Chapter 119: It’s Futile

Goddess Viona lowered her arms slowly. The golden embroidery along the cuffs of her silk robes was singed, but she barely noticed. Behind her, the पचास thousand imperial legionnaires entrenched along the cliffside parapets were dead silent. The cheers had died in their throats. The holy fire of their goddess had not even reached the iron hulls; it had been blown out of the sky like cheap paper lanterns.

Viona’s teeth ground together with a harsh, grating sound.

"Tricks," she whispered, her voice trembling with rising fury. "A fluked combination of iron needles and sulfur. You think you can swat away the elements themselves?!"

She planted her boots wider, tapping into the deep, ancient reservoirs of her divine core. If fire could be dispersed by concussive shockwaves, then she would call upon magic that possessed physical mass and weight.

"Depths of the boundless abyss, heed my call!" Viona chanted, her voice climbing into an ear-splitting shriek.

A massive, cerulean magic circle expanded beneath the water of the bay, stretching three hundred yards wide. The sea began to boil and froth. The tide receded violently from the stone docks of Port Solis as thousands of tons of saltwater gathered into a towering, solid mass.

"Eighth-Tier Hydro-Arcana: Tidal Serpent of Leviathan!"

With a deafening roar of churning water, a colossal beast rose from the ocean. It was a serpent composed entirely of high-density pressurized saltwater, over eighty feet thick and four hundred feet long. Its head rose sixty feet into the air, its liquid fangs churning with localized whirlpools.

With a whip of its massive tail, the liquid titan surged forward. It did not fly through the air; it traveled half-submerged, using the ocean itself as its conduit, moving across the waves at eighty knots straight toward the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill.

"Drown them!" Viona screamed, pointing toward the lead destroyer. "Drag their iron into the dark mud!"

Inside the Combat Information Center of the Gerald R. Ford, the tactical screens flickered as the acoustic and surface radar tracks updated.

"Surface contact approaching at high velocity," the sensor operator barked. "Displacement profile matches a sustained water-mass anomaly. Heading directly for Churchill on bearing two-seven-zero."

Admiral Donovan stood over the console, calm and detached. "They’re trying kinetic hydro-dynamics. Weapons free on heavy anti-surface ordinance. Churchill, deploy the five-inch battery. Have the Bunker Hill fire a pair of Harpoons set for low-skim surface detonation."

"Bridge, Churchill acknowledges. Main gun tracking target."

One mile off the carrier’s starboard side, the forward five-inch/62-caliber Mark 45 naval gun on the bow of the USS Winston S. Churchill traversed smoothly, its long barrel locking onto the charging water serpent.

BOOM!

A five-inch high-explosive round roared from the barrel, followed two seconds later by another.

BOOM! BOOM!

The automated turret cycled at sixteen rounds per minute. The shells were equipped with point-detonating and delayed-cavitation fuses. They slammed directly into the throat of the roaring water serpent.

KABOOM! KABOOM!

Underwater shockwaves ripped through the creature’s compressed mana structure. The high-explosive filler tore open massive voids in the pressurized water, collapsing its forward momentum.

Before the serpent could reform its crest, two AGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missiles fired from the slanted deck canisters of the USS Bunker Hill dropped out of the sky.

Skimming barely five feet above the swells, the five-hundred-pound penetrating blast-fragmentation warheads slammed square into the core of the serpent’s chest.

KER-BLAM!

A catastrophic double detonation blew the liquid beast apart from the inside out. A towering geyser of foaming brine and white spray shot a hundred feet into the air, raining back down into the ocean in a harmless, flat wave that lapped softly against the hull of the Churchill.

The water serpent was gone in ten seconds flat.

On the breakwater, Viona gasped, staggering back half a step as the magical backlash sent a dull thud through her mana core.

"Water... blasted apart by mere steel?!" she stammered, her eyes wide with shock.

The imperial legionnaires on the cliffs were beginning to back away from the palisades, their hands shaking as they watched the liquid titan vanish into thin air.

"No... no!" Viona raged, her hair flying wildly as celestial lightning sparked around her shoulders. "You cannot block the heavens! You cannot shoot the sky!"

She raised her right hand toward the overcast clouds above the bay.

The temperature plummeted. A jagged purple magic ring spun rapidly into existence three miles above the water, tapping directly into the atmosphere’s electrical charge.

"Wrath of the Celestial Heavens: Judgment of the Thunder God!"

CRACK!

A blinding bolt of violet divine lightning, five feet thick, plunged straight out of the cloud deck. It moved at the speed of light, arcing downward with enough raw electrical energy to vaporize an entire castle keep, targeting the primary radar mast of the USS Gerald R. Ford.

There was no missile fast enough to intercept lightning.

Yet, as the violet bolt struck the carrier, there was no explosion.

The ship’s massive steel superstructure, bonded tightly with a comprehensive naval earthing and lightning-dissipation grid, swallowed the strike whole. Copper grounding cables, heavy conductive bulkheads, and Faraday-cage shielding shunted the millions of volts directly down through the hull and harmlessly into the millions of gallons of surrounding conductive saltwater.

A shower of bright white sparks danced along the carrier’s flight deck edge, accompanied by a sharp snap.

Inside the carrier’s bridge, the instrument panels flickered for less than a second as the surge protectors tripped and reset automatically.

"Direct lightning strike on the primary mast," the damage control officer reported over the internal net. "Zero casualties. Circuit breakers absorbed the surge. Radar and communications are fully operational."

Donovan didn’t even blink. "Understood. Continue monitoring."

On the flight deck below, deckhands in yellow and green jerseys simply glanced up at the scorch mark on the lightning arrester, then went right back to chaining down an F/A-18.

Viona stared in absolute horror.

Her ultimate lightning spell—the divine punishment that had executed rogue dragons and rebel archmages for three centuries—had vanished into the ship like water poured into sand. The iron monster had literally absorbed the wrath of the heavens and kept humming along as if nothing had happened.

"H-How...?" Viona whispered, her breath turning shallow. "How do they possess wards against the gods themselves?!"