Its hull was screaming, its armor plating taking a relentless barrage of dense spall impacts.
It hadn't been caught by the ground shockwave—the kind that could fracture whole tectonic plates—but the spray of debris was unavoidable.
Countless shards born from that world-shaking collision slammed into its body like a hailstorm flowing upstream, hammering it without pause.
The impacts weren't strong enough to punch straight through in a single hit, but at that kind of per-second density, it felt like the frame would be battered apart in just a few breaths.
And with the heat baking it, the once-hard exterior was softening, making it even easier to tear apart.
Still, it refused to accept this.
It refused to die here like this.
Ever since an Imperial noble had "modified" it, it hadn't been allowed to revel in slaughter on the battlefield. It hadn't been allowed to unleash the full force a weapon like it was meant to wield.
Instead, it had been treated like some kind of display piece.
That resentment boiled over.
The sheer unwillingness to die drove it to let out a bigger roar—its engines, the only way it could speak to the outside world, howling with a deeper, fiercer thunder.
It unleashed the full output its body was meant to have—past one hundred percent, forcing itself higher, clawing for altitude.
A few seconds later, it broke through the hellfire rising from the ground that was trying to swallow it whole.
It saw the sky again.
It saw the stars again.
And it shuddered with something like delight.
That tremor seemed to startle its pilot for a split second. Pathetic.
No—actually, the pilot was impressive. The best of all the ones it had ever carried, the one it respected most.
Strong, like it was.
There was no way they were dying here.
"Huh?"
Kain, punching through the firestorm surging up from the ground, felt something—something that made him ignore the agony of his full-body burns for a moment as he froze.
Had he just… sensed emotion from the Thunderhawk?
Was this the so-called Machine Spirit?
That brief shove of acceleration—beyond what this airframe should've been capable of—was that a Machine Spirit buff?
He didn't have time to think.
Gulp.
Several vials of Earth Elixir went down his throat, forcing regeneration harder, dragging his consciousness back from the edge of blacking out.
At the same time, he forced the Thunderhawk to detour, angling toward the "back" side of the falling fortress.
Because the fortress wasn't a true bomb. The destruction it caused when it struck the ground didn't radiate evenly in all directions.
So Kain's plan was to get behind it—where the shock would be weaker, where most of the force would be absorbed by the fortress's own colossal mass.
He rolled the Thunderhawk hard, flipping into an inverted, tail-first reverse flight so he could stare straight down.
The entire hive looked like a gigantic anthill that had been crushed flat. The land itself had caved in, brutally.
The shockwave of the impact became a small-scale crustal tsunami—he could see the surface ripple and warp like ocean swells, spreading outward in expanding rings.
Everything it touched was erased and remade into ruin.
At the same time, magma from within the planet's crust—like it had been squeezed by an immense fist—erupted up through the crater.
Or maybe it wasn't purely natural magma. Maybe it was a hive's internal power infrastructure, plus the fortress's own detonation—fire like a tidal wave melting material into a molten flood.
Either way, that magma surge spread outward with the crustal tsunami, racing across the land.
For an instant, it felt like he wasn't just hearing the death-screams of countless people.
It felt like he could hear the planet itself screaming.
Then a massive shadow swept over him.
A bad feeling crawled up Kain's spine. He rolled the Thunderhawk again and looked up.
Don't tell me another fortress is coming down.
It didn't look like it would hit here. The trajectory was—
No.
No, no, no!
It was heading toward where his starship was.
That might be the only ship he had left right now—one of the superlative crystallizations of the Golden Age, the thing that gave him even a sliver of confidence to move through a universe crawling with monsters and mad gods.
…
Asuna might be a sheltered young lady, but she wasn't the kind who needed servants to feed her and dress her.
Her upbringing wouldn't allow it.
Her parents had raised her to become someone her father could be proud of—capable, disciplined, exceptional.
So yes—Asuna could cook.
Of course, cooking had to be learned, and nobody starts out good at it.
When she first learned, she'd produced some truly awful dishes.
Once, while learning to grill meat, she'd overcooked it. The meat didn't turn into pure charcoal, but it half-melted, sticky and fused together in a way that made your skin crawl.
And now, what Asuna was seeing on the livestream made her scalp go cold.
A corpse.
If you put a person into a massive oven and roasted them through, it would probably look like this.
But the person wasn't dead.
He was still alive.
The chair he'd been sitting in had apparently weakened from the heat and snapped, collapsing to the ground.
And the "roasted" man's flesh had adhered to the chair. When the chair broke and dropped, it tore a layer away with it—like the skin was being ripped off alive.
Asuna's stomach lurched.
It was horrifying.
But then she saw something even worse.
Worse in a way that made her whole mind tremble.
"What… what is that?!"
There was no easy way to describe a scene that catastrophic.
It was the kind of devastation you only saw in sci-fi disaster movies—like an enormous construct had fallen from the sky into the earth, inflicting destruction on a scale that defied comprehension.
Maybe only Mount Fuji erupting into a colossal detonation could compare.
No—this wasn't a natural disaster.
This was war.
She could see aircraft still trading fire.
She could see battle beyond the atmosphere.
And the fighting itself was strange—some of it was machine versus machine, but some of it involved things that looked organic.
Creatures. Monsters.
Then something even larger crossed the sky, blotting out everything above the aircraft.
A portion of that vast bulk glowed red, clearly from atmospheric friction.
And the widening, burning area made one thing obvious:
Something impossibly heavy was falling.
Something was about to slam into the surface of that planet.
Only now did Asuna fully understand what Kuroneko-san had meant when she said that "Mr. Golden Toilet" was struggling on the edge of death.
This wasn't just him.
His whole world—his entire planet—was hanging on the edge of death.
(End of Chapter)
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