Unrivaled!

December 26th. ### Heavy snow fell from the sky. The entire Northern Border was frozen for a thousand li, with snow drifting across ten thousand li. ### Polu City. ### One of the five great cities of the Northern Border. ### Heavy machine guns and City Defense Cannons were arranged atop the towering walls. Soldiers braved the wind and snow to stand guard, with braziers for warmth not far behind them. ### Several thousand meters beyond the city walls stretched a seemingly endless sea of tents. ### Fifty thousand Northern Barbarians were stationed there! ### Since the war began, the Northern Barbarians' million-strong army had first split into dozens of forces, attacking the five great cities and more than twenty Military Towns of the Northern Border. ### By now, half of the Military Towns had fallen! ### As for the five great cities, which were easy to defend but difficult to attack, the Northern Barbarian army lacked gunpowder weapons and siege equipment, so it had adopted a strategy of surrounding them without attacking. ### They stationed tens of thousands of troops outside each city, tying down the Northern Border Army within and preventing it from easily splitting off forces to support other locations. ### Thus, in the days since the war began, while fighting raged fiercely elsewhere—even the rear, Beichuan Province, had already been engulfed in flames—the five great cities on the front line were instead unusually calm. ### But that did not mean these five great cities were unimportant. ### Not only did they tie down nearly three hundred thousand Northern Barbarians, they also occupied critical locations, preventing the Northern Barbarian army from pouring into Beichuan Province in the rear. ### The only way was to cross mountains and traverse all manner of perilous paths and trails, suffering massive