New Dunkirk was blanketed in snow.
The wind and snow from the Odin Icefield gently strangled every trace of life from this port city. Thick ice had stretched all the way from the Odin Icefield, with the nearest ice sheet less than twenty li from the harbor. Towering icebergs drifted through the channel outside the port with the wind and waves, posing a deadly threat to navigation.
No civilian vessels entered or left the harbor anymore. Even the warships conducting routine patrols—only super-heavy battleships clad in iron armor or protected by magic arrays dared to cruise along the coastline in this season.
Within New Dunkirk Port's naval harbor, a super-heavy battleship nearly four hundred meters long floated lightly upon the water. Three tower structures had been built along its deck, fore and aft, and its entire hull was clad in alloy armor a foot thick. Navy, the newly promoted naval lieutenant general, stood atop the highest tower at the center, his face dark as he gazed toward the ice sheet creeping ever closer across the northern sea.
An unprecedentedly frigid winter—this winter, the ice seemed poised to press right up to New Dunkirk Port itself.
This was no good news for New Dunkirk. The crude, brutal beastmen of the Odin Icefield, as well as those savage, bloodthirsty foreign races, could march straight across the ice to Dunkirk Port.
Ordinarily, in battles fought across the sea, the Northern Garrison Fleet stationed at New Dunkirk could easily destroy the foreign races' troop transports upon the water, preventing too many of them from reaching shore. The vast sea was the boundary between life and death.
But if the foreign races came marching over the ice, the Northern Garrison Fleet would be completely at a loss.
"Gather every soldier left behind and prepare for