On the evening of August 29, west of the Boundary River at Iowa Pass, the last three tribes arrived at the Ratmen's joint encampment. Tens of thousands of Ratmen made over a thousand skin rafts, linking them together into a floating bridge a hundred meters wide.
Then an army of rats, Ratmen, and Magic Rats surged eastward like a black fog. They crossed the long Iowa Valley and finally caught sight of the pass, dozens of meters high, and the Gallop Knight Order beneath it.
Before the Two Suns sank below the plateau, their yellow light set the knights' breastplates ablaze like flames. If the entire knight order was a sharp spear, then the four Senior Knights at the very front, paired with four Intermediate Black-Scaled Horses that had just achieved a breakthrough, were the spearhead, responsible for piercing through the enemy;
The fifteen Intermediate Knights behind them, together with their Junior Black-Scaled Horses, were the two blades of the spearhead, responsible for inflicting heavy casualties;
Further back, the thirty Junior Knights and fifty Knight Apprentices formed the spear shaft. Their armor and the Black-Scaled Horses beneath them would channel vast quantities of magical elements into the entire knight formation.
The black fog halted before the orange-red flames. From amid the sea of rats emerged an Intermediate rat as large as a Steel-Bristle Pig. Its shrieks sent the entire rat swarm into a frenzy.
"Gallop Knight Order!" Petreus Lanyuan, the Senior Knight leading the order, shouted his command. "Charge!"
More than a hundred riders advanced together, their thunderous rumble shaking the entire valley as the air turned scorching hot in an instant.
Although the magic within the valley formed its own system and was difficult to connect with from inside the pass, the magical elements in the valley still followed