Chapter 39: 38. Black Lightning

38. Black Lightning

Li Ang finished washing up in a rush, put on his clothes, and went outside.

Zoe and the nearby villagers also noticed the anomaly in the night sky.

The villagers’ faces were filled with fear, associating this with the escalating magnitude of the Earth Serpent that sought to destroy the island; they had likely already endured a round of heart-wrenching terror while on the ground.

Now, with the distant sky as crimson as blood, their panic was self-evident.

Zoe trotted over and grabbed Li Ang’s hand.

Like the villagers, this was the first time in her life she had seen either an omen in the sky or a scene of war.

Within the blood-red curtain of light, five magic-guided airships, each about one hundred meters long, were arranged in a formation. Their hulls were shuttle-shaped, and unlike the streamlined gasbags atop traditional airships, their suspension devices used armored suspension wings made of magic-guided technology, installed on both sides of the rear of the ships.

Airships were products of the magic-guided civilization of the Makaina Island Nation. As a new type of tool, their hulls were flatter and wider, they flew faster, had strong resistance to extreme weather, could be equipped with magic-guided naval cannons, and possessed the performance to collide head-on with large flying magical beasts.

However, the Makaina Island Nation was located in the Ignis airspace; their ships had no reason to come to the Flos airspace to wage war.

Satus Island was located in a remote area, and the nearby islands were not very prosperous, so it would not cause any disputes at all.

Li Ang carefully peered at those airships and discovered that the emblems hanging on their hulls did not belong to the Makaina Island Nation.

Then they must be products sold by the Makaina Island Nation. He had heard before that they had started accepting orders for new types of ships, and many forces placed orders immediately, but the Heavenly Groups were all taking a wait-and-see approach.

What force did they belong to? He had never seen the emblems on the ships before.

The airships were not attacking each other; what they were constantly tracking and bombarding with their naval cannons was a mass of ice-blue light.

That mass of light charged rapidly between the ships. Each impact caused a patch of ice to condense, and its own powerful kinetic energy caused some soldiers on the decks to be sent flying directly off the hulls and fall into the bottom of the sky every time it struck a warship.

The aerial battlefield was getting closer and closer to Satus Island, and Zoe’s hand gripped tighter.

Li Ang looked at her, and the young girl noticed the gaze he cast over; the panic originally on her face turned into a smile that she returned to him.

It seemed that as long as he was there, she would not worry about anything.

But Li Ang had his worries.

As the fleet approached, he also saw clearly what they were fighting against.

It was a giant magical beast, or to be precise, a giant wolf galloping through the sky.

Its body length might have reached twenty or thirty meters. Its entire body was dark blue, its amber eyes trailed with flowing light, and the fur on its neck, spine, joints, and tail was long and supple, with the color at the ends transitioning into ice-blue, turning into wisps of light spots drifting in the air.

The moment he saw the giant wolf, Li Ang saw a flash of runic divine light in Zoe’s dark red pupils. She opened her mouth, wanting to speak but stopping herself.

The magic-guided naval cannons extending from both sides of the airship hulls were constantly tracking the giant wolf’s movement trajectory, while the rapid-fire cannons on the decks were continuously spraying purple-red energy shells under the control of the soldiers.

"Woo—!"

After approaching Satus Island, the giant wolf seemed to have gone mad. After a high-pitched howl, magic power surged around its body, and dozens of ice blades four or five meters long condensed. The low temperature brought dancing snowflakes, and more than half of the sky entered a frosty, snowy state; even on the island, one could feel that chill.

Li Ang saw at a glance that this was the power of the Excellence Realm, having stepped beyond the 7th rank. No longer needing the process of spellcasting materials or aggregating matter to reshape, it directly created and molded a large number of ice blades harder than steel.

The giant wolf rotated its body and whipped its long, furry tail outward. Dozens of ice blades shot out in an arc one after another, instantly staining the ship decks with blood.

The ice blades did not shatter after being shot out; they gathered back to the giant wolf’s side. It condensed a layer of ice armor on the surface of its own body, and these blades rotated their angles in the air, combining with the armor to become a set of ice blade armor that brought death.

"Awoo!"

The giant wolf growled and rotated its body, slamming into an airship like a tornado. At the moment of contact, the icy sharp blades tore through and pierced the steel on the surface of the ship, and combined with the giant wolf’s violent impact, the entire hull was split in two from the middle.

After the hull was torn, the airship’s magic-guided circuits immediately broke, and the spirit core inside lost control. The large amount of magic power it drew ignited purple-red flames, and the other spirit cores inside the two sections of the hull detonated simultaneously, exploding into two clusters of scarlet dust in the firmament.

"Oh my," Li Ang sighed, "No wonder the Heavenly Groups didn't place orders earlier; the safety of this magic-guided technology is still a bit problematic."

The soldiers blown to death fell toward the bottom of the sky, and some who lost their footing and spun in the air happened to come near the giant wolf and were bitten to pieces by it in one gulp.

This force was a bit ridiculous; they had the money to buy expensive magic-guided warships, but no money to equip their soldiers with gliders.

When that airship was attacked, the remaining four ships stopped their attacks and scattered, and by now, there was already a certain distance between them.

"Did they escape?" Zoe said.

Li Ang felt a strange spiritual reaction.

He raised his hand, feeling a tingling sensation on his skin, and with his skill in spiritual affinity, he could feel that all the spirits in the vicinity seemed to have fallen into a tremor.

What was going on? He had never had this feeling before.

Just at this moment, the four ships adjusted their directions, facing the giant wolf with their bows. The mechanisms at the bows opened, and a total of four strangely shaped cannons extended from within the bows.

They had the appearance of magic-guided naval cannons, but the barrels were longer and wrapped in a strange substance with a dark purple base, looking like asphalt or even biological tissue. They were constantly wriggling, and at the same time, yellow bubbles like pustules were rising from them.

The four cannons fired in unison. What sprayed out of the muzzles were not energy shells, but four bolts of black lightning. They spread out into more beams in the air, forming an electric net for a moment, sealing off the giant wolf’s space for evasion.

The lightning was like a living thing, tracking the giant wolf, and finally bombarded its body.

The black electric light was deflected by the sturdy ice blade armor, and the resulting explosion was not enough to shatter the armor, only blowing up some ice gravel.

However, when the electric arcs touched the parts of the giant wolf’s body not covered by armor, it was like a wildfire igniting dry grass, instantly causing its body to ignite with black flames.

"Woo—"

The giant wolf seemed to feel unbearable pain. The ice armor on its body surface could not be maintained and disintegrated into broken ice that flew in all directions. Some fell onto Satus Island, directly causing the surrounding meadows to be shrouded in frost.

Unable to extinguish the flames on its body, the giant wolf howled and flew across the sky of Satus Island, speeding toward the horizon.

The magic-guided power furnaces at the sterns of the four ships were turned to the maximum, and purple-red flames sprayed from the sterns as they pursued the giant wolf swiftly.

By the time they had almost turned into small black dots on the horizon, the quiet village became noisy, and the villagers, unable to understand a war of this level, fell into a chaotic mess.

Li Ang immediately went to get his bag; besides his notebook and adventure lantern, he also had a key item for leaving the island—a ship-boarding beacon.

It was a product of the largest shipping company in the sky, Kantuo, made of special mineral parent-child stones. When the child stone was detached from the parent stone, there was a spiritual attraction between the two.

As long as the beacon was turned on, a passing passenger airship equipped with a parent stone compass in the distance would sense it and then head to the location of the child stone beacon. It could be understood as a kind of mobile "bus stop."

This type of beacon was something only VIP passengers had, and Li Ang had been adventuring in the airspace for many years; this was also part of his accumulation.

He injected a spiritual manipulation spell to make the spirit of the child stone stronger, so that when they saw the parent stone react strongly, they would prioritize coming over, and the success rate was very high.

Seeing that fleet and the giant wolf, Li Ang felt he needed to leave the island as soon as possible.