The faint glimmer of dawn was replaced by the brighter, ceaselessly flickering orange-red muzzle flashes.
The Sauron had dragged more than a hundred Cannons of every caliber through trenches reinforced and widened overnight, hauling them with frantic human and animal labor, and had finally deployed them at the incredibly close distance of just fifty paces from Carnford's outer earthen wall!
It was a suicidal distance, and a distance for fighting to the death. The Cannons were aimed at the earthen wall looming faintly through the morning mist, almost level with the ground.
"Fire!!!"
At the Sauron artillery officers' throat-rending roar, more than a hundred muzzles simultaneously spewed jets of searing flame several meters long!
The deafening booms merged into one, nearly tearing apart eardrums. The earth shook violently beneath their feet as hundreds of heavy solid iron balls shrieked across that brief stretch of death and smashed into Carnford's earthen wall like a rainstorm!
"Boom boom boom boom!!!"
The front of the wall was instantly pounded as though by a giant's relentless fists! Great clumps of brown frozen earth, rubble, and wood chips, mixed with gun smoke, erupted skyward, shrouding the entire section of wall in billowing dust.
The wall shuddered violently. The tamped-earth surface was blasted full of craters of varying depths; protective arrow boards at weaker points were smashed apart outright, and the sandbags behind them were flung away.
Yet Carnford's silence was brief.
Almost before the smoke from Sauron's first volley had dispersed, flames of vengeance burst from the firing slits behind the earthen wall and in the bastions on either side!
"Counterattack! Aim for the enemy gun positions! Rapid fire!"
Carnford's artillery was not as dense as Sauron's first barrage, but it was more precise—and more lethal.
The Minin Cannons and Eagle Cannons deployed in gaps