Chapter 102: Finding Out Who Is Causing This

The harbor of Port Solis was drowning in black smoke and burning pitch.

Six grand warships were already resting at the bottom of the bay, their broken wooden masts poking out of the oily water. Sailors, dockworkers, and temple acolytes were running frantically across the stone docks, screaming and throwing wooden buckets of seawater onto the spreading flames. High above them, the Aegis continued to glow with bright golden light, untouched and pristine. The sight was maddening. The ultimate divine shield was standing strong, yet the fleet beneath it was being torn apart from the bottom up.

Up on the stone terrace of the sea cliff fortress, Lord Justin was pacing back and forth, clutching his head with both hands. His polished golden plate armor was covered in dark soot.

"Where are they coming from?!" Justin screamed, his voice hoarse from shouting. "There are no enemy sails on the horizon! No foreign armies on our shores! How are they throwing fire into our harbor?!"

The garrison officers standing beside him looked at each other with pale, sweat-streaked faces. None of them had an answer. The foreign barbarians had attacked without showing a single man, a single banner, or a single ship.

"A mortal enemy must exist somewhere!" Justin snarled, slamming his armored fist onto the stone railing until the masonry chipped. "They cannot hide forever! They cannot just strike from thin air!"

Justin spun around, pointing a trembling finger toward the high stone pens carved into the northern cliffside.

"Summon Captain Ragnald!" Justin bellowed. "Launch the Third Aerial Wyvern Squadron! Tell them to fly beyond the holy ward! Scour the open ocean for fifty leagues! Find whatever demon or ship is sending these water-spears and bring me their heads!"

Ten minutes later, inside the high cliffside dragon pens, heavy iron chains rattled against the wet stone floor.

Captain Ragnald adjusted the thick leather straps of his enchanted breastplate. He was a veteran aerial knight of the Holy Solarian Empire, having served Her Divinity for over fifteen years. He had fought against border fortresses and crushed rebellions across the southern islands. His mount was a massive, crimson-scaled highland wyvern named Ignis. The beast stood twelve feet tall at the shoulder, its yellow reptilian eyes burning with raw ferocity and a low rumble of fire vibrating deep in its chest.

Around Ragnald, twenty-nine other knights were rapidly strapping into their double-girthed riding saddles. Each knight wore light mithril-plated armor and carried an enchanted lance tipped with explosive fire gems. Slung across their backs were composite longbows and quivers filled with wind-infused arrows designed to punch through wooden ship decks from high altitude.

The wyverns were agitated. The loud underwater explosions from the harbor had upset them, making the beasts snap their leathery wings and hiss violently at their handlers.

"Steady, Ignis," Ragnald muttered, patting the beast’s thick, scaled neck. He pulled his leather flight goggles over his eyes and climbed into the saddle, locking his boots into the stirrups.

A messenger ran into the pens, waving a red imperial flag. "Captain Ragnald! Lord Justin orders an immediate sortie! You are to pass through the western gate of the holy barrier and conduct a full reconnaissance sweep across the sea lanes!"

Ragnald drew his long broadsword and raised it into the air.

"Knights of the Solaria!" Ragnald’s deep voice boomed over the shrieking coastal wind. "Our fleet burns beneath our feet, struck by cowards hiding in the mist! We are the talons of Goddess Viona! Form a wedge formation! We take to the skies and hunt down these sea rats!"

"For Her Divinity!" the twenty-nine knights roared in unison.

Ragnald pulled hard on Ignis’s reins and kicked the beast’s flanks.

With a deafening roar, the red wyvern leaped off the edge of the stone cliff. Its massive, leathery wings snapped open with a loud crack, catching the rising thermal updrafts. Behind him, twenty-nine more wyverns launched into the empty air, their wings beating in a steady, thundering rhythm that shook the entire cliffside.

They climbed rapidly, circling above the harbor.

Below them, Port Solis looked like a burning pit. The thick black smoke from the sunken galleons rose directly up toward the inside of the golden dome. To leave the safety of the Aegis, the squadron flew toward the designated transit node—a narrow aperture in the western boundary where temple mages used golden mirror signals to temporarily lower a small section of the ward.

A circular opening materialized in the golden light.

"Through the gate!" Ragnald yelled through his enchanted communication collar. "Maintain combat spacing! Keep your eyes on the water!"

One by one, the thirty wyverns glided through the golden portal and cleared the boundary of the holy barrier.

The moment they crossed over, the air changed completely. The warm, stale air of the protected city was replaced by a biting, freezing ocean wind. Dark gray clouds rolled across the sky, and the vast, empty blue expanse of the Eastern Ocean stretched out endlessly before them.

Ragnald leveled Ignis out at an altitude of four thousand feet. The thirty wyverns formed a wide V-shaped hunting formation, covering a search line nearly two miles wide.

"Scan the waves!" Ragnald ordered over the comm collar. "Look for foreign flags, iron vessels, or strange sea beasts! If you see anything moving on the surface, mark it with a yellow flare!"

"Understood, Captain!" his wingman, Lieutenant Vane, answered from the saddle of a green-scaled wyvern fifty yards to his left. "Visibility is clear beneath the cloud ceiling. We can see for fifteen leagues. If there is a fleet out there, they cannot hide from us."

They flew westward for thirty minutes, their mounts gliding effortlessly on the coastal wind.

The ocean remained dead calm. There were no foreign wooden galleons, no ironclads, and no rowing fleets. There was only the empty, rolling water and the occasional flock of sea gulls.

Ragnald frowned behind his flight goggles. His grip on the reins tightened.

"This makes no sense," Ragnald muttered to himself. "A fleet that can sink six capital ships must have dozens of warships and supply vessels. Where could they have gone?"

"Captain," Vane’s voice sounded in his ear, carrying a hint of confusion. "Could they be hiding beneath the cloud deck? Or perhaps using high-tier water invisibility magic?"

"Water magic cannot hide thirty ships from thirty pairs of dragon eyes," Ragnald replied firmly. "Keep flying. We push to forty leagues."

An hour passed.

The squadron was now far out over the deep ocean, well beyond the sight of the imperial coast. Port Solis was reduced to a tiny gray speck on the eastern horizon, with the faint golden glow of the Aegis barely visible against the cliffs. The knights were growing tired, their arms stiff from fighting the cold wind, while the wyverns let out low grunts of fatigue.

Then, without any warning, Ignis suddenly twitched.

The red beast let out a sharp, anxious hiss. Its long reptilian neck snapped straight up toward the thick overcast clouds above. The spiky crest along its spine stood completely rigid.

Across the entire formation, the other twenty-nine wyverns began to react the exact same way. They stopped flapping smoothly. Their wings beat erratically, and their heads jerked in wild panic, snapping their jaws at the empty sky. Several beasts attempted to bank away, fighting against their riders’ reins.

"Ignis! Steady!" Ragnald shouted, pulling hard on the leather straps. "What is wrong with you?!"

"Captain!" another knight yelled frantically over the collar. "My mount is refusing to obey! It senses an apex predator! It thinks an ancient sea dragon is above us!"

"Look up!" Vane screamed. "Above the clouds! Something is—"

A sound tore through the heavens.

It was not a roar, and it was not thunder. It sounded like the sky itself was being ripped in two by an iron blade.

A deafening, high-pitched screech echoed across the atmosphere, so loud and violent that it rattled the knights’ armor and made their ears bleed. Before any of them could even raise a shield, a single dark shape dropped out of the gray clouds above at blinding speed.

It moved faster than any falling star. It had flat, sharp gray wings that did not move, and a single, glowing blue circle of pure fire burning at its tail.

The gray machine streaked directly past the right flank of the formation. The sheer blast of its supersonic wake hit the knights like an invisible solid wall.

Two wyverns were violently flipped upside down by the air pressure alone. Their riders lost their grip, screaming in terror as they tumbled thousands of feet down toward the cold ocean below, their bodies swallowed by the gray waves.

Ragnald desperately held onto Ignis’s saddle as the shockwave washed over him, his heart pounding in his throat.

"By the gods..." Ragnald gasped, his voice choking in absolute disbelief. "What... what kind of beast was that?!"

The strange gray creature did not slow down. It climbed straight up toward the heavens at an impossible vertical angle, carving a white line through the gray sky, and vanished back into the dark clouds without a single flap of its wings.