Volume 10, Chapter 16 – A Chaotic Assassination

“Oh my…” Witnessing all this from below, Yisi couldn’t help but sigh softly. “Although I had a bad feeling, I didn’t think it would actually happen.”

If only one Magic Airship had fallen, the cause could be attributed to a soldier’s operational error, or a problem with the Magic Airship itself. But not just the Magic Airships, even the Horned Eagle Knights fell with them. There’s no other possibility besides someone intentionally creating chaos.

“There are no demons or similar entities on the map either.”

I’ve probably been dragged into an event like an assassination of the emperor or a rebellion. The [Omniscient Map] doesn’t tell me which people bear ill will toward the Norta Empire’s emperor, so there was no way to avoid this in advance.

“The airship… the airship is falling!”

After the people on the ground saw the Magic Airship turning into a giant fireball and plummeting, they naturally fell into chaos.

“Get out of the way! Don’t block me!”

“Iyaaaaaah!!!”

The imperial residents kneeling on the ground couldn’t be bothered with etiquette anymore. They let out panicked screams as if the end was near, while shoving the people blocking them, single-mindedly trying to escape to a less crowded place.

Although the carriage was currently stopped right against the wall of a building by the roadside, no one could be sure that the carriage wouldn’t be swept away by the chaotic crowd. Not to mention, some ill-intentioned people were taking advantage of the chaos to rob others. To avoid being drawn into the crowd, Yisi secretly used a [Magic Shield] that was hard to see with the naked eye to block the people, preventing them from getting near the carriage.

However, the next second, some people dressed as ordinary civilians, but who were actually rebels—probably rebels, Yisi was just guessing—suddenly tore off their commoner clothes and drew weapons hidden underneath. To hide their identities, this group didn’t wear armor, only tying black strips of cloth on their waists and arms as a way to distinguish friend from foe. Because this group’s level wasn’t even as high as Tiffany’s, and they were scattered throughout the crowd, Yisi hadn’t noticed anything unusual about them when she checked the [Omniscient Map].

“Seize the traitor Adonis!”

“Send the man who consorts with demons to the guillotine!”

Opposing these terrorists were the imperial soldiers, who immediately sprang into action. At the same time the Magic Airship fell, an inverted, bowl-shaped, earth-yellow shield appeared over Adonis’s carriage. Ordinary soldiers who couldn’t use magic dispersed the crowd, forming a perimeter that no one was allowed to approach, while magic casters chanted wind magic, attempting to catch the Horned Eagle Knights falling from the sky.

“Protect His Majesty!”

“Kill all traitors on sight!”

The two forces quickly clashed, and the already chaotic streets instantly became even more disorderly.

“Eh…” Yisi frowned. “They aren’t bothering with the commoners.”

Although she knew that in the soldiers’ hearts, Adonis was clearly more important than the common people, the fact that these soldiers didn’t even mention evacuating the civilians, letting them be exposed to the airship’s impact zone, was somewhat disheartening.

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Hearing the shouts outside, Tina and Laxy peeked out of the carriage.

“They didn’t make the shield’s range cover the entire city? Human monarchs are as selfish as ever.”

No, no, unless a magic circle was prepared in advance, a normal shield couldn’t possibly cover an entire city, right?

“My Lord, I request permission to help evacuate these innocent humans.”

Not wanting to watch a tragedy unfold, Yisi checked the [Omniscient Map] for potential dangers and nodded.

“Mhm. Laxy, take Camilla, Mary, and Refina with you. Tiffany hasn’t recovered yet, so she’ll stay in the carriage. Pepe and Tina will guard the carriage. Laxy, those people with black cloth tied on them might obstruct you. If you encounter them, try to use magic that makes them lose their will to fight.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going too!”

Under Yisi’s direction, the four quickly joined the effort to evacuate the crowd.

“Can’t this one go with them?”

“To avoid exposing your identity, you can’t.”

Tina is currently wearing a white bonnet, which is why her demon horns aren’t exposed. If the bonnet were to be blown off by the wind or fall off in a fight, not only would those people yelling about eliminating those who ‘consort with demons’ turn and attack Tina, but even the soldiers protecting the emperor would probably join in.

“What about you?”

Pepe asked the most crucial question. Just as Yisi was about to answer with a mysterious look, a group of men with black cloth on their waists gathered near the carriage, sizing up Yisi, who was standing outside, and Edith, who was leaning halfway out of the carriage.

“I saw it! They didn’t kneel to Adonis earlier! They must be connected to Adonis!”

“Maybe they’re foreign envoys invited by Adonis!”

“Capture them! Take them back as hostages to threaten Adonis!”

“Yeah, let’s make Adonis regret this!”

Trouble coming right to my doorstep?

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In contrast to Yisi’s head-tilting expression, Edith looked rather interested. She leaped out of the carriage, standing between Yisi and the men who had taken a fighting stance.

“I’ll handle this. Yisi, go do your thing.”

“No problem? Er, I mean, can you leave them with a breath? They’re just ordinary people, not even level 20.”

Facing Yisi’s reminder, Edith confidently placed her left hand on her chest and gave Gungnir a diagonal wave with her right. She raised her head slightly, her doll-like, exquisite face bearing the smile of a predator.

“Relax. This is just an appetizer, not yet the main course.”

“Mhm… then I’ll leave it to Pepe. Tiffany, make sure Tina doesn’t run off.”

“Leave it to me.”

“This one is not a child.”

After getting her companions’ replies, Yisi leaped to a rooftop in a single bound, under the dumbfounded gazes of the rebels, and quickly left the chaotic street.

◇

“First, those Magic Airships.”

Standing at the top of a clock tower, Yisi looked up at the Magic Airships, which had become massive fireballs. Unlike her prediction that the people on the airships had rebelled and made them fall, it seemed someone had tampered with the airships. From Yisi’s position, she could clearly see the crew on the airships running around desperately, performing damage control. However, their efforts only slowed the airships’ descent; they didn’t change the reality that the airships were about to crash. The airships, filled with thick smoke and bright flames, were beyond their control. On some airships, people had already given up and were jumping straight to the ground.

“How could they possibly survive jumping from that height? [Strong Airflow].”

Using wind magic to create cushioning pads one by one at the jumpers’ landing spots, thus ensuring their lives, a lightly disguised Yisi unfolded the [Wings of Hermes] and began to rescue the people still trying to save the Magic Airships.

Although saving them would only require consecutive uses of [Mass Teleportation], just saving the people and not the Magic Airships would cause the airships to crash to the ground, causing massive casualties. At the same time, teleporting large objects, even for someone as powerful as Yisi, required the aid of a magic circle. This meant it was impossible to teleport the Magic Airships as well. Therefore, Yisi chose to create strong winds to change the Magic Airships’ flight trajectories, making them land in the plains outside the city—she just needed to use an even stronger [Strong Airflow] right before they landed to let them touch down smoothly, and the people on board wouldn’t perish with the airships.

However, the idea was nice, but when she actually tried to implement it, Yisi ran into a difficult problem. First, the Magic Airships, unlike the people jumping from them, were not easily affected by the wind. These bulky but extremely light airships, once they encountered strong wind, would spin around chaotically in the air like leaves caught in a gust. If the people inside hadn’t immediately grabbed the railings, the first violent shake alone would have thrown them off, not to mention that since the Magic Airships were already very close to the ground, one slip-up in Yisi’s control would blow the people on the ground into the air.

“Tsk, I have no choice but to change plans?”

Waving her hand to dispel the wind magic, Yisi this time chose to approach a Magic Airship and make a grasping motion at it from close range, controlling its flight direction with [Invisible Hand].

Although the airship’s hull creaked and deformed to varying degrees under the immense power of the [Invisible Hand], the effect was much better than when using wind magic. The Magic Airship stopped flying about chaotically and instead hovered motionlessly in the air at a bizarre angle.

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“Captain! Captain! We’re going to crash—eh?!”

“Wait, why did we stop? Did damage control fix the airship!?”

“But the fire is still here, and the airship has no magic power left. How could it suddenly stop?”

“Look outside! It’s like something grabbed us!”

“Hey! Look over there! There’s someone there!”

All the crew members quickly ran to one side of the hull, looking in the direction the speaker was pointing. The person they were pointing at was naturally Yisi, but because Yisi had applied a simple disguise and was some distance away, the crew could only see Yisi’s hand gestures, not her face.

Then, under the crew’s horrified gazes, the hovering Magic Airship began to move along with Yisi’s arm movements. The whole process was exceptionally smooth. If not for the fire and thick smoke, the crew wouldn’t have even felt that this was an airship that was about to crash. The reality was just as they saw: they were being dragged through the air by someone.

“Heavens… is this the power of a god?”

“Oh! My Goddess! Look at what we’re doing! Our airship is being towed!”

“This is a Magic Airship that not even General Carl can lift! Only a god! Only the Goddess’s power! Could make us float again!”

“The Goddess has descended once more!”

The crew’s praises gave Yisi a headache. Because [Invisible Hand] wasn’t a ‘third hand’ controlled by thought, but rather magic that amplified her own hands’ movements, if she used even a little too much force, the Magic Airship could be crushed by her carelessness. Plus, for efficiency, she was grasping two Magic Airships at the same time, one in each hand. Therefore, she had to concentrate all her attention to ensure the airships wouldn’t be destroyed in her hands.

Fortunately, this process went without incident. And with practice making perfect, Yisi spent only a short time placing all the Magic Airships in safe locations. The plains outside the city were too far from her current position, and there wasn’t enough time, so Yisi temporarily picked several city squares and ruins as drop-off points.

The Norta Empire can clean up the aftermath. I’ll just ensure the lives of the commoners.

By the time Yisi had dealt with the Magic Airships, the battle on the ground had entered a white-hot stage. The rebels were not as weak as Yisi had judged. The rebels who infiltrated the city were just rabble meant to tie up Adonis’s footsteps. From the sky, the rebels’ true main force was hidden on a small hill outside Wilfred City. They had used bushes and trees as cover overhead to evade the Horned Eagle Knights’ reconnaissance. Now, however, they had removed their camouflage, revealing row after row of cannon muzzles hidden beneath the thicket.

Besides magic cannons, there were also massive monsters that looked like toads but were over five meters long. The [Omniscient Map] showed that these were named ‘Cannon Toads,’ military-use monsters capable of spitting out fireballs and stone projectiles.

Under the long-range firepower of these monsters and magic cannons, a barrage of magic cannonballs, trailing long flames, rained down on the city. Although the vast majority of the shells struck the inverted, bowl-shaped shield protecting Adonis, blooming into one fireball after another, some shells still missed their mark and fell into the city districts and streets.

Not good.

“Ooooh! It’s Lady Angel!”

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“Lady Angel is blocking the fireballs!”

“I hope Lady Angel doesn’t get hurt…”

“Look! Lady Angel shattered the fireball!”

“The Goddess sent an angel to save us! Long live Lady Angel! Long live the Goddess!”

Yisi’s furrowed brow relaxed.

“Haa, good thing Laxy is here.”

Leaving the evacuation task to Camilla, Mary, and Refina, Laxy herself rose into the sky, intercepting the errant magic cannonballs one by one. Aside from the shells fired by a few large-caliber magic cannons, the power of the other cannonballs was only at the level of Tier-3 magic. It wasn’t difficult for Laxy to intercept them.

“That said, I can’t let Laxy keep intercepting them forever.”

Yisi locked her target onto the artillery position on the hill outside the city.

“[Rain of Stone Projectiles].”

Although it was a low-level spell, not even Tier-4, her goal was to plug the muzzles of the magic cannons and the Cannon Toads’ mouths. Never mind stone projectiles, even just mud mixed with a small amount of magic ore fragments would be completely sufficient to deal with the magic cannons.

However, just as Yisi was about to fire the stone projectiles, which were so large they required two hands to hold, a magic power fluctuation that made Yisi’s heart skip a beat swept across her back. Subconsciously, Yisi used [Blink], flashing to a spot a hundred meters directly above her previous position. Then, she saw the source of the magic fluctuation—a dazzling red ray of light shooting from the distance. It wasn’t a spear or an arrow, but a continuous, laser-like red ray.

The ray originated from Wilfred City’s Tower of Alexia.

Zzzzz—

Sweeping past the spot Yisi had been standing a moment before, the crimson light scanned the hilltop that was spitting out cannonballs. The instant it made contact, as if an eraser had wiped across paper, a scorched black, lifeless area appeared where the red light passed. The [Omniscient Map] showed that this single strike had eliminated one-third of the rebels’ main force. However, the person using the Tower of Alexia didn’t let the rebels off. After that, the Tower of Alexia lanced out dozens more times, until the entire hill was flattened. Only then did the attack stop, due to the massive consumption of magic power.

As for the chaos in the city, the rebels were no match for Adonis’s Imperial Guard and fled like rats. Without the fire support from outside the city, this group was nothing but a disorganized mob.

Scanning the [Omniscient Map] once more and confirming her companions’ statuses, Yisi let out a soft sigh of relief.

“Only Laxy’s magic is at rock bottom, everyone else is fine… I really wish the people of this world could just settle down. Sheesh.”

Grumbling in a low voice, Yisi looked back at the flattened hill, shook her head, and returned to the city.