Chapter 230
The story continues off the page
The Last Dance Before Midnight
A masked dragon asks the lanternwright for one slow dance
The army began to move.
With each step they took, the rocks launched from the trebuchets passed them like enormous shadows.
The vibrations beneath their feet, accompanied by booming impacts inside the city, grew stronger.
The soldiers could feel it clearly.
We are entering death.
We are advancing toward death.
The dead-gray city finally began to stir.
At last, something began to reveal itself.
“Th-That?”
It was unmistakably a monster.
The difference was that, unlike the monsters they had encountered before, which took animal forms, this one's form resembled a human's.
“Althe, have mercy……”
“What…… What kind of hell did those things crawl out of?”
Things that had crawled out of hell.
It was a creature so grotesque that those words were no exaggeration.
It had a human torso, but moved on all fours with twisted arms and legs. The places where its eyes and nose should have been were covered with skin, while its mouth had been torn open even wider.
Ferda had seen one of those in Gyeonghuigung.
‘A ghoul monster.’
-Kieeeeeek!!!
With a shrill roar characteristic of monsters, they descended from the city wall.
No—they poured down.
As though an anthill had been dug open, monsters poured out from within and charged to punish the intruders.
“Halt!”
“Sound the shield-wall horns!”
Following the horn signals, the soldiers thrust their long spears forward and formed a shield wall.
The archers, the engineers operating the trebuchets, and the mages all prepared to bombard the enemy from a distance.
Olivia began issuing orders as well.
“Front rank, halt! Form a shield wall!”
She commanded the knights in a voice that rang out like thunder.
More than a hundred knights stood in two ranks, driving their shields into the ground. Then they knelt, bracing the shields.
They became supports holding up the enormous shields.
“First Infantry Company! Deploy in the rear! Load and report!”
The tactical infantry stood in front of the knights' shields with magitech rifles.
They inserted large cylindrical cartridges and raised the rifles, using the shields as rests.
“Loaded!”
“Loaded!”
“The entire First Company is loaded!”
Olivia raised her sword high.
“Warriors, open fire!”
Papapapang!!
As a thunderous roar erupted, the movements of the spearmen beside them faltered.
And then they witnessed an astonishing sight.
Blue beams traveling in straight lines struck the bodies of the charging monsters, bringing them down where they stood.
-Kieek!
The monsters that had been charging without hesitation faltered.
The commanders who had been waiting for the right moment opened their eyes wide.
‘This is beyond anything I imagined!’
‘I knew rifles would have tremendous firepower and stopping power, but are they really this powerful?’
Seeing them in action surpassed all imagination.
Their stopping power was so great that the front line around Ferda's army formed an arc.
There were one hundred tactical infantrymen, and each fired thirty rounds.
A full three thousand mana rounds shot forward, laying waste to everything in their path.
When the mana stones inside them finally lost their light and became mere chunks of stone, the company commander shouted.
“Warriors, cease fire!”
“Rotate the rear rank! Second Company, open fire immediately!”
They performed the exchange they had practiced until they were sick of it, continuing to pour out rounds without a gap.
It seemed as though they were holding back the wave of ghouls surging toward them, but that lasted only a moment.
“Commander! Those idiots have started using their heads!”
The humanoid monsters seemed to possess intelligence and stopped charging mindlessly.
They had grabbed the corpses of dead monsters, using them as shields as they charged forward.
“Keep firing!”
Whenever one of the charging creatures fell, the others picked it up and piled corpse upon corpse into a wall of flesh.
With the rifles' firepower, stopping them had become virtually impossible.
But William had anticipated situations like this as well.
William, his adjutant, took over command.
“Second Company, fall back! Front rank, stand!”
The Second Company withdrew while still firing, and the knights stood up, gripping their shields tightly.
What rifle fire could not accomplish—
“Prepare the shotguns!”
—they would break through with even greater firepower.
The knights raised their muzzles over their shields, which they held at an angle.
When the ghouls drew close enough to the knights, the monsters that had charged behind their shields threw those shields to the ground and leaped over the shield wall.
“Fire!”
If the rifles had been thunder, this was the earth-shaking birth of something that could overturn heaven and earth.
[Insert]
Bang!
Kwagwagwang!
A blue explosion spread from the muzzles and shot down the humanoid monsters flying toward them.
The monsters nearby were blown backward with holes covering their bodies, while those hit by point-blank shots were torn completely to pieces.
The power was tremendous, since it consumed an entire magazine at once.
“Aim forward!”
And they still had one round left.
“Fire!”
Kwagwagwang!
The monsters were helplessly pushed back by the force of the rounds spreading across a wide area.
Reading the situation, Olivia quickly issued an order.
“Front rank, advance ten paces! Form a wedge!”
The knights pulled their shields from the ground and moved in accordance with the order.
Becoming a spearhead that pierced the front line, they advanced without hesitation and drove their shields into the ground again.
That spot once more became a firing rest for the tactical infantry, and a fortress.
The other commanders could not hide their astonishment as they watched.
They continued to move in a way that denied all their common sense and experience.
Because Ferda's army was small and placed knights with large shields at the front, they had assumed it was a defensive formation.
They had thought that, being defensive, it would also be the slowest to move.
Yet an army of only five hundred was advancing like a spear, piercing the front line.
The commanders had also thought Alberto would be the one to make the greatest contribution to Ferda's army.
His incredible strength and defense suited his nickname, the One-Man Army.
Yet he merely stood in the very center of the formation, silently serving as a shield just like the other knights.
Alberto had become part of the army, and he made no unilateral moves.
That was why the magitech shone in its purest form.
“Is magitech really that incredible?”
Because there was no hero, everyone became a hero.
An ideal army's tactics had been created.
-Even if we are slow, we will never retreat.
Ferda's boast came suddenly to mind.
Indeed, only the two siege towers behind Ferda's army continued to advance.
The commanders revised their tactics.
“Battalions nearest the Far Eastern forces! Shield-bearers and knights, support the Far Eastern forces' flank!”
“Help establish a defensive line centered on the Far Eastern forces! Never expose your sides!”
Even if it meant sacrificing lives, the Far Eastern forces were the surest breakthrough to victory.
Filling in the weak points of the wedge made the formation more solid, allowing it to advance more boldly.
Ferda continued watching the battle from the rear.
‘Not bad.’
Many of the infantrymen had experienced monsters before, so they were not easily frightened or intimidated.
They knew that before overwhelming firepower, even those creatures were ultimately nothing more than chunks of meat.
‘How are the others doing?’
Ferda turned his gaze and surveyed the battle.
While Ferda was breaking through with his army, the other Imperial armies depended heavily on the exploits of a hero.
That hero was Count Rooster.
He could play that role because the warhorse Count Rooster rode was extraordinarily special.
It clearly had the shape of a horse, but its bulging muscles and horned barding made it look like a bull.
And it was not merely a matter of appearances. It pushed in from the flank of the front line, sending ghouls flying, trampling them underfoot, and severing their momentum.
It looked like a reckless attack, but it was cautious nonetheless.
Knowing there was no morale to break, he did not force his way too deeply, instead inching the front line forward.
‘What about Ureas?’
He was quietly watching all this from the rear.
He claimed he was surveying the battle to direct the troops, but his mouth did not move; only the commanders were busy.
Ureas apparently called it a strategic rest.
‘What about the allied forces…….’
The allied forces were also pushing forward in a manner similar to Count Rooster, except that Ferda's army was not there.
Because demonkin were involved, their commander had insisted that monsters would be present, and they advanced slowly, just as he had expected.
Unlike Ureas, who was taking a strategic rest, Hudret was carving a path at the forefront with his knights.
‘How heroic.’
Whether he was a true hero remained to be seen.
After the two sides had faced off and grappled for quite some time—
“The monsters are retreating!”
Ferda raised his head at someone's shout.
Just as they had said, the ghouls that had been holding the front line were retreating.
“Run for your lives, you bastards!”
“Keep firing! No survivors on this land!”
The scattered ghouls climbed back up the walls and disappeared inside.
The kingdom's city once again exuded an eerie silence.
“Men! This was possible because of your fighting spirit! Press forward and carry this momentum onward!!”
Ureas's shout bolstered the Imperial Army's morale.
The allied forces must have shouted something similar, because a roar rose from the west.
With nothing left to stop them, the siege towers now pressed against the city walls.
Ferda went to William's side and asked,
“Report the current situation.”
“Current report: total personnel, 504. Survivors, 504. Three wounded. Of those wounded, two merely have broken chins from being struck by a knight's helmet.”
“Then we should consider our losses nonexistent.”
Their morale was already at its peak.
If they had been dealing with ignorant meat shields, he might have urged them to throw themselves into the furnace, one after another, but each of these soldiers was practically a mage in their own right.
They needed to be kept alert.
“Stay sharp, men. The real battle will begin inside.”
“Yes!”
“Unlike this wide-open field, countless slaughterers will hunt your lives through the canyons formed by the buildings. I wish you good fortune.”
After Ferda finished speaking, the soldiers began preparing for the next battle.
“Regent.”
Olivia and William, who had commanded the army, came to him.
He knew what they had come to say.
“We can’t go any farther from here.”
“It’s all right.”
Olivia was an Imperial princess and, at the same time, someone destined to become a saintess.
Now that things were becoming truly dangerous, she could no longer take part.
That was as far as Ureas had permitted her to go, and Ferda understood his decision.
Olivia's blue eyes shone with sorrow.
Her face looked as though she might burst into tears at any moment.
She looked like a wife sending her husband off to war.
“Please…… take care of yourself.”
With those words, she turned her horse around and rode toward where Ureas was.
Zed, who had been beside him, tilted his head slightly and remarked,
“It seems the princess truly cares for you, Regent.”
“Your acting seems to be improving with every passing day.”
Ferda naturally assumed it was an act.
He could not imagine a woman so strong ever making such an expression.
Zed stared at Ferda's face for a moment, then shook his head from side to side.
The siege towers reached the outer wall, and the drawbridges were lowered.
“Move! Move!”
The soldiers waiting inside rushed into the city all at once.
The eyes of those who entered the city trembled.
“Good heavens……”
“They bombarded it day and night for three days, didn’t they……”
It was something everyone would know—unless they had slept like the dead for three days.
What they should have seen were half-destroyed buildings, yet every building stood perfectly intact.
The streets were bustling, but that was because of the stones they had fired—not because anything had been broken or smashed.
“Everyone, enter the city!”
“There are no civilians! To break the power of the king who sold his soul to the demonkin, we must kill every human in this city!”
At the commanders' shouts that no mercy would be shown, the soldiers came down from the outer wall.
Just as they entered the main street and began moving, the enemy started to act again.
Something flew out of an empty building and landed in the middle of the soldiers.
Shhk!
It released several streaks of light and afterimages.
The iron armor of the soldiers touched by the flashes was sliced apart, reducing the humans inside to masses of blood and flesh.
“A-an ambush!”
“It’s a monster!”
The soldiers cried out in confusion.
Only after dozens of heads had fallen did someone finally shout the truth.
“It’s demonkin!”
“Bring the knights!”
Black skin and red eyes.
The brutal demonkin who had once rampaged across the land but were now rarely seen were waging urban warfare and displaying an overwhelming presence.
Only after hundreds had been sacrificed did the knights finally arrive and confront the demonkin.
“Althe, protect the Emperor!”
“You evil creature! I have come to pass judgment upon you!”
They were demonkin once called Knight-class, and each possessed enough power to surpass a human knight.
It took three knights to engage one, and they could only drive a blade into its heart after sacrificing one of their own.
“Liam, we will never forget your sacrifice, I—huh?”
They had certainly pierced the demonkin's heart.
Yet just as its form began to grow hazy, it changed into the utterly ordinary appearance of a commoner.
“Wh-What……”
“Does this mean what we fought wasn’t a demonkin?”
Amid their confusion, a chill ran down their spines.
Could their gut feeling have been correct?
The door of a house at the far end of the road opened, and a black figure appeared.
It was the very demonkin who had fought them only a few minutes earlier.
The man smiled coldly and said,
“Well then, shall we begin round two?”
Despair had not even begun yet.