Firemonth arrived, and the giant sun hung high in the sky.
Even in this nation on the Northern Continent, some regions had begun to feel the scorching heat of summer.
Gawain turned the documents before him to the last page. The charts and data gradually settled in his mind. After several seconds of thought, he looked up at Rebecca and Maggie. "So all the recent attempts to break through the Missile Limit failed?"
"...Yes, they all failed," Rebecca said with her head lowered, sounding particularly dejected. "Whether we increased the thrust of the propulsion arrays or changed the layout of the Wind Force Field, nothing worked. I compiled detailed records of every failure. Those were what you just read."
"Mm... I saw them," Gawain said, frowning as his gaze swept over the stack of documents he had placed on the desk. A long-forgotten sense of the unknown and contradiction seeped from between the lines, stirring his rapidly turning mind. "And every test encountered a similar problem during the final stage of acceleration... The magic field sustaining acceleration was suddenly subjected to enormous disruption, its output plummeted, and the aircraft decelerated..."
"It felt like suddenly crashing into a chaotic, disorderly, yet incredibly powerful Magic Mire," Maggie, who had personally carried out most of the test flights, immediately reported her impressions. "No matter how much output it had been maintaining before, that mire quickly broke it apart. The speed simply wouldn't go any higher."
Gawain fell silent for a moment, thinking in that silence.
The Missile Limit—the speed limit faced by all physical flying objects. Once an object approached this limit, it would be caught by an invisible yet powerful "mire." For magic-driven flight devices, this manifested as the collapse of the magic field sustaining their thrust. As for birds and beasts