Atop the towering city walls, Ovi swept his gaze across the sky overhead, then slowly lowered it to the boundless Snowy Plains below, where mountains rose and fell.
"Sometimes, I like coming to the very top of these towering walls to look at the scenery between the mountains."
Ovi looked at the young officer beside him and smiled hoarsely. "This should be the best vantage point around here, right? The sky inside the city always has boundaries, but up on these walls, it doesn't."
"Yes."
The officer nodded lightly.
A faint sound seemed to drift from the distant void.
The officer raised his head and looked north. After hesitating for a moment, he asked slowly, "General, it seems the Vist Steel Mercenary Group really is attacking the northern city."
"Vist Steel started out in heavy industry."
The howling cold wind carried shards of ice across Ovi's face. He reached out and rubbed his hands together, sighing, "A lot of the heavy mining machinery on the Federation market is produced by them. Those big, crude machines can be modified for siege warfare too.
"So their Mercenary Group has more siege equipment than any other mercenary group in the Federation. From what we saw over the past few days, they even bought Class B combat units to equip their mercenary group.
"Of course, according to them, those weapons are meant to deal with heavily armored giant beasts."
He clapped his hands and looked up at the sky. "As for whether the Federation really has that many heavily armored giant beasts, no one knows."
Scattered ice crystals began falling from the sky, gathering into tiny snowflakes.
The clear heavens were gradually obscured by hazy clouds.
Ovi reached out and caught a snowflake. "It's snowing again."
The officer beside him also looked up at