Chapter 224: Surveying Every Nation, When It Comes to America There's Only One Word I've Learned—
War without a declaration. Japan's fine old tradition.
They'd used the exact same trick once before, at Pearl Harbor.
And now Japan had turned that same tactic on the Astartes, or more precisely, on Umbrella Corporation itself.
The sudden strike against the Astartes stationed in Japan left them confused for a moment, but word quickly came through that Umbrella's branch office in Japan had been surrounded as well.
The instant the Astartes received that report, they understood exactly what it meant.
Once the news of the ambush and the siege on the branch office reached Matthew, an order came down from him almost immediately.
[Kill.]
[Wipe out every last one of these ungrateful pieces of trash.]
The moment that order went out, the Astartes legion stationed in Japan, which had been holding to pure defense one second earlier, launched into a savage counterattack the next.
Tokyo.
At that moment, the entire city, or really, the entire country, had shifted into a state of war.
Thanks to hard-earned experience from being hit by the 'mushroom clouds' during World War II, the moment fighting broke out, local residents ran straight for the nearest air-raid shelters and evacuation points.
The streets fell into total chaos.
Above Tokyo.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
A formation of F-15 fighter jets cut through the cloud layer.
"Command, this is Tengu. We've located a small group of Astartes over Tokyo. Requesting permission to engage."
Tengu was the formation's callsign.
Inside the command center, the moment the commander heard that Tengu had locked onto the small Astartes unit, he didn't hesitate for a second.
He gave the order to attack immediately.
Hearing the command come through over the radio, the pilots didn't hesitate either.
The 20mm Vulcan cannons mounted on their jets opened fire all at once!
In an instant.
A storm of steel screamed toward the Astartes below.
Above the street.
Four Astartes looked down at the ground forces moving in below them and had just started to move when a dense curtain of "metal rain" descended from above.
The Void Shield responded instantly.
Before a single round from the cannons could even reach their powered armor, the kinetic energy had already been fully absorbed by the void, converted into energy and fed straight back into their own systems.
The lead Astartes tilted its head up, watching the fighter jets streak past overhead, then split the assignment among the rest of the unit. "Three, Four, you two handle the ground forces on this block."
"Nine and I will take out the fighters harassing us from above."
"Any objections?"
"None." Three and Four answered in unison, their eyes already on the line of tanks rolling up the street.
The next instant, the two of them dropped straight off their Green Goblin gliders.
A heavy thud rang out through the street as their weight hit the ground.
Pulling his gaze away from the distant tank column, Three looked up at Eight and Nine, still hovering overhead. "For the ground fight, Four and I won't be needing the gliders for now. They're set to follow you two. Feel free to take them over."
Hearing that, Eight glanced at the combat display, which showed [Equipment AI syncing], and gave a nod. "Right, then—"
"For the Emperor!"
"Kill them all!"
With that, Eight tilted his head back up toward the sky again.
Seeing the fighter formation lining up for another pass, the two of them said nothing further. The Green Goblin gliders beneath their feet surged forward.
In an instant.
The pair, who a moment ago had been standing in midair over the street, blew straight through the sound barrier and tore up toward the fighters above.
Inside the cockpits.
The Astartes' sudden acceleration gave the pilots a real scare.
But it didn't take long before they noticed something. Their pursuers had gone supersonic, sure, but they were still slower than the jets underneath them.
An F-15 could typically hit Mach 2.5. Under normal circumstances, a Green Goblin glider could have caught up without any trouble, but carrying the sheer weight of an Astartes capped it out at around Mach 1.8.
Seeing that the Astartes couldn't catch up to them for the moment, the pilots' faces twisted into looks of open contempt.
"And here I thought this 'Astartes' thing they keep going on about was supposed to be terrifying."
"Didn't expect even we could outrun them."
"No kidding, Murata. Doesn't matter how nimble those single-man flyers of theirs are. If they can't catch up, they can't catch up."
"Fall behind on speed, and all you're good for is getting strung along like a kite!"
Over the comms, the pilots traded laughs, every word dripping with mockery.
But the mockery didn't last long before an alarm blared through the cockpits.
"Beep, beep, beep, beep—"
"Locked by enemy fire-control radar!"
"Missile inbound! Missile inbound!"
The sudden warning shook every pilot in the formation.
The plane at the back of the formation had just started to release countermeasures when a missile from Oscorp Industries slammed straight into it.
BOOM!!!
An explosion tore through the sky.
The pilot who'd been trading jokes about the Astartes only a moment ago was now nothing but a fireball trailing black smoke.
Seeing that, the rest of the formation scrambled to release flares, trying to throw off the missiles locked onto them from behind.
But to their shock, the missiles chasing them weren't fooled by the countermeasures at all. They stayed locked on, refusing to let go for even a second.
With the first wave of flares having failed, the remaining pilots hurried to release a second wave, then a third, then a fourth.
But—
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Three more explosions rang out behind them, enough to send a cold sweat down the backs of the formation's two aces, Murata and Takahashi.
The two of them were luckier than the rest.
Relying on some genuinely exceptional flying, they'd managed to lure the missiles chasing them into their own flares instead.
Watching the missile detonate behind him, Murata let out a long breath. "Finally lost it."
Under his flight helmet, his forehead was already soaked with sweat.
"Takahashi, you doing okay back there?"
"...Fine."
"But their missile tracking tech is insanely advanced." Takahashi's voice came through the comms, carrying the particular relief of someone who'd just survived something close.
"If our evasion skills weren't a cut above everyone else's, we'd already be scattered across the sky in pieces with Murashita and the rest."
Murata adjusted his oxygen mask, his fingers easing slightly on the stick.
"But we still shook them, didn't we?" Murata forced a strained smile, turning his head to glance out the left side window, trying to confirm Takahashi's position.
But the moment he looked, that smile froze solid.
Less than five meters outside his window, a Green Goblin glider hung there, silent, matching his speed and heading exactly.
No one was riding it.
It just hovered there, right beside him.
Murata had no idea how long it had been flying alongside him like that.
The moment he saw it, though, his stomach dropped.
Twenty-three years of service. Over three thousand hours in a fighter cockpit. He had never seen anything like this in aerial combat.
Just as Murata was trying to work out what the thing was about to do—
The next instant.
A burst of blinding blue flame erupted from the tail of the Green Goblin glider!
Without a shred of warning, the whole glider slammed sideways straight at Murata's cockpit!
No warning shot. No feint.
Under normal circumstances, no pilot alive would attempt something this reckless. But this wasn't normal circumstances.
The Green Goblin glider had no pilot at all. It was, put simply, just a slab of metal driven by an onboard AI.
And right now, the only thing it needed to do was shatter the canopy of the plane in front of it and throw the pilot inside straight out at ten thousand meters.
"—Son of a bitch!" Murata shoved the stick forward almost on pure instinct.
The F-15's nose dropped violently. The massive negative-G force crushed his body back into the seat, blood surging up toward his head.
The edges of his vision flooded with dark red.
Whoosh—
The Green Goblin glider grazed the top of his canopy, leaving behind a single white scrape across the glass.
Staring at that white scratch, Murata's whole body shook.
That feeling of skating along the edge of death, again and again, had his heart pounding out of his chest.
"Ha! Hah! Dodged it! I actually dodged it!"
"Of course I did! I'm Murata, ace of the skies! There's no way I die in a cockpit!" Murata shouted it out loud.
But before that flush of survivor's relief could even settle in, a fresh wave of unease crept back over him.
Behind him.
That dive he'd just pulled to evade had dropped him instantly from supersonic straight down to subsonic.
And it wouldn't take long for the F-15 to build back up to Mach 2.5 from where he was now.
But those few seconds were enough. When he glanced back, he saw a shape closing in fast.
The Astartes he'd left far behind a moment ago was already right on top of him.
Under Murata's gaze, the Astartes suddenly launched itself off the glider!
Its whole body shot forward like a cannon round, straight at him!
THUD!!
A dull metallic impact sounded from the top of the fuselage.
The entire plane rocked violently.
Murata didn't need to look to know exactly what had just happened.
It had landed on his plane.
That two-and-a-half-meter steel monster had landed right on top of his aircraft.
Inside the cockpit, the red warning lights strobed wildly, the shrill blare of the alarm nearly splitting his eardrums.
Murata's hands clamped down on the stick, knuckles white with the effort.
He tried to roll the plane to throw the thing off his back, but before he could even begin the maneuver, a massive metal hand smashed through the canopy and hauled him straight out of the cockpit.
Then hurled him down toward the ground below.
Once that was done, the Astartes looked at the now-empty cockpit.
The space was too cramped for it to climb inside.
Still.
Not being able to get inside didn't mean it couldn't fly the thing from the outside.
Its hand closed around the rudder.
A few simple inputs, and the plane's speed dropped sharply.
The second Astartes landed on the fuselage right behind it.
Once that one had steadied itself, Eight, now piloting the plane, accelerated instantly.
Straight toward Takahashi in the distance!
Takahashi, still tangled up dealing with the Green Goblin glider on his tail, hadn't noticed at all that the Astartes had swapped rides and was now bearing straight down on him.
By the time he realized what was happening, the Astartes was already right behind him.
He turned his head and saw two Astartes clinging to the outside of the fuselage like a pair of geckos, and his whole body went cold, like he'd been dropped straight into an ice pit.
Before Takahashi could react, Nine pulled a man-portable railgun, half as tall as a person, off its back.
Aimed it straight at Takahashi.
And began charging.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!!" Takahashi cursed silently in his head.
No hesitation.
He punched out immediately.
The canopy blew off in an instant, and Takahashi shot out of the cockpit.
But before his parachute had even opened, Nine, still clinging to the outer hull, leapt off in the same instant, one metal hand suddenly filling his entire field of view.
CRUNCH.
Nine's hand closed around Takahashi's skull without a shred of hesitation and crushed it in a single grip.
The headless body was tossed aside without a second thought.
Once that was done, Nine, now in free fall, was caught neatly by the unmanned Green Goblin glider waiting below.
Aerial elimination, complete.
Elsewhere, on the ground.
Tanks weren't anything unusual to the Astartes.
They were a standard part of every defensive stress test, without exception.
So compared to the air units, the Astartes handled the tank formations with even more ease.
The moment Sanwiston activated, its combination of high-speed mobility and sheer, hopeless brute force cleared the entire ground battlefield in what felt like an instant.
In the middle of it all.
Blood and fire were consuming the whole of Japan like a plague.
THUD!
A single kick sent an already-wrecked tank blocking the street flying out of the way.
In an instant, a soldier who'd been hiding behind it found himself fully exposed to the Astartes bearing down on him.
The Astartes drew the chainsword-blade from its side.
The soldier stared at the massive figure closing in on him, chainsword in hand, and couldn't even manage the impulse to fight back.
Thinking about how that monstrous blade was about to cut him in two, he pulled his sidearm from his belt with shaking hands and put the barrel in his own mouth.
The gunshot rang out, and a body dropped to the ground.
At the same time, a figure in a black bodysuit, blond hair, a black cape trailing behind, had appeared somewhere over Japan without anyone noticing.
The corrupted Homelander.
Matthew had sent him here with a single, straightforward assignment.
Kill.
Kill until Japan's politicians never dared show their faces again.
Kill until Japan's soldiers never dared pick up a gun again.
Kill until the entire world never dared look down on the name Umbrella again.
From up in the clouds, Homelander looked out at the dense formation of fighter jets filling the sky over Japan, a dark smile spreading across his face.
The next instant, BOOM!
Before the crack of the broken sound barrier had even faded, the distant formation had already been torn apart into a series of burning fireballs by Homelander's sudden strike.
The disturbance drew the attention of every other flight unit in the air, and they scrambled to redirect their attack toward him. But before a single one of them could get a finger on the trigger, Homelander's eyes suddenly flared crimson, and a wave of pure, mortal dread surged through every one of them at once.
"Watch out! Move!" a pilot screamed over the channel.
But it was already too late.
A hum—
His heat vision swept across the entire sky, and explosions bloomed one after another in its wake.
"Report! Word from Air Force Command!"
"Squadrons One through Thirteen have all gone dark, no contact!"
"Report, word from Army Command. Ground units One through Forty-Five, all confirmed lost. No survivors."
Inside the command center, the officer overseeing the entire operation listened to the reports pouring in from the field like snow, disbelief written across his face, cold sweat running down his skin.
The moment the words "no survivors" reached his ears, his legs gave out from under him, and he dropped straight to the floor.
"How could this... how could this happen. It's barely been any time at all. How did it turn into this?"
Even as he said it, he scrambled back up, meaning to run straight out of the command center to see the front line for himself.
But before he could—
The door to the command room slammed open.
The sudden impact knocked him back down again.
Before he could even open his mouth to curse, several communications officers stumbled in.
"Sir! Sir, this is bad!"
"Urgent report from the Prime Minister's residence!"
"Every senior government official in Japan has just been wiped out. A decapitation strike, carried out by the Astartes..."
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