As Frank Franklin and his entourage of mages left the warehouse, one of the hooded men hastened his pace to catch up with him."Father." Pulling his hood down, the mage revealed a handsome, young face. Fred Franklin was looking a little nervous, his pale face slick with perspiration. "Are you sure this is really necessary? Setting 3,000 monsters on a city?"
"What are you saying, now that we"ve already reached this point?" Fred Franklin laughed, not at all bothered. In fact, he was pretty pleased at giving the girls the slip at the warehouse. He was still amused at their stunned expressions when he revealed that the people in the chamber were all illusions. "Getting cold feet now?"
"No…but…I feel that this is a little…excessive?"
"Hmm…" Fred grinned. "Not at all. By my calculations, I think our plan will have a 90% chance of succeeding. I think it"s better to prepare for the unexpected, just in case the 10% chance of failure actually happens."
Then he paused for a moment. His entire entourage also halted behind him, waiting on his every word. Not caring about them, Frank snickered.
"Well then…the monsters should be annihilating the northern fortress right about…now."
He narrowed his eyes, and for the first time, a tinge of seriousness gleamed in those dark amber pupils.
"The actual battle will take place in the morning. What perfect timing."
With a chuckle, he and his entourage of mages disappeared into the thick crowds that thronged among the streets of Jing Tian City, the ma.s.ses still unaware of the tragedy that would befall them shortly.
*
The alarms rang shrilly throughout the military camp. Everywhere, soldiers were hurrying about, rus.h.i.+ng toward the armory where the personnel in charge were handing out weapons. Not just rifles and ammunition but swords, axes, hammers, bladed weapons and other melee weapons. The quartermasters were also busily giving out supplies, to ensure the soldiers had enough to last them in the battlefield. The military staff themselves were strapping on armor and their gear, beginning the casting of their spells to physically reinforce themselves or boost the destructive power of their weapons.
I woke up to the shrieks and red lights, dazed from the commotion. Finding myself in an unfamiliar bed, I sat up and rummaged for my gla.s.ses.
"Oh, you"re finally awake."
A soldier with a white lab coat over his military uniform paused to check on me, a tense smile forming on his face.
"You"ve been asleep for about a week now. We were thinking you"ll never wake up." he glanced up at the ringing alarms. "I guess the noise was too much."
"What"s going on? Where am I?"
"Oh, this is the northern Jing Tian Fortress. You"ve been here before, I believe. A few months ago, students from your school came for a training camp – you were one of them, I recall." The doctor turned grim. "But now"s quite the bad time to wake up. A horde of approximately three thousand monsters are closing in on our position as I speak. All military and combat personnel have been mobilized to fight them. With such huge numbers, however, I don"t know how long we"ll be able to hold out for." He then began striding away. "Sorry, but I"ve to prepare. There will definitely be a lot of wounded, so…"
"I"ll join the fight." I was already getting out of bed, putting on my shoes and grabbing my storage device and other stuff. My two swords, Gan Jiang and Mo Ye, were right beside me, the soldiers having been kind enough to leave them where I could retrieve them immediately.
"You"re a civilian," the doctor countered sternly. "You should be evacuating from the base with all the other non-combat personnel."
"I"m a student of Jing Tian Magic Academy and have trained in combat magic. I can"t just leave you guys to fight on your own." I took a deep breath. "How long until the monsters get here?"
"An hour, maybe less." The doctor scowled. "They"re moving quite rapidly. It"s strange…it"s as if someone is directing them. I"ve never seen monsters move together in such large numbers with purpose."
"…"
There was something about his revelation that struck me as ominous. Monsters being directed? In such large numbers? Moving with purpose? I had never heard anything like that before, even from any of the books I had read. Yeah, this was odd in the extreme.
However, I didn"t have the time to ponder over that. The monsters were near, and they would hit the fortress before I could consider any possibility with regards to their strange behavior. I should focus on the current predicament for now.
We had to eradicate the monsters before we sustained too many casualties.
None of the soldiers paid any attention to me as I hastened down the corridor, looking for any sense of direction. They were all gathering in the plaza in full combat gear, armed with a vast range of weapons. I could see Sergeants bellowing orders as they organized their squads and platoons into neat rows and officers frantically exchanging holographic notes and discussing tactics and countermeasures against such a desperate situation. Even with full attendance of every soldier in the base, they only numbered to about five hundred at most.
Not very good odds against three thousand monsters. It normally depended on the rank and type of monsters – after all, even a single squad of ten soldiers would be able to exterminate three thousand rank F Minion-cla.s.s monsters on their own, but from the grim and tense expressions written over every soldier"s face, I could tell that we were facing quite the dangerous enemy.
Otherwise they wouldn"t be mobilizing an entire base of soldiers.
"At least three rank B monsters…"
"A thousand rank C monsters…"
"The rest are mostly rank D monsters…"
"With our current forces, we can"t fight against so many rank C monsters and three rank B monsters…"
"If there were only three rank B monsters, maybe we can hold out against them, but…"
"No way can we fight a thousand rank C monsters and two thousand rank D monsters with the forces we have on hand…"
"We"ll have to do our best…"
I caught snippers of dialogue from the heatedly arguing officers as they discussed numbers and disposition of the enemy. Having fought a rank B monster firsthand, I was aware of what a formidable opponent it was. I didn"t want to get smacked around to death by a Crastrate again. h.e.l.l, I hoped to never see another Crastate for the rest of my life.
"Where are they coming from, Sarge?"
"The north, I heard."
"One big ma.s.s! You can see them stretch for almost a mile!"
"Hah! Great! I"ll be able to increase my tally to a few hundred this time!"
"I"ll probably survive longer than you!"
"Hah! Wanna bet? I"ll probably last an hour more than you!"
"Game on!"
The officers weren"t the only ones talking. I could overhear the common rank and file soldiers chatting to each other, trying to ease themselves before the big fight. Even though they knew most of them wouldn"t survive this conflict, they were still trying to keep the atmosphere light-hearted, bantering and bragging to each other.
What interested me wasn"t the details of their banter, however, but the intelligence I could gather. So the monsters were all coming from the north, and they were clumped up together in a single ma.s.s. That sounded pretty…
…good.
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An idea forming in my head, I hurried toward the northern portion of the base. None of the soldiers were paying any attention to me. Why would they? They dismissed me as a civilian, and one of the sergeants even called out to me as I strode past him.
"Hey, kid! The evacuation is that way! Hurry up! The transports are leaving!"
"Sorry, sarge! I forgot something!"
As he had no authority over me, the sergeant couldn"t order me to leave my stuff behind, and he shook his head with a sigh, relenting. I nodded my thanks and continued toward the northern section of the camp, where several towers stood proudly. Summoning Cygnus, I soared to the highest building and landed on its rooftop, getting a bird"s eye view of the approaching monsters.
The soldiers were right. A ma.s.sed horde of monsters cl.u.s.tered together in a single coherent formation, all marching forward toward a particular destination. I didn"t know if the fortress was their goal, but they were certainly headed in our direction.
And after they took the military camp, they would most likely proceed onward in a straight line. Doing a 180, I saw the familiar silhouette of Jing Tian City in the distance.
"Don"t tell me their destination is Jing Tian City?"
Pus.h.i.+ng up my gla.s.ses as I turned around to study the monsters, I noted that they were still some distance away. At their current speed, they would reach us in forty-five minutes, maybe forty.
Good. More than enough time.
"Scorpio."
Summoning my Constellation spirit, I had him perch on the rooftop. Grinning, I jabbed a finger at the approaching horde of monsters.
"Start casting Antares. We"re going to give them a nasty surprise."
Scorpio nodded, and his stinger began gathering ma.s.sive amounts of mana. Without any monsters to attack me at the moment, I could help Scorpio cast his spell undisturbed, and within fifteen minutes, it was done. Glancing at the immense amount of mana acc.u.mulated at the front of his stinger, I nodded in satisfaction.
"All right, Scorpio! Fire off the Antares! Annihilate that monster horde!"
Scorpio acknowledged with a cheerful nod, his mental acknowledgement pinging the back of my mind. s.h.i.+fting around to gain an optimal angle, he pointed his stinger toward the center of the approaching horde of three thousand monsters and unleashed the red, purple and bluish-white ball of mana into a single tremendous torrent of destructive energy that seared through the military camp, leaving a scorched trail in the forest, before slamming into the middle of the monster army.
The entire horde vanished in a gigantic explosion. A mushroom cloud billowed upward, expanding ravenously as it swallowed up shrieking and roaring monsters, incinerating them instantly. Stretching to about three miles wide in diameter, it mercilessly devoured every trace of the monster horde, wiping them out in a colossal conflagration that left a molten crater in the forest.
The monster horde as well as the forest they were traversing simply ceased to exist.
"HOLY f.u.c.k!"
"What the h.e.l.l?!"
"What"s going on!?"
Below, the soldiers were making a ruckus when they saw the monster horde obliterated from a single spell. Granted, it was a spell of ma.s.s destruction that took an unG.o.dly amount of time to cast, but its effects were sure and true. There was no trace of even the three rank B monsters that commanded the army of terrifying creatures bent on invading Jing Tian City and slaughtering it.
"Did you see that?!"
"Where did that spell come from?!"
"Who cast it!?"
Whoops. Time to go. I was about to turn and jump off the tower and into a waiting Cygnus when someone appeared right in front of me.
"It was you, huh?"
He was a military officer. Spotting the star epaulet on his uniform, I could guess that he was a general, the overall commander of the Northern Fortress. A second later, a few colonels and majors joined him, their weapons at the ready, but the general raised his hand and had them lower their weapons.
"You are…that kid from Jing Tian Academy."
I gulped. "Yes, sir."
He sighed and scratched his head, turning to survey the ma.s.sive destruction I had wrought, then turned to me.
"Don"t get me wrong, kid. I"m grateful to you, but…next time you fire off a nuke from the premises of my base, could you at least let me know beforehand?"
"…will do, sir." If there was a next time, that is. I sincerely hoped there wouldn"t. It certainly wasn"t fun to have a horde of thousands of high ranking monsters marching toward your city everyday. "Um…do you mind if I leave now?"
"Hmm…"
The general stared at me intently, stroking his chin. Then he grinned.
"Before that, do you mind writing a report? I need to submit something to my bosses, after all." He grimaced. "I don"t know if they"re going to just accept that a kid not under my command just nuke an entire army of three thousand monsters into oblivion."
"…right."
"Colonel Tai, help the kid write his report."
A colonel standing next to the general snapped off a salute.
"Yes, sir!" he then turned toward me. "If you don"t mind following me to my office we can get started immediately."
Left without much of a choice, I followed him.