Falcon City.
The once-prosperous streets were now deserted and bleak.
Apart from a few main roads leading to the royal palace and military camps that remained clear, every other street and alley was littered with piled-up obstacles and barricades.
Several laborers worked hard to fasten steel bars cast from scrap iron into triangular anti-tank hedgehogs with rivets. This was already the eleventh one they had completed today.
The labor crew's supervisor told them that these could stop The Alliance's tanks.
Yet almost everyone thought it was a waste of effort.
If even the river embankments could not stop The Alliance's tank tracks, what use were these hastily assembled anti-tank hedgehogs?
They could simply ram down the houses on either side of the street and go around them.
"I heard Beast Town has fallen."
A shirtless man wiped away his sweat and rested his sun-darkened arm on the anti-tank hedgehog they had just assembled.
The nearby laborers all turned to look. An old man in his forties or fifties muttered skeptically.
"Really?"
The man answered with certainty.
"Absolutely true! I was working outside the city yesterday, and I saw a unit retreating from the direction of Beast Town with my own eyes..."
Whether or not they cared about the war's progress, Falcon City's residents were all familiar with that fortress-like settlement.
Before the Velanders came here, they had never tried to build a fortress in the desert, their economy being too weak.
For that very reason, the Falcon royal family often praised that fortress standing in the desert, using it to prove that relying on the Legion had been an incomparably wise decision, to demonstrate the Legion's advanced construction techniques, and to showcase the friendship between the Kingdom of Falcon and the Legion...
And that had indeed been true. Until half