Chapter 41

CHAPTER SIX Deus Ex Machina An old dwarf was fishing off the Goar pier. A fleet of airships had just flown past toward Yokohama. “Wh-what the…?” The old man’s confusion grew as he saw the awakening taking place in the middle of the collapsing iron island. Larger as he heard the cries of the iron island under the warped night sky. In the middle of the geyser produced by the collapse of the island’s corpse… “A giant…?” …stood a figure roughly three hundred meters tall—a mechanical titan. Its silhouette was fuzzy from the warped space dividing Goar and Yokohama, but it clearly had a human shape. The mechanical god was slim, with long limbs, its entire body flickering with lights that resembled kabuki stage makeup, and a sword in its hand so giant, it paralleled its own height. Light radiated from its back, as divine as it was sinister, and it rotated faster and faster to make up a ring of light. The next moment, red rays shot from its left eye. The mechanical god shook its head, and the ray followed its path to raze the airships flying around the island. Most of the dozen aircraft were engulfed in the light and vaporized with an explosion. Only a couple were left, but not due to a miss or mercy on the part of the mechanical god. It was because those left were unarmed. “Wh…? Wha…aaa…?” Although the old man had no way of knowing any of its reasoning. He threw away the rod, and the bucket fell and spilled its contents into the sea as he crawled away. The face of the black-haired man who said he wanted to go to that island crossed his mind. The mechanical god took a step forward. Forward to uniting mankind under the name of the Progenitor, for the sake of world peace. The bodies of all citizens of Yokohama were turned into aether and their souls into data that the mechanical god, Atlas, absorbed. Yokohama collapsed in the blink of an eye without the Atlas to support it. From underneath the rubble escaped Veltol, Gram, Sihlwald, and Takahashi in Gram’s arms. They opened a hole overhead with attack magic and used the rubble as a foothold to escape before the debris could crush them. The four of them saw the Atlas’s red rays engulf the airships flying in the sky. The light had a name. And it was… “Gungnir?!” Gram shouted it out. “Gungnir?” Sihlwald repeated, confused. “I’ve heard of this… It’s the spear of a god in Earth’s mythology, correct?” Veltol said. “Yeah,” Gram replied. “This is an antiaircraft magiweapon developed during City War II, named after the spear.”