon collapsed! The master masons are buried! We have no stone to repair the breached coastal forts!"

"The White Marsh salt flats have been turned to poison and ash!" another herald gasped, falling flat on his face, clawing at Belis’s velvet boots. "No salt can be gathered! The meat depots in the interior will rot in their barrels within days!"

"The Blackpine flumes are burning! The timber yards are cinders!"

"The draft beasts have scattered across the plains! The wagon trains cannot move!"

Belis stood frozen in the center of the room. The imperial ledgers he had carried for decades lay scattered and trampled on the bloody floor. His wrinkled hands trembled so violently he could not clasp them together.

"It is not an invasion..." Belis whispered, his voice cracking into a broken, hollow whimper. "They are not trying to take our land. They are... they are unmaking the empire. They are dismantling everything our ancestors built over three centuries... and we have not even seen a single one of their foot soldiers."

Lord Justin slumped against an ivory column, his sword sliding from his numb, armor-clad fingers. The heavy steel weapon hit the floor with a hollow clatter.

"Fifty thousand men on these cliffs..." Justin laughed, a terrible, broken sound devoid of sanity. "We stand here in shiny gold plate, holding sharp steel, with magic gems in our pommels. And fifty leagues away, the world is being erased. We are guarding an empty house. A house with no bread, no stone, no horses, and no salt."

Goddess Viona stood at the precipice of the balcony, her golden robes stained around the hem by the fine gray ash blowing in from the burning interior.

Her divine aura was fluttering wildly. It was no longer a calm, radiant halo; it was an erratic, spitting storm of golden fire that scorched the stone railing beneath her fingers.

She stared out past the edge of the Aegis.

To the west, the American Carrier Strike Group rested motionless on the calm blue water, gray and unyielding, like an array of ancient sea gods watching an anthill burn. To the east, north, and south, the inland sky was dominated by towering black pillars of smoke that merged into a single, terrifying cloud of industrial ruin.

Her holy shield was intact. The Aegis of the Sun was untouched. Not a single pebble inside Port Solis had been scratched by foreign steel.

Yet she had never felt so utterly powerless.

She was an immortal entity of immense magical might, capable of leveling mountains with high-tier celestial incantations. But she could not stop forty separate fires raging across hundreds of leagues simultaneously. She could not cast a spell to rebuild forty square miles of pulverized grain silos. She could not breathe life back into the crushed iron foundries.

Modern total warfare did not care about her divine lineage. It ignored her divine challenges. It bypassed her proud frontline champions and cleanly, efficiently severed the neck of her civilization.

Viona turned around slowly. Her eyes, usually glowing with cold celestial beauty, were bloodshot with hysterical rage and deep, gnawing terror.

She looked at Ayanokoji.

The boy stood in the corner of the pavilion, his dark hair undisturbed, his black abyssal spear held loosely in his right hand. The black Torment Band around his arm pulsed with cold crimson light. His face was entirely devoid of fear, sorrow, or triumph. He was simply a mirror reflecting the cold mathematical doom of the empire.

"Ayanokoji..." Viona whispered, her voice shaking violently as she crossed the pavilion. She reached out, her trembling, jewel-ringed fingers digging painfully into the fabric of his uniform. "Tell me... what do they target next? What else can they possibly burn?!"

Ayanokoji’s dull, glassy red eyes did not shift. He stared straight ahead into the empty air, his voice emerging in that steady, emotionless monotone that chilled her to the marrow of her bones.

"The secondary logistics nodes have been successfully neutralized, Master," Ayanokoji stated flatly. "Physical transport across the continental interior is effectively paralyzed. According to standard operational doctrine they’ll attack vital resources."

"What is it?"

"Water purification stations, municipal reservoirs, and sewage aqueducts for the civilian population centers," Ayanokoji answered.

"Then in that case, we must attack now!"