I Became a Witch and Started an Industrial Revolution

The captain of the Aerial Knights shouted himself hoarse, completely unaware that he had already been marked.

On the deck of the Lapland flagship, a mecha soldier painted in navy blue knelt on one knee. Resting before him on a deck-mounted recoil absorber was a sniper cannon with an overall length of nearly five meters.

Through the enormous scope mounted atop the sniper cannon, the Knight Captain's figure appeared with crystal clarity.

Meanwhile, inside the anti-aircraft tower above the mecha soldier, an optical observation team rapidly calculated firing data and transmitted the results directly to the soldier.

As the calculations concluded, the mecha soldier received the finalized firing solution and loaded a 50mm tungsten-core fin-stabilized armor-piercing round into the waiting chamber before locking the breech.

Bang!

The mecha soldier's body jolted from the recoil.

Almost in the very next instant, the Knight Captain, who had still been loudly issuing commands, exploded from the waist up into a cloud of crimson mist. Only then did the magic shield surrounding him reveal the clean hole that had been punched through it before slowly dissipating into the air.

The Pak-50 Sniper Cannon.

Within a range of one kilometer, any target below Saint-level was guaranteed to die with a single hit. Even Aerial Knights, who could merge with their mounts to strengthen their Magic Shields, could not withstand it. There was simply no opportunity to survive long enough for a second shot.

With their commander killed instantly, the Griffin Knight Order, which had been regrouping for withdrawal, immediately descended into brief chaos.

In the distant sky, countless black dots emerged.

Seeing the fierce aerial battle ahead, the incoming carrier-based fighter squadrons immediately jettisoned their underbelly drop tanks on their squadron leaders' orders and accelerated.

"Enemy attack!!! Squadrons 4, 8, 12, and 19, engage the enemy head-on and cover the retreat! Move!!!"

Having assumed command, the Vice Knight Captain roared out his orders as he watched countless steel birds diving toward them.

Before he could continue issuing commands, his body suddenly felt weightless as he spun through the air.

While tumbling helplessly, he blankly saw the familiar body of his mount companion—

Only half of it remained.

Its head was gone.

Having completed another precise assassination, the soldier looked at his handiwork with satisfaction before patting the black-painted barrel of the Pak-50.

"You're amazing! From now on, you're my closest comrade... and my lover!"

The four knight squadrons faithfully carried out the Vice Knight Captain's final order before his death, charging directly toward the diving fighters.

The collision between elemental storms and storms of steel played out continuously across the sky.

Although large numbers of Griffin Knights were constantly shot down, the main body of the Griffin Knight Order successfully escaped the fleet's and airships' firing range.

Only a little over a hundred fighters had arrived as reinforcements, and they were successfully pinned down by the rear-guard knight squadrons, making pursuit impossible.

However, it did not take long before countless black dots appeared on the distant horizon once again.

This time, they nearly covered the entire sky, like a massive black storm cloud racing across the heavens.

More than a thousand newly developed long-range land-based heavy fighters, having completed their long-distance flight, arrived on the battlefield in time.

Ignoring the small groups still locked in combat, they flew straight toward the retreating remnants of the Griffin Knight Order.

The enormous size of the incoming aircraft filled the Griffin Knights fighting the rear guard below with despair.

The reason was simple.

On the first wave of steel birds, they had already witnessed two identical gun barrels mounted on each aircraft.

But these newly arrived fighters...

Each carried five.

Once they caught up with the retreating Griffin Knight Order and entered firing range, the heavy fighters shuddered as dense smoke erupted from their airframes.

Shrieking rockets streaked into the griffin formation like a meteor shower, detonating against countless Magic Shields and sending violent ripples across them.

Then, amid the horrified expressions of the Griffin Knights turning their heads to look back, dazzling torrents of metal erupted from the fighters.

In an instant, the barrage exceeded the threshold of the Magic Shields.

Every Griffin Knight caught within the streams of fire exploded into clouds of blood before falling from the sky like rain.

The six rapidly spinning barrels beneath the nose glowed faintly red, joining with the paired machine guns mounted on both wings to weave a path of death forged entirely from metal.

The enormous dragons were particularly unfortunate, becoming the focus of concentrated fire.

Dense barrages from multiple six-barreled Vulcan cannons blanketed every inch of their scales.

Their flesh disintegrated piece by piece in midair.

It truly embodied the saying:

"They found traces of biological tissue inside the shell casings."

The fighter formations performed staggered diving attacks based on their speed differences, ensuring there was never a single gap in their firepower.

When they had disengaged from the earlier battle, the Griffin Knight Order had still numbered roughly three thousand.

Now, that number plummeted at an astonishing rate.

Although part of the reason was that they had already fought two consecutive battles and had expended large amounts of magic power, leaving them far from peak condition, the devastating results achieved by the newly arrived fighters still left the Allied Navy below utterly stunned.

The Vanguard-class Heavy Fighter

was a twin-engine, long-range heavy fighter developed from the Gringol Medium Bomber platform.

In the propeller-driven era of the previous world, heavy fighters had possessed very little practical value.

Their large, cumbersome airframes naturally suffered overwhelming disadvantages in maneuverability compared to ordinary fighters, a gap that was almost impossible to overcome.

Against aircraft like the Zero fighter, the difference was on an entirely different level.

But in this world...

They had finally found their purpose.

The Zero fighter possessed outstanding dogfighting performance, faster climb rates, and superior maneuverability, making it ideal for frequent small- and medium-scale aerial battles to contest air superiority.

The Vanguard fighter, however, embodied a design philosophy completely opposite to that of the Zero.

The Magic Continent's aerial forces did not rely solely on small and medium-sized magical beast mounts.

Large creatures such as dragons were far from uncommon.

With their thick scales and immense durability, dragons could practically ignore the firepower of the Zero fighter, whose attacks amounted to little more than scratching an itch. Even if the Zero maintained complete tactical superiority, scoring a kill was exceedingly difficult.

The Vanguard fighter did not suffer from that problem.

Or rather—

It had been created specifically to solve it.

Its mid-mounted propellers left the inner sections of both wings unobstructed.

Each wing was fitted with two twin-mounted DShK heavy machine guns, while a six-barreled Vulcan cannon was integrated beneath the nose.

On the two-seat Vanguard fighter, the four wing-mounted DShK heavy machine guns were controlled by the fire-control officer seated in the elevated rear cockpit, whose superior field of view allowed for more effective targeting.

The nose-mounted six-barreled Vulcan cannon, meanwhile, was controlled directly by the pilot.

Its very existence was meant for large-scale head-on aerial warfare against the various Allied Knight Orders.

During the opening frontal dive attack, the instantaneous volume of fire produced by the machine guns and Vulcan cannon truly deserved the title of airspace sweeper.

The price was sacrificing maneuverability against magical beast mounts in exchange for utterly insane firepower and endurance far beyond that of ordinary fighters.

To fit the entire six-barreled Vulcan cannon system into the aircraft, the Gringol platform underwent extensive redesign and optimization before engineers finally managed to cram the massive weapon into the Gringol bomber airframe.

The aircraft's interior essentially contained a miniature ammunition conveyor system capable of feeding the forward-mounted six-barreled Vulcan cannon continuously.

The advantage was simple—

Load it once and keep firing.

Once the ammunition feed carousel at the end of the supply system had been emptied, the mechanic in the rear cabin only needed to rotate it to the next loaded section.

If a malfunction occurred, it could simply be rotated to the next feed port, bypassing repairs altogether.

The downside, however, was that replenishing this ammunition system would become every logistics officer's eternal nightmare.

With the six-barreled Vulcan cannon's terrifying rate of fire—

Two hours of loading.

Five minutes of happiness.

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