Stone grinned briefly as he saw the General of Cocytus vanish along with the Flying Dutchman. If Jones managed to survive that duel and the [Skill] lasted for a quarter of an hour, they might even be able to finish this swiftly.

The first few monsters arrived at the Dreadnought and the destroyers that flanked it, but those were just minions that fell to the ships’ various Close in Weapons Systems, the CWIS also occasionally referred to as “Sea Wiz”. Those were designed to deal with missiles and planes, not monsters, but the rapidly firing guns chewed through them with ease. Almost ten thousand rounds a minute were nothing to sneeze at.

Also, now that the damage to the ice wasn’t being near-instantaneously repaired, they’d take another shot at breaking the ground the army was marching on.

There’d been two submarines attached to the carrier group, as well as the Nautilus, but they’d been cooling their jets under the ice until now, without a good way to contribute against foes atop a layer of ice that was over a hundred meters thick.

And the destroyers only had a handful of missiles, which they’d been saving for just such an opportunity.

Even as the firing solutions were being prepared, things coordinated to inflict maximum damage and isolate as many foes as possible, the Dreadnought’s guns kept firing. They’d never been silent for more than a handful of seconds for over five minutes, unleashing countless shells and tearing apart anything that had the misfortune to wind up in front of the guns’ barrels.

The General of Coycytus had been largely torn to shreds already, but that target was now beyond their reach.

And the Arizona was focusing on Iammax, firing the barrel of its gun by barrel to get at least some hits in, but the Dreadnought’s current priority was Rath.

The lion-demon had been sticking with the army, hiding behind Iammax’s defenses, being the only Tier 9 still on the battlefield, but now, he was going straight for them.

He was fairly agile, a great deal more mobile than something that big had any right to be, and if Dr. Thoma’s “predictions” were correct, his presence brought disease.

“Shields up,” Stone ordered, and countless magical sigils on the outside of the ship flared to life, manifesting a titanic mage’s shield all around. That should help against that.

The shields wouldn’t last, though. The spell array for it did have capacitors, but those were more akin to a separate part of the enchantment that mana could be poured into and not used until it was needed than something analogous to the electrical component by the same name.

Pure mana could not be stored in its raw form, it would simply dissipate, the only option they had was to put it into an enchantment in some form, be it by directly powering it or adding it to a secondary part that could hold mana in stasis, but mana stored in the latter would never be useable for anything else.

Which meant that the battleship had countless capacitors for dozens of different [Systems], and they were utterly un-interchangeable.

Another report flashed throughout the fleet’s “party”, the captain of the destroyer closest to the action, the Anrtrim, warning that his crew had had all physical Stats reduced by five percent.

And fifteen seconds later, that was upgraded to seven-point-five percent. Ten percent. Fifteen percent. Oh, that was not good.

“Use of recovery potions to fight off the debuff is authorized twice per individual, beyond that, remain at your posts as long as you are able,” Stone ordered. Potions would stave off the symptoms for a time, but if someone reduced the efficacy of future potions too much, dangerous injuries could easily become fatal due to the potions no longer being effective.

The Antrim vanished, teleported away with one of its captain’s [Skills], reappearing beside the Bunker Hill, beyond the grasp of the ice.

In front of the Dreadnought, the ice was dyed red by now, covered in demon blood and bodies, chewed apart by its smaller guns, but the few destroyers stuck in the ice on their side of it didn’t have anything close to the amount of defenses, even with support from the airplanes overhead.

So they zapped themselves away, the smaller ships being easier to move and therefore giving their [Captains] a [Skill] like that even at the lower evolutions.

And, of course, they’d left behind a little present for the hordes of hell. Depth charges and torpedoes would be entirely useless in this battle, so they’d been left behind and detonated as the monsters swarmed.

But the Dreadnought was too big to be moved like that, and without any other targets to focus on, even its defenses would eventually be overwhelmed even with support from the others.

Eventually was not the same thing as now.

The destroyers each held several missiles in VLS canisters to take out powerful or far-away targets, but the munitions for that were highly limited, and the battleships and aircraft provided more than enough firepower.

At the same time as those were launched, the submarines under the ice launched their torpedoes, the spread of projectiles calculated perfectly to crack the ground ju-u-ust right.

Iammax was isolated with just a handful of minions, large concentrations of the army were perched together in one place, and Rath suddenly found himself on the wrong side of a two-hundred-meter gap in the ice, barely managing to stop. The gigantic lion’s legs flew out from under him as he tried to brake, leaving him flipped onto his side and digging his claws into the ground until all momentum was gone.

Perfect.

“[Bullet Hell],” Stone announced.

People might have started shouting the names of their abilities in public for no reason other than appearances, but the military had a far longer tradition of making sure the people who needed to work together were aware of what each other was doing.

For example, stating “[Bullet Hell]” was short for “I just activated one of my cooldown [Skills], do what you were taught to do to support it”,

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In this situation, it meant focusing all guns on the ship that weren’t absolutely vital to their defenses onto the lion. Every time one of the projectiles entered an unseen boundary, they triplicated, the first projectile continuing as normal but the other two manifesting on other points on the invisible sphere and firing towards the center from there. The center, and the demon within, which fully restored itself a couple of seconds before the [Skill] ended.

All they had to do was kill it one more time, at it would be done.

But Stone wasn’t the only one who cut loose, drawing deeply from their well of single-use, or long-preparation, attacks.

A few more cooldown [Skills] that there hadn’t been a good opportunity to use, and magic that had taken seemingly forever to prepare.

According to scuttlebutt, the Mage Jose Maria Sandoval had been sitting on an out-of-the-way corner of the Bunker Hill’s deck with a lawn chair and a cooler of beers, and hadn’t moved from that position by more than a single foot in hours. Some theorized that that must have been a part of his “process”, potentially linked to his [Skills], but it hadn’t become clear until now.

Semi-translucent spears of powers, thousands of them, flashed across the intervening space, tearing apart a good third of the army, but most of the projectiles were aimed squarely at Iammax. Most only pierced the skin and then vanished to make space for the next in line, but there were a lot of them, until several fully pierced through the demon’s body, to the point where he looked like he’d been used as a pincushion by the world’s angriest sower.

And then, a hail of real arrows, ranging in size from regular arrows to small trees flew from another spot on the carrier, sliding neatly into the existing holes and sticking there until Iammax graduated from pincushion and became a porcupine.

As powerful as the Demon King was, that still made it damn hard to keep moving after that.

While that was going on, the sky had been covered by the fastest-manifesting storm in history, blotting out the sky as far as the eye could see, lighting arcing into the sky from both a specific plane and another spot on the Bunker Hill’s flight deck. That plane was the only one of its kind in the sky right now, that had to be the German S-Ranker who’d berthed on the American carrier.

The plane then flew straight up, vanishing into the storm. And then, mere moments later, it flashed back down, wreathed in lighting to the point where it practically seemed to be made of lightning, until it crashed into Iammax.

Once the light from the titanic eruption of power had vanished, Stone could see the plane retreating back into the sky while Iammax pulled himself from the hole in the ground he’d wound up in, fully regenerated.

So he’d “died” and been restored. According to Dr. Thoma, that meant that they had to kill him just two more times.

A good chunk of the army wiped out, Iammax killed once, that was … an achievement. But for using up so many trump cards, he’d really hoped for better results. The third [Raid Boss] could be returning at any moment, and there was still the lion to contend with.

Arcane Symbols wreathed the flight deck of the Bunker Hill, countless small orbs beginning to manifest above the circles, ballooning up to ever-greater sizes, until they began to come unmoored and drifted towards the demons.

They weren’t moving very quickly by modern standards, but still crossed the distance in a few seconds. It wasn’t a very impressive-looking attack to be sure, but considering its scale and the amount of time it had taken to prepare, it had to be strong … right?

That supposition proved itself true when the orbs dropped onto the the densest patch of foes, burst, and a wave of white energy flashed out, a waist-high, ever-expanding, ring of energy that carved the demons apart.

Now, they had a clear shot at Iammax, the minions were also isolated, and stuck on the ice, and taking down Rath would be pretty easy.

Wait … what was that demon doing?

The King of Warfare had dropped onto his knees once he’d dragged himself out of the hole the lightning had left him in, planted his sword in the ice, and had both hands on the hilt.

“Captain, look at the ice!” the Navigator warned, but Stone had already noticed the issue.

Red-black metal was manifesting out of thin air, bridges being built at lightning speed, grappling hooks flying from the furthest-forward ice-floes to grapple any ships that could be reached, and suddenly, the armies were in a position to reach even the carrier.

And the Dreadnought was still stuck. Before, freeing it from the ice hadn’t been a priority as the missile bombardment would have isolated it from the demons. And now, it wasn’t just bound by ice but also countless chains that grappled onto whatever they were able to attack.

Flying would have been an option before, the ship could take to the sky for a time that was brief but nevertheless would suffice to reach the ocean.

Now though, they’d have to either get rid of the chains or carry tens of thousands of tons of ice with them. That wouldn’t fly, literally.

“Permission to use the Eschaton armament?” The XO asked.

“Granted, one salvo,” Stone nodded, “Target Iammax.”

Hopefully, disrupting his concentration would get rid of the chains. And if it didn’t, well, he was in no position to defend himself, and the Dreadnought would have to free itself another way.

Eschaton was a very old word, referring to the end of the world, the doomsday.

But when it came to weaponry, it meant something slightly different. They were weapons designed with incredible power, power that well-surpassed the mere mechanical endurance of the vessel firing those weapons, with the ship only managing to (hopefully) remain intact due to the [Captain’s] [Skills].

The first weaponry had been designed for an American Captain whose ship had almost sunk but been saved through his actions, rewarding him with an epic [Class] with a focus on durability.

As the story went, that was when the engineers had gotten ahold of him, taking full advantage of the ship’s new properties and designing stupidly powerful weapons whose recoil would have blown normal ships to flinders.

And based on that, most Navies had built some kind of powerful but damaging weaponry just in case someone gained the ability to use them.

Stone and the Dreadnought were capable of using the British Eschaton weapons, barely. Certainly not the point of being able to fire multiple salvos without repairs in between.

An entire salvo of Eschaton shells was worth around a tenth as much as the entire ship, and could obliterate a city.

A penetrator cap made of an experimental metal whose name Stone wasn’t even allowed to learn, alchemical explosives that would have likely sunk the ship if even just half a dozen had cooked off in the munitions storage, countless runes and enchantments to increase movement speed, reduce air resistance, and push against the barrels of the guns.

It was that last part that took these projectiles from “power and expensive” to “self-destructively overpowered”.

The entire ship yerked to port from the recoil, ice crunching under the keel, as every gun available spat its deadly payload at the Demon King.

“Turret A, barrels 1 and 3 damaged, turret C, barrel 2 damaged, turret Y, barrel 4 rendered inoperable for the foreseeable future.”

And that was why they didn’t often use Eschaton weaponry.

One salvo, and they were down a sixth of their guns, but three of the guns could be repaired in minutes at a minimum. Firing again would cost them between a third and a half, and the damage would take hours to fix. And a third salvo would knock out most weapons for potentially days.

Well, all of that, and the fact that with every salvo they fired, a beancounter dropped dead of a heart attack, but that could be considered as a bonus, not a reason against.

It didn’t seem like Iammax had enjoyed their little gift, though, as he’d been blown clear of his sword and half a dozen holes had been blown into his armor.

Good.

But then, the demon raised a hand, a sword flipping through the air until it returned to his hand, and was once again planted in the blade in the ice.

Not only did the battlefield keep becoming more and more advantageous for the demons, but several more chains began to appear to tie down the Dreadnought.

And Rath had a path straight towards them, which was especially bad as they couldn’t currently get away. Not using the traditional means, anyway.

Ah, what the hell.

“[Instant Evacuation],” Stone ordered, then, once the rest of the ship’s crew had been swept away, whispered, “[Union].”