Chapter 18: Chapter 17: Second Wave

Yo. USS Dick here. We’re sailing north, and we’re passing by San Fran in the meantime. We won’t be making port, though. A bunch of merchant ships are gonna be coming beside us and offloading supplies while we’re still moving.

Sam’s a helluva slave driver, honestly. If I weren’t an aircraft carrier, I’d be hungry and depressed eating ice cream half the time. Kinda makes me wonder how Oreo does it.

Speaking of, ice cream doesn’t exist in this world. What a fuckin’ disgrace, these bastards—invent it faster, goddamnit!

The waves are quiet and mostly wooshy-washy. If I had hands I’d be tossing rocks into the ocean by now. So bored.

I point one of my magic cannons upwards. They still feel a bit weird to use, like, imagine you suddenly gained extra arms? I have to consciously think about moving them each time, but anyway—

I fire off a firework spell that Marge taught me sometime ago—l’ll explain later.. After about 300 yards of travel, it explodes into sparkling red, blue, and white. Merikaaa.

The crew in the nearby carrack-looking merchant ship pause and watch. Some of the people on my deck pause and watch as well.

I’m really fuckin’ bored, so y’all just watch.

I’ve got shitty magic manipulation skills though, so when I went to try and make flower shapes and animals, they just turned into venus flytraps and tardigrades. I swear, I’ll get better at this.

“An aircraft carrier using magic?!” you ask? Honestly, I’ve got no clue, either. It kinda feels like I’m just modulating my electricity supply to the cannons when I do it. Maybe Marge installed some kind of translator on the cannons or something? It’s kinda like how people learn to use cybernetic prosthetics, I guess?

So basically, imagine getting extra arms, and they’re prosthetic arms. Honestly, I’m amazed I can still get decent accuracy with them.

I put on the fireworks show for a bit, but then I notice Sam whipping words at the people who stopped moving to watch. I don’t want them to get egged by Sam, so I stop the fireworks, and everyone gets moving again.

The boredom sets in again. The sea’s wooshy-washy and I wanna stop watching the waves crash against my side. I’ve been playing elevator music ship-wide for the past hour.

God, make something happen.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have said that.

The radar’s getting fucky again and I’m afraid to say that this might be a second wave.

{Sam—SAM!}

“W-HUH?!” She draws her sword, causing the other personnel around her to draw their weapons as well.

{Sam! Op Room! Now!}

Realizing it was just the PA system, she speeds through the corridors and tosses herself through the door to the Operations Room, does a combat roll, and takes out her sword again.

{Amazing—no, Sam! We’ve got a second wave!}

“W-hUH? Demons?!” Sam strikes a pose with a step back. “Well, it has been a while and I’m surprised it took them this long… Nevertheless! Also, Sir Grey, for matters of emergency, do not call me here.”

{They’re still at the edge of my radar range, moving at 50 knots. We’ve got uhhh—four hours? Ain’t a time crunch to call you back here, I guess?}

“Ah, you are correct—the commanders must be called as well. Sir Grey, if you would please?”

I find everyone and call them. None of them quite gave the same fuzzled reaction as Sam. How disappointing.

{Marge!}

“AH!”

She fumbles a bunch of potions in the hallway and some of them bounce around the floor—she got the shatterproof ones, huh? Maybe there’s still a bit of fun on-board, after all.

***

Basically, we can’t be expecting help. Whatever passes as the Merikan West Coast Fleet and the remaining Japanese escorts are all still full of holes, and the army stationed in the city’s just as depleted. We’ve all got about the same opinion of it as about drafting old men into the army.

After Sam makes the royal equivalent of a manager’s “Anyone got any ideas?” and two others give sensible replies, a third person’s hand shoots up.

“We’ll make a cannon!” Marge proudly insists. Unfortunately, no one’s taking her seriously. Sam sighs with a hand to her forehead.

“Marge, I doubt any size of cannon can win us this battle. Even Sir Grey’s rail cannons, powerful as they are, are not enough.”

Marge shows a coy smile and puts a mysterious plate on the desk. It’s dense with magic hoodle-do and shinazz. Everyone’s groaning and I’m the only one who doesn’t get what’s happening.

{Uhhh—what’s that?}

Everyone groans louder.

Huh? Is this like “No! You’ve awakened her! She’s gonna do the thing!” ?

Focusing my CCTV on the plate, I notice that there’s… a plug? An honest-to-God plug that goes in a standard three-prong socket? Okay? So I’m going to power it?

“It’s a constructor!”

{Hmmm—nah, I still don’t get it.}

“Okay okay—plug goes in,” she says, pointing at one of my sockets, “and cannon comes out!”

… Out of that thing?

{I really don’t get it. What’s special with this cannon?}

“Oh~ Y’know~ The thing~”

Huh?

“The pfshewwbAAAA thing~”

… No, yeah, I get that she’s talking about a nuke, but the heck’s with that sound effect.

***

150 nautical miles and closing. I’ve got a math problem for ya.

I’ve got a 200-nautical mile range on my radar. In the last attack, I confirmed that a demon wave was about 20 nautical miles thick. Demons are spaced eeehhhhh 30 feet apart on average.

Uh-huh, the question for this math is: How many demons do we have to kill?

Thankfully, there’s no math teacher around, so I can just assume a demon rectangle of 400 by 20 nautical miles, or 8,000 sq. nautical miles, is gonna fill up my radar screen when we’re smack dab in the middle of them.

In square feet, that’s 295,360,000,000 sq.ft.

If there’s 30 ft. between demons, then that’s a demon density of eehh 1 demon per 900 sq.ft?

So that’s about 328 million demons. Assuming we only had to kill off about half of them while the others ignore us, that’s still 160 million demons.

Y’know, come to think of it, how did we survive last time? If it was like that, then they’d had more demons than we did ordnance. I only ran out of SAMs and some of my Phalanxes are just radar tubes now, but that’s all.

Marge plops down the constructor plate on-deck and plugs it into the ridiculously-long extension cord. A blue outlight coalesces from the plate, spreading out and creating a wireframe of the cannon-to-be.

All I can say is it would probably put a scratch on Godzilla.

It’s basically a Paris Gun—heck, it’s probably slightly longer than that. What bothers me is that there’s barely any reinforcement on it. It’s basically a tube that happens to swivel around.

{Uhh, that won’t explode, right?}

“Don’t worry about it! It’s part-magic!”

Some of the people within earshot of Marge, who was standing on-deck, started shaking their heads with a “She did it again…”

So basically the structural parts are all handled by magic? Amazing.

The cannon takes half an hour to finish, at which point the elevator comes up, together with a few of my marines pushing a trolley along, loaded with artillery shells of some type. Accompanying them is a woman in a mechanic’s apron. Marge taddles over to greet them.

“Sophia!”

“Señorita, these are half of the shells. The other half are waiting in the lower deck.”

“Great! Let’s test them out!”

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With a light flick of the wrist, Marge magicks one of the shells and it starts floating. As she walks towards the cannon, the shell follows closely behind.

Each shell looks like the large version of one of those fancy matte black aluminum water bottles, and there’s actually a bunch of inscriptions on the outer shell. Looking at the other shells, none of them have the same inscriptions. Huh.

She magicks the shell into the breech and closes it. She puts her hand on the cannon, and it creaks as it points at a nearly 45-degree angle, downrange along my flight deck.

At least the recoil won’t roll me over like this, right?

“Greeey! The trigger’s yours! Fire it like one of the magic cannons!”

{Don’t you guys have to get away or something?}

“We’re shielded, it’s fine!”

I play an alert on the PA system.

{Firing the… Margic Cannon! In three!—} “Wait, who told you to call it that!—” {—Two! One!}

I jerk the current feeding into the cannon a little, and the muzzle blast covers the whole sky. The sea around me trembles, and circular ocean waves escape from the blast.

A blue panel of light glitters in front of Marge, her assistant, and my marines. Doesn’t look like they lost their hearing.

We wait for a minute, but nothing happens. No flash on the horizon or anything of the sort.

I look at my radar and, after another 5 minutes of absolutely nothing happening, I notice that a small gap has appeared in the demon wave, but not where I expected.

This is my first time actually firing stuff at this kind of ridiculous range. Even my railguns don’t reach this far, and even then, I’ve never even fired them at their maximum range.

Ugh, I need to consult.

Marge is celebrating on-deck, while everyone else around her is petrified.

{Uhh, Marge? I think there was a hit, but it’s not where I thought it would’ve landed. You got an idea what’s going on?}

She pauses with a smile on her face. She puts a finger to her chin and looks up to the sky.

“Ah! The rotation of the world!”

Oh—oh! Wait, I know this one! It showed up in one of those missions in COD! Fuckin’—uhhh—Coriolis effect!

… I’ve got no idea how to calculate that shit, so I’ll just wing it!

{Oh, got it, got it.}

“W-wait, you do?! W-wow, you’re a lot smarter than I thought…”

{Oi.}

“Hm? Did I say something~”

{Gh, whatever. Just keep the rounds coming!}

***

I fire off the entire salvo of 11 shells they initially brought up, desensitizing the whole crew. Heck, it probably brought their spirits up. It took me the whole of 30 minutes to fire off those 11 shells, though.

After a 10-minute break, a second batch of 9 shells made it up. I fire those off in 25 minutes.

When I fire off the last shell, a trickle demons are already within 50 nautical miles, and I think we saw the flash that should’ve been the nuke going off.

Out of the 8,000 sq. nautical miles of demons, I think each shell takes out about 6 sq. n.miles, so after firing 20 of them… Yep, barely dented it.

It’s not like this was our only plan. Marge and her magical sweatshop (there’s like, 200 mages down there passing nukes around and dumping magic into each one like crazy) actually managed to produce 300 tactical nukes over the past couple of weeks.

It’s not a mistake to say that we can basically wipe out about 20% of the wave on our own, or basically 40% of the ones that we really have to deal with, assuming the rest of it just passes us.

It’s just that we didn’t have a lot of ways to actually drop the nukes on them. Marge already modified my magic cannons to accept physical ammunition, so there’s some artillery crews on standby waiting for the demons to come within range (30 n.miles for the magic cannons). I also have some specialty shells for the railguns made, but just like, 20 or so, since the physical acceleration is just too powerful and ordinary shells just wouldn’t do it. The wyvern riders also had a bunch of nukes in the form of missiles that they were supposed to fire-and-forget, which they really should coz those missiles had less range than the warhead had blast radius.

Oreo was also given some personal nukes. Imagine that, having your own personal tactical nukes.

Overall, 180 tac nukes were allotted to the four magic cannon batteries I had, while 20 were for my railguns. Another 90 were given to the wyvern riders, while 10 were for Oreo.

I’m not sure who did the logistics for this, but didn’t that mean that half our wyverns had nukes? The fuck, is that okay?

***

I fire my cannons as fast as the artillery crews could load them. The horizon is nothing but blue flashes and infinite shockwaves.

It’s too easy to get desensitized to it. Even just one of those blowing up on us can wipe us out, you know? It’s just so surreal, honestly.

At some point, we were winning, in a way. I knew we didn’t have damn near enough nukes to wipe them all out, though. Watching it from the radar’s just as surreal. I think we managed to punch a hole through the demon wave, but that didn’t really matter. Just a bit over half of the demon wave turned into an inverted V formation right at that moment, obviously changing course to steamroll us. We might actually just all die here.

The demons are getting too close, so Sam sends out the wyverns. They screen the demon wave, and we start seeing lasers shoot out from over the horizon. The number of nukes going off increases for a while, but after two hours of fighting, I notice that the traffic of wyverns coming in and out of the lower deck is down to about half.

{Sam, we can’t go on like this.}

Sam and the other commanders are in the Operations Room.

“You, address the princess properly—” some prim-and-proper guy says.

{I don’t care.}

Some dumbass wants me to worry about something like that?

{Sam, we need the help of the Merikan and Japanese ships stationed in the bay.}

She grits her teeth and slams the desk.

“If we do that, the city will be wiped out!”

Silence takes over the room. She’s right, but… I don’t know. If we go down here, it’ll be wiped out anyway.

{We’re going to lose this fight. If we do, the city’s next. There’s no other fighting chance, y’hear me?}

There’s just silence for a while.

“Send a message to the fleet in the harbor. We are requesting aid to meet the demon wave,” she orders.

***

I turn around and point towards the mouth of the bay. I can already see a cordon of ships waiting on the left and right.

All the same time, I’m still firing my cannons, and the riders are still intercepting the ones getting too close. I’d run down my nuke stocks a long time ago, keeping a couple of railgun shells in reserve just in case. The riders are also still holding on to a precious few of their own nukes in case the wave got too close.

Part of the way towards the cordon, and I squint in a way that only an aircraft carrier knows how. There’s bubbles foaming up to the ocean surface.

{Waaait, the fuck is thaaat.}

I can see something black under the water.

{Hey hey hey hey hey hey—}

An ellipse of water rises—then breaks. I can see antennas and a hull made of some sort of black material that looks like it’s swallowing all the light that hits it.

Shit. It’s not showing up on radar, either.

It’s a triple-hulled submarine arranged in a triangle. The whole thing is huge, probably the same size as me. The sides of the top hull pop open like a fuckin’ baggage compartment and honest-to-god Predator drones start shooting out and fanning out.

It’s a… it’s a fuckin’ underwater aircraft carrier.

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