Fanaticism (1)
"Damn it!"
The faces of the demons charging at the Information Castle Dante had built contorted with ugly fury.
'A siege defense out of nowhere?'
And not some makeshift fort—this was a finished work, every structure optimized for defense.
"First, attack!"
Just as the army of Hell reached its decision, spells fired from three thousand gunports.
They were basic pure-attribute spells, but nine thousand shots per second was overwhelming.
"Arrgh!"
The vanguard demons toppled, and the second line—running over their bodies—soon collapsed too.
The mounting corpses began to expose a definite threshold between firepower and mass.
'Is this even possible?'
A condensation of magic.
Too complex for one human to manage, but Dante had made it his specialty and his trade.
"Charge! Push them with numbers!" To take a fortress without feeling, the demons had to accept sacrifice.
"Go! Go!"
Throwing themselves in with death in their eyes, the line of force began to be pushed toward the Information Castle.
"It's working! A little more!"
As the leading demons closed to forty meters, Dante propped his feet on the table and put a cigarette between his lips.
"Activate automaton."
He tilted his head and sparked it with his fingers. The castle rose more than a meter into the air.
Kukukukukuku!
Blood-smeared frontline demons widened their eyes in disbelief at what was happening.
"W-what is that?"
No—they couldn't bring themselves to believe it.
"The castle's moving."
Slowly, yes, but to see an enormous castle shift as a whole was a spectacle.
Still, watching demons were so irritated they wanted to kill the nearest thing.
Dante exhaled a long stream of smoke, leaned back in his chair, and watched the multivision.
"If only it were faster, it'd be perfect." The automaton simultaneously relocated the coordinates of every magic circle entering the Information Castle. Precise like clockwork gears, its speed depended entirely on Pascal's computational rate.
'If I had ten more years—no, five.' He regretted not having been able to make a truly impregnable system.
'No excuses.'
Dante crushed his cigarette with a bitter smile.
"Someone always manages in the end." Thinking of Shirone, whose gap had already widened, Dante began to actively manipulate the castle.
The demons following the shifting Information Castle had killing intent in their eyes.
"The demons are going to flip out!"
No matter how slow, when you counted how many demons had to die to move the castle a single meter, it was a decisive advantage.
You could see the demon formation, which had held the horizon, compressing toward the Information Castle.
Lupist, watching from the Tormia front, muttered in astonishment, "You can move a castle?"
Of course, the demon host numbered in the hundreds of millions; they didn't have the power to entirely overturn the tide.
"Impressive."
But if a single person had caused such a deviation, the efficiency was on the order of ten thousand times greater.
"There are talents in Tormia, it seems."
Garcia, second commander of the cathedral forces and Amy's knight, had come up beside him.
Lupist offered a brief salute. "He was once judged a talent who could represent the kingdom. No one disputes that now, but—"
"You mean Shirone. I'm envious." There wasn't a mage in the world who didn't know Yahweh came from the kingdom of Tormia.
"I'm not proud of it, exactly. In a sense, that child isn't the kingdom's possession."
He had already stepped outside the system.
"No point clinging to what you can't control. What matters to me is this." Lupist gestured at the Information Castle. "The 3rd Division will support the defense. Whatever happens, bring Dante back."
"Yes!"
Knowing Dante's strategic value, the division commander moved his forces on command.
Having checked them on the rear-feed multivision, Dante opened a stair on the castle wall.
"This is a good place to start. Deactivate the automaton."
Stopping the computations needed for movement freed up various systems.
Firepower climbed, of course, and demons shattered before the walls.
"Raaaargh! Raaaargh!"
As the demons' screams poured through the speakers, the screen blinked red.
Enemy in the blind spot.
At that moment Dante manipulated a device.
"Now! I'll smash you!"
A demon at the gate raised a giant hammer—and a voice came from the door.
- Please enter the password.
"Huh? A password?"
Looking closer, a panel with numbers and symbols had been installed near the doorknob.
A demon, half-open-mouthed as he watched, reached to press a key.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
A mortar fired from the inner keep arced down in front of the wall and struck the demons.
"You stupid bastards! Just smash it and go in!"
When the vanguard was annihilated, the second line swung huge scythes and surged for the gate.
"I'll cut you down!"
Dante snapped into the microphone.
- The password is 1111.
The demon froze mid-swing, a serious internal conflict flickering across his eyes. He lowered his scythe and extended a finger.
"Crap!"
He pressed the number 1 four times, but when nothing happened he looked up and shouted, "What the hell? It won't open!"
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
A second mortar volley obliterated the second line. Dante's voice crackled out again.
- …you have to press Enter.
Veins stood out in the demons' eyes.
"You making fun of us?"
From that point on it was pure, manic destruction; every weapon slammed into the gate.
"Damn solid!" Its durability far exceeded expectations, but the immense mass pushing from behind could not be stopped.
"They've broken through!"
The gate opened. Hearing the alarm from the control room ceiling, Dante rose.
"Activate the resistance system."
The demons poured into the inner bailey like vomit and froze at the sight inside.
"Is that an actual castle?"
There were stone paths rising through grass, fountains and statues. On the inner keep ringed by the moat, Tormia's 3rd Division stood ready.
"Finally, something to kill! Go!"
As the demons headed for the inner keep, mines under the grass exploded and gun barrels popped from the statues.
A fountain circulating combustible liquid ignited, spraying fireballs in every direction.
"Run! Run!"
It was mountain after mountain of defenses.
As they entered the drawbridge to cross the moat, a hologram of a beauty appeared.
- Welcome to Dante's Castle!
"Shut up!"
Even knowing it was fake, they clawed at it—and beneath their feet a chill void yawned.
When the drawbridge vanished and they fell into the moat, a powerful corrosive began to eat at their skin.
"Raaaargh!"
Green liquid boiled, serpents rose to the surface and spat acid in all directions.
'What is this place?'
Thinking how many more traps they'd have to pass before meeting the castle's lord, a demon near death felt a prickling dread. The greatness of the Information Castle was that it twisted the demons' trajectories by at least 0.1 degrees.
'0.1 degrees.'
Indistinguishable to the eye, but Lupist was satisfied with that.
'The important thing is that their course is altered.' Even if the starting point looked the same, the farther the line ran, the more glaring the difference would become.
"Ironwave!"
A wave of iron pushed the earth aside, and Garcia burned the enemies with infernal flames.
In the sky, Plu's phoenix formation expelled fire according to its algorithm.
"Ha ha ha! Humans! It's humans!"
The battlefield resembled Hell, but for the demons it was their most comfortable place.
'That's the problem. It's hard to break their morale.'
Beyond physical power, the demons' bellicosity was a temperament humans simply didn't have.
Seeing the allied troops pull back, the Fairy King Enox raised his hand.
"A human's enemy is an elf's enemy."
Lupist requested that the army of Hell be diverted toward Bashka. That would require twisting their bearing by more than thirty degrees, even roughly speaking.
"Open the flower field!"
The ground trembled, and over three hundred gigantic structures unfolded steel petals like flowers.
A shadow spread for kilometers; fierce energy crackled over the petals as if about to erupt.
"What's that…"
Enox lowered his arm.
"Exterminate!"
A flash with the power of a map weapon seared the ground and three thousand demons vanished in an instant.
"Scatter! Avoid the flash and break through!" Instead of orderly dispersion, formations fractured into near-chaos, making the attackers' task far harder.
If the pilots of the living-flowers had been human—
"This is no problem."
Plarino, linked to the living-flowers through the Small World Aperture, rapidly shifted the aim points.
Controllable at neural speed, it was no different to her than crushing ants underfoot.
A roar swallowed every sound; demons brushed the flash and burned.
Having fallen back to the flower field, Lupist scrutinized the battle even while fighting.
'They're performing better than expected.'
The rate at which demons fell to the Flower Clan's strikes far exceeded baseline.
'Should I be glad?'
In thirty minutes, roughly one hundred fifty thousand demons had been killed.
In other words, firepower capable of annihilating the entire army of a small kingdom in half an hour.
The problem was that this huge number still didn't reach even 0.1 percent of the army of Hell.
'Meanwhile, allied losses are about four percent.'
As time passed, the asymmetry would only accelerate, but even that wasn't the worst part.
'They'll keep pouring in.'
Because no matter how many were killed, the soldiers perceived the enemy as infinite. When you're standing under a waterfall, you don't think about when the stream will stop.
'On the order of hundreds of millions.'
This was precisely why Iruuki had risked everything to push the elemental-bomb project.
Balkan, positioned near the army's core, propped his chin on his hand.
"Hmm."
Through the crowd feed, the whole flow of events in the flower field read as a single massive current.
'They're definitely baiting us. And the living-flowers—'
Watching the bursts of flashes fired in rapid succession, he nodded.
"Given the response speed at that scale, this isn't purely a mechanical system. Humans would be much slower."
The conclusion formed.
"It's the Flower Clan."
It couldn't be explained without the Small World Aperture.
Balkan called out, but Smodo's gaze was fixed on the Information Castle at the horizon.
"What are you staring at? Want to go?"
Smodo snapped back and looked at Balkan.
"No, I usually hit all the hot spots when I travel."
Balkan's mouth twitched.
"I'd like to send you, but not now. Focus on the ancient weapons. Where are they weakest?"
Fastidious Smodo found the most agitated movements among the three hundred living-flowers.
"Northwest. Twenty-three, forty-seven, and eighty-eight. Those three act different—like they're scared."
Balkan nodded.
"Seize them. If we capture one, we can destroy the living-flowers nearby. You and Zetaro go."
"Okay."
Smodo and Zetaro moved to the front; elite demons rapidly followed. Natasha pointed at herself and asked, "Balkan, me?"
Balkan considered carefully, but there was only one thing Natasha could do.
"Kill him."
The Knight of Maha.
At the welcome sound of that, Natasha turned toward the flower field, eyes shining.
"Good."
The martial aura rising from the center of the flower field—the draw of Rian's fighting spirit—pulled at her.