The next moment.
Five Shadow Marine Warriors stepped forward in unison and, together, hoisted a thirty-ton Iron Golem clean off the ground.
A flash of purple light followed.
Whoosh.
The five Shadow Marine Warriors and the Iron Golem they carried dissolved into a huge cloud of violet smoke and vanished on the spot.
This was their exclusive, utterly unreasonable, and downright brutal strategic-transport method.
Right behind them came the Engineering Endermen of the logistics branch, ferrying crates of ammo and mountains of gear.
They too hugged their towering piles of supplies, turned into streaks of purple light, and disappeared.
Weathered Survivor Base.
Atop the watchtower refitted from an abandoned steelworks, One-Eyed Garry pressed a telescope to his socket and anxiously scanned the eastern horizon.
The thunder of artillery, even fifty kilometres away, still rolled across the land like distant thunder, proclaiming the carnage of that battlefield.
He lowered the telescope and paced irritably.
"Damn it, why isn't that bastard Zack back yet?"
He knew Zack's speed; even on foot the round trip of a hundred kilometres should take two or three hours at most.
Yet half a day had passed with no word from that side.
A strong sense of dread began to coil around his heart.
Could those newcomers be stronger than he'd thought—
so strong that even an experienced scout squad like Zack's had been taken without a sound?
The more he thought, the more restless he became.
"Hey!"
He barked at a nearby sentry, patience gone.
"Go tell every last brother below to stay sharp. No one wanders off, got it?"
"Yes, boss."
The man answered at once and turned to carry the order.
But the instant he turned, he froze as if struck by a paralysis spell.
His mouth fell open, eyes staring blankly at the sky.
"The hell? Didn't you hear me?"
Garry's temper flared; he kicked the sentry sprawling.
The man tumbled, too terrified to feel the pain, and scrabbled upright, pointing skyward, voice twisted with fear.
"N-no, boss… the sky… look at the sky!"
Seeing that ghost-white face, Garry's unease deepened.
He jerked his head up, following the outstretched finger toward the cloudless blue.
The sight stopped even his apocalypse-hardened heart for a beat.
In the empty multiverse, a dense swarm of black specks had soundlessly appeared.
No.
Not specks.
With the vision of a Tier 3 Awakened he could clearly see cube-shaped, snow-white, ghost-like creatures.
Their heads were perfect cubes, soft tentacles drifting beneath.
"What the hell are those things?"
Garry's mind went blank.
"A new kind of flying Mutated Zombie?"
"Stop gawking! Sound the alarm—everyone battle stations!"
He roared at the dumbstruck sentry.
The man scrambled down the watchtower as if granted amnesty.
Garry kept his lone eye fixed on the spectral white swarm, suspicion and dread warring on his face.
He narrowed that remaining eye, trying to see more clearly.
Then he witnessed something even more bizarre.
Atop each white cube creature… something stood.
Giant metal behemoths?
Several thousand metres up, among the clouds, a hundred huge golems floated, their signature infant-like wails lost in the high-altitude wind.
On every golem flat crown stood five Shadow Marine Warriors clutching a thirty-one-ton war machine—an Iron Golem.
This was the opening course America had prepared for the raid.
"Target locked—commence drop."
At the command, the warriors atop the golems released their grip without hesitation.
Captain Ash, his soul fused into the Iron Golem, felt his very spirit torn from its shell.
Weightlessness.
Pure, unsupported weightlessness.
After a decade of piloting fighters and pulling every extreme manoeuvre, he had never felt a drop this raw, this unprotected.
Wind howled past his ears; the ground rushed up at dizzying speed.
Thirty-one tons, supercharged by gravity, turned his steel body into a tungsten lance that could pierce anything.
Even with nerves of steel, Ash's heart hammered wildly.
Exhilarating.
Absolutely f***ing exhilarating.
So this is war in Other World?
Before the adrenaline rush could fade, the next moment, in Garry's horrified stare, over a hundred steel titans—like meteors from the multiverse—plummeted straight down.
Their target: the Weathered Survivor Base below.
"Holy shit!!"
When Garry realised the giants were coming right for them, only two words remained in his skull.
They really were after him.
And—
what the hell kind of attack was this?
An airborne drop?
From several thousand metres?
Yet worse was the speed of their fall.
This wasn't free-fall.
It was the devastating acceleration granted to thirty-one terrifying tons by Mother Gravity.
They tore the air with a shriek, swelling to fill Garry's pupils.
An apocalyptic pressure, as if the sky itself were collapsing, clamped down on the entire base.
Before the sirens could finish wailing,
before the numb survivors could react,
the first Iron Golem arrived.
BOOM!!
A thunderous, earth-shaking roar,
as the thirty-one-ton steel giant slammed into the central plaza in an unstoppable, perfect landing.
No explosion, no fireball.
Just raw kinetic fury unleashed.