CHAPTER 471: WAR OF IRON - PART 1 - TUNNELS IN THE SAND

As the duo neared their target, Anko kept her eyes open for any sign that they were being noticed. Her four arms each held knives as they ducked around tents, watchful of the patrols and random soldiers running about. Not seeing any demonkin, she kept her hood up in case her pink hair and grey skin were enough to give her away.

It was in the area between the tents and the army that they would be most at risk, and worse still, because there wasn’t just one angel near the General. Off to the sides, hidden behind the reserve formations, were dozens of angels with normal weapons and magic guns.

Guess that’ll make flying out of here difficult, she thought as she noticed many of them were watching the battle with amusement on their faces.

The General was about thirty measures away, but the guards around him looked strong and alert. Ducking down into the nearest tent, she found Ferro making some last-minute choices for spells to load into his suit.

"Did you figure out something to make us invisible?" Anko asked hopefully.

"I’m pretty sure if it exists, it’s not in the second tier," he sighed.

"So how do you want to do this?" she asked. "We’ll only get one shot with all the angels out there."

"I’m thinking dropping something heavy on him might be our best option."

"I’m thinking fire," Anko proposed.

"Fire might take too long to kill him. But if we make a big ball of ice, we could just hurl it at him with the lift and push spells."

"Why don’t I just hurl my knives then? Iron cuts through magic pretty well."

"They might be expecting that, though. We need to be able to break through all the shielding he has in one hit and take him out. Were you able to get a look at what he’s protected by?"

"Uh... I forgot," Anko confessed.

Ferro facepalmed, which was a perfectly fair reaction now that she remembered he’d asked her to peek with manasight. "So we don’t know what his defenses are?!" Ferro’s two tails lashed with frustration, and he kicked at some of the sand. "If we keep going out there to get a look, we’ll get spotted."

"Well then, maybe you should have figured out something with the sigil core like you said," Anko frowned and crossed all four of her arms, careful of her knives.

"I tried setting up a Second Tier spell, but I stopped because it would take too long. The longer we delay, the more we might as well be digging our own graves."

As Anko opened her mouth to reply, an idea flashed into existence, only to falter as she tried to think about it. "Say that again," Anko said, trying to reel the idea back.

"I said it would take too long to-"

"Not that thing! The other thing."

"About digging our own-"

"That’s it!" Anko exclaimed. "We dig! That way we’ll be invisible, and we can just drop the General guy into a big hole and fill it with sand! We have a spell for that, remember? We used it yesterday where all those soldiers needed to shi-"

"Don’t remind me," Ferro said. He hadn’t reacted well to the smell of the latrines, but Anko was able to ignore it because she’d grown up on the streets and had sometimes ventured into the sewers of Norneau. "How will we keep track of where he is?"

"We just need to pop up now and then. If we start the hole here, we’ll be pretty close, and I can go back and forth to make adjustments. I’ve got a really good feeling about this plan!"

Judging from his eye twitch, Ferro didn’t seem too enthused, but he let his hands fall onto his lap and said, "Fine. Let’s get this started before I change my mind."

"Great!" Anko beamed before scrolling through her suit menu to assign the digging spell. Ferro did so as well, and they started using their spells to scoop sand away and towards the sides of the tent.

After about one measure, they struck gravel, and after a quarter-measure of that, they struck bedrock. The great thing about the spell was that it let them excavate that as well as it powdered the stone using about double the mana it needed for sand.

The not-so-great thing they discovered was that they didn’t have a lot of places to put it. Ferro solved that with a simple spell to blow the sand away, aiming it out towards the battlefield to avoid someone spotting it inside the camp.

Thanks to the magic programmed into their suits, a task that would have taken days of manual labor flew by in a matter of minutes. With the superior sense of spatial reasoning granted to her by her mavenry, Anko only had to look for the General once more in order to keep them on track. And this time she remembered to use manasight.

"Ugh, the guy’s got more layers of magic around him than, uh, one of those fruit things with a lot of layers," she complained once she returned. "But at least he’s not moving."

"You mean onions?" Ferro replied.

"Yeah, that!"

A few more minutes and they were almost there.

"Hold up," Anko suddenly called out as Ferro was about to dig out the bedrock above them. "We need to make sure he, like, drop-drops. If there’s too much sand between up there and down here, he’s not going to sink right and drown."

"Remind me not to get on your bad side," Ferro quipped. "You’re downright cruel sometimes."

When he put it that way, she did feel a bit bad about subjecting someone to drowning in sand, but dead was dead in her book, and it wasn’t like they’d get any mercy if they were caught. Instead of answering him back, she pointed out that they should make a big circle about ten measures in diameter.

From there, they simply powdered the bedrock continuously with the digging spell, forming a well of sand by repeating the digging spell to make the grains even finer.

"Okay, here’s the tricky part," Anko said once they had a nice trap set. "We need to dig up and fast to drop him. I’m thinking he’s about there," she pointed at a spot and used the light spell in her suit to highlight a point right of center, which was the same spot where a seep of sand was leaking through a crack in the bedrock. "Then after that, we keep powdering more rock on top of him..."

"Uh, Anko-"

"Let me finish! And then if we see daylight, we can fly out of the hole and start blasting-"

A loud, sudden crack announced the collapse of the stone as a pair of brief screams was cut off by the collapsing stone and sand.

Both of them blinked heavily as they saw their target and the angel who had been next to him flailing, only half buried.

"Shit!" Anko shouted. "Dig! Dig!"

They got to work, powdering the sand around and above their target until they were entirely subsumed. Then to seal the deal, Anko switched to her flamethrower and blasted the surface into molten glass.

The whole burial took less than a minute.

"Phew!" Anko declared. "I think we got-"

A sudden, heavy thud announced their discovery, and before the smoke could entirely clear, Ferro heard a voice that chilled him down to his tails.

"You..." Lanoch’s voice was ragged with age and bitterly cold with hatred as he hefted his axe in one hand.

"Run!" Ferro said as the liokin swung for them both. Simultaneously, he launched a spike of ice that shattered against Lanoch’s body as his axe collided with the tunnel wall. It began a fissure that travelled faster than Ferro could run as Anko sprinted ahead, and between them sand began to spill in from above, close to the airhole they’d made about halfway through.

Anko turned around at the last moment and called out "Ferro!" as the tunnel collapsed, trapping Ferro on the opposite side of her.

As quickly as she could, Anko switched on her digging spell and began to clear the rock and sand, revealing daylight above.

Lanoch was too large to enter the tunnel, but that didn’t stop him from hacking at the walls with mavenry-enhanced strength as he sent more and more cracks along the tunnel. A soldier landed behind him, shouting, "What the fuck are you doing?" only to get cut down as Lanoch bisected him with barely a glance.

That was the moment Anko grabbed Ferro by the arm, shouting "Fly!" as she took off through the hole above. They barely managed to escape as the tunnel collapsed, sending twin plumes of sand into the air.

Ripping off her cloak, Anko regarded the stunned faces of their target’s defenders, before drawing her knives and readying her flamethrower to start a little chaos.