[V4C7] Mobile Firing Platform
Translated by Jodas 4: Flying Through the Sky“Pyofuuuuuuuuuuuu!!”
With the Magical Flying Device on her back, Tia concentrated on pushing mana into it.
Bags filled with sand were tied with strings around her ankles. Despite how it looked, it was no means of torture.
When she determined that her flight would be more stable if she had a counterweight, she had wanted to try it out as soon as possible.
Wind blew out of the Magical Flying Device. That wind pushed Tia’s body forwards.
“Piyoppopoooooo! …………..Pefu.”
Tia’s body floated just off of the ground, but the sandbags pulled her back down until she landed unceremoniously back on the ground. She couldn’t catch the wind currents.
Watching her, both Maintenance Office Director Kappel and Barrett, his assistant, sighed.
“I knew it. Too much weight makes it too hard to take off.”
“But if we make it too light, she’ll just be thrown like a cannonball, spinning the whole time……”
The Magical Flying Device required a certain amount of force to get the user off the ground.
As a result, up to now Tia had been thrown out like a cannonball and ended up spinning uncontrollably.
If she had a counterweight, she could bring that spin under control. However, she couldn’t take off with the weight of that counterweight. — Thus Tia and the men faced a conundrum.
Kappel slapped his knees.
“How about this: let’s try making the ropes holding the counterweights longer! If we do that, she can take off with full force, then once the ropes stretch, the effects of the counterweight will come into play.”
“If we want to stretch those ropes so she can fly up to the necessary height for stable flight, they’d have to be ridiculously long. Isn’t that basically a kite at that point?”
Barrett had shown Tia one of the ‘kites’ he was talking about earlier in the Management Office.
They were devices made by stretching a cloth across a wooden skeleton and throwing it as high as you could, holding a string to keep it from flying away. If you caught a gust of wind, it could fly high into the sky.
For that to work, Tia would have to tie really long ropes to her ankles, connecting her legs to the counterweights.
(That’s……. a little……. I don’t like it…… it’s like a ball-and-chain…….)
Basically, how she would catch the wind currents — the time between takeoff and free flight — was the issue.
Considering that, Tia looked up at the Third Spire: Water Bubble.
“Piyo! I can just jump from high up! Then I can ride the wind!”
In response to Tia’s suggestion, Barrett’s face tightened while Kappel’s eyes gleamed.
“You understand you’re talking about putting on an untested prototype flying device and jumping from high up, right kiddo?”
“But the logic is sound. It’s also tempting to try and save the mana cost of getting off the ground…… You’ve got a good eye, kid. I made the right choice bringing you in!”
Saving the mana cost. Right, that was another objective.
To put it bluntly, magical devices had horrible fuel consumption. Even without that challenge, flight magic consumed mana at an incredible rate. It was a slapdash magic that wasn’t suited for long-distance flight.
Combining that with a magical device meant the available flight time was incredibly short. If they could conserve the mana used in that first instant to take off, it would be a huge help.
(It would be fine if the magical device could just use my mana though…… but it sounds like magical devices don’t work that way.)
Magical devices were filled with a certain amount of mana beforehand, then they activated when the user directed a tiny bit of mana into it.
That let ordinary people with low mana could use them.
Basically, they weren’t designed to consume large amounts of a user’s mana.
Tia was a Harpy, so she had much, much more mana than a human. So she didn’t really mind if it used some of her mana, but it irritated her that that wouldn’t happen.
Now standing on top of the Third Spire’s roof, Tia checked to see if the counterweights on her legs were secured tightly.
Barrett had readied these sandbags for her, saying “This should be enough for your body type.” Together, they were only about half of her body weight.
(I’d be fine if they were a little heavier…… but I guess humans can’t carry that much weight on their feet.)
Harpies’ legs were particularly strong. With enough effort, they could grab a boar by their talons and fly off with it.
To be honest, Tia occasionally thought she would rather be carrying something heavy with her feet than with her arms.
“Hey, kiddo! Are you good to go!?”
Barrett shouted from the base of the Spire.
Tia leaned over the side of the roof and waved at him.
“Yep! The wind’s blowing nicely, so I’m going! Hup!”
Without a shred of hesitation, she jumped off of the roof and activated the Magical Flying Device.
Propelled by an intense force from her back, Tia leaned into the wind, puffed out her chest, and spread her arms.
“Hmph!”
Adjusting her angle, she caught the wind with her whole body.
She floated upwards — but before she could fully ride on the wind current, The pull of gravity slowly won over Tia’s body.
(It’s no good. I don’t have enough momentum; I’m not high up enough…….!)
Thanks to her plan of jumping off from high up, she had been able to, however briefly, ride the wind. However, she just didn’t have enough momentum or altitude to maintain flight.
Yesterday’s success was only made possible by her cannonball trajectory at maximum power and the miraculous coincidence of acquiring a counterweight while in mid-flight.
When Tia slowly floated back down to the ground, she bit her lip and stared at the sky.
(I have to start from much, much higher up.)
A flock of birds flew across the sky as she stared up. She would have to fly at least that high…… but before she could finish that thought, something came falling down from even higher than the birds.
A tall man holding a spear — Oliver Lange.
“………….Piyopp!”
With the Magical Flying Device still strapped to her back, Tia waddled as fast as she could.
Oliver Lange, the man who jumped higher, higher, higher than anyone else, swung his arms in midair.
He’d tried out many variants of swinging his arms, but if he was holding a spear at the same time, he’d found it was easiest to swing his arms horizontally.
As if trying to grab hold of a chunk of air, he moved his arms, swam through the wind, and advanced — probably about a step forward.
Then, as he fell back to the ground, Oliver brandished his spear. This piercing attack, accelerated by the force of gravity, was the most powerful attack Oliver was capable of.
“Hmph!”
He thrust his spear towards his landing point.
There was need to make multiple thrusts. In order to make best use of the momentum of his fall, a single thrust was enough. — A thrust that would pierce through his enemy’s heart with certainty.
After landing with his spear planted in the ground, Oliver stood up.
No matter how hard or how much he trained, he couldn’t match up to his brother.
His brother exceeded him in talent, mana, and everything else. That was the truth, and anyone you asked would tell you the same.
And yet, that was no reason for Oliver to give up on fighting.
Because he fought for the sake of that brother of his.
(I won’t run away again. Ever.)
The Langes were a family of Monster hunters. Both Oliver and Frederik had been training with a spear every day for as long as they could remember.
However, his brother Frederik disliked anything that had to do with fighting, and often tried to run away from his training.
One of Oliver’s daily missions was to find where Frederik had run off to and hidden when it came time for their training.
That was until just before Oliver’s tenth birthday.
”‘Brother! Brother! It’s time for practice! If you don’t get going, Father will yell at you!’”
When he shouted through the door of the storage closet where his brother had shut himself in, he heard a sniveling, crying voice.
”‘No more…… I don’t want to do any more training……’”
”‘Brother, if you don’t train, you’ll never get strong!’”
Frederik had always been easily frightened and a coward.
Yet it was Frederik who was blessed with talent for hunting Monsters. Everyone around them held high expectations for Frederik.
It was clear that those expectations only backed Frederik even further into a corner.
”‘You know, we Langes get targeted by Monsters…… If I go to the battlefield, I’ll be the first one they go for……the Monsters……they, they’ll eat me…………I don’t wanna……eek……’”
His crying became louder and louder.
That prompted Oliver to exhale proudly from his nose, puff out his chest, and make a declaration.
”‘Don’t worry, Brother! I won’t let you die! Because I’m strong! I’ll protect you, Brother!’”
That was his promise.
And yet……When it actually mattered, Oliver ran away. He couldn’t protect anything, or anyone.
When he went on patrol through the forest with his father and brother, Oliver encountered a Monster. A powerful Monster the likes of which they’ve never seen.
A terrifying Monster with the upper body of a human woman, and the lower body of a spider.
The woman’s face was beautiful, which only served to make the grotesque expression on her face even more bone-chilling.
That Monster was both strong and crafty. It used other monsters as bait to lure Oliver and the others towards it, and immediately snatched Frederik with the threads it controlled.
His father jumped into the fray to safe his brother, but the spider entangled his father’s weapon with its threads, then — the claws on the ends of the spider’s legs cut his father’s arms clean off.
His father, the strongest man he knew, couldn’t even land a finger on it.
The moment that realization hit him, Oliver’s mind was taken over by fear, and he ran away from the scene. He didn’t look back; he only ran.
……The next day, only his brother returned.
There was no way of knowing whether the Monster had let him go by a whim, or whether it had been satisfied after eating their father.
While his brother had survived the encounter with the Monster, he was all beat up, and in a condition that was anything but sane. The light had drained from his eyes, and could barely speak at all. From time to time he would sit up with a jolt and start sobbing.
While he recovered physically after some rest and care, by that point he had started to avoid Oliver.
His brother, who had once cowered and ran from his training, now silently brought his spear to the training ground without a single word of complaint. He himself asked to join in more Monster hunts.
Then, on his thirteenth birthday, he decided to head for the Wedge Tower, which allowed him to operate in more than just the region the Lange family was responsible for.
Oliver, who was twelve at the time, ran after his brother to take the entrance exam, but he couldn’t pass.
(Brother must have been disappointed in me.)
The little brother who constantly ran his mouth about how they could leave everything to him when he was young ran away, abandoning his father and older brother when it mattered most.
(I get it if you can’t trust me anymore.)
Nevertheless, to fulfill that childhood promise he made, Oliver Lange chased after his brother and knocked at the gate of the Wedge Tower. He took the entrance exam four times.
……But his talents in both combat and magic were insufficient each of those times.