Changqingzi shook the blood off his hands in disgust, tucked the false cores into his sleeve, and flickered back aboard the Flying Boat.
Barely ten seconds had passed.
The three thousand-year-old fiends whom Little Japan worshipped as gods, staking its national fate on them, had died without so much as a scrap remaining.
On the aircraft carrier's bridge, the coffee cup in Michael's hand fell to the floor with a clatter and shattered. He was the commander of America's Seventh Fleet.
"That... that's a demon!" Michael roared himself hoarse, fear utterly destroying his reason. "All ships, open fire! Antiaircraft missiles, close-in weapons! Shoot that damned boat out of the sky! Now!"
Alarms screamed through the sky.
Over a hundred warships swung their guns around simultaneously, their fire-control radars locking firmly onto the silver Flying Boat overhead.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
Hundreds of antiaircraft missiles shot into the sky like a swarm of bees, trailing long plumes of flame. Thirty-millimeter close-in guns spat tongues of fire over ten meters long, sweeping a storm of metal toward Chen Lin.
Chen Lin stood at the bow with his hands behind his back, watching the barrage as though it were a cheap fireworks display.
The Silver Barrier covering the Flying Boat shimmered faintly.
The instant the missiles and shells touched the barrier, they struck what seemed an indestructible wall of divine lamentation and detonated in midair. Amid the deafening explosions, the Flying Boat remained utterly still. Not even a ripple disturbed its barrier.
"Mortal iron, daring to touch the immortal path?" Standing behind Chen Lin, Changqingzi curled his lip in disdain.
Chen Lin lowered his head, sweeping his gaze across the vast but grotesquely unwieldy Seven-Nation Joint Fleet below.
Over a hundred warships and seventeen thousand soldiers had strutted across these waters as though nothing