Valiant General

The wait for the great fire below at Bluestone Pass Fortress to die out felt interminable. Though it lasted only a little over twenty minutes, to those aboard the airship—especially the Hidden Dragon Hall students who had never experienced real war—those ten-odd minutes seemed scarcely shorter than the entire airship journey from Hidden Dragon Island.

For most castles and fortresses of this era, built primarily from stone or reinforced concrete, the greatest purpose of White Phosphorus Gel Incendiary Bombs was not to destroy the target's structures, but to devastate and kill living personnel and some ground facilities.

Once ignited, White Phosphorus Gel Incendiary Bombs could not be extinguished. They congealed and clung to any surface they splashed across, continuing to burn. Their flames could reach temperatures of over a thousand degrees; under such heat and burning effects, once struck, most steam-powered defensive installations on the ground would be destroyed.

And if it got on a person or some flammable material, the outcome went without saying.

From beginning to end, the anti-aircraft turrets at Bluestone Pass Fortress below only managed to fire two ballista bolts before being completely silenced by the blaze of the White Phosphorus Gel Incendiary Bombs. Against a large war airship hovering thousands of meters in the sky, those two bolts lost their force long before they could reach the airship's underside, arcing down toward the ground.

Once an attack by White Phosphorus Gel Incendiary Bombs damaged a castle or fortress's steam pipes or caused mechanical failures, as soon as the pressure in those turrets dropped, the anti-air ballistae became nothing more than ornaments.

In this era, the only truly effective weapon against airships was other airships. Unfortunately, until Huaiyuan Hall's airship had completed its first wave of attacks, the Zhen Family's airship from Tianhan City had never