Ulf had rashly pressed ahead with a lone force in pursuit of Lyon's rearguard cavalry, only to suffer a minor setback under a sharp countercharge. Dozens of riders were killed or wounded, and he had to fall back several kilometers before barely managing to regroup his somewhat scattered troops.
He had no time to concern himself with that. He immediately climbed to a high point on North Mountain, raised his brass telescope, and looked toward the land that had become the target of the entire Sauron army.
What he saw through the lens made even this veteran general, battle-hardened and accustomed to every manner of Broomflower fortification, draw in a sharp breath.
As far as the eye could see, beneath the mountains where Carnford's main city stood, the once relatively gentle meeting ground of plains and hills had been utterly transformed into a vast, savage, death-soaked three-dimensional defensive maze.
At its outermost edge lay several deep, Z-shaped reverse-slope trenches, winding like giant pythons and clearly visible through the telescope.
Their lips had been deliberately cut steep, while the trench bottoms were faintly packed with dense arrays of sharp objects pointing upward—sharpened stakes and iron caltrops, glinting with an ominous sheen beneath the dim sky.
Even more chilling was the seemingly level open ground before the trenches. Ulf had no doubt that still more land mines lay buried beneath it.
The enormous quantity of excavated earth had not been hauled away. Instead, behind the trenches, it had been rammed into a continuous, undulating, thick and low sloped earthwork, visibly more than five meters high. This earthwork was not meant to stop infantry—it had been built specifically to absorb and deflect cannonballs.
And at that very moment, along the crest of the earthwork, a black cannon muzzle jutted out every dozen or