Yu lightly waved his hand in place of a reply. The next instant, he was high in the air.
He learned something just now. That man—his will had been lost at the bottom of a bottle, and yet he’d been moved by Devicer Three. He’d displayed respect. This, Yu discovered, was another aspect of what it meant to be a hero.
“Three!” Aliya called. “Look! This is happening near the portal-keep!”
Footage appeared in Yu’s visor and began to play. “That’s—Is that a giant?!”
In the waters near Nayuta, directly next to the crystalline castle, a stream of lava was erupting from the ocean, and it was morphing. Changing. Into something anthropomorphic. Limbs sprouted and bubbled from the fiery torrent, and three cavities were hollowed out on the face—two eyes and a mouth.
The bottom half of the gelatinous lava colossus was concealed beneath the ocean, and the water around its waist boiled violently. From there to its head alone, the monster measured 118 meters tall, dwarfing many of the surrounding buildings.
“I can’t identify it! It’s either extremely rare, or the archmage created it entirely themself!” Aliya was flustered. Yu could hear it. “Its functional name for now will be ‘lava giant’!”
“Roger that. Heading there now.”
They would have to manage against the dragons at Central Tower on their own. The anti-gravity lifters carried Yu across the city at max speed, towards the newborn, burning leviathan.
Central Tower stood, fittingly, in the middle of the central block at three hundred meters tall, with the giant, imitation Prayer Wheel towering at sixty meters nearby. Together, the two buildings supported the needs and wants of the entire settlement—making them high value targets during a war. The perfect prey to send eight white dragons after.
“I’ll handle defense of the tower and the wheel!” Aliya shouted.
“Thanks! I don’t know how I was gonna do that and manage the droids around the city at the same time,” Ijuin replied with audible relief.
When Aliya had first made it to the droid lab’s testing room, it took her a minute to process the sight she saw there. Ijuin sat cross-legged in the middle of a kaleidoscope of holograms projected all around the room. He stared at the floor where bird’s-eye footage of Nayuta depicted enemy and ally positions with dots of varying colors, each corresponding to a different kind of droid or Anomaly. No further information was given. No name tags, no numbers, no data. But the scant amount of information was plenty for Ijuin, and the abundance of information being displayed by the myriad holograms similarly bothered him none.
“Medical, focus on that area,” he muttered, pointing with a baton he’d found from lord knows where. “Kannon Team, deploy to the shopping streets and flush out any stragglers.”
If a device was nano-compatible, Ijuin could crack it. He parsed the constant flow of information, deciphered the best course of action, and enacted it like a conductor to his orchestra, or a shogi player to his pieces.
“You know,” Aliya started to say before she could stop herself, “you almost look pretty cool, for the chubby nerd character.”
“We do not fat-shame in this house, Aliya!”
Meanwhile, just outside the window, a surreal dogfight was underway between the eight dragons and the squadron of giant arms and fighter planes. Aliya quickly turned to step outside and link up with the droids.
The enemies were officially designated as “white dragons,” and this particular breed of drake trended towards the smaller end of the spectrum, generally reaching about fifteen meters in length. But what they lacked in raw strength, they made up for with pure speed and dexterity. Even compared to their red relatives, who could dance across the sky like a swallow, these beasts were unmatched in the air.
A jet-black MUV Silent Raptor tailed one of the dragons endlessly, firing from behind, but a fraction of a second was all it needed to lose sight of its target. The creature sensed the danger with its animalistic instincts, swiveled out of the way, then reappeared behind the Silent Raptor in an instant.
White dragons hunted with deadly ice breath, inducing frostbite in their prey by emitting a frigid flurry from their maws that also pelted their foe with pointy icicles. Pilots the world over had met their end to that very attack.
Not even missiles, supersonic jets, or any other modern long-range weaponry had proved consistently effective against the otherworldly reptiles. Nothing could match their reaction speed, their beastly instincts, their sheer power—but most troublesome of all was, as always, their magical nature. Even when targeted by an auto-tracking missile, the monsters could seemingly vanish out of its path, only to reemerge from nothing and shoot it down with their breath. If it had been an F-15 fighter jet, the machinery would subsequently fail and the pilot would freeze to death in the cockpit.
But the MUV Silent Raptors had no pilots. The anti-gravity lifters allowed the Silent Raptor to practically swim through the air and reposition itself behind the dragon once more. It fired again, but too late. The dragon was already gone. The beast came directly from above this time, reaching down to slam the jet with its hind legs. Too late again. The Silent Raptor swerved right back behind the dragon.
Central Tower was swarming with similar dogfights all over—a never-ending game of tag between the droids and the drakes. Had the Silent Raptors been occupied by pilots, they would have been long dead from the insane g-forces. The maneuvers they were conducting wouldn’t have been possible. But still, the stalemate showed no sign of ending.
“Now!” Aliya thrust out her fist, and a MUV Puppeteer hurled itself towards a dragon in the heat of a chase. The steel fist slammed into the snowy reptile’s body and pummeled it straight into the ground. “Finish it!”
One of the fighter jets broke off and descended with fluidity so graceful that not even a VTOL could have replicated the motion. And it did so while holding a hand axe. Sound waves propagated through the edge, creating a vibroblade, and it hummed through the air as the arm brought it down over the dragon’s neck—a hair too slow. The dragon, a beast driven into a corner with nothing to lose, sprang up and dodged the blow. It landed back on the ground on all fours and took a wide, firm stance. It almost looked like a dinosaur.
Aliya was not entertained, however.
“Ugh, what am I supposed to do?!” she groaned.
“I might have an idea!”
Natsuki kicked off the ground and up to the grounded dragon’s snout. With a flutter of her peony furisode and a flash of her monomolecular blade, she buried the katana deep into the beast’s eye.
The dragon roared, at last in pain. Natsuki, despite what her usual antics might lead one to believe, could not fly, and she had been waiting patiently for just this moment.
“Whoa!”
“Natsuki!”
But the dragon easily flung the girl off with a sharp flick of its head. The white monster beat its wings angrily and took to the air once more, unconcerned with the pest on the ground.
“Gah, this isn’t gonna work! This guy makes my sword look like a toothpick!”
Natsuki stuck the landing and emerged unscathed. Unfortunately, not even the kabukimono samurai girl could stand up to the king of reptiles. Aliya’s shoulders slumped dejectedly.
“Wait...” she murmured suddenly.
Aliya ordered the droids to continue as they were and scurried out of the lab. Ijuin was too focused to even notice her leave.
She flew into the elevator, rode it down to the ninth floor, then dashed into the Other World Archive for Culturally Significant Artifacts—otherwise known as the Treasury. Hurrying through and around the various items on display, she came to one in particular and stopped.
“Natsuki, do you have a minute?” Aliya asked through the commlink.
“You know I love our chats, but I’m sorta fighting a dragon right now,” she replied. “Can it wait?”
“Not if you want to win.” There, inside a display case all by itself, was the Green Dragon Crescent Blade. And below its deadly, curved edge, down the long shaft at the ferrule, was a wheel. “There’s a weapon here, and I think it has a Prayer Wheel. A small one, like the Mark III has.”
“Wait, what?!”
Aliya’s head started to tingle.