Chapter 751 Fog That Steals
With all the ruckus at the floating island platforms, there was another fierce battle in the seas of Pandapolis which no one could see. Even with the aid of high level magic, the Royal Mages could not accurately detect anything to make a proper assessment of the situation.
The Fog that Steals was something similar to an Anti-Magic Field, which was created to overload the mages' senses. The more sensitive one was to magic, the harder it was for them to do anything within it. So, with no magic acuity special visual senses to guide them, the Demon Fleet Leviathan relied solely on their seafaring instincts and years of experiences to bring them to victory.
For this reason, Captain Edward and Kenway were very adamant that this particular skirmish would end up to be an easy battle despite the destructive firepower the metal ship possessed. Unfortunately, they had no idea about the technological advances in Jin's world and with a speckle of System's guidance, it had basically triumphed over the difficulties of navigating in a fog.
It was like putting a blindfold on a person with X-ray vision when the humans on the Stalingrad turned the sonar radar system on. The Stalingrad could have tracked every single ship's position without the Deep Ones' as trackers though Gan Yang, the temporary captain of Stalingrad, agreed with the AI that having the trackers was a good alternative.
Wolte had done this partly as a precaution in case the technology might have had problems against he ability, but more importantly for the Deep Ones to act when needed.
The Captain initially thought that he needed to use the magic descramblers to get the positions of the ships but never knew it was just a 'basic' level of fog magic. Yet, even though he knew where the ships were at and how fast they were coming in, the seas of Pandapolis were not exactly large enough for a battlecruiser of this size to move around freely.
Gan Yang had termed the Stalingrad as a sea fortress that could barely move. Then again was there a need to move a fortress, especially when the enemies were closing in? All they needed was to readjust their guns and get ready to fire at any threats to deter or kill their enemies. Besides, the AI had told them that they actually had monster allies under the sea waiting to strike when the Stalingrad put a hole in their enemy's ships.
"So this is what the AI Wolte meant with moving trackers in the sea, huh." Gan Yang thought to himself as he checked the arsenal of weapons Stalingrad had. Upon learning that there was an army of undersea troops ready to ambush the ships, Gan Yang sent a series of orders for his deck to position guns to aim at the nearest incoming threats as well as forming solutions on what to hit.
"Sir, Torpedoes One to Ten are ready. Energy Shields are up, and all the turrets are hot with Type-3 Timer Control munitions." His second in command reported. Those shells were the very same type that had rained down on the safe zone, and Gan Yang was not going to hold any punches.
"Do not let them get any closer if possible for now. A fleet this size might not be much for this new girl and its paternal AI but their crew members might be aquatic in nature and may attempt to hijack the ship. We have to do as much damage as possible to ensure the loss of lives so we can defend this ship without too much hassle. Reduce their numbers, and we can do a proper counterattack." Gan Yang ordered only to realise…. he talked too much.
"Fire!" The subsequent simple order suddenly lit the ship up like a huge firework within the fog. And similar to fireworks, Stalingrad's 'sparks' flew in various directions targeting all the vessels that thought they had the upper advantage.
Some of the sailors in the Demon Fleet Leviathan laughed when they saw the Stalingrad light up. It was obviously the very same mistake every ship had made when they first encountered Focalor's Fog that Steals ability. They believed that by shooting whatever they got, they would have the probability of hitting something.
However, the ships of the Demon Fleet Leviathan had noticed that the ship had not moved a single inch ever since the inception of the fog, so its direction was still the same. And despite Kenway, Edward and Focalor having a brief visualisation of how the cannons worked, they all assumed that the ship's position equated to where the large barrels were placed, much less their minions and lower ranked soldiers.
Thus, they had falsely assumed moving out of their range of fire was sufficient enough not to get hit as per their medieval way of fighting in the seas.
They. Were. So. Wrong.
As with every modern battlecruiser, all of their main cannon turrets could be moved with ease, and the Stalingrad's guns were aimed based on the ship's size as tracked by Wolte's allies. (Bigger, meaner guns reserved for bigger targets.) The Deep Ones gave a visual report of how large the ships were from beneath the seas, and it was later easy for the AI to 'recommend' the targets to Gan Yang and the rest of his crew.
Hence when the Stalingrad fired, the demons had no idea that each and every shot would be accurate to the centimetre. A couple of the ships had been so sure that they were safe that they even had their magic shields down in order to conserve magic.
Needless to say, even with protection, Wolte's explosive shells could have penetrated their defences easily, and many of them were a direct hit to the centre of their ship.
But to their surprise, the damage done was not as significant as they had feared. Compared to what the demon sailors had been told, they were afraid when they saw it pierced into their cargo hold. But nothing happened for a moment.
And because of that, many laughed it off that it was just a lucky shot and even guessed that their enemy might be out of powerful ammo.
What they didn't expect was that in the next minute, the Type-3 shells exploded suddenly. And with their supplies of gunpowder in the cargo hold, the ship turned from a capable fighting beast into a prison on fire.
(The demons should clearly revamp where they store their munitions.)
The same happened for command ships for all three demon captains, but because of their sheer size, the shells missed their cargo hold and only exploded a part of the ship. With capable mages on deck, they were able to extinguish the fire better compared to the rest of their counterparts, and that was enough for Wolte to distinguish what threats were worth facing.
As for the ships that caught on fire? Their misery merely began as the Deep Ones happily emerged their heads out of the water. The Fog was the perfect cover for them to perform some exercise without revealing the trump card of Qiu Yue's last contingency plan.