Countless fireballs, dragging blazing tails, looked as if they were about to crash into the planet.
In truth, they were massive numbers of aircraft punching through the atmosphere.
The Imperium's Thunderhawk Gunships—multi-role craft that combined orbital insertion, gunship duties, and medium-bomber capability—had their barrels flashing a constant orange as they raked everything that dared attack them… including identical craft of the same type.
Once they drew close enough to the surface, they began dropping brutally destructive munitions. The payloads slammed into whatever they deemed a target that needed to be erased, and the shockwaves and firestorms swallowed everything nearby.
Then, without warning, a razor-sharp metallic screech and a sound like shattering glass rang out.
A cockpit window burst apart, and a wide sheet of blood splashed across the fractured viewport. The metal decking near the pilot's station was torn open as well.
From the ragged hole, it was obvious the shell had punched up from below—piercing through the craft's belly, smashing the control systems, and then continuing on to wreck the cockpit window.
This firepower wasn't coming from other aircraft.
It was coming from ground-based anti-air defenses.
With the pilot dead—and the co-pilot dead as well—the Imperial craft lost all control, spiraling and tumbling as it plunged toward the ground.
But before it could "kiss" the earth, the people still alive inside weren't simply thrown out.
They jumped.
And their wargear made it clear they were no ordinary soldiers.
They were Astartes.
Higher in the sky, even more troops drifted down under open chutes—these were the planet's PDF (Planetary Defence Force).
They weren't being ferried from some surface fortress by heavy transports for an airborne drop.
Most of them were being delivered straight from orbit by transporters in the planet's upper atmosphere.
And for most of them, they never even got close to the ground before their transports were hit—forcing them to jump early.
Some didn't even get the chance to open a chute.
Their transports were blown apart outright, and their bodies—studded with who knew how many shards of metal—fell with them, doomed to impact.
If you looked carefully, the dense barrage blasting down from outside the atmosphere seemed almost indiscriminate—because it was also striking the descending troops.
But if you looked even closer, the trajectories of the shots hitting the drop formations clearly originated from several specific directions.
It looked as though those fire positions had been seized by the enemy.
Then, dozens of terrifying, colossal beams of light stabbed down through the atmosphere, hammering multiple areas on the surface.
One in particular struck the outskirts closest to Kain—the suburb where the factory had been, the very place the warship had been stationed before.
Blue detonation-light swallowed the entire complex in an instant.
In the same moment it bloomed, it was already excavating the earth—vaporizing it.
The shockwave followed, further scourging the ground as it surged outward, carrying a powdery haze of sand and dust that spread in every direction.
Kain was about to be hit by a sky-blotting "sandstorm."
And yet, none of that was the most lethal part.
Before the shock-driven dust wall could reach him, Kain saw the worst possible development.
It came from the sky—specifically, from a defensive fortress in planetary orbit.
He wasn't worried about its bombardment.
He was worried about the fortress itself.
It was breaking orbit.
…
If witnessing the war between Ms. A2's androids and the machine lifeforms had been shocking…
Then what she was seeing now shattered Kuroneko even more.
If Ms. A2's war could be described as a fierce clash between nations across a vast front…
Then the war in this "Mr. Golden Toilet" dimensional netizen's world looked like a war for the entire planet.
A world-sweeping war.
A war to defend the world.
An apocalyptic war to repel an off-world invasion.
Demons were one thing.
But those insect-like monsters—no matter how she looked at them—resembled the kind of alien bug-swarm invasion Kuroneko had seen in those Alien-style films.
[Fallen Angel Kuroneko: Why does it feel like this war in his world is… how do I put it…]
There were laser cannons, electromagnetic guns, and even something so massive you could see it clearly with the naked eye through the cloud layers—an enormous shape that looked like a space fortress.
A world with this level of technology had combat visuals and military hardware utterly unlike Ms. A2's battlefield.
Ms. A2's war felt like a sleek, far-future science-fiction conflict.
But this war—somehow—gave Kuroneko a sense of backwardness.
Take the dense, swarming airborne drop troops in the sky, for example.
It looked like a World War II-style mass airborne operation on an absurd scale.
In other words—
[Goal: Become S.T.A.R.S.: The way they fight is outdated. They can't keep up with the times. It's like World War II human-wave tactics.]
That was exactly what Kuroneko had been trying to say.
In the world of "Goal: Become S.T.A.R.S.", someone apparently knew her story's plot and had warned her about events that were going to happen.
So now she needed to infiltrate an organization called S.T.A.R.S. to investigate something.
A T-virus crisis.
As for what kind of crisis, another dimensional netizen had said they needed to log off and organize their materials properly before coming back to explain.
But the reason that netizen could know anything at all was because "Goal: Become S.T.A.R.S." had mentioned a company in her world the netizen recognized—one from a Resident Evil film.
Umbrella.
That was one of the key pieces of "evidence" everyone used to reach a conclusion:
Information about one person's world might exist in another netizen's world in some kind of "work" format—film, game, novel, and so on.
But the netizen who said they would log off to never came back online afterward.
It left people wondering whether something had happened to them in their real world.
And the netizen who knew the situation in "Goal: Become S.T.A.R.S."'s world happened to be the one Kuroneko was closest to.
Because she was a fan-artist.
She had even shared her real name—more accurately, her handle had been registered with her real name from the start:
Shimazaki Setsuna.
So the fact she still hadn't returned online for so long made Kuroneko genuinely worried.
Right—this crisis in "Goal: Become S.T.A.R.S."'s world was also described as a zombie outbreak, similar to the one in Saeko Busujima's world.
That was why Kuroneko had searched for zombie-related information in the first place—only to stumble across intel about Saeko's world existing in her own world as well.
[Goal: Become S.T.A.R.S.: This is completely unacceptable. If they can drop this many soldiers from orbit—along with armored vehicles, aircraft, and even a massive fortress—then their space tech is obviously far beyond my era. But the way they wage war is primitive. They don't treat soldiers like human beings!]
You could feel the anger in her words, and Kuroneko understood it.
There were simply too many.
It looked like hundreds of thousands—maybe over a million—being dropped like this.
It was a casual disregard for human life.
With tech developed to this level, they shouldn't be leaning on human-wave tactics.
War should be far more automated.
And look—there were even anti-air guns firing up into the sky that still required people to operate them.
How inefficient was that?
Even the aircraft's cannons were being manually operated.
It was practically World War II dogfighting procedures.
Had this world's technological development gone down some warped path?
Had it never developed artificial intelligence?
…Hm?
A sudden, massive lance of light—fired from space, punching through the atmosphere, striking the ground—detonated with a blast that shook Kuroneko to her core.
This was what a nuclear explosion must feel like.
The worst part was that one strike landed near him, obliterated the factory, and then the terrifying shock-driven duststorm came roaring in.
For a moment, the livestream looked almost like it had gone black—chaotic, smeared, and barely readable—making everyone's anxiety spike.
But since the stream was still live, it meant he was still online.
Still alive.
Finally, when the image cleared, he had survived again.
But what had been a fairly new second suit of power armor now showed obvious issues.
It felt like it wouldn't survive a second round of punishment.
And the shockwave had turned everything around him into an even deeper hell.
…Hm?
He was staring fixedly up at the sky—why?
The sky—!
Oh no.
This is beyond beyond beyond beyond super bad!
(End of Chapter)
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