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Volume 7 Chapter 7 Part 3

Translator: Kell

The other guy cast his Sandstorm barely within what his range would allow, and I was right at the edge of it. That’s why I was able to evade it so easily. If he cast it after coming close to me first, I would not have been able to evade easily.

Taking all that into consideration, I did not retreat. Instead I moved slowly from side to side to make it harder for the enemy to land their attack. I’m almost in range of Sandstorm now, but I still did not move back.

“Sticky Bomb.”

“Sticky Bomb.”

Then the enemies cast their spells once more. This time, to my sides, preventing me from moving left or right. Seeing this, I stopped for a moment to avoid stepping on the trap—and then I jumped over the Sticky Bomb on the right side.

There was a bang, and smoke started rising from the spot I was in just a moment ago. The wind quickly blew away the smoke, revealing a small crater about a meter in diameter. If whatever made that crater hit me, I would have been a goner.

Of course, it’s not that a meteorite or something happened to land at the exact spot at the right time. It was the enemy’s attack—a surprise one using magic. But it wasn’t cast by any of the enemies in front of me right now.

“I knew it.”

I looked at the person who fired the spell just now. Towards the summit of Raijis’ active volcano.

“I can’t tell from here,” I mumbled.

The distance from here to the top of the mountain was about ten kilometers if you follow a straight path. My eyesight was not good enough to see people that far away. I could use a telescope, but I can’t just look at something in the distance while in the middle of battle.

But I was quite sure that the attack just now came from the summit of the mountain.

“Sachylis,” I called. “What does your Search Enemy say?”

“Same as before: two inside Raijis, and three at the mountain summit.”

“Got it. Tell the rest of the squad not to stay at a spot that’s visible from the summit. Also, tell them that when they move, make sure they can’t be seen. There are snipers up there. A hit means an instant death.”

I heard a gulp coming from the other side. She doesn’t want to believe that someone can snipe a target from more than ten kilometers away, and killing instantly at that. Sure, they’re accustomed to battles that involve using Skills… No, it’s precisely because they’re accustomed to such battles that sniping at a distance of ten kilometers feels incredibly unrealistic.

Long-range sniping is usually done with magic or arrows. But that’s only if the target is about a kilometer away at most.

Magic can fly as fast as a hundred kilometers per hour, which means it takes nearly thirty seconds to cover one kilometer. It makes it difficult to hit the target, no matter how hard you try to aim. This is because the target would move before your attack could reach them. Thirty seconds might be manageable if it’s a surprise attack, but a distance of ten kilometers means it will take three hundred second, or five minutes, for the spell to reach its target.

If you ordered a skilled sniper to predict where the target would be five minutes from now and hit their mark, they would give you a weird look. It’s not even sniping at that point. It’s the job of a fortune teller. Unfortunately, there are no divination Skills in BBO that a sniper can use.

In contrast, an arrow has high velocity. Depending on the Skill you use, you can reach speeds of nearly a hundred meters per second, almost 360 kilometers per hour. At a distance of 1 kilometer, it takes about 10 seconds to hit a target. Now this is more realistic.

Still, to cover a distance of ten kilometers, it would a hundred seconds, around a minute and a half. On top of that, unlike magic, arrows are affected by air resistance and wind, so they don’t always fly straight. At a distance of one kilometer, some Skills can be shot with an error of a few centimeters, but at a distance of ten kilometers, the error will be in meters. At this point, you’re basically just hoping that your arrow hits.

What’s more, you won’t be able to kill the enemy when you hit them. Both arrows and magic lose power if the target is too far away. Even if the arrows and magic that flew for ten kilometers hit the head, there won’t be enough force to kill the target at that point.

In other words, sniping at a distance of nearly ten kilometers is not realistic in every sense of the word. This is common sense in combat involving magic. There are no Skills that can overcome this barrier, even at higher levels… Well, except for one.

The exception to this is the Ether Cannon, a Skill that Mages manifest through the Awakening System. The speed of this magic slightly exceeds the speed of sound, and within a distance of one kilometer, it will land almost as soon as it is cast. Even at a distance of ten kilometers, it only takes a few seconds to land a shot—and unlike an arrow, it reaches its target in a straight line, unaffected by wind and other factors.

Since the spell doesn’t lose power even when traveling quite some distance, it can kill people even this far. In fact, it kept enough power to leave a crater at the point of impact. It was clear just how absurd this spell was. The caster managed to hit his targeted spot that was so far away—so far in fact, that you probably can’t even see the person at all. Standing still at a spot within visual range of an Awakened Mage is equal to immediate death.