When the missile equipped with the wide-area incineration warhead exploded, Koutarou and the others were just outside its effective range, which was simply because they had moved in a zigzag pattern rather than directly toward Kiriha’s group. If they had moved a little closer, they would have been in danger.
“This is horrible...” Koutarou said. “Maxfern blew up even his own allies.”
Upon reaching the effective area of the missile, they were faced with a land devastated by fire. The trees and shrubs were carbonized and had lost their shape. The only things left were scorched stones. There were no survivors in the burned wasteland.
“Yeah. There are a lot of confused spirits,” Sanae said. “Neither the animals, plants, nor humans know that they’ve died.” She was quietly angry. She normally openly displayed her emotions, but not this time. The sight she was seeing was terrible.
“They really will do anything...” Koutarou murmured. He and the others had expected this sight. Even a few hundred meters away from the effective area, they had felt the blast wave and heat, so they had known what sort of destruction they would witness, and they’d been prepared for it. Still, when faced with reality, the shock was palpable.
“Even I would not cause such senseless destruction,” Alunaya said in disgust. Not even the fire dragon emperor would bring such chaotic destruction with his flames. He used fire for life and to live. The destruction before them was clearly not for such a purpose.
“I wonder if the others are okay...” Shizuka murmured with worry. If the girls had been within the range of such destruction, it was hard to imagine they were safe.
“I hope they’re all right,” Koutarou agreed with a somber expression. Though he believed they were alive, he couldn’t shake the fear of what he’d do if they weren’t. But those three had created countless miracles, so Koutarou told himself that surely they had done so this time as well.
“Wahahaha, they’re dead!” Maxfern’s voice suddenly echoed through their surroundings. “I fired the missile right where I knew they were!”
Koutarou looked up at where the voice was coming from and found a large mobile weapon floating in the air. Maxfern had been convinced that Koutarou would show up and had moved the mobile weapon into position.
“Maxfern! Are you insane?!” Koutarou shouted.
“Who can say? After two thousand years, how much sanity could remain?”
“How many of your own allies have you sacrificed to kill just three people?!”
“You do the same, don’t you?!” Maxfern shouted back at him. “Or are you under some delusion that soldiers won’t be harmed?!”
“The soldiers aren’t fighting under the assumption that they will be killed by their allies! You’re just tightening the noose around your own neck, Maxfern!”
“Don’t worry. They will hear that it was you who killed them!” Maxfern laughed. Even if the Imperial Army had proof, the Liberation Army would only say it was fake. They would never imagine that Ralgwin would do such a thing. His reputation shielded Maxfern from suspicion, hiding the truth from the troops.
“You are rotten...” Koutarou was aghast at Maxfern’s words. He had fought others who could be considered evil. But even when cornered, they had followed the unwritten rules of the battlefield. None had ever ignored the loss of soldiers from the outset. But Maxfern was different. He easily committed taboos. Koutarou didn’t understand what drove him, but it was shocking behavior.
“This is war, Blue Knight! I will pay any price to kill your women!” Maxfern taunted him. Killing Kiriha, Ruth, and Clan was a huge strategic victory for him. It would also allow him to pay Koutarou back for some of the grudges of the past, so losing some soldiers meant nothing. He would do anything—use anything—to win. His frame of mind hadn’t changed in over two thousand years.
“Unfortunately, you have failed in that, Violbarum Maxfern.” That was when a cool voice rang out, stopping Maxfern short. It was a voice he never could have expected.
“Kiriha-san?!” Koutarou exclaimed.
“We finally meet, Satomi Koutarou.”
The voice belonged to Kiriha. At some point, she had joined them, wearing her usual calm smile. Naturally, Clan and Ruth were behind her. All three of them looked fine.
“How?! How could you have survived that?!” Maxfern screamed, astonished by their appearance. He couldn’t believe it. There was no way they could have survived the wide-area incineration warhead as far as he knew. That wasn’t overconfidence or blind belief either—anyone would understand that upon seeing the devastating explosion.
“It was simple,” Clan replied. “We collapsed a cave on purpose and buried ourselves.”
They had run into a cave by the ravine and blown up the entrance. The threats from the warhead were the shock wave, heat, and lack of oxygen. However, distortion fields and Spiritual Energy Fields had some resistance to those, so by using bedrock to block out most of the danger, they had survived. Of course, depending on the direction of the entrance and how deep the cave went, they could still have been cooked alive, but fortunately, the cave they had run into was deep enough for them to survive.
“But even if you survived the explosion, how did you get out?” Shizuka asked, perplexed. Hiding in a cave could protect them from the explosion, but it would trap them. It should have been incredibly difficult to get out without proper tools.
“Good point.” Ruth nodded. “It was a gamble.” The girls had actually been buried inside.
“We didn’t know if we could escape before running out of oxygen,” Clan explained.
Not everything had been ideal, and they hadn’t been able to plan everything, but their top priority at the time had been to escape the explosion.
“Then how are you here?!” Maxfern shouted. “That should be impossible!” He couldn’t accept the situation. And especially not that Kiriha was alive. She looked a lot like his niece, Lidith, who had once betrayed him. Her getting out of the situation unharmed was incredibly frustrating.
“In conclusion, you went too far, Violbarum Maxfern,” Kiriha told him, hiding her mouth behind her fan.
The gesture that seemed to be making fun of him only angered Maxfern further. Then Theia and Sanae-nee, who spoke through the comms on Koutarou’s armor, poured even more salt into the wound.
“How foolish. This is what happens when you let your emotions get the better of you and use that kind of bomb,” Theia said.
“Thanks to you burning everything down, it was easy to find them,” Sanae-nee added.
It was they who had saved the girls. The effects of the warhead had been disastrous, burning down everything within a kilometer, but that had removed all life from the area, including plant life. As a result, Sanae-nee had been able to easily locate them. After all, there were no other living auras nearby, which had made it simple. Theia had rushed to the spot with soldiers and dug them out.
“Impossible!” Maxfern exclaimed.
“If you had been a little more careful, you would have won,” Theia continued. “You were too hasty, Maxfern.”
If Maxfern had used a less powerful bomb, or a biological or chemical weapon, the outcome would have been different. Some life would have survived, and it would have been difficult to find the three girls in the cave. But due to his insistence on using excessive firepower, he had lost his chance. In that crucial moment, the gap in their experience fighting with spiritual energy and magic had decided the outcome.
“Even so, it won’t matter if you all die here!” Maxfern screamed. “Die! I’ll kill you all!”
The large mobile weapon had a second Rengan Strategic Missile stored behind it with the same warhead as the first one. If he fired it, he would be able to kill the three girls for sure, not to mention the Blue Knight and Princess Theiamillis were present too. It was the perfect time to make up for his failure.
“You seem cunning at first glance, but when you get emotional you lose sight of things,” Kiriha answered just as the three people next to Koutarou disappeared. A moment later, there was an explosion in the back part of the mobile weapon.
“Grevanas, what happened?!” Maxfern cried.
“It seems like an unmanned craft self-destructed! The missile launcher has been damaged!”
“What?!”
One of the unmanned craft that Clan was controlling had self-destructed. She had stolen four from the Liberation Army, three of which had been lost when used as decoys. Clan had used the remaining one to attack the mobile weapon. When firing a weapon, the distortion field in the area was released, so a relatively small unmanned craft could slip in. Thanks to Clan’s skilled disguise of signals, the craft’s approach had gone unnoticed, so Maxfern had had no way of stopping it. That said, because it was so small, the force behind its self-destruction wasn’t all that large. The missile launcher had been damaged, but it hadn’t caused any real damage to the mobile weapon itself.
“It looks like it worked out,” Clan remarked. “Now there’s no need to worry about that bomb.” Her voice came from Koutarou’s armor. She wasn’t actually there. In fact, the three girls were just holograms serving as a distraction, which was how they had suddenly disappeared.